The Facination with Objective Ranking
Objective ranking is like putting a score at the end of your review. The short of it is that it is fun and can be logistically useful, but it is often woefully inadequate as a form of expression. It has some material advantages but it also runs the risk of minimizing what makes one game attractive–in essence miscommunicating the point of your review to your readers.
One way to improve the use of objective ranking and minimize poor communication is to break it down into categories or sub-scores. However that can get hairy and inconsistent as the reviewers have to juggle a lot of math to get stuff right across many shows. Also these sub-scores often don’t reveal the big picture, at least they do no better than a single score would. There’s also a school of thought going in the opposite direction that encourages the use of simple objective criteria, such as thumbs up or down, to provide a simple “is this worth your time” result that readers look for in an objective rank review.
So let’s look at a new, proposed system:
Here’s a page taken 2 steps away from Jenkins, so there has to be some amount of credibility…so says Wikipedia on video game analysis and the divide between ludology and narratology. Short of quoting the article to you, you can think of narrativists that play the game for the plot, and ludologists for people that play the game for the gameplay.
In extension, these two seemingly-opposite perspectives drive not only game development, developers, and reviewers, but also players and their experience of the game. I am going to quote a bit of Jenkins (well, not directly):
Henry Jenkins attempts to find a compromise between ludology and narratology with the following points:
- Not all games tell stories
- Many games have narrative ambitions
- An analysis of storytelling in games can be done in more than one way
- The gaming experience can never be reduced to the experience of a story
- If games tell stories, it is unlikely that they do so in the same manner as other media
Many games can be seen in light of this compromise.
In essence, this possible weeaboo has stated the issue really well, in the context of an objective video game ranking system (thanks Tycho!). It inspired me to attempt to apply the same metrics to anime. Go ahead and skim that link right now.
The act of trying to give a ludological-equivalent score to anime seems unnecessary–after all, one could conclude that the conflicting perspective arose from the interactivity of games and a way to cope with that fact in a traditional review. However, invariably the audience’s interactivity has and will always be an important and tangible part of artistic evaluation. Just because the player has a big hand in a video game experience doesn’t mean the viewer of a play or the reader of a book can be effectively eliminated from a review.
In light of today’s new media and the entangling/mutating pop culture with the people within, it may be sensible to deploy such a metric. After all, fandom is about interacting with some piece of work, albeit in the meta level. (I think this is what he was trying to say regarding Lucky Star.)
And sometimes the interaction can take place even within the established framework of the work itself. Beyond magic shows where the performer solicits an accomplice from the audience, or the awes and gasps the storyteller get from her audience, some traditional works demand an interactive response. But more aptly, Real Drive episode 6 mentions this in the form of a novel. The ending of the book was a bunch of empty pages that you can remove and write your own. I guess we can throw text books into this category as well (and, almost by correlation, much of children’s literature).
I think all these are considerations to properly implement the proposed metric–in other words, to create a set of two values, one to evaluate the underlying story elements and the other to evaluate the quality of expression and interaction of said work–how the work “game” the viewer. Sort of like the divide best described by statements like, for instance, “good story, badly written”? Let’s hijack those bullet points from Wikipedia to illustrate this point further, and let’s see if they hold water:
- Not all anime tell stories
- Most anime have narrative ambitions
- An analysis of storytelling in anime can be done in more than one way
- The viewing experience can never be reduced to the experience of a story
- If anime tell stories, it is unlikely that they do so in the same manner as other media
Let’s start with an easy one: #5. Some anime tell stories just like other media–it can be even liken to a video game. But is this the common case or the exception? I think the answer lies somewhere in between. Unlike other medium, anime in particular has had some conventions unique to itself. Some shows embrace this fully (eg. Kaiba, Eiken), others approach the opposite extreme (eg. Nodame, Oofuri (yay license)). There are other reasons why the animation medium is preferred (eg. Satoshi Kon, Studio 4c) and these creators leverage the differences and advantages of the medium to their ends. In that sense, anime is no different than games in the way it tells a story–that it’s relatively unique. Still, I think #5 is easy because it doesn’t hold any water as it reduces the inquiry about the necessity of talking ludology about anime to a tee. Nonetheless, we have to see that anime does have those aspects to it. Some even in the meta.
Can the viewing experience be reduced to the experience of a story? I think question #4 hones in on the ludological (hmm need to think of a better word for that in this context)/narrative divide. I know a lot of people got into anime purely for this reason–they enjoy the story and their experience of the story is utmost important to them. But even among these serial-narrative nuts, many of them can discern the quality of storytelling and how it affects their ultimate enjoyment. I think I am being honest in saying that most anime have pretty silly stories. If you’ve had a hundred, nay, fifty titles under your belt, you can probably agree with this statement. What is so enjoyable, however, is those twists and turns within the story. Coincidentally, that also explains why a lot of anime TV serial narratives have crap endings–because the story is silly. At least, how I answer this question builds the foundation to a case for the bi-scoring analysis: in other words, how does an anime game its viewer?
I suppose #5 wasn’t that cut and dry, but #3 ought to be–actually, many anime tell their stories in more ways than one, and they can obviously be analyzed in more ways than one. My favorite title of all time is a master of this. The hard part is figure out just how many ways we can piece together stories (both different and same stories!) out of the same 26 episodes. Question #3 addresses the meta participation aspect. If ludology examines the the gameplay experience to a game, then whatever ludology equals in anime (or motion pictures in general) examines not just the meta fan response, but the condition of the show as the show left the viewer, and the state of the viewer in response to the show.
Question #2 ought to be easy–pretty much all anime have some kind of narrative ambition, right? But perhaps we can gain some insight by examining this question along with question #1. In as much as the audience can extract meaning from even simple games like tic-tac-toe or pong, or argue that Portal is some kind of message about lesbianism, it may very well be possible to say that there are no such things as games (let alone anime) that do not have any sort of story. But “narrative ambition”? It’s pretty clear some game do not have them. How about anime? Possibly so, but if they exist, I think they would be resigned to the realm of indie animation and fan doddling in general, with some exceptional shorts or music videos.
All of it seems inconclusive.
And at this point I’m just going to ask and answer two questions, for practicality’s sake:
1. Is a ludology-equivalent score meaningful in the context of anime?
2. And if so what is it a score of?
I believe it is clear that a ludological score method does not translate to anime directly, but one can apply the same concept to look at anime (in a very basic form, give a score for the story and a score for everything else). It may be some notion of style or artistic value. It could be a notion of “has this anime achieved what it set out to do” beyond its narrative ambition? It could include a reflection of the show’s production value, creativity and intelligence.
At the same time, one has to question just how much overlap is there between these two values. In terms of video games, there is definitely an overlap between a ludological and narrative perspective–they aren’t mutually exclusive. In the same way, how a story come out in an anime–ultimately what it expresses as theme and message–can and does exist outside the narrative. I previously note how the show “game” its audience is ultimately the equivalent, and to some ends that is what a reader is looking for in a review, and it may be meaningful if only at that. “How it games the audience” as “is it fun to watch”?
What it is a score of is something we just have to read the review for, I guess. this isn’t quite like scoring for figure skating, even if it does employ this metric.
Homework: I guess it makes sense to actually think of what one would consider to factor into a narrative or gaming score.
- Production value, artistic value, drawing, design, direction, music, sound, choreography: I think this is all non-narrative.
- Writing, dialog, character development, narrative voice, pacing: Narrative.
- Acting: Probably Non-narrative.
- Plot, character, theme, consistency: Narrative.
Effectively, if art can move people, it can do it through narratives (eg. a sad story about a thing) or through something else (eg. a sad picture about the thing). To differentiate the two has some value.
Man, I need to reread the book Trigger Happy. It has a chapter where the author looks at this dichotomy and how games without narratives still have have “stories”. There’s no narrative in Madden, but the individual games have “stories”. Kinda like that.
I need to sit down and sort my thoughts out on this so I can communicate this succinctly, but basically the big point you raise about shows like Sucky Star and Nadesico heavily comes down to realizing that as a viewer, you always are bringing in massive amounts of “outside knowledge” that you use to “interact” with a text.
That’s part of it, and the quality of that interaction (sans the quotes) may very well be something to consider.
I’m from that keep-things-simple school of thought. My grading system has three degrees of good and three degrees of bad. It’s intuitive, informative, and arousing, if I do say so myself.
I think a simple system works very well, but it helps a lot to have a more subtle rubric behind it. I’m a fan of Siskel and Egbert’s simple system, if you can’t tell–mainly because you are getting two reviews for the price of one, simple score, and it’s nuanced enough to convey a wide variety of meaning depending on how well you know the reviewers.
Anyways, it’s all food for thought.
From my neglected blog http://aloedream.animeblogger.net/archives/148 on ratings.
Thanks for the tip. I know a professor who grades this way; his students hated it.
Relative rating systems work very well, which is why implicitly a full numerical system should have relative consistency. But as I implied, it’s a lot of work to synchronize a few hundred titles every time you do this.
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