The Five I Gave Too Fast

I have a rule, stated plainly on the about page here, that I don’t finalize a rating the same day I finish something. A day of distance, minimum, before it goes in the notebook. I built that rule specifically because of one game, a few years back now, that I gave a five to within an hour of the box going back on the shelf, still riding the high of a genuinely great final session, which added a real spring to my step for about a week, and then I spent the following two months quietly discovering I was wrong.

I won’t name the game, mostly because the specific title matters less than the pattern, which I’ve since watched repeat with other people’s reviews of other things, myself included apparently. The first play was excellent. Tight decisions, a comeback nobody saw arriving, the exact kind of session that makes you want to text someone about it immediately. What that single great session hid, and what only showed up over three or four more plays, was that the game only produces that feeling under a fairly narrow set of conditions, and outside that window it’s fine, competent, unremarkable. I’d rated the ceiling instead of the average, and I didn’t have enough plays yet to know there was a difference.

I couldn’t tell you why it took me that long to notice the pattern in my own habits, given that noticing exactly this kind of gap between the strongest case and the actual typical case is more or less what I do all day at work. A claim that works beautifully in one narrow embodiment isn’t automatically a good claim. I know this. I apparently needed to relearn it about my own hobby before the rule about waiting a day actually stuck.

I quietly revised that five down to a three a couple months later, once enough plays had happened that the pattern was undeniable, and updated the notebook with a small correction mark I still use for exactly this situation. It’s not a system I love using. Admitting a rating was wrong feels different than just disagreeing with someone else’s take, closer to admitting the instrument was miscalibrated rather than the reading being debatable. But the alternative is a log full of first impressions dressed up as considered opinions, and that’s worse than the occasional correction mark sitting there as a small, honest record of having been wrong once.