2020-07-17-tired-a-personal-rating-system.en.md (7728B)
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2 title = "TIReD: A Personal Rating System"
3 date = 2020-07-17T21:30:00-05:00
4 slug = "tired-a-personal-rating-system"
5 draft = false
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8 As the pandemic gives me a chance to look through my backlog of movies, shows, and books (read: anime and manga), I started to consider establishing a personal rating system to ease up writing (hypothetical) reviews.
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11 ## Guiding Principles {#guiding-principles}
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13 Typical rating scales feature 10 or more levels, which is in my opinion way too wide a range to choose from, not to mention those featuring a 100-point-scales. Even the most common 5-star system gets cumbersome fast as soon as we take half-stars into consideration. What exactly differentiates a 6 from a 7 or a 4.6 from a 5.1? Higher granularity could be useful in aggregated ratings, but not so much from an individual reviewer's perspective. I much prefer the approach [s1vote](http://s1vote.com/) took: give the users fewer but more distinctive levels to pick from.
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15 My anecdotal evidences show that most online ratings converge around the 70% mark, a rating just as safe and useless as [predicting a 40% success rate for anything](https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/06/29/this-one-quick-trick-will-allow-you-to-become-a-star-forecaster/). In other words, the lower half of most rating scales are underutilized: how often would you rate something one-and-a-half-star instead of just one? Besides, more often than not, I read ratings and reviews to find out about good shows, not the bad ones. It should be sufficient to only focus on "the better half": why would I sit through the entirety of a bad show and take the effort to give it a rating anyways? There is no -1 star in Michelin Guide, is there?
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17 Summarizing the quality of anything with a single metric seems unfair. I want the rating system to be more expressive, capable of conveying the different aspects of a show that I find enjoyable. At the very minimum, an opinionated pick should be distinct from something with a more general appeal.
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20 ## Rating Methodology {#rating-methodology}
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22 Enter the TIReD scale! The following uses anime/tv shows as the example here, but much of this methodology also applies to other art forms. A show is scored in the following categories, with sum of points forming the final rating:
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24 | Category | Range |
25 |----------------------------------|-------|
26 | <strong>T</strong>angible | 0-2 |
27 | <strong>I</strong>ntangible | 0-2 |
28 | <strong>Re</strong>visit-ability | 0-1 |
29 | <strong>D</strong>iscretionary | 0-1 |
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31 Tangible aspects of a show include visual style, animation, soundtrack, CG quality, special effect, etc. To put it simply, how physically well-made a show is. Starting from a score of 0, a show would be scored a
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33 - +1 if the show is overall attractive to watch and either has consistent high quality with very few shortcoming (perfection) or utilizes unique ideas/techniques to great effects (ingenious);
34 - +2 if its physical quality/way of expression alone would be sufficient reason to watch the show, even if it gets a 0 in all other categories.
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36 Intangible aspects include story, character building, plot pacing, cultural reference, etc. This quality should be relatively medium independent, i.e. I would enjoy a faithful recreation of the story in other art forms at least just as much. Criteria for scoring is similar except for remakes/adaptations with an clear intent to follow the original and when I have seen/read the source material: scoring would be based on the source material's intangible score adjusted downwards by 1 point, with at most extra 1 point adjustment based on quality/difficulty/effect of the remake/adaptation with in the range of 0-2. For instance, a mediocre retelling of a +2 story should only be awarded at most a +1. Remakes and adaptations probably have an easier starting point than original contents, so I wanted to adjust for "how good the show could have been", provide an answer to "should I still see this if I've seen the original", and pick out the "watch this instead of the original" or "transcended and elevated the original story" shows.
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38 Revisit-ability, as the name indicates, represents whether I would want to revisit/rewatch the show later. This correlates more with my own taste or nostalgia: is this something that I would gladly jump into in an leisure afternoon. Longer shows tend to suffer a bit by this metric, so I would take into account of especially memorable segments/episodes. However, in event of remakes and adaptations, this point should generally only be rewarded to the best version of the work in my point of view.
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40 Discretionary point should be awarded sparingly and only when a show doesn't already achieve full scores in all other categories, making the possible maximum score 5 instead of 6. This is used as an adjustment for shows that I feel the current rating system doesn't do it justice. Common situations where this applies include but are not limited to:
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42 - categorical superiority: best of its kind;
43 - a tight coupling between tangible and intangible aspects of the work: it simply won't be the same without one another;
44 - quality in spite of objective limitations, especially for older shows or those with a tight budget.
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47 ## Format {#format}
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49 A TIReD rating is recorded as `X=T/I/Re[+D]`. For instance:
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51 - a show scoring 1 in tangible, 2 in intangible, 0 in revisit-ability, and 0 in discretionary would be recorded as `3=1/2/0`;
52 - a show scoring 1 in tangible, 0 in intangible, 0 in revisit-ability, and 1 in discretionary would be recorded as `2=1/0/0+1`.
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54 Shows that I abandoned halfway, meaning I won't be able to give a rating, will be marked as `DNF` (did not finish).
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57 ## Self Q&A {#self-q-and-a}
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59 Some fragments of thoughts that I came across when designing TIReD.
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61 Q: How should tangible points for books be awarded?
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63 A: I'd say it's how good the writing is at face value, i.e. is it "literature" worthy. While I not really confident in my ability of identifying great works, but a +2 should at least be something better than _Harry Potter_.
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65 Q: How should world settings built up in previous/related works affect the rating?
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67 A: World building actually fits into both revisit-ability (if the system/world is interesting and makes me want to read more about it) and intangible quality (whether the character actions are justified).
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69 Q: How was the rule for discretionary point determined?
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71 A: The best shows should always get full score regardless of the exact scale, so awarding them discretionary points is meaningless. However, there are seemingly not-so-impressive works that really show the passion/devotion/love/good faith of the production team/author and shows whose existence alone is a boon for its fans. I want to express my enjoyment in a way that still allows me to assess the tangible and intangible aspects of a show on an absolute scale, as any further complication can be taken account of as discretionary point.
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73 Q: What happens to ratings for a remake before and after you watch the original?
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75 A: I'll adjust score for the remake now that I have experienced the original.
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77 Q: A lot of details could be lost in translation. How to deal with translated works?
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79 A: For now I will treat these the same way as remakes: adjust the rating if someday I came across the original.
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81 Q: How did you come up with the name "TIReD" (and name for the categories)?
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83 A: The first category to have a concrete name is revisit-ability. From there on it's mostly just playing around with words and initials. I almost settled on "TIRD" thanks to [Urban Dictionary](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tird). Well, not everything is sh\*t. 😜