The score, and what it does not cover
The score out of ten reviews the game. It accounts for the whole playthrough, the hours logged appear in every byline, and it is not weighted toward the opening in any way. Two of the highest-scoring games in this file have openings we would not defend.
The opening grade sits beside the score as a separate judgement. It is one of five words, and it describes how the game handed over its rules rather than how good the game turned out to be.
The five opening grades
| Grade | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Shown | The majority of rules are demonstrated by situations rather than stated in text or dialogue. |
| Discovered | The player is permitted to fail and works the rules out, with instruction arriving after the need for it exists. |
| Mixed | Sound instincts undermined by ordering, or clean rules teaching that implies something untrue about the game. |
| Told | Rules arrive predominantly as text or dialogue, frequently ahead of the moment they can be used. |
| Withheld | A rule necessary to play competently is never taught at all and must be found outside the game. |
The three timings
All three are taken by hand on a cold installation, with no prior knowledge of the game beyond its genre, and the clock starts at the first interactive moment rather than at the main menu.
Time to first meaningful choice. The first point at which the player selects between options that differ in outcome. Scripted sequences where an incorrect input is refused do not count.
Time to first permitted mistake. The first point at which the game allows a genuinely poor decision to have a consequence. In several games this figure does not exist within the opening at all, which is itself a finding.
Time to competence. The point at which we could act without consulting a panel, a menu or a memory of one. This is the figure the reviews order by, because it predicts more about how an opening feels than either of the others.
Timing from the first interactive moment rather than from the menu is a deliberate choice. A long intro sequence costs the player exactly as much patience as a long tutorial does.
The cards
Every distinct instruction the game delivers is written on an index card as it arrives, marked told, shown or discovered, and numbered in sequence. Nothing is reconstructed afterwards from memory, because the sensation of confusion fades faster than almost anything else in games and cannot be recalled honestly an hour later.
Laid out in order on a table, the cards make two things visible that are almost impossible to notice while playing: repetition, and instructions that arrive before the mechanic they describe is available. Both are recorded as counts in the review.
The ten-hour retention check
At ten hours of play, every rule the opening taught is re-tested cold: could we still state it, and had we used it since. This is the part of the procedure readers question most often and the part we would defend most strongly.
Across forty-one openings the result has not varied. Rules that were shown or discovered survive almost without exception. Rules that were told survive only if the player used them shortly afterwards. Rules explained before the mechanic existed do not survive at all, however clearly they were written.
What is deliberately not measured
We do not score openings for length alone. A thirty-one minute opening sits above a four-minute one in our estimation when every minute of it is doing work, and the shortest opening in the file is not automatically the best merely because it is short.
We also do not treat the absence of text as a virtue in itself. Keybindings are arbitrary facts about a program and must be stated; attempting to demonstrate them wastes the player's time. What matters is whether a thing that could have been shown was stated instead.
Corrections
Timings are taken once by one person and are therefore fallible. Several readers repeat them on their own installations and publish their figures, and where those figures differ from ours in a way we can reproduce, the review is amended and the change noted in the text rather than made silently.
Two elements of this procedure exist because of reader results: the ten-hour retention check, and the decision to start the clock at the first interactive moment. Both replaced earlier approaches that produced flattering numbers.
In short
One score for the game, one word for the opening, three timings, a card for every instruction, and a retention check ten hours later. Everything above is repeatable by anyone with a stopwatch and a packet of index cards, which is the only claim to authority this publication makes.