5-Star Rating Systems: An Analysis

My good fried Karle e-mailed me an article from Slate titled I Queue that takes a good hard look at the ramifications of Netflix's whole "Friends" feature. Since Netflix debuted the ability to spy on your friend's rental habits, I've been decided obsessed with the whole thing. I think the Slate article nails it perfectly.

It does bring up a very important issue, one that occurs to me frequently (and just did yesterday as I rated a few books here on Vox), which is how to treat the 5-star rating system.

I find that a lot of my cultural appetite has some involvement with the whole 5-star system: iPod+iTunes, Netflix, Vox, Amazon, Cnet, 1up. This is just a tiny sampling of places where I'm given the opportunity to rate something. Okay, upon furture reflection I realize that some of these (1up, in particular) doesn't stick to the 5-star system, but elaborates it into 10-points. But regardless of that, any rating system can ultimately be boiled down to 5-stars and, more than likely, probably should.

So how do you treat the 5-stars? Netflix offers a handy guide, in ascending order of: Hated It, Didn't Like It, Liked It, Really Liked It, and Loved It. It's handy, yes, but it doesn't really capture everything, does it?

Moving forward from this point, it seems logical to consider the percentage into which each star falls. Is it simply 20% across the board, or do 1- and 5-star ratings cover a combined 20% of the polarized ends of the spectrum, with the remaining 80% evenly distributed among the middle ratings? After all, as Sam Anderson points out in the Slate article, you might love both Mean Girls and Annie Hall (leading to a 5-star rating for each), but can you really equate the two and still sleep at night?

I don't have an overwhelming answer to the quandry, but I find myself being a hell of a lot more discriminating about 5-star ratings than anything else. With books for example, a 5-star rating can only be applied to a book I would read again. This may not sound like much to most people, but you must appreciate that for myself, there is so much out there I'd like to read, from low- to highbrow and every step in between, that it's really difficult to justify picking up a book I've already read, particularly if the details of it are still fresh. In fact, I could probably count on both hands the books I've read multiple times, and the authors on one crippled hand after an accident in a factory. Kurt Vonnegut gets read multiple times (I can't even recall the number of times I've ploughed through Slaughterhouse Five) as does William Gibson's Neuromancer (which also doubles as the source for every name I bestow upon a computer-related hardware device).

Films are a tougher nut to crack, particularly given the time involved in watching a film compared to reading a book. After all, it's far easier to devote the time to watching even a bloated (albeit, masterful) film like Apocolypse Now than it is to revisit Dostoevsky's Crime & Punishment, as tremendous as it is. Therefore, the rules for 5-star books don't apply to film. So what does?

Well, I haven't quite nailed it yet, and as any of my Netflix friends could attest to, the rules change on a regular basis. Films that have changed my life sound like a good candidate for 5-stars, but that also seems so limiting. After all, as much as I adore Annie Hall, I don't really think I can call it life changing, yet to bestow anything less than 5-stars on it would be a crime.

There was a time I fancied making films. I think herein lies the key to the 5-star rating: Films that inspire me to want to make films. Unfortunately, even here lies a fallacy, as I'm sure any one who has sat through a Renny Harlin picture can tell you, an awful film can be just as inspirational, in a "I could do it so much better than that!" sort of way. As a result, it's important to specify that the 5-star rating is reserve solely for brilliant works that inspire to make films that one would-be director could proudly hold up alongside those masterworks, not garbage that instills a sense of self-important ego stroking.

As for music, well, all bets are off. The big problem I see with rating music is inherent in my approach to music. I'm an album guy. Single songs aren't my thing. This is why I have a difficult time appreciating radio, since radio is entirely dependent on the playlist format, not the album format. As a result, while I may not love the Lennon-McCartney song "Maxwell's Silver Hammer", I find it difficult to rate the song anything less than 5-stars because of how much I love Abbey Road.

I don't think I've really come to any conclusions here, but hopefully my ramblings can lead others towards putting a little more thought into their rating systems. Incidentally, anyone who cares to add a Netflix friend, feel free to send me an invite at eurotransient(at)gmail.com.