Understanding Our Scoring System

Welcome to Geeky Sweetie, the sweet side of being a geek! We review things that appeal to a female “geeky” audience. Therefore our scoring system is a bit unique.

You will see two product ratings per review.

The first, denoted by pink hearts, is how “sweet” something is. We take many things into account here from style/fashion/form to likelihood that it would appeal to a female audience. Even non-gendered items, take for example a book, or a video game, we try to estimate how favorable a girl is likely to find this item.

How do we determine this?

First of all, I am a female geek myself. And since the opinions of this blog are my own, I do base it on personal opinion. More over, I do have a method to what I look for.

Take for example, a video game. I score games on the following factors:

Story: I look for story driven games. While my tastes certainly do not represent every single female gamer out there, I think it safe to assume most girl gamers desire story-based games as opposed to action-driven games. I give extra marks to games which have strong character development, emotional impact, and branching plots based on players’ decisions.

Aesthetic: Or graphics, if you will. I tend to favor anime-style games. Once again, not representative of the whole, but there’s already enough “mainstream” game review sites out there. I’m trying to cater to audiences with similar tastes to myself, be they male or female, people that like the vivid colors, imaginative characters, and an overall “cuter” feeling.

Genre: This is where things get a little dicey. I tend to prefer rpgs, strats, adventure, and sims so I’m not very objective at my scoring here. If I’m reviewing a game that’s not in one of those categories it is likely to get a lower score from me, and comparatively, almost always games within these categories will get higher marks.   It’s just what I enjoy playing, and I feel most of my readers and fanbase care more about these genres too.

Gameplay: Here is where I try to be as objective as possible. Sure a game might fit my other criteria, have anime artwork, an 80+ hour sweeping story with multiple endings, but is it fun? Does it have good controls? What about the user interface? Save features? Load Times? Bugs? etc. This also goes into its geeky factor, but girls care about these issues too. Poor gameplay can kill an otherwise good game.

Music: Soundtracks are very important to setting a mood and atmosphere within a game. I think girls are more of an “emotional” gamer than men, things like music play a big impact in helping to tell the overall story and carry the emotion of the characters through to the audience. I try to gauge how well the soundtrack accomplishes this task.

Hidden Goodies: I think that women are more “exploratory” and curious as gamers. I know I talk to every single NPC twice (or until they start repeating themselves), and explore every nook and cranny of every locale. I love learning about the lore, finding hidden characters, doing sidequests, discovering little known secrets, etc.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it gives you some insight. All of these factors come together in this case to help determine a video game review’s “Sweetie” Factor. 5 pink hearts = epitome of sweetness right there. 1 pink heart = not likely to appeal to a female audience at all.  2 hearts = less likely than 3 hearts which is “somewhat likely to appeal to a female audience”. While 4 hearts is extremely likely to appeal to a female audience.

So what about the gold stars that I see everywhere; what are they? Gold stars represent the item’s “geeky” score.  This is just a score of how geeky an item is and how likely it is to appeal to geeks regardless of gender. It’s a more objective and less opinionated score.

In my game review example, I would likely consider things such as gameplay, controls, graphics – this time weighting the score for graphics capable of pushing the latest hardware to its limit, performance, lag, load time, bugs, crashes, length of game, replay value, server performance, etc

Ok but let’s say I’m reviewing something else… Let’s say I’m reviewing a cell phone; that’s geeky right? but can it be sweetie too? Yes, it can!

Cellphone sweet factors include: color, form/style, screen size, accessories available for it, apps/games available for it, etc.

While a cellphone’s geek factor, or the gold stars you see on a review, indicate it’s processor speed, storage space, features, camera, battery life, etc.

What if something is not able to fit into both the geeky and sweetie categories? We still try our best to rate the items but occasionally you may see an item with zero hearts or zero stars. For example, a hair care product probably won’t be “geeky” unless we’re talking about funky hair color such as manic panic, so you are not likely to see a gold star rating on our beauty product reviews.  I can’t think of many examples of the reverse, where a product would not have some way to measure it’s sweetie factor. Style is EVERYwhere.

So now you know 🙂 Pink hearts = an emotional evaluation of the item in question while Gold stars = a more scrutinizing evaluation based on the construction, design, or technical components of an item.

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