Why I Won't Rate Anything I Haven't Finished

There’s a specific move I see in reviews sometimes, somebody plays three rounds of a game or reads sixty pages of a book, decides it’s not for them, and rates it anyway, low, with a note explaining they didn’t finish. I understand the impulse. I’ve felt it myself, sitting with something that isn’t working for me and wanting to close the loop and move on. I still won’t do it, and the reason comes straight out of my day job.

I can’t fail a building on an inspection I didn’t complete. If I walk a property and get through the electrical and the plumbing and then get called away before I check the structural elements, I don’t get to write up a pass or a fail based on what I saw, I have to go back and finish the job before anything official gets filed. The county doesn’t accept a partial inspection as a verdict, and I’ve internalized that rule so completely that applying a rating to a book or a game I abandoned partway through feels, to me, like the same kind of dishonesty, even though nobody’s checking my work the way the county checks that job.

The practical cost of this rule is real. I’ve abandoned all of you out there wondering how in the hell I’ve managed to sit on a draft for six weeks because the book underneath it just isn’t moving, and there have been a few times I genuinely considered breaking the rule just to get a review out on schedule. Vast sat unrated for almost a month because I couldn’t make myself get back to the Cave role’s rulebook after that disastrous Wednesday session. I finished it eventually, gave it the three it earned once I actually understood what I was rating, and I think that three means something a rushed-out two wouldn’t have.

The counterargument, and I’ve heard it from more than one person at the table, is that DNF-ing something is itself useful information, a low rating with an honest “I couldn’t finish this” attached tells a reader plenty. I don’t disagree with that as a piece of information. I just don’t think it’s the same category of claim as a rating, which to me implies I actually evaluated the whole thing on its own terms, not just the part that happened to be in front of me before I quit. If I stop reading a book at page sixty, all I actually know is that the first sixty pages didn’t hook me, and that’s a real, useful, different thing to say than “this is a two out of five.” One of those is honest about its own limits. The other one pretends to know more than it does.

So the rule stands, even when it means a review sits in my drafts folder longer than I’d like, even when Deb asks why I’m still slogging through something I’ve admitted twice I’m not enjoying. Finish it, then rate it. Everything else is a guess wearing a number.