I have been tinkering around with a scoresheet that I could use to quantify elements of stories that I really value. In this post, I will go through this scoring system and my mentality behind this. This will apply mostly to books, movies, and shows. I feel that games would need additional categories. I may or may not stick to this system and I also may tweak it over time, but for now, it is a fun thought experiment.
Categories:
- Impact/Personal History
- Presentation
- World Building
- Aesthetic
- Protagonists
- Antagonists
- Themes/Depth
- Uplifting
- Tension
- Pacing/Length
- Emotional Resonance
- Destination Clarity
- Consistency
There is some overlap in many of these categories, but I will briefly discuss what I mean by each of them.
Impact/Personal History: Since my scoring will be my own personal score for the media, not truly an attempt to find the objective quality, this category is very important. This category weighs how long I have loved a story and how much of an impact the narrative has had on me. This gives weight to stories with staying power as well as nostalgia.
Presentation: This will score how well the medium of the narrative presents said narrative. If a written work has good vocabulary, description, and pros, it will score higher. Comics or other static visual mediums will weigh page layout, art quality, and panel/page turn usage. Film and TV will also be scored for their acting, choreography, cinematography, and even their soundtrack.
World Building: This will score how interesting I find the world the story is set in. Is it believable? Is it free of contradictions? How in-depth is the history? How creative are the powers? Does the world itself elevate the story going on inside of it. This is one of my favorite elements to any story!
Aesthetic: This is a weird one. It will score how well I think the presentation of the media gels with itself. I generally don't like drastic differences in character designs. Or a super cartoonish character set in a grim and sinister world. Does the *look* of the story mesh together well? I like to be able to tell what story a character is from by looking at them. This can be uniform design or artistic style. At the bottom line, I want to score whether or not the media looks good and coherent.
Protagonists: This will score how much I like the protagonists of the story and how well I think they convey the story. How well-characterized are they?
Antagonists: This will score how much I appreciate the antagonists and how much they contribute to the quality of the story.
Themes/Depth: This will score how much meaning can be drawn out of the narrative. Does it have deep, thought-provoking themes? Plenty of stories are fun, and that is enough. But many great stories also convey deeper and more meaningful ideas.
Uplifting: This is actually a category I have recently come to appreciate, but does the story leave me feeling uplifted and edified after finishing it? Obviously, this is not mandatory for a piece of art to be great and worth watching. There are some dark things I think we need to be confronted with, but I appreciate it when light shines out from that darkness.
Tension: This will score how unpredictable a narrative is and how well it conveys tension. This is not to praise stories that are simply subversive, but rather stories that handle their stakes well and can leave the audience guessing, engaged, and on edge.
Pacing/Length: This will score how well a narrative utilizes its length. Does it become slow, boring, or bloated? Not all long stories are going to score poorly here, but I do believe many stories are better if they are a manageable size.
Emotional Resonance: This is a weird one. This category scores how well the piece of media is able to manipulate/predict the emotions of the readers. Is the creator able to craft a story that causes the audience to feel the appropriate emotion?
Destination Clarity: This will score how clear the end goal of the narrative is. I genuinely appreciate this in a narrative and dislike when a story feels aimless. Having this can also help prevent a poor score in Pacing/Length.
Consistency: This will broadly measure how well a story stays consistent with what it is doing well. One amazing season of television does not make a show great. One really good volume of a comic, chapter of a book, or discussion of a theme may push a score higher, but if the story is very inconsistent in any of the above categories, it will score worse here.
I think I will score each of these categories from 1 to 10. I don't think this is a perfect system, but it is an insight into the categories of storytelling that matter a lot to me when I discuss media. Hopefully, this will be useful or at least entertaining moving forward.
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