Today I decided to change some of the formatting on my review section. Though I doubt anyone will notice, I do feel the need to explain why I have removed the numerical scoring system.

After some consideration and looking into various ranking systems, I have decided that I don’t particularly care for any of them. 1-10 (with or without decimals). 1-5 stars (with or without halves). The 100 point scale. F to A (with or without +/-). Wordy descriptors such as poor to excellent. None of these really floats my boat.

Why? In the end - it’s arbitrary. Whenever I play a game, I don’t think to myself “hmmm… this is looking like a 6… no, maybe a 5.5.” Maybe you do, but I don’t.

Furthermore, I think the concept is flawed.

As a society, we have been conditioned to think that we can evaluate a performance down to a number. The winners have the lowest time or the highest number of points. It’s an objective measure of performance that I know well - during high school the almighty 100 was driving force behind my quest to be valedictorian.

Furthermore, we tend to use only the upper half of nearly all the scales because we’ve been conditioned to believe that anything below a 70, a 7, a C or 3 stars is failing. Most games don’t fail - otherwise they wouldn’t get published. Failing represents something that is broken, such a mindset does not translate well into rating games.

A quick look around most major review centers shows that few reviewers dare to buck the trend and rate games using the entire scale. The majority of reviewers will use 6 or 7 (D or C) to indicate a truly poor title. It’s not often that a game receives a 3 or 4 (half a star). If such systems are to be used, then let them use the entire scale – not just the upper end.

There is also the question of the 10 (100, A, excellent). What games deserve a 10? Is a 10 the representation of the perfect 10, IE the perfect game? Or is it merely an excellent game that deserves distinction from the rest of the pack? Reviewers go both ways – some don’t hesitate to hand out a 10, but others are so hesitant about claiming a game to be perfect that they’ll never use a 10.

Whether such a scoring system (whether for high school grades or Olympic medals) is objective can be debated. However, that is not my purpose. Reviewing games shouldn’t be objective. Though I try my best to keep the first/second person viewpoints out of my reviews, some of what I felt during the game should boil through. Otherwise you have a simple description of game mechanics that is totally devoid of the passion and enjoyment that I feel when I play.

When I have had to come up with the score (overall and subsections), it’s just a number. It doesn’t describe anything. Two games could both get a 75 from me and offer two completely different experiences. I don’t write 800-1200 word reviews so that I can boil it down to a number/letter/word. If you want to know how I feel about the game, then read the review - it’s not like I write Robert Jordan length novels.

So the only two opinionated things that are left in the “score box” are the challenge level and the recommendation.

I don’t use a scoring system for the challenge of a game. In fact, I don’t even have a set word box to pull from. Though many games will get a simple easy or hard, I do feel that this has enough of an individual description within itself to warrant inclusion.

Recommendation is the new thing that I replaced all of my previous arbitrary scores with. It’s a gut-level, end-all question: do I recommend this game to play? Yes or No. No caveats, no conditions, no corollaries.

I don’t claim this to be a perfect answer. I do have to assume that you are interested in playing the title, and I have to assume that you like the genre. Yes and no could also be quite variable:

Indeed the “no” could range from “I wish I had those hours of my life back” to “this game is almost good enough, but there’s so much better out there.”

“Yes” can range from “it’s pretty average, but I had fun playing it – worth a playthrough” to “this was a life changing experience and everyone should be forced to play it.”

Again, it’s not the perfect answer, but hopefully people are just going to read the reviews and not complain about the lack of a score system. Then again, probably not. Oh, and just to cover my butt – this is all opinion. It’s how I feel, not necessarily hard facts – but since this is my website and my reviews, I can do whatever I want.

Feel free to post any comments below.

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