"Kids Love It!"

If you check my reviews for Civ Rev or Mighty Final Fight you are more likely to be met with a weird Youtube clip or a Rambo reference than a numeric score. Although at first glance this might be seen as the result of severe head trauma, there is actual reasoning behind this decision to eschew number scores.

I understand that many people like having an easy number that will explain everything, but in the end I think that a number score is the worst part of any review. I am not alone in thinking this way. Adam Sessler of X-Play has railed against the way his scores are interpreted by sites like Metacritic. And there are countless others, just about every reviewer hates giving numeric scores and just about every reviewer is forced to come up with them so that they can be used for sites like Metacritic.

Metacritic is a website that averages the scores from multiple reviews. I think at its best, a site like Metacritic can provide a quick way to evaluate the quality of any given game. At its worst it can skew perceptions. It places far too much emphasis on trying to quantify an ultimately unquantifiable experience. And if you can say that 3 times fast you unlock a portal into another dimension.

Publishers base multimillion dollar decisions on these scores. A higher aggregate score can mean the difference in licensing agreements. Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment came up with a plan where developers whose games did not achieve at least a 70% average would be subject to higher royalty rates. Sounds like a great idea right? Why should there be sympathy for developers that make crappy games? Its not like 70% is an outrageously high number.

But what about something like “50 Cent: Bulletproof”? The game sold over a million copies and has a Metacritic score right around 50. Hardcore gamers and critics hated it. 50 Cent fans loved it. Does this mean that Bulletproof was a good game?

God no, and I am not trying to argue that popularity equals quality. But still, it is worth noting that critics and the general public often have wildly different opinions.

One of my favorite movies, Armageddon, has a Metacritic score of 42. What do these numbers ultimately mean? What kind of a score would the Sistine Chapel or the Mona Lisa receive? I am pretty sure that there would be at least two reviewers who think they are overrated and would give them scores of 40 or 50 out of 100.

I think a critic’s job is to provide an insightful analysis and evaluation of a given work of art. A numeric score gives no real insight or clarity. What is the difference between a 5.5 and a 6? Does one provide .5 more entertainment? What about the difference between a 3 or a 4 out of 10? At what point do the numbers become meaningless? I think that most reviewers would agree that coming up with a score is the worst part of trying to critique something. Trying to quantify any subjective experience is so far beyond impossible that we are venturing into the realm of ridiculousness. No 2 people have the same kind of measuring scale, because no 2 people are approaching a game in the same way. Just as 2 English professors might give wildly different grades for the same paper, 2 different reviewers might give wildly different scores for the same grade. Metacritic takes the absolute worst parts of criticism and celebrates them.

I might be able to get past my issues with numeric scores if I felt I could trust the sources. Because Metacritic is taking scores from all kinds of sites you end up with scores from sites I have never heard of. Check out these reviews of Resistance 2 Check out those scores down at the bottom and look at the sites they come from. Now I want you to think about this for a second, how much can traffic to your site increase if you throw out a score of 60 for the big holiday game. Is Edge magazine truly trying to say that Resistance 2, one of the most popular and best games on the PS3 really deserves a “D-”?

There is way too much temptation to give a low score just to drive traffic. When I first started writing for WingDamage, one of my friends (jokingly) suggested giving Killzone 2 a score of 5 out of 10 so fanboys would flood the site. Electronic Gaming Monthly gave Assassin’s Creed a 58. How many angry gamers spent hours on the 1up message boards virtually screaming about this low score? How much advertising did they see while they were there? Not that there is anything wrong with advertising revenue (check out our ads from project wonderful) but there is an obvious temptation to give a low score to a high profile game to drive traffic to your site.

In the end, I hate Metacritic because it celebrates the worst part of videogame reviews.

What do you think? What are your thoughts on numeric scores? Is a reference to an unfortunate fryer accident any better or clearer?