Editor's note: I give this one a 7.5. Rimshot! -Demian

Gamers are more concerned with numbers, order, and ranking than obsessive-compulsive autistic accountants tuning their NCAA tournament brackets for the office pool. Everything has its place, and most arguments concerning video games are about the placement of a particular title in the grand scheme of things.

But it's more than that. Quantify, categorize, score, compare -- and at the end of the year/decade/century, put them all into a numbered list.

For a journalistic endeavor based primarily on subjectivity, the games press and its audience seem strangely determined to apply the scientific method to figure out just what games are good.

Any type of media that covers products will rank and score those products. But certainly no industry does it with such vigor, vitriol, and consequence.

Who's to blame? Editorial? Publications need eyeballs and index fingers to stay in business, and it gets the clicks, this quantification. But why, and why are the lists then promptly cut and pasted and subjected to even more scrutiny all across the Internet?

I would say that this numbers obsessions is inherent in video games themselves. Look at the very essence of games and you'll find competition, levels, scores, and ranks.

Of course, marketing has a lot to do with it, too. Ultimately, we're playing into the hands of the slick marketing execs paid to make their clients money. Comparing titles on message boards and in editorial copy is a battle waged between marketers, and even if a game ranks but a single notch higher than a competitor on an end-of-year list, it's a badge of honor. Yes, we may use our own opinions to create these lists, a victorious skirmish, but the fact that we compare at all is a whole war won for a man in a suit, hearkening back to the days when Nintendidn't. Or Nintendid, as the case may have been.

A list, a score, or an evaluation is easy to understand -- an absolute, a rock for the ages. These bite-size chunks on the buffet of mass media can appeal to the reader's ego, or rally the tribe should World of Warcraft earn a spot in front of Half-Life 2. Either way, we're associating a little bit of our own identity with products -- products we should enjoy, not adopt as children.

But the list and the score are here to stay. Maybe if we had an inspirational leader, an oft-pined-for Lester Bangs-type, say, we could change not only the industry, but how the audience interacts with the industry. But how much can someone like that say with only a number?