We’ve all seen it.  That game you’ve been looking forward to all year finally comes out.  You can’t wait to see the reviews; almost sure it will score high.  The moment is finally here, the page turned, the site finally loaded, to a score that you are sure will be good: 7.5.  Your eyes swell up with tears of disappointment.  You had such hopes, such dreams that this game would be mind blowing, but it couldn’t even score higher than 8.

I’ve been guilty of this myself.  Seeing a review score of a game, seeing how it is only in the “7” category, and then changing my mind about purchasing it, let alone even play it. A score of seven is still a good game, but why am I programmed such to think that it’s not even worth my time?  It could be that gaming is a expensive hobby, or even that I don’t have enough time to play all the games that come out each year, so I only bother with those that score extremely high in a review.  These are mere excuses my friend, for the real problem is not the games, but the accepted way in which we percieve the review score.

One out of ten, one out of five, it does not matter.  Both ways are flawed.  How could we ever give a game a general score, when the people who play them are not general?  Someone who likes first person-shooters may rate them higher then someone who prefers role-playing games.  You may rate one game a nine out of ten, but I could disagree and rate it a 2 out of 10.  Both of us are right.  But should these numbers be the basis of whether we should purchase a game or not?  They reflect opinion, not the actual game.  and when a game is reviewed, it is also being reviewed from someones opinion.  Yet we still use that number score to justify a games value.

Now I know many of you might say “well try reading the WHOLE review, don’t just look at the number.”  This is true, but as for myself and I’m sure others, we skim through it and pay closer attention to the end comments and scores.  The problem is that the number ends up reflecting the quality of the game.  People see a lower score and assume it's not good, or try to compare it to something else. We must ditch these numbers and give honest opinions on why we would buy/rent/skip a game.  We must be given enough information to make these decisions on our own, not led to believe that the best games score higher then a nine.

We must abandon this silly number system brothers and sisters! To many good games have been skipped over simply because they couldn't score higher then eight.  You shouldn't judge a book by its cover, and we shouldn't be judging games with numbers.