This isnt to say that review scores have no worth, but for the most part, giving any form of art a score pretty meaningless and arbitrary.

I think we all need to accept that everyone’s definition of an 8/10, 9/10, and 10/10 are different. Some people even go as far as to include decimal places, such as a 6.4 or 8.9. For me, 7/10 is the bar for a game I would say is “good, but with big stuff holding it back” and 8/10 and higher being games I can confidently recommend with 10/10 being games that despite any flaws they may have, have enough merit or represent pinnacles of their genre or style that I think everyone should at least give them a shot. And I’ve had people tell me that my way of rating games is wrong when it’s just reflective of what value I look for in media. For some people, a 10/10 is the perfect game that does everything better than every other game and therefore is a game that basically can’t exist. That doesn’t make either interpretation wrong as it simply comes down to what we look for in games.

This should be obvious, but in any form of actual game review, whatever the final score ends up being is like the least important part. It can be a good indicator up front if the reviewer thinks the game is any good, but the reasoning contained within the actual review, their explanation for what the game does/doesn’t do well, is what’s actually important.

Review scores only work imo in a few contexts. First off, they make for a very good statistic. Stuff like Metacritic scores gather up thousands of reviews and average out the scores. Whether or not you agree with that consensus, it tells a story about what people overall seem to think of the game and what that consensus is. Also, how much an audience score may or may not deviate from a critic score is really interesting to look at and think about why it may be. Stuff like this tells a story about how we engage with and analyze art and I do think a consensus being simplified to a single number is a good way to get an idea of what people think, the important part being that you can still look at what people actually had to say for a more complete picture. The number is a good way of building the frame for that picture.

I also think review scores can be fun when it comes to getting a picture of a person’s taste in games. I recently did a post of everything notable I played in 2023 where I gave each game a short review and score out of 10. Not only does this feed into the point of what different people consider 10/10 worthy to be telling of their overall ideology when it comes to art as well as giving explanations to justify that score for them, but it IS fair to compare review scores when all of those scores are coming from one person. I hear all this shit about “IGN gave Spider-Man PS4 an 8.9 but Spider-Man 2 only gets an 8 but it’s ranked by them as the best Spider-Man game” when all those reviews and that list were made by different people with different perspectives and mentalities on what makes games enjoyable. As for me, I would give Spider-Man PS4 an 8 and Spider-Man 2 an 8.5. This is more valid as a direct comparison because both those scores came from me (in the sense of them both being from one person) instead of the first coming from me and the second coming from someone who doesn’t even know me or what I look for in games.

At the end of the day, I don’t think review scores are completely worthless, but there is a very limited set of environments where they’re actually useful. Too much weight is put on this number rather than actual discussion about the game. Simply saying “Yeah this game was a 6/10” isn’t good criticism and is pretty bad for the sake of conversation as there’s not really much else to engage with other than an ultimately arbitrary number. I know some dude’s Reddit post isn’t going to change anything about how we as a community discuss games, but I just wanted to put my feelings out there on the topic.