9.249378 out of 10

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By David Field
10:18 Dec 4, 2007

Here's a handy hint for everybody: always stretch before and after a midnight to dawn session of Zone 3. Your legs will hate you for some time afterward if you don't.

As you may have guessed, this advice came from recent adventures in the real world. I spent yesterday holed up in my apartment, unable to walk down the stairs. Gravity 1, Dave 0. The single upside of this was that I have had some time to play Super Mario Galaxy, which my flatmate had been banging on about for some time. "Metacritic gives it an average of 9.249378 out of 10!"; I seem to partly remember and partly embellish him saying.

It's not surprising that scores came up in the discussion, but it is interesting that the discussion should come in the wake of Jeff Gerstmann of Gamespot's shock firing, over what was presumably his score of a game, even though he gave it what should have been a better than average 6 out of 10.

Somehow, somewhere, the games industry started normalizing scores not between 1 and 10, but between 5.5 and 9.5. Nothing's happened to that old reliable bell curve that we all know and love, but the values at each end of it have changed. And that means one of two things: either you are on to us game reviewers and compensate for skewed numbers when you read our reviews – or you flip open a magazine at the newsagent, mentally jot down the score of the game you're interested in, steal the cover disc and make for the door before you're asked to pay anything.

Why does this happen? Buggered if I know. I'm predominantly a tech journo, but I've been gaming long enough to know what's worth my (and my friends') time.

Perhaps it's because of the symbiotic relationship game reviewers have with game PR. Generally speaking, they are the gatekeepers to most of the information that game journos get to write about. Perhaps it's the result of a decade-old snowball effect of reviewers being wowed by games and wowing each other with overzealous tales of what they're playing, and a resulting migration toward high scores. Or, while we're on this train of thought, reviewers worrying about scoring a game differently than everyone else.

Perhaps it's because of the way business works. Since we tend to receive a complaint or two whenever we put ads on this site (as an aside: I've lived on an alternating diet of baked beans, canned soup and toast for the last week and a half) you might imagine the people in sales have some sort of stonecutters' handshake going on with game publishers to give us money for favorable editorial content. Not so, a fact to which my nutritionally insignificant meals will attest.

Regardless of all these variables, we still have a fundamental problem that isn't going to go away anytime soon. There will always be some sort of vertical exaggeration going on in the numbers that accompany game reviews. You can find that value and compensate for it by knowing the author's personality, background, how they were feeling on the day they played the game and a list of other variables that, if they were all accounted for in an Excel spreadsheet, would push a few megabytes.

In lieu of this, please read everything in the review before you look at the score. Games make you feel something when you play them. It's our job to give you an insight into that feeling, not reduce an experience to an easily graphed statistic on a bell curve representing value for money.

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