The scoring system that I've been using for video game reviews on this blog is a holdover from the reviews that I wrote for Game Observer (now defunct as of 5/13/2014). I'm not a big fan of using scoring systems for reviews, since reviews are inherently subjective, and it's very hard to quantify the quality of a creative work with any degree of precision. I can rate a game on technical levels, but that still doesn't tell whether a game is "good" or not. A game can be technically perfect, but not very "good"; alternatively, a game could be technically inferior, but is just more fun to play, and is thus "better". In fact, sometimes, my scores don't really match up with how I actually feel about the game because I include categories for technical executions of the game that may not have any real relevance with respect to whether I like a game.
Unfortunately, however, attention spans being what they are, a simple score does serve a function for some readers who are either unable to read the full text of my reviews, or who are unwilling to read the full text of my reviews.
You may have noticed that my scoring system changed slightly. I'm still going to reuse the basic scoring system in which I grade a game based on a set of five criteria and then average those criteria scores into a single overall score. However, I've changed the criteria slightly, and would like to spend a moment to define what these categories represent.
My reviews will now start using 4 pre-set criteria, and an additional "wildcard" criteria.
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44fffe34-4cbf-4e47-ac2d-6d2d6ded3b4b|3|3.7
Tags:review, score