Richard's Online Journal
On Game Scoring
All this fuss over Kane and Lynch (The last post poked fun at the story, but it’s worth pointing out that nobody involved has outright said what happened, so everything’s still very much guesswork and secret-source level gossip), and subsequent talk about scoring, really makes me nostalgic for Daily Radar’s wonderful system.
Scores, in a word, are useless. No matter how you try to explain your workings, nobody listens. Even if you think 6/10 means ‘mediocre, but okay if you’re into this kind of game’, most people are going to see it as a fail. Especially since most people talk about scores without even mentioning the review text itself. For my money, the best rating system around remains poor old deceased DR’s — which went something like this:
Dud. Miss. Hit. Direct Hit.
And that was it. Technically, not that far different to a score out of five. But much better as a stamp to put on the end of a review, and much less prone to mis-interpretation. And since ‘Miss’ especially could be anything from ‘doesn’t do anything new’ to ‘tries but fails’, it’s much harder to go off on one without taking the text into account.