October was what I’d categorise as an angry month for me here at Citizen Game. I’m normally fairly serene, laid back to the point where I’ve trouble seeing over my pelvis, but October was for me punctuated by some personal outbursts of frustration masking what I’d ultimately describe as seething rage.

You see, I think you’ve all lost your minds.

It’s all Medal of Honor’s fault. Or rather, the reaction to and reporting of its critical reception. In the run up to its release MoH was being trumpeted by EA as the triumphant return of a venerable franchise, the publisher’s long awaited answer to Activision’s Call of Duty behemoth. No one but EA ever came close to publically suggesting that MoH would successfully challenge CoD’s massive sales and critical success, but there were reasonable predictions that the game would achieve satisfactory review scores upon release.

What happened next has proven to me, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that review scores (for all the importance placed upon them) have been rendered completely meaningless by the collective mania of publishers, press and the gaming public.

MoH debuted and the Metacritic average (infamous for its dubious scoring conversions yet held up by publishers and public as the ultimate assessment of a game’s overall quality) quickly came to (and still stands at) seventy five across all formats. That’s seventy five out of a hundred point scale. That’s the cusp of the top quarter, that’s comfortably in the top third. That’s, dare I say it, a good score. It’s certainly a high one. Of all the possible scores on that scale, it’s higher than seventy four of the other scores that the game could potentially have ended up with.

Would he class seventy five percent as Tier One?

Anyone looking in from the outside would think that MoH had done well. But, they’d have also been pretty damn confused by the reporting that followed. For my money, The Escapist’s own doublethink reporting  on the matter exemplifies my problem perfectly. Their headline on October 13th describes that Metacritic score as “middling”. Except, it isn’t. Seventy five out of one hundred is no where near the middle. Not even close.

It gets worse. On October 19th The Escapist carried a story describing the sales of the game as “not amazing”. That’s not wrong. But the article claims that “MoH is earning generally poor reviews, including from The Escapist‘s own Steve Butts”. In six days a seventy five average has gone from being categorised as “middling” to “poor”. For some reason. Maddeningly, The Escapist’s review of MoH scored it three stars out of five, which the Escapist’s own guidelines describe as “average”.

I don’t wish to appear to be singling out The Escapist (full disclosure: they once gave me some work), it’s just they’ve done such a good job of demonstrating what I find so contemptible about attitudes to review scores. In this case, no one is interested in using the hundred point scale properly. That’s the same hundred point scale that publishers are using as a benchmark for success, the same scale that consumers check to inform their purchasing decision. As of yesterday, EA’s CEO John Riccitello was still doing damage control over an average score of seventy five. Which isn’t a low score, except when it is.

We’ve lost the plot Citizens. Every publisher is terrified of anything less than ninety percent, every gamer thinks everything less than eighty isn’t worth their time or money and the press are stuck between the two, awarding high scores to games they think are poor and doing nothing to help the situation So much stock is placed in the likes of Metacritic, in the out-of-ten or percentage mark at the end of a review, and yet the attitude we have to those scoring levels has rendered them completely without merit or meaning.

And that’s driving me to anger and despair.

They make no sense. They’re not used properly. Something needs to change.

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