It’s easy to pick on numerical review scores. In fact, the internet is positively stuffed with examples. Reviewers call them irrelevant, and developers call them arbitrary and meaningless. Both scoff at Metacritic, and developers in particular have damn good reasons to undermine numerical scoring. Even I take the odd potshot and insist on using my own scoring system.

You’ve probably already spotted the disconnect. Everyone seems to hate numerical scores, but nobody stops using them (well, I did, but you can bet that my principles end where a publisher’s paycheck begins). So one of two things must be true: either everyone in the world is now and always has been stupid, or there is some legitimate merit to numerical review scores that nobody bothers to talk about. This looks like a job for sophistry.