Alot of people spend years making a game, & in the end it all comes down - pow! - to a number between one & 100 or one out of 10. Publishers look at the score they've been rated, if it's high they'll put it on the box. They're idiots, scores are stupid. It's one out of ten for the idiots. Great games that just need more time & work will look, numerically, like any other dead loss & get binned.

Putting numbers on games devalves everything, it turns a creative process into a business process & reduces the healthy disscussion of relative merits, achievements & failures to a shouting match. Ponder about this, from some lifeless person commenting on a certain websites review: "8/10?! That is absolutely ridiculous! Everything points to a 9/10 AT THE VERY LEAST & then you come up with 8/10! Do the correct thing & sort the score out".

How many of you have wanted a game that looks great, looked up some reviews for it & went straight to the score? I know i have. I also know that if the score is high, it will probably influence you into buying it, even if you have not read the review. It happened recently with Borderlands, someone posted what score IGN rated it & people were saying "i have to get it, 8.8 is a great score" - i bet half of them didn't even take a glance at the written review.

You can see the problem. All disscussions of merits & flaws devolves into a trash-talking, pointless, vitality-draining match over a number. Why? Was Picasso's Guernice a six or what? Score becomes battlefield flags for believers to stand under. These believers fight for no more reason than the flags are there.