Lol you may or may not recall that I've maintained my strong anti-Metacritic score views for many years. Being a "journalist" has nothing to do with it (in actuality, I consider myself nothing more than someone who likes writing about games despite doing it for a decade; I'm not getting paid and still feel I have a lot more evolving and improving to undergo); the fact that Metacritic scores are damaging to the industry and too often used as an argument for "I'm right, you're wrong" has everything to do with it.
I read your words, but not enough people read words in reviews, which is something I've been exposed to all too often since writing for Nintendo Life, where my work has an audience of thousands - if not millions - of people, all of whom focus solely on the score I awarded a game and getting ip in arms over it rather than actually taking into account what I wrote.
A recent example of what I'm talking about would be my review of Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games. I awarded it a 6/10, which translates to "not bad" as clearly stated on the site's scoring policy. Yet once again I had to deal with people calling my comments "violently untrue" because the were focusing on the low score rather than what I actually wrote.
If I had my way, reviews wound consist solely of words. A score is there merely to provide context, yet they're treated as gospel and hold far more power over people's decisions and reactions than intended, because they just scroll down to the bottom of the review, look at the score and immediately decide I'm being overly harsh when - if you take the scoring policy, the description and meaning behind 6/10 and what I actually wrote into account - I'm really not.
Oh and I shall indeed look into Ratchet & Clank.
