Board 8 > Should 5 be the score for an average game, or 7 (out of 10)?

(+) Yeah! (+)

The argument is old: why do reviewers never use the lower range of review scores? Why are games often graded from the 5-10 range instead of 1-10?

As a kid I thought 5 meant an average game, but now I think 5 just means your game is mediocre, and 7 really is more like an average game. Most games nowadays are good games, so it makes sense that a 7 is average, while all the best games are 8-10 and passable games are 5 or 6. Then any game you hate is between 1-4 depending on how bad it is (4 would be like nearly passable but just too flawed, and then 1 is total garbage).

What does B8 think

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6 is my normal go to for average

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5 is a game that's neither good nor bad.

I'd say the average game I play is good.
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I mean it SHOULD be 5. I guess the problem is what we perceive as an average game. An average game is one I picture that works, you can play it start to finish with minimal issues, but it's rather unremarkable in its gameplay, graphics, characters, what have you. When I see a game given a 7 I tend to think more that it has great ideas and stands out in some way but there are just a few things that ultimately drag it down, which doesn't seem average to me.

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Doesn't 7 mean "good" in most scoring guides?

If the average game is good, then the average would end up being 7.

edit: really, the fact of the matter is that most games are going to be 7 or higher because bad games tend to either get improved prior to release, or not released at all.

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The reason people get confused about this is that scores of 1-5 basically zero out to "not gonna bother playing this any time soon"

7

I think it's because of how much longer video games are than say movies or books. A 5/10 game might be decent for a couple of hours, but I wouldn't want to spend 10-50 hours on it. Whereas a 7/10 game is good enough that I'd be more willing to justify that kind of time sink.

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Snake5555555555 posted...

I mean it SHOULD be 5. I guess the problem is what we perceive as an average game. An average game is one I picture that works, you can play it start to finish with minimal issues, but it's rather unremarkable in its gameplay, graphics, characters, what have you. When I see a game given a 7 I tend to think more that it has great ideas and stands out in some way but there are just a few things that ultimately drag it down, which doesn't seem average to me.

Is that really average, or is that just a mediocre game? To me, the difference is between a measurement of quality (the score) and a statistic (the "average" score, ie mean or median score).

By your definition of 7, I'd still say 7 is the average because that definition sounds like the most common kind of game (that's technically a mode, I know, but still).

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In theory I intend to make 5 my average when grading stuff. In actuality it always winds up being 7, probably because if something's not going to get above a 5 I'm probably not spending enough time on it to give it a solid score.

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The reason the average game is a 7/10 is that companies don't release games in the 1-5 range, because they're not profitable.

A few truly awful games do get released every year, but the vast majority aren't so bad as to be literally unredeemably bad. This skews the mean rating of a game.

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I suppose this could also come down to whether 1-10 is a relative scale (like if 5 is set as the mean of a normal distribution) or a measurement with set criteria.

Just depends on how you use that system

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I also think a 5 can be viewed as a 'neutral' score. Essentially saying you don't hate it, but you don't particularly like it either. Which to me isn't a game worth playing.

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5/10 ain't considered average in... most other scoring metrics, though. Scoring 5/10 in most levels of academia (at least in the United States) will earn you an F.

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Mac Arrowny posted...

5 is a game that's neither good nor bad.

I'd say the average game I play is good.

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Solioxrz362 posted...

Is that really average, or is that just a mediocre game?

mediocre by definition is something of moderate quality, not very good or bad.

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Tom Bombadil posted...

In theory I intend to make 5 my average when grading stuff. In actuality it always winds up being 7, although maybe it evens back out if you consider that there are lots of games I haven't played, and those are likely to skew a lot lower than the games I do play.

GildedFool posted...

The reason the average game is a 7/10 is that companies don't release games in the 1-5 range, because they're not profitable.

A few truly awful games do get released every year, but the vast majority aren't so bad as to be literally unredeemably bad. This skews the mean rating of a game.

Pretty much these, you can add that even people who review games for a living don't make a huge dent in all the games released in a year and unsurprisingly they skew towards big name titles or titles with some media coverage and those games tend to be at least passable.

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This is why x/5 is a better scoring system. Everyone agrees that a 3/5 is average so you dont have any issues with differing grading systems

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the average of games that make it to release being 7 is fine

most of the 1s, 2s, 3s, 4s, etc get canned by their studios before they can see the light of day, but it's still useful to have those numbers

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Numbers are meaningless without context. Everyone's got their opinions about what x number should represent. In an ideal world, 5 would be the average, but our world is like a 7 tops.

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