Is any rating system worth a damn?

BitMob put up an interesting article by Suriel Vazquez yesterday entitled, "Avoiding the 7-9 Scale: An Exercise in Different Review Scales."  It discusses a variety of scoring systems professional game reviewers use to rate games, and some of the strengths and weaknesses of each.  Given the ridiculous (and mostly arbitrary, and totally overblown) power of the Metacritic score, it's a worthwhile discussion.  

The author has concluded that, to better serve his readers, he needs to use some kind of scoring system himself:

I'm not exactly in the position to demand that sort of attention from my readers, either. I'm a relative amateur in the field of video game writing, so I must make concessions to the reader before I can expect them to trust or relate to my point of view. Rather than being a crutch, review scores are a way to hold myself accountable. My text and score should more or less match -- with a certain amount of wiggle room for interpretation -- and if they don't, then it's because of my failure to properly articulate my thoughts. I need something to keep my writing in check; otherwise, I focus on nitpicks and make a review take on a different tone than I intended it to.

I like your attitude, Mr. Vazquez.  My two cents (originally posted in the article's comments section) are below the fold.

Used correctly, the “monetary value” rating system should be the most informative, and thus the one most likely to make Metacritic’s system irrelevant.

To begin with, I disagree with Mr. Vazquez that “[i]deally, a game's evaluated price and actual price will match.”  The “ideal” game -- from the gamer’s point of view -- should be one with an evaluated price that exceeds the actual price.  For example, Portal is currently available for $20.  In retrospect, I would have been willing to pay $30 for the game if I had known ahead of time how much I was going to enjoy the first play-through.  That’s equivalent to a score of a 15 on a 1 to 10 scale. 

The problem with using a 1 to 10 scale (or other fixed-range metrics) is that it imposes an arbitrary limitation on the reviewer’s ability to communicate his/her level of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with a game.  So, a 15 for Portal would be a technically invalid score, even though you might think it earns that score.  That’s why the monetary value system is superior:  there are no constraints.

It’s much more rhetorically effective for a reviewer to conclude that “the developer should have paid me to play this game” than it is to simply award the lowest possible score.  If you allow for a negative dollar value, a $0 score means “play it only if you get it free,” and a negative value means “even if you get it for free, you’re never going to get those hours of your life back.”

The other problem with fixed-range scoring systems is that once you deduct points, the game can never earn them back.  A game may, for example, have a host of technical issues, but could still be worth the asking price.  The monetary value system can account for that.  There’s a devoted community of Vampire - the Masquerade - Bloodlines fans out there that would argue that the game is still worth buying on Steam for 20 bucks, even though it’s buggy as hell.

The other strength of the monetary value system is that it provides a more practical way to score games with monthly subscription fees.  If you have to drop $15 a month to play a given MMO, a reviewer should be able to offer a more nuanced judgment about the value of the subscription, not just the initial purchase price of the base game.

At the end of the day, gamers want two pieces of information from professional reviewers:  (1) whether the game’s systems work reasonably well, and (2) whether the game is fun to play.  The reviewer can break things down any way he/she likes:  +$20 for a great story, -$5 for technical issues, etc.  As long as the monetary value system is logical, consistent, and doesn’t have any arbitrary constraints, it can be a much more effective means for the reviewer to communicate with the reader, compared to a fixed-range scoring system that uses undefined units.

Is a 72/100 the same as a 7/10, and are either of those equivalent to a C-?  I have no idea. But if you tell me the Orange Box was worth $75 at release, I’ll pay attention.

I've used the monetary scoring system myself, in an IUN review of the first Borderlands DLC.  As many times as I've said to myself that I wasted X number of dollars on a game, it's the only system that makes sense to me.