The Cursed 7 (out of 10)

Personally my biggest trigger was giving this game a decent 7. Unthinkable! Unless you remember that 7 for AAA is equal to 1.

Access Journalism. A term that became a bogeyman and silver bullet in an arsenal of

many gaming grifters on YouTube. A favourite term to discredit any media outlet that doesn’t agree with their loathing of the ‘wokeness’. This term became such an effective weapon because there is a kernel of truth to it, of course, and the very idea of access journalism isn’t anything new or even strange. Ever heard of lapdog versus watchdog journalism? In general, the idea is that big media outlet will pamper and pander giants of the industry to make sure they have an amiable relationship. That they retain their, yeah, access - have game copies send early for reviews, get insider scoops, fresh materials, be on a media list of approved outlets.

It’s hardly a surprise that this is happening in gaming. It is a colossal industry and money speaks. Gaming, as an entertainment, is bigger than movies and music. It’s bigger than any other source of entertainment, in fact. When billions are on the line, there will always be some folks with, let’s say, bendable spines - if that bend makes them reach deeper into the pot of gold.

And so, we arrive at the, by now, old and withered complaint about the rating systems and the most troubling of its outcomes - The Cursed 7.

I was genuinely thinking that we are out of that era. That the arguments about it are, by now, mostly obsolete. After all, didn’t IGN already give much lower grades to some games over the past decade? REDFALL got that juicy 4 out of 10, and it was by no means a game from a tiny studio with no corporate backing. We are talking Arkane here! A studio with pedigree with XBOX behind it. Then we got hit by GOLLUM, also scoring a measly 4 (which, by the way, feels way too generous to me, but that’s another discussion…). BEAST OF REINCARNATION cupped a 6, so did the latest YOSHI game. Is the curse over? Can we finally put this whole conversation to the ground?

No, because of WOLVERINE. Listen, I have no stake in this horse race… Is what I would say if not for my vehement and vigilant watch over the state of AAA and their many downfalls! I do not want gaming to fail, of course, but I always feel a smirk slip over my expression when a giant studio with limitless budgets stumbles over errors that most players would be able to point and call out. Anyway, WOLVERINE sort of brought the topic back, via a sneaky backdoor. Because it is, merely, a 77/100 game on Metacritic. You could say, hey, damn, that’s a pretty good score, now, isn’t it? It means the game is better than just good! It’s… almost very good!

But you cannot just erase a decade of cultural reshaping overnight. By now in most gamers minds a score of 7 means “this is basically garbage, but we’re on corporate payroll, so we cannot really give it anything less” - now remember, this isn’t objective statement. This is, simply, a common perception. It doesn’t even matter that IGN was bold enough to give this game a 6! Which is so much lower than a measly 7! Outrageous.

See, because deep in the capital G Gamers heart of hearts they know what is the REAL rating system. 1 out of 10? Pshaw! Bullhonky! A psyop! Everyone knows there are only 4 real grades left of a brute, short scale of 7 to 10:

7 - Garbage. The game is basically unpayable piece of trash, insulting to the players, with nothing of worth in it. A truly despicable piece of media that no living eyes should behold for they will be tarnished forever with its utter, soul-crushing mediocrity.

8 - Acceptable slop. A game that you can play. It won’t wow you, it won’t make you feel anything, but it is a title you can actually play and if you have some weird kinks for particular genres, you might even get a sizzle or two of an EMOTION out of it. Almost decent if seen from a particular, flattering angle.

9 - Good! This is a GOOD game. Far away from perfect, of course, no masterpiece, gosh, but this is where the enjoyment resides! Now this is a game worthy of spending your dollars. Just remember to save 30-40 bucks more than you expected because you really need to buy the Limited Platinum Special Edition to get that cut content in!

10 - Very Good! This is the game that everyone is raving about! It functions! It has almost no bugs! And it like… stirs something inside you, a feeling or two, even. Very unusual, but when you play it, you don’t even want to check your phone to doomscroll for an hour at a time, which is unheard of and makes your family worry.

Just to be clear, I am, of course, exaggerating for comedic effect. I was, after all, a firm believer that we moved away from this vision after last few years, but alas… It seems to be deeply rooted in as the discussion around SONY latest blockbuster title indicated. That 7 in front of any rating still feels… Bad. Stinky. The odium remains.

One of the reviews that helped cement IGN as a source of horrible takes.

There is a very good question here that I seen asked in various places - why the 1-5 rating exists when they are used so rarely? When was the last time you’ve seen a game rated 1 or 2? Or even 3, for that matter? The idea here stems from the definitions of those marks. It is rare for us to see such grades not because there aren’t games that could deserve them, but because it is almost impossible to accrue such a mark to begin with. Why?

Because most outlets consider a technical feasibility to be a big part of the game grade. What does it translate to, is that a game with no major bug, a game that… Functions… cannot really be lower than 5 out of 10. See 1 isn’t the baseline, 5 is - the humble 5 just means a game that plays and that you can finish. It doesn’t matter if the story sucks, if the mechanics are incredibly boring and the whole experience makes you feel number than a week-long company teambuilding retreat. If the game allows itself to be played and completed without major hindrances that’s when you get a 5 out of 10. To score those elusive superbly low scores you would need to deliver something so utterly broken that it just cannot happen in a world of business.

But wait, there’s more, and I am guilty of it too. If you check my last year of reviews, I barely gave anything a lower grade than good stuff. It’s not because I forgot about the other grades, but it’s because I’m only human, after all. What it means is that I don’t want to talk about games I dropped, discarded or tossed into the bin. I want to bring some light to the titles that make me happy! That tantalized me, enchanted me, made me want to talk about them to friends and family. I believe most reviewers feel that way - why waste time to write a fuming, seething piece about a game that made you angry, when you can spend that time noting how much you enjoyed another title!

This goes doubly so, I believe, for personal projects like this blog - I am not bound to any corporation or studio. I have no contractual obligations. No big audience I feel I MUST play some games for and give my views on them. I can, literally, just play what I want and write what I wish. Nonetheless, integrity is still important - and so I decided to do a little review of my internal grading system and recently you could see a little shift; I’m being way sparser with my highest ratings. Saving them for games that really touch something in my soul.

I do not know if any revolution here can take place. All the numerical systems will be always looked upon as a gauss curve, ultimately. The middle number will be considered the true ‘low bar’ for mediocrity. Take a 5 stars system! Everyone knows 3 stars means ‘acceptably mediocre’ while 2 stars would be really bad. No matter what you do with numbers, it will always click in people mind like so. Perhaps if the baseline was set differently. If a media pundit made a very strong case that an average game starts at one star, and anything more is just accruing positives? Or… Best yet, get rid of grading. Yeah! That’s the ticker, remove the number, the summary, banish them and rely on readers to scrounge up your impressions from the text.

Now guess why no big outlet ever tries something like this. Attention is a currency on the internet, and few people have the will and time to just read a big block of text. Skipping down to see the score and the summary is, sadly, the default behaviour. And so, we the people created this system and upkeep it with the delightful power of apathy! Oh well. I can just hope that, given time, we’ll free ourselves from the shackles of 7 to 10 and at least embrace a much more robust 5 to 10 grading system. One can hope…