Some people tend to disagree when it comes to rating video games – and various other media, for that matter. Rating scores seem a bit ambiguous and arbitrary when nobody knows how reviewers derive their rating or what these scores mean. When using a numerical system, does a rating of “5 out of 10” mean the game was average/down-the-middle, or does it mean the game lived up to 50 percent of its potential, which when translated to a common grading scale results in a “F” letter grade? Does a “10 out of 10” mean a game was perfect? Surely someone will have some aspect of the game they didn’t enjoy. Perfect is simply unattainable.

Should a reviewer use each number in his scale equally among the games he reviews? It’s hard to find a gaming magazine or Web site that doesn’t lean toward the high-end of the scale when rating games, dishing out 7s, 8s and 9s far more often than 2s, 3s and 4s. I’d like to think the reason we don’t see reviews with ratings in the lower range of the scale is because games are usually entertaining or done well enough that they just don’t deserve to be rated there. After all, you wouldn’t say an activity sucked when you enjoyed doing it. And as the costs for game companies to develop games rises because of increasing staff, time and use of expensive high-end technology, they can’t afford to release a product that doesn’t sell. One would hope this translates to the creation of a quality product, instead of one just riding the coattails of a franchise name or merchandising scheme.

But why have a rating for a game to begin with? After all, that mass of words next to the score is a review, and hopefully one would be able to glean how a reviewer felt about the product from those words, without having to employ an arbitrary score. Additionally, video game ratings don’t hold up over time. As games become more and more involved and finely tuned, the standards of comparison go up.

But the truth of the matter is that scores are given so readers can quickly get an idea of the quality of a game, without having to wade through a lengthy review. This idea applies and is especially useful when viewing an archival database of recent games, where one can quickly find highly rated games that might strike their fancy.

Here at FYI, we have decided to employ a new letter-grade scale for all game reviews. Not only can students relate to letter grades, but they seem to have an innate understanding of them. When a grade of “C” is bestowed, students generally understand this is an average score, and a grade of “F” signifies a game “just doesn’t cut it.” As far as the grade of “A+” is concerned, we’d like to clarify that this rating is reserved for games that are not only standouts in their genre, but also set new standards for quality and entertainment.

Steven Sifert is a senior in psychology from Belmond.