You will probably be aware that the rating system on this site only goes up in incremements of .5. If you've been here a while you'll also be aware it used to be 0.1, and it's always bothered me how Gamespot decided to go to a much less precise scale. Most other sites still let you rate a game with 100 possible scores (IGN, metacritic etc.) but Gamespot for some reason decided to lower it to 19 (1 - 1.5 - 2 - 2.5 - 3 - 3.5 - 4 - 4.5 - 5 - 5.5 - 6 - 6.5 - 7 - 7.5 - 8 - 8.5 - 9 - 9.5 - 10).

Now you may be wondering why they would do this, or why I am making a blog over something so trivial (the answer is I'm bored and haven't written a blog in a while). The only answer I could of think of was that it was easy. Gamespot have to spend less time thinking up a score for a game, for example they may not be able to decide if a game is 9.1 or 9.2 out of 10, so they can just lump it into the 9.0 gap. Maybe I'm wrong and it's so the games on the site are easier to filter or categorise, if that's the case it's still a laziness issue.

Why am I annoyed by this so much? The system forces you to be less precise with your ratings, and as a result a game is often either scored above or below what it actually deserves. For example if you wanted to give a game 9.7/10 you either have to lie and say it's a 10/10 game (not many games deserve a perfect score!) or push it down to 9.5. In the end you will have multiple games on 9.5, a lot of these will be better or worse than others given the same score. Or you'll have a load of 10 out of 10s.

Why bother with that? It's like when youtube took away the 5 star system and replaced it with Like and Dislike. It just takes away a lot of choice and makes it easier and quicker to rate something. Basically, like a lot of things reviewing is "dumbing down" for the mass market.

The sheer amount of variation on offer

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Now it's your turn to post a comment, do you agree with me or disagree? Is Gamespot starting a trend or are they just plain lazy? Am I being ridiculous making a blog about this?Thanks for reading.