I decided that my last response was sort of a butthead post to make, so I'll go ahead and explain my reasoning for why Metacritic is worthless. There are two reasons for this: the first one is that there is no higher authority for the quality of an art form, and the second is that even if we wanted to pretend that critics are more qualified to say what is good (they aren't, just what is meaningful) then the particular critics of the video game media are compromised - chiefly by the community for which they write.
Claiming metacritic as a source of quality in an argument tends to be an appeal to a higher authority, which implies that there is an objective standard of quality to which a higher authority will be closer. This is a flawed assumption, because there is no such thing as an objective measure of quality in art.
The problem with the critics of video games in particular is that not only are they typically not educated in artistic analysis, they're pretty much nothing but fanboys who have been put in the high sat for no particular reason. The video game review is perverted twice by this: firstly in that they speak from a limited, skewed perspective that defines quality according to a very narrow band, and secondly in that they do not want to piss off their userbase. Why do more video game critics agree than critics in any other field? Because they odn't have their own voices. They play according to the expectations of the majority, and stay as harmonious as possible so as not to be decried by gamers who believe in absolute quality.
That post would have been a lot longer but I tried to express my thoughts in as few words as possible.







