On a ten point review scale, what number should represent an average game?

[Robert_Downey_Jr.]

Shadow1980 said:

These sort of discussions always remind me of this:

Or as XKCD put it:

Personally, I think that if we're going to grade reviews on a point scale, then the entire scale should be used, with the middle number being the average. Otherwise, what's the point of all those numbers? Keeping tabs on relative levels of awfulness (of which there are presumably three to four times as many as there are levels of greatness)?

Video game review scores shouldn't be scaled to be like school grades, with everything below a 7/10 being considered a failing grade. It's the only medium I know of where a plurality if not outright majority of people compress the "good/passing" review scores into a relatively narrow band. Even Metacritic openly uses this different standard (albeit not as bad as the one used in the joke scales above):

Put in terms of a visual scale, it looks like this:

Each of the five categories is spread evenly across 20-point ranges for movies, TV, & music, but for games they are not. "Generally Favorable" and "Universal Acclaim" are arbitrarily restricted to a 26-point range for games, as opposed to a 40-point range for other media, and "Universal Acclaim" alone occupies a 10-point range for games, half what it does for other media. While a 50/100 would be "Average" for a game on Metacritic, it's at the very bottom of the range for "Average," whereas for movies, TV, & music a 50/100 is right smack in the middle of "Average."

Most official descriptions of scoring systems used at sites like IGN, as well as Metacritic's own scale for movies, TV, & music, treat the scale as if a 5 or 6 out of 10 is "average," rather than treating anything below a 7 or 8 out of 10 as "average." This should be how all game review scores are treated.

This about covers it