I'm currently writing a bit of a journalism-journalism article about people's gravitation towards "average" marks.  Now, of course, sites like Metacritic, GameRankings and N4G are feeding this something rotten, but the specific problem I'm looking at seems to be exclusive to games, and something we press-folk are feeding equally.  Why, when film and music critics assign a wide variety of scores to an individual product based on greatly conflicting opinions, do scores (and, of course, the text) tend to sit neatly around a specific scoring band?  If a film's Metacritic average is 90, it almost exclusively also has a few dissenters who absolutely detested it for a perfectly valid reason.  With games, you can pretty much guarantee that most publications awarded it around about that score.  Why on earth is this?

The result, of course, is that whenever a magazine does stray away from the expected mark, there's an abundance of conspiracy theories flying around concerning the reason.  Unusually high marks garner theories of bribes; low scores develop into accusations of bias towards a different console manufacturer.  Rarely does anyone stop to think about the fact that, maybe, that was the writer's honest opinion of a game.

Why are we all so often in agreement?  Surely that's the main problem.  We deviate from the pack so rarely that, when we do, it's confusing people.

Is it because there's something quantifiable about games that doesn't exist in film, music or literature?  If a game "performs to a reasonable standard," it usually garners a reasonable mark for that alone.  Is that adequate reason?  Is our assumption that games are split into identifiable components, and the game's quality is no more than the sum of its parts, the reason for this general concensus?  And is that a fair assumption to make, or not?

Very interested to hear people's thoughts, and hopefully nick a few quotes from the article if possible.

First thing that comes to mind is the fact that most games target a wide audience and most gamers tend to play a wide variety of games. This is certainly not the case with film and even less so with music, which, depending on your personal preferences, you either like or detest. In gaming, nearly everyone judges by the same criteria, which in my opinion relates to your remarks about a game's quality being no more than the sum of its parts. For instance, we all want to see stunning graphics, short loading times, credible voice acting, intersting gameplay mechanics, high replayability, a sense of realism, reasonable artificial intelligence, an amusing story line... Even though we don't always value these qualities equally, this has more to do with the game than the reviewer. For instance, AI is more important than story line in most strategy games, though in RPGs, not so much. In racing games, we expect to see realistic car handling instead of impressive music, and so on. I think this leads to a common perspective on what games are fun and what games are best used as coasters.

It would be interesting to see what happens when reviewing games that do not appeal to a wide audience, such as Dwarf Fortress or Flight Simulator, because they're not developed according to our general expectations, likes and dislikes. Suddenly, we're back in a situation where the player either hates it or loves it.

It's an interesting and complex issue that could looked into in many ways.

I’m not entirely sure about the process of how movies/literature is reviewed, but one aspect that could do with a further look is how the critique process feels reversed.

With movies you have studios trying to impress critics to earn the best reviews, but with gaming it almost feels as if the critic has to impress the publisher. They feel too involved at times, influencing the way (to some extent anyways) on how gaming journalist have to present their opinion. It’s not something that is noticeable with all titles, but it does come out with certain games - Kanye and Lynch Gamespot fiasco anyone?

I think business is more heavily orientated surrounding a game rating. Bad reviews can cause advertising and public relation nightmares with publishers. Who’s going to continue support a group of journalists who don't conform, when there are those willing not to tread on toes? I think outlets may come across as homogenous at times because publishers control too much of the stake. It seems more common with the big name sites because as a business they rely on the lifeblood of publishers.

It doesn’t seem to be this way with other mediums; it very well could, I don't really know. Of course, it's a very black and white way of looking at the issue and I'm sure many other factors also come into play.

Well, one factor that affects review scores a lot of the time can be simple peer pressure. It seems like whenever there's great critical acclaim for a game EVERYONE has to love it. It is inherantly amazing, and if you don't think so, YOU'RE doing something wrong. Not the game. And that's a really hard idea to push on anyone of logical mental status.

Sadly, there's no way around the fact that if you gave Bioshock a 2 out 5 you'd get a flood of hate and dissent which is unwarded but unavoidable. So, the biggest reason most folks might end up going along the same lines when scoring or critiquing a game may be that they think if everyone else thinks this, and they don't, they're wrong.