Seventh Heaven?

 Meanwhile, over at the New Statesman...
 ...Helen Lewis has declared war on the number seven.
 Alright, that's a bit harsh. She doesn't have anything against sevens in general. She's not, say, the worst person to play craps with or show a rainbow to; she doesn't hate David Fincher movies or ensemble westerns. She just wants a score of "seven" to be banned from video game reviews, or possibly reviews in general.
 I'm actually on side with this. She's right. A score of 7/10 denotes a sort of ambivalent shrug. "It was alright. Not good, but not bad or mediocre."
 This, Lewis argues, represents a failing - or at least, an inherent laziness - on the part of  reviewers.
 She also makes the accurate point that seven occupies the logical place of five. If something is average, then, according to all known laws of mathematics, it should score a five out of ten. Five is the middle ground.
 However, when something scores 5/10, everyone assumes that's a low score. So a seven is usually substituted.
 So far, I'm in agreement with Helen Lewis on these points, at least superficially.
 Then she goes off the deep end, all the way to eleven.
 She argues that scores, in general, are a bad idea when it comes to reviews.
 Reviews, she believes, should be conducted entirely through words, not through a points system. A reviewer should be able to paint a detailed enough picture of the subject in question that a numerical ranking would become redundant.
 Which is nice, and all, but seems to be asking a lot.
 First and foremost, I think I can speak for a large swathe of the population when I say I'm not reading reviews for their literary content.
 If I wanted to read something with excellent storytelling and deep thematic undertones, I wouldn't start searching for it in "What Car?" anymore than I'd look to see if a product was worth buying in the back pages of "Oliver Twist."
 Lewis seems to argue that scores out of ten (or five, or 100) represent a sort of "dumbing down" of the consumer public, but computer game reviews - her chosen medium - are shaky ground in which to plant the "intellectual improvement" flag. Whilst I profoundly disagree with Roger Ebert, Mark Kermode and other head-in-the-sand film reviewers that games are a worthless medium, I am also more than happy to admit that I often buy or play games just to blow shit up.
 In the same way that I'm not looking for artistic merit in a Call of Duty multiplayer match, I'm also not looking for Shakespeare in the reviews.
 Lewis says that the dumb-down factor in reviews reduces the whole process to a warning for the consumer as to whether the water is hot, cold or lukewarm.
 This isn't a bad thing.
 Personally, if I employed someone to review my water, say, in a bath, I don't need them to compose a haiku every time I'm about to bathe. Being told whether it's hot, cold or lukewarm is actually exactly what I want, and nothing more.
 Unpleasant though it may be for journalists to admit, reviews are essentially part of the marketing machine; they're designed to tell us what to buy. Nobody is going to buy a bad game on the justification that the reviews had strongly developed character arcs, a clear through-line and muscular prose that recalled Cormac McCarthy anymore than they're not going to buy a game they liked the look of because it had nothing but five stars and the phrase "fucking awesome" as the review.
 As I mentioned, I broadly agree with a lot of Helen Lewis' more basic points: The distinction between a 56% score and a 57% score is arbitrary and ridiculous, the whole 7/10 thing is a cop-out, and reviews do need at least some depth.
 But ultimately, the hard truth is this: Nobody is reading reviews as literature.
 We just want to know if something's any good or not before we spend our money.

 Still, here are some video game reviews that don't quantify anything:

Red Dead Redemption:

 Like being given loads of chocolate as a kid by a relative who smells like whiskey, who then drops you and shatters your hip, but it ultimately makes you a champion contortionist.

Dead Rising 2:

 Like losing your virginity in a small car. Especially if you're a necrophiliac.
 

Duke Nukem Forever:

Y'know when you really need the toilet, but then it turns out you didn't as much as you thought you did? That.

Little Big Planet:

 Like rain on a corrugated roof, which you know doesn't leak, and will make interesting patterns in the grass on the hills.