The idea of an out of ten scale is that 5 is the middle, which should represent average. Or at least it used to. When a book is rated 6/10 that is an above average book. But when a movie is given 6/10 that is an average or below average movie. And these days a video games has to be an 8/10 or it is not even worth playing by the general consensus. More recently I’ve been looking at guitar reviews where almost every reviewer seems to give 9/10 or more to every guitar I see reviewed.

Now these average numbers don’t matter in and of themselves, as long as you know what the average score is you can judge based on that. But as a reviewer it allows no freedom in scoring. A book that is a 7/10 is certainly worse than one that is 9/10 and there are specific reasons to point out why. But both are good books. A 9/10 video game and a 9.5/10 video game have about the same difference in score as the those two books compared to the average. The same 2 point difference has to be squished into a .5 difference now. There are no in-between points. But you can still say that the 9.5 game is better.

The problem actually comes in low scoring games. Since everything below 8/10 is seen as a failure in video games, how can you accurately score things? 6/10 and 7/10 might seem natural. These scores are just below a good game. But what exactly is the difference between 3/10, 4/10 and 5/10? These seem like they are arbitrarily given out. Any score within this 3-5/10 range can effectively be given the same score.

The other problem lies with how something is reviewed. As price is highly variable in many of today’s products, in order to compare the high end and low end products on the same spectrum you have justify the higher scores on low end products as “for the price”. This is a good camera “for the price.” The downside to this is that you cannot compare things that are not “for the price.” My newest guitar receives mostly 9/10 and 10/10 on review sites yet it is also apparently “significantly worse” to the $2000+ guitars. None of these reviews can accurately score that.

So we should stay with a very easy to use four point system. Or maybe even less than 4 points. Bad, Satisfactory, Good, Great. Just as arbitrary as what we are using now, but with less of the fluff. There are still awards given out at the end of the year anyway, and rankings could be done entirely separately to distinguish the greatest games.

From left to right:

1. Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson
2. Anathem – Neal Stephenson
3. Foundation – Isaac Asimov
4. Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
5. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
6. The Name of the Wind – Patrick Rothfuss
7. American Gods – Neil Gaiman
8. The War of the Worlds – H. G. Wells
9. Virtual Light – William Gibson
10. A Game of Thrones – George R.R. Martin
11. The Lies of Locke Lamora – Scott Lynch
12. Neverwhere – Neil Gaiman
13. Snow Crash – Neal Stephenson
14. The Diamond Age – Neal Stephenson
15. The Forever War – Joe Haldeman
16. Singularity 7 – Ben Templesmith
17. The Mortal Instruments Trilogy – Cassandra Clare
    • City of Bones
    • City of Ashes
    • City of Glass
18. The Wheel of Time, first three books – Robert Jordan
    • The Eye of the World
    • The Great Hunt
    • The Dragon Reborn

I’m going to be reading these for the next few years…

I’d like to thank The Sword and Laser, Mark Miltenburg and a few other people for these fine suggestions.

But more importantly, thanks to spending over an hour on the train every day, I recently finished Neuromancer which is a much harder book to follow than any of those. It started because Gibson throws a ton of details at you all at once at the beginning in a quick rush to explain everything. A few chapters in it is apparent that this first stuff doesn’t mean all that much except to serve as a nice back story. It does come up again later though.

The hardest part of reading it was the fact that he rarely states who is speaking which becomes incredibly confusing when there are three characters talking at once. It is just assumed who is talking by what they are saying as if I know the characters well enough already. Daemon and Diablo are very explicit in who is speaking and as a graphic novel V for Vendetta can’t help but be explicit.

Apart from that I found the overall plot fairly simple, except near the end where he throws in some weird loops and I’m not quite sure what has happened. I’ve heard this is a book that grows on you with re-reading so I may just do that in the coming months.

Next up: Ender’s Game then Dune and I’m considering buying Cryptonomicon after that.