A lovely article but it, and Orwell (sorry, George), missed one crucial thing about publishing.
Publishing has always been driven by advertising, not the other way round. Since reviewing relies on publication to reach the reader, reviewing is at the mercy of advertising.
Creating a publication has a price tag and that cost is almost entirely borne by advertising. Someone has to pay to set up the printing press, ink the letters, buy the paper, run the whole thing, and ferry it out to market. (Need the modern equivalent? Okay. Someone has to buy the servers, run the software, rent the office, pay the staff, and lease the bandwidth.) Who pays this price? Advertisers, people who pay to have their voices heard in praise of their product or service. It was true in the heyday of newspapers, magazines, and pulp-and-paper books and it is true now. If you ever want to know whose opinion you are reading, look at the advertising it's placed next to or who owns the publisher. That should give you a rough idea of the amount of spin you'll get and where it will spin towards.
I love scoring. You know why? Because it exists to help the reviewer express an opinion faithful to his experience as opposed to a canned one that will appease the advertiser.
Think about it. A reviewer picks up a mediocre game and sees it for what it is: mediocre. She sits down, writes a review that points out the flaws and strengths, and then attaches an eight out of ten to the review. The eight ensures that the advertiser, who wants the game to sell well, will be happy with the review and not pull funding from the publisher. If the score was a six, the advertiser would be outraged. "How dare the reviewer tell people the game is anything less than good? We'll fix them! We'll give our advertising money to a reviewer and publication that give good reviews, ones that will make the public buy what we're selling." But that eight leaves the reviewer's words untouched, which is all to the good.
The score is a smokescreen, folks. It's there for those who are too lazy to read the actual review or who don't credit the review with any actual meaning. And for parting the lazy with their money, it works just fine for advertisers. It's a nice, bite-sized, useless bit of data to throw at the public that was tailored specifically for that purpose. The actual review, the expression of opinion and critique of the game that takes up four pages or ten thousand words or however much space the reviewer needs, should have no influence on the score beyond the barest of margins.
Scores exist to protect the reviewer. More power to 'em, say I. Let there be two scores, let there be a thermometer, let there be a horribly drawn critter in the corner of the page that mutates depending on the number on its chest if it keeps the advertisers at bay and lets the reviewer continue to express himself freely.
