How my scoring system works

On any of my review posts, you’ll see a score box like this one near the bottom, which has my overall score for the review:

It’s a ranking out of 20, higher is better. Why 20? Because a 1-5 stars system that allows you to do things like 4.25 stars is 20 distinct values, so I liked the idea of turning it directly into that.

The score is a short circuit summary, but it’s also important that it’s not a directly comparable number either. Books, games, anything can be very different from each other and are very different for each person. In a direct head to head, I won’t always think a 17/20 book is wholly better than a 16/20.

You might also see a score box like this one, which doesn’t have a value:

That means I wrote the review a long time ago and didn’t attribute it a score at the time. Instead of trying to retroactively apply a score, I have left it undefined, which I think better captures the original intent of the review.

And that brings me to what I’m measuring. I’m talking about how much I enjoyed the experience. How good I think it is is certainly a big part of that, but I’m not trying to measure an objective quality metric of how good each book/game/etc is or could be. I’m mostly saying how much it hit the mark for me. (I don’t want to just say “how much I enjoyed it” because some media is sad but gets high marks because that was the right choice for that experience.)

I also really enjoyed making an adaptive score box for the website, so I input the score and it generates the little box you see on the page!