I, like many of you, have been guilty of a heinous crime. It’s one that I am ashamed of, but I hope you understand:

I neglected to read a review and looked at the score.

I know, I know…the guilt has been punishment enough, and I hope never to do it again -- but I will. How can I not? How can you not? A score is there to help us -- an exclusive summary for the busy gamer. We should be able to look at the review score guidelines for a website and, in the future, judge a game by the score that website deems it is worth. Right?

Hell no. But in these days of Metacritic and Game Rankings, how can we avoid this lethargy within our ranks?

To answer this, we have to look at a different aspect of gaming culture: Fannboisaurus Rex. The fanboy came, saw, and conquered by multiplying. It slipped into gamers’ ears while they became absorbed by their Nintendos, Xboxes, and PlayStations before burrowing its way into their brains and affecting their tolerance and judgement…oh, and their patience too. Ever since the console war of the current generation kicked off, we have seen the fanboy grow. They demand perfect ‘10/10’ scores for their exclusive games and laugh when the rival console lands an ‘8/10’ triple-A title.

As a result, the actual journalism part of game journalism becomes less relevant and those numbers at the end of a review become oh so important. We only need to look at Killzone 2 to understand the immense pressure gaming writers suffer in choosing a score for the game. They can compliment it all the way through their review and have a legitimate reason for its 8/10 – but that’s not enough for the fanboys. They erupt, lava flows and it leaves the rivals to roast the game from their pedestal. Extinction of the Fannboisaurus Rex would be humane.