Unravelling the magic and alchemy of Metacritic

rockpapershotgun.com:

On the latest-but-one revision of their About page, Metacritic describe the process of calculating a videogame's aggregate "Metascore" as a kind of "magic". The FAQ cheekily invites you to "peek behind the curtain", evoking the figure of the theatre conjurer beckoning the audience on-stage to inspect the props, before performing the trick. You're only shown so much, however. There are tables for conversions between different review scoring systems, demonstrating how a B- becomes 67/100, but the "weighting" Metacritic gives to each source publication when producing the combined Metascore is a closely-guarded mystery.

You could argue that the secrecy is necessary to avoid heavily weighted publications being targeted and pestered by fans to deliver positive reviews of forthcoming games, so as to swing the average (though in practice, Metascore soothsayers have long since sussed out which outlets have the most votes). But I think it's better understood as a mixture of basic trademark protection and a mechanism of enchantment, a means of both deterring imitators and keeping avid readers guessing about the output. After all, no professional magician seriously wants to give away how the trick is performed, much as no meat magnate wants to show you the inside of a sausage factory.

Metacritic's founders are former attorneys, and one way of analysing the "magic" of review scores and Metascores is through the lens of copyright law. Cornell professor James Grimmelmann digs into this in a - wait, come back! - genuinely very readable paper about whether scores and ratings can be copyrighted in the US, which you can download for free over thisaway. Combing a brace of court cases from the past century, Grimmelmann slowly puts