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Amazon has been all over the headlines this week, courtesy of its intriguing $99 Fire TV capsule console. From hiring talent like Portal's Kim Swift and Far Cry 2's Clint Hocking, to buying Killer Instinct studio Double Helix and securing versions of The Walking Dead and Minecraft, as a tech company Amazon has been making all the right noises. It clearly takes gaming seriously.Yet at the same time, as a retailer, it's just taken a giant leap backwards by quietly starting to roll out the use of Metacritic scores on its games listings. Those ubiquitous traffic-light numbers will now appear at unmissable size, right next to the "Add to Cart" button. If it was bad news for a specialist retail service like Steam, and it's even worse when a mainstream retailer the size of Amazon follows suit.
The slow and inexorable acceptance of Metacritic as some sort of ultimate truth is as predictable as it is depressing. We humans are driven to impose uniformity, to find a box for everything, to have things in the right order. This means we're also prone to something called apophenia, the tendency to see patterns and meaning in unconnected data.
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