#objective scale of how good it was probably like. a 7.5/10? in terms of how much we enjoyed it probably an 8.5/10

[echidnana]

just watched alien romulus!!!! really loved it omg we were worried it would suck but we loved it

[princesssweetandpetite-blog]

65 Questions You Aren't Used To

1. Do you ever doubt the existence of others than you? Sometimes I doubt existence in general.

2. On a scale of 1-5, how afraid of the dark are you? 7.5

3. The person you would never want to meet? The me without you.

4. What is your favorite word? Jiggy

5. If you were a type of tree, what would you be? Red Oak

6. When you looked in the mirror this morning what was the first thing you thought? Ugh

7. What shirt are you wearing? My golden girls shirt, it says Stay Golden.

8. What do you label yourself as? Odd

9. Bright room or dark room? Dark

10. What were you doing at midnight last night? Seeping

11. Favorite age you’ve been so far? 18

12. Who told you they loved you last? Cyle

13. Your worst enemy? The ones who robbed me of my childhood.

14. What is your current desktop picture? Jules, my doggo

15. Do you like someone? I like my boos

16. The last song you listened to? Tiny Dancer by Elton John

17. You can press a button that will make any one person explode. Who would you blow up? Someone

18. Who would you really like to just punch in the face? Also someone

19. If anyone could be your slave for a day, who would it be and what would they have to do? It’d be cyle, he’d clean, give me cuddles and rubs and he’d bang me every hour

20. What is your best physical attribute? (showing said attribute is optional) not sure

21. If you were the opposite sex for one day, what would you look like and what would you do? That’s tricky

22. Do you have a secret talent? If yes, what is it? Not so much no

23. What is one unique thing you’re afraid of? Yellow balloons poping

24. You can only have one kind of sandwich. Every sandwich ingredient known to humankind is at your disposal. Probably any kind of Italian related sandwich

25. You just found $100! How are you going to spend it? Bad things

26. You just got a free plane ticket to anywhere in the world, but you have to leave immediately. Where are you going to go? Dublin, Ireland

27. An angel appears out of Heaven and offers you a lifetime supply of the alcoholic beverage of your choice. “Be brand-specific” it says. Man! What are you gonna say about that? Even if you don’t drink booze there’s something you can figure out… so what’s it gonna be? Jaggy

28. You discover a beautiful island upon which you may build your own society. You make the rules. What is the first rule you put into place? No liberals allowed

29. What is your favorite expletive? ????

30. Your house is on fire, holy shit! You have just enough time to run in there and grab ONE inanimate object. Don’t worry, your loved ones and pets have already made it out safely. So what’s the one thing you’re going to save from that blazing inferno? Pictures

31. You can erase any horrible experience from your past. What will it be? The bad things we’ve done.

32. You got kicked out of the country for being a time-traveling heathen who sleeps with celebrities and has super-powers. But check out this cool shit… you can move to anywhere else in the world! Scotland

33. The Celestial Gates Of Beyond have opened, much to your surprise because you didn’t think such a thing existed. Death appears. As it turns out, Death is actually a pretty cool entity, and happens to be in a fantastic mood. Death offers to return the friend/family-member/person/etc. of your choice to the living world. Who will you bring back? Kelly

34. What was your last dream about? Don’t remember

35. Are you a good….[insert anything you’d like here]? Listener.. no I’m deaf

36. Have you ever been admitted to the hospital? Yes

37. Have you ever built a snowman? Duh

38. What is the color of your socks? Blue and pink

39. What type of music do you like? Heavy metal, 70s &80s , rap, anything

40. Do you prefer sunrises or sunsets? Sunrises

41. What is your favorite milkshake flavor? Banana

42. What football team do you support? (I will answer in terms of American football as well as soccer) Michigan Wolverines

43. Do you have any scars? Tons

44. What do you want to be when you graduate? A decent person

45. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be? My whole head, everything about it. (Face and hair)

46. Are you reliable? Try to be, but don’t have to many people to be reliable for.

47. If you could ask your future self one question, what would it be? Are you okay now?

48. Do you hold grudges? Yes

49. If you could breed two animals together to defy the laws of nature, what new animal would you create? A dragon pig

50. What is the most unusual conversation you’ve ever had? Hmmm I don’t know

51. Are you a good liar? Not really

52. How long could you go without talking? Not long

53. What has been you worst haircut/style? My bowl cut when I was 3

54. Have you ever baked your own cake? Yes

55. Can you do any accents other than your own? British

56. What do you like on your toast? Butter jelly sometimes cinnamon and sugar

57. What is the last thing you drew a picture of? Cyle and I as stick figures in love of course

58. What would be you dream car? 69’ z/28

59. Do you sing in the shower? Or do anything unusual in the shower? Explain. I sing here and there

60. Do you believe in aliens? Sorta

61. Do you often read your horoscope? Daily

62. What is your favorite letter of the alphabet? C

63. Which is cooler: dinosaurs or dragons? Ahhh both are cool!

64. What do you think about babies? I love babies and want my own babies in the near future

65. Freebie! Ask anything interesting you can think of. Yikes I have nothing. Oops

[breakingarrows]

What makes a game a good game? I’ve been thinking about this, as well as what I have to offer to the greater conversations that are perpetually in motion Online. Taking a break from my usual outlet due to a huge feeling of apathy, I looked back towards my younger days just posting whatever it was on my mind on Tumblr and thought that was a time I was more satisfied. Not with a byline or great recognition but just kinda creating and putting it out there for nobody but myself to look over on a portfolio. So here are some thoughts on game criticism and media and the way they are used and could be used.

There is no such thing as an objective review. A great example of this is Objective Game Reviews that would post “Game reviews that are fact, not opinion.” An example from their “review” of RAGE:

One of the weapons in RAGE is the “wingstick,” a thrown blade weapon that can slice off the limbs of enemies and return to the player. Wingsticks can be steered through the air by moving the crosshair, and if they hit a hard surface or an armored enemy they can break. The player can craft wingsticks and alternative ammunition with parts looted from the world or purchased from vendors. Normal ammunition can be looted from enemies and refilled during a fight, whereas if alternative ammunition runs out the player must pause to craft more.

Another great example is Jim Sterling’s “review” of Final Fantasy XIII. Sterling did not like Final Fantasy XIII, giving it a Below Average, 4/10, for Destructoid on March 16, 2010. Of course reactions ranged from “whoa!” to “you didn’t even play the game.” In response, Sterling wrote up an objective review:

The videogame has graphics and sound. The graphics are seen with your eyes and the sound is heard by your ears. When you start the game the graphics and the sound will occur almost at the same time, letting you know that the game has started. There is also text which players can read.

Gamers who cry out against reviews that are not objective just disagree with what is being said, and don’t actually want an objective review that is just listing the things in the game as factual statements with no opinion on whether those things are good or bad. The same can be said of those who cry that a reviewer is “biased” towards a certain game/company/genre/etc. Most famously this is hurled towards Nintendo reviews for games that are perceived as bad but get good reviews “because Nintendo.” Sometimes it can be hard to not fall into this trap, as my reaction towards Skyward Sword getting hugely praised in 2011 was viewed as coming from people who couldn’t help but worship at the feet of Zelda and Nintendo.

The issue though, of universal praise for nearly every major title every year is something worth discussing. Both Nick Capozzoli, Vincent Kinian, and Tevis Thompson have talked about this before, the latter with a bit more hostility and other issues all his own, but the fact remains that there is a deep hole of variety when it comes to game reviews. This isn’t helped by the fact that more sites are beginning to realize the stupidity of assigning a score to a game, as if a number can accurately sum up a game’s worth and that elevating all games on the scale of numerical weight means games never meant to be compared to each other will be. See the meme of IGN’s review of Party Babyz Wii whose 7.5 was copy+pasted next to “better” games that got a lower review score for years.

Tevis links back the inability for game critics to come out and say Red Dead Redemption 2 sucks to the universally praised Bioshock Infinite of 2013, a game that mainstream media made multiple offerings to in the form of breathless praise, whereas others wrote out their criticisms on the periphery, best exemplified by the recent Critical Compilation on the game.

One critic he mentions is Videogamedunkey, a YouTuber who puts out short videos about whatever game is currently in the discourse. His slant is generally as an entertainment, comedian, wanting to make his viewers laugh, but also he talks about what he liked in the game and what he didn’t like. With Red Dead Redemption 2 Dunkey’s conclusion is the excess bears down on the game and he became as disillusioned as protagonist Arthur Morgan does with his mentor Dutch. It’s a fine video/review, though doesn’t nearly have the bite Tevis appears to want with regards to Red Dead Redemption 2, a bite I personally found in Jess Joho’s review of the game for Mashable which most aligned with my own feelings on the game and one he does list. Listing Dunkey also either shows Tevis’ ignorance or agreement with another Dunkey video: Game Critics, which provoked lots of conversations about people who review games for larger sites. Though, reading through Tevis’ piece, that video might be why he apparently looks up to Dunkey for good criticism. It is not like some of the issues Dunkey lists are wrong.

You’ve got your fanboys, your hobbyists, your escapists.  Your ‘objective’ reviewers, your consumer advisers, your spec hounds.  Your people pleasers, your twitter cheerleaders, your industry bootlickers.  Your never hate a game philosophers, your games are hard to make sympathizers, your but some people like it! tsk-tskers.  You’ve got old critics who’ve given up and young critics who’re getting there.  You’ve got so many internet professionals and professional apologists.  The tired, the self-censored, the players of the game.  None mutually exclusive.  All guardians of the status quo.

I think the real issue here is that the required work to put into really proving this sort of thing is massive. Reading and sorting the reviews based on site and author, taking into account Twitter posts that extend the conversation into an endless timeline unsearchable by keyword due to the often vague nature of criticizing criticism publicly. There have probably been hundreds of tweets in response to just Tevis’ blog as well as games criticism in general. It seems like the conversation about reviewers, their role, their work, their compensation, their method, is repeated ad nauseum monthly. Games media loves to talk about games media. I mean here I am, someone much lower than those I’ve mentioned, talking about it myself.

This sort of work loses the point, about what is it that makes a game good? Objective reviews are useless, subjective reviews are useful. What makes a subjective opinion worth reading? What makes the work their talking about worth something? These are the sorts of things that have many answers.

Some small things to get out of the way are some more useless things, specifically the belief that a 10/10 means a game is perfect, is a belief that is hard to get around despite how simple it is. A 10/10 just means it is the pinnacle of what games can achieve and others should be more like this one. What constitutes a 10/10 is, as everything is, up to personal taste. For myself, 10/10’s practically don’t exist since no piece of art is without flaw. We are all humans. Remember before when I said assigning numerical value is stupid? Well given the circumstances of Metacritic, assigning a numerical score might not actually be a dumb thing when it's used as a statement, a punctuation at the end of your text. If Tevis used numerical scores in his reviews and got onto Metacritic he would be able to wield them much more usefully as a way to vocalize dissent through metascore than as just a page of text most will pass by without reading.

Phrases such as “Isn’t for everyone” or “not a perfect [x].” are also useless in terms of criticism. Not every game is made for everyone or could even accomplish that if it were the intention. That phrase can be applied to any and every game and is therefore useless. As mentioned before, no piece of art is perfect, so simply stating that as some sort of qualifier that, “I like this but it’s far from perfect,” is such a pathetic qualifier that should never be used.

A review worth reading is one that brings a point, a perspective, an idea that you didn’t have before about a piece of art and put it in your head. It also has to have supporting evidence for its conclusions, the sort of Philosophy 102 cogent argumentative qualities that blew my mind as a college kid. Given that we have already had decades of consumer grade reviews: ones that break a game into categories and tie them together into a qualitative statement at the end, that we would be able to move on from that into something different. This includes the derogatorily described “blog” reviews, ones that are less about whether or not the graphics never stuttered and more about whether or not a personal connection was made to a specific aspect of a game, whether large or incidental. These are the kind of conversations that bring something new than whether or not the guns sounded satisfactory. This is the sort of conversation that differentiates critical YouTubers like Raycevick from Noah Caldwell-Gervais. Both put out videos on the recent Wolfenstein series and both took very different approaches to what they wanted to say about the game. Raycevick was more focused on the mechanics, the variation of the map, the way it linked together its setpieces. Noah was more interested in what the game had to say about America, Nazism, and the ways to resist and cope with a fallen country. The former might make for a good quick recap of what the games are and what they do in a input-output sense (think right-trigger, left-trigger of Call of Duty), but it's the latter that does the digging into what the game is beyond whether the shooting was good or the stealth sections not too frustrating.

When ascertaining whether or not a game is good there are some easy questions to ask. Did I make an emotional connection? Was that emotional connection cheap (say showing a dog dying) or earned? Does the game have something to say about a topic and do I agree with or disagree with its conclusion about said topic? Did I enjoy spending time within the game and why? Was this a worthwhile spending of my time?

Mechanic’s based criticism is also valid, but personally less interesting. Does it matter if Anthem has good shooting and flying if the things surrounding it are bland? This is where subjectivity again comes in. So far, out of all the shlooters released, I’ve found that you can have the most mechanically satisfying circle, but if that is surrounded by mediocrity it doesn’t matter, it’s a bad game. I don’t care whether or not the shooting felt good in a game, I want to know if the things surrounding those mechanics is worth investing time into. Red Dead Redemption 2 had a rote shooting gallery mechanic underlying most all of its missions, and that couldn’t be saved by the characters and world surrounding it which left me feeling like I had wasted my time come the credits. Of course many felt the opposite, and its the ways we craft the arguments and explanations for why we felt that way that make a good criticism. A review is likely not going to and not meant to convince you that a game you hate is good, but it should at least allow you to understand why the author felt that way about it.

Something that has cropped up recently when covering games is the conditions under which they are made. As we, hopefully, work our way towards a labor revolution not only in games but across all aspects of culture, we have become more aware of the way corporations exploit the lower class workforce. AAA development means overwork, let’s not even get started on the lie of the 40 hour workweek, underpaid, and stress that routinely leads to the end of careers. Rockstar management came out and boasted about their 100 hour work weeks in New York Magazine, which was then qualified as just the writing team, and then was further qualified by a Kotaku report (that has been the norm) about the conditions under which Red Dead Redemption 2 was created. The question became whether or not this would affect reception of the game. It didn’t.

I sometimes struggled to enjoy Red Dead Redemption 2’s most impressive elements because I knew how challenging—and damaging—some of them must have been to make. Yet just as often, I found myself appreciating those things even more, knowing that so many talented people had poured their lives into crafting something this incredible.

The game currently has a 97 on Metacritic, there was only one “mixed” scored review, and even those who didn’t give scores offered only a slight hand wringing at the way the game was created in their text. Kotaku’s section ends with a shrug, “yeah the people who made this were exploited but I’ll be damned if that exploited work isn’t impressive.” It’s useless to have in the text as it leads nowhere, and the question of, “was their labor worth it?” should always be answered with a resounding NO. We are attempting to unionize the industry in order to keep exploitation from happening. What a fucking useless gesture to contemplate whether or not someone spending weeks crunching was “worth it.” It’s the sort of thing Tevis called out in his post,

They couch any troublesome truths in acceptable gamerese, outline all possible caveats, neuter any rhetorical force, maybe dress it up for their academic buddies while they’re at it.  Suddenly everything is ‘messy’ or ‘complicated’ or ‘full of fascinating contradictions’.  Sure, they’re ‘frustrated’, even ‘disappointed’, but they’re still rooting for the game.  And always with due deference to their audience.  It’s not for me but it’s cool if you and it’s totally just a taste thing now don’t get me wrong now I know what you’re thinking now I’m not saying that, y’all.

Some of this comes from the fact that games media is largely made up of, and rooted in, enthusiasts: people who do it out of a love for the media itself. This may best be exemplified by a recent (now deleted) tweet from Brian Altano, video host/producer at IGN Entertainment:

I've been working in the video game industry since 2007 and I don't think I've ever heard more than three people legitimately call themselves "game journalists" without being sarcastic, ironic, or putting it in air quotes while laughing about it. That's... not an actual thing.

Brian has never been someone you go to for criticism or news, the things journalists do. He exists to make you laugh, to entertain you. Going to Brian to determine whether or not you should buy a game will end with “Yes!” or “Maybe try it out.” Brian exemplifies the type of critic Tevis decries in his opening paragraph. He isn’t a critic, but he does represent a larger audience than critics do. There isn’t a real large audience for the type of work done at Bullet Points Monthly, or else their Patreon would be much higher than it currently is. People go to websites like IGN and GameSpot to have their already convinced minds reinforced that what they like is Important. This is why there are multiple articles whenever a new trailer or piece of information comes out about the next Star Wars or Marvel movie or Game of Thrones. These things are big so we have to talk about them and reinforce their importance, further enriching the pockets of corps like Disney, whose billion dollar company is immoral with its continued existence.

The roots of game criticism comes from the game magazines and websites of the 1990’s. Work that existed to be read and shared not because they did a good job interrogating the things they proclaimed to love but because they were entertaining to read and reinforced your love, whether it be Nintendo, Sega, Sony, or Microsoft. The same sort of circular reinforcement continues in the larger sites today, which is why AAA games will never fall below a favorable average on numerical compilation sites, with exceptions of course. Not that this sort of status quo is unique to just games media. Noam Chomsky, in the book On Western Terrorism, mentions how the media in the West give no time to dissenting opinion,

If you want to say that China is a totalitarian state you can say it, you know. If you want to say something like the U.S. is the biggest terrorist state in the world, they are not going to stop you, but you do sound like you are from Neptune, because you are not given the next five minutes to explain it. So you have two choices, to either repeat propaganda, repeat standard doctrine, or sound like you are a lunatic.

I hope you’ll forgive me for likening the universal love of game critics to the propaganda machine of western news media, as it's comically different in terms of importance, but the similarity is there. People who don’t conform to the generally accepted opinion on a game are labeled contrarians just looking to make a buck off a different opinion. Those who are praising Breath of the Wild are just Nintendo hacks. Those who call into question aspects of God of War are just SJW cucks.

Michael Thomsen touches on this status quo as well in his review of Jason Schreier’s book Blood, Sweat, and Pixels for The New Inquiry,

In these times, the most important task of game journalism isn’t to serve a public interest but to ensure that fans can continue to identify some version of themselves in the games they have played, and ensure future releases will allow them access to even deeper levels of self-expression and understanding. In playing the next game, owning the newest console, having an opinion on the latest patch, we feel like we can become stabler versions of ourselves, all at the cost of clearing out space—both mental and financial—for open-ended consumption of a form without any purpose beyond this increasingly tautological pleasure. This process is necessarily dehumanizing. Games matter because you are here to play them, and you remain here to play them because they matter.

We can do better, as being human is to strive to be more than we are (yeah its a corny Star Trek clip but that episode fucks me up). I think it should be obvious that better games criticism is probably pretty low in terms of importance when you look at other things, but I do think it has influence on creating and leading conversations, the kind that lead towards stronger rights for laborers and are more critical of the output of corporations who seek only to deepen their own pockets.

[welcometoyouredoom]

Here then is my current provisional list, from most to least realistic, where 10 is the real world, and 0 is total cartoon nonsense, with especially emphasis on spaceships and space opera:

10. The real world. Science is explained, no handwavium. Also, Non-Fiction. As TV Tropes puts it: “The Apollo Program, World War II, and Woodstock fall in this class.”

9.6. to 9.9 Technothrillers and Futurology. Technothrillers take place only a few years in the future, with only a few plausible near future tech projections. This category overlaps with Futurology which includes, as explained in TV Tropes “stories which function almost like a prediction of the future, extrapolating from current technology but do not assume or invent any important new technologies or discoveries.”  Quite likely some of the more rigorously and scientifically realistic of the ultra hard space exploration categories of the following category actually go here.

8.6.to 9.5 Ultra Hard Science – only extrapolation from known laws of physics. In TV Tropes this is called Speculative Science. In contrast to the previous categories, the science is “genuine speculative science or engineering, and the goal of the author to make as few errors with respect to known fact as possible.” Interplanetary vessels have milligee thrust. Rockets have to choose between high thrust low isp, or high isp low thrust, you can’t have both. Adherence to thermodynamics, real science. No torchships. Preferably no aliens, if there are, they are limited to the same physics we are, and also must justify in terms of Great Silence (Fermi Paradox). Greg Egan, Kim Stanly Robinson Mars Trilogy, Arthur C Clarke 2001, Asimov The Gods Themselves, GURPS Transhuman Space, Andy Weir’s The Martian, the first two books in Robert L. Forward’s Rocheworld series and Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress fall in this class. 9.5 is the most realistic, with only plausible near future tech projections.  For some excellent examples on Ultra Hard SF ships in fact and fiction, with authentic rocket science, see Winchell Chung’s Atomic Rockets website, a resource that I simply cannot recommend highly enough.  For tabletop spaceship combat game, see Ken Burnside’s Attack Vector: Tactical (although this also has less realistic FTL as a background explanation for why the battles are not in our solar system). John Lumpkin’s Human Reach series features similarily authentic spaceships, although the setting includes wormholes which pertain to one or two realism grades down.

7.6.to 8.5. Very Hard Science – extrapolation from laws of physics, with minimum handwavium for story purposes. Basic torchships (high thrust high isp), interplanetary vessels average around 0.3 gee thrust or less. Adherence as much as possible to thermodynamics and real science. Interstellar, non-relativistic travel. In TV Tropes this is called “One Small Fib”, “stories that include only a single counterfactual device (often FTL Travel), but for which the device is not a major element of the plot.” Some alien or posthuman handwavium / unobtanium allowed. Big Dumb Object without handwavium. Preferably have an explanation for Great Silence (Fermi Paradox). Arthur C Clarke Rama novels, Gregory Benford, Bruce Stirling Schizmatrix, Stephen Baxter. Many Hal Clement novels (e.g. Mission Of Gravity, Close to Critical) and Freefall belong here.

6.6 to 7.5. Hard Science – extrapolition from laws of physics, plus some handwavium for storytelling purposes. In TV Tropes this is called “One Big Lie”. “Authors invent one, or, at most, a very few, counterfactual physical laws and writes a story that explores the implications of these principles.” Tech otherwise consistent and explained. Interplanetary vessels average around 1 gee. Relativistic travel. May have reactionless drive but must be realistic, say exotic matter or singularity or other unusual tech. FTL only if plausibly explained, otherwise relativistic travel. Includes thermodynamics, rocket science, etc. Aliens with realistic-seeming biology, non-humanoid only. Token explanation of Great Silence (Fermi Paradox). Most works in Alan Dean Foster’s Humanx Commonwealth series, the Ad Astra board games and Robert A. Heinlein’s Farnham’s Freehold fall in this category, as do many of Vernor Vinge’s books. Also Haldeman Forever War, Niven Mote in God’s Eye, Greg Bear various stories, Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space/Galactic North Universe, Posthuman Studios Eclipse Phase (everything else very hard, say 9 out of 10, but “sleeving” consciousness with its associated cartesian ghost in the machine implications, also alien wormholes that are pure unexplainedium). John C. Wright’s The Golden Age probably would go here as well (say 6.7)

5.6.to 6.5. Firm Science – with handwavium and unobtanium, but these reasonably explained in the context of the setting. Torchships rather than reactionless drive, but absurd acceleration given energy allowance (fudging the figures). Token thermodynamics only. FTL with reasonably plausible explanation. Ignores Fermi Paradox. Niven’s Known Universe, Peter Hamilton, James Corey’s The Expanse, a lot of space opera in general.

4.6.to 5.5 Physics Plus (to use the TV Tropes moniker). “Stories in this class once again have multiple forms of Applied Phlebotinum, but in contrast to the prior class, the author aims to justify these creations with real and invented natural laws — and these creations and others from the same laws will turn up again and again in new contexts.” Some Science. Reactionless drive ships easily pull dozens or hundreds of gees. Doesn’t explain why relativistic reactionless drive ships aren’t used as doomsday devices to annihilate whole planets, or as perpetual motion free energy devices. Differs from Token Science in that there is still some rocket science. Heinlein Citizen of the Galaxy, Starship Troopers, Brin Uplift universe, Iain M Banks Cultureverse, Schlock Mercenary, David Weber’s Honor Harrington series, David Brin’s Uplift series, and Battlestar Galactica (2003) fall in this class.

3.6.to 4.5 Token Science. Some real science, but only because this is “science fiction”; the science is there only for storytelling purposes rather than realism. For the most part handwavium and unobtanium with little or no explanation. Ignores thermodynamics (no radiator fins). Reactionless drive, agrav, forcefields, tractor beams, stealth, some aliens look like humans, others very different. FTL with arbitrary explanation.  Consistency in worldbuilding, in contrast to the Pure Technobabble category.  Frank Herbert’s Dune, Dan Simmons Hyperion Cantos, Firefly/Serenity, maybe Eve on line.  Babylon 5 may belong here, although humanoid aliens belong to the next category down, and conversely fighters use vector thrust and larger ships generate artificial gravity by centrifugal spin, which put them in at least the 6 or 7 out of 10 category.

2.6 to 3.5. Technobabble and Handwavium. Differs from Science Fiction In Name Only in that at least there is some attempt, no matter how poor, at a rational explanation. Or in otherwords, to quote TV Tropes: “Phlebotinum is dealt with in a fairly consistent fashion despite its lack of correspondence with reality and, in-world, is considered to lie within the realm of scientific inquiry.” So for example the Enterprise cannot land on a planet, showing that large ships are outer space only. Even so, this is still full of sillytech and inconsistent worldbuilding. Because of handwavium and phlebotinum, anything can be explained. You can have ST style matter transportation because it is assumed all the technical problems were solved, most aliens are humanoid, many identical in appearance to H. sapiens, human and aliens can interbreed, and humans live in similar environments can eat same food etc, because it is assumed there were humanoid progenitors. At the same time, there is serious worldbuilding incompatabilities e.g. if you have ST matter teleportation otherwise you could easily drop a nuke in an enemies lap, have immortality, limitless clones, etc. But it is never explained why this never happens. Star Trek is the classic example, but also included here is E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman series, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Warhammer 40k, the Star Wars Expanded Universe novels (now called “legends” and considered non-canon) which at least make some attempt at explanation over the totally unrealistic canonical movies, Cowboy Bebop, and StarCraft.

1.6 to 2.5 Artistic License. Although unambiguously considered to be “Science Fiction”, there is no actual science to be found. Rather, the story follows what looks good artistically from our contemporary early 21st century perspective. Ships wheel and bank in a vacuum, blaster bolts move slower than tracer rounds. Battles directly mapped from WW II naval engagements. Lantern-jawed heroes and busty maidens, or scary monsters, or both. More realistic than comic book superheros only in that it’s assumed you need a spaceship to travel through space, and there is an attempt at a consistent plot. Star Wars, Guardians of the Galaxy, Dr Who, Red Dwarf, Farscape, Space Battleship Yamoto. Some Star Trek movies, e.g. Star Trek out of Darkness has worldbuilding inconsistencies  that are if anything even worse, e.g. Transwarp allows teleporting across interstellar distances, but it is never explained why people still use spaceships

0.1. to 1.5 Comic books. Only token attempts at explanations – Marvel and DC superheros, e.g. superpowers because from a planet with a red sun, Genetic mutation, or Peter Parker bitten by a radioactive spider. Sometimes not only that, so that, to quote TV Tropes: “Green Rocks gain New Powers as the Plot Demands”. The DC and Marvel superhero universes belong here, along with Futurama, manga and anime like Dragonball Z and Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, and humorous aspects of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

0. Cartoons that are not meant to make sense, e.g. Marvin the Martian