The same score has different meaning to different people, making them extremely arbitrary and almost worthless, so can we stop using scores in general? Please?
Scores are only as arbitrary as the opinions backing them, and of course everyone who reads a review will draw different meanings from the opinions of its writer. Hardly a reason to dismiss them.
The thing about review scores is that you have to put them in the context of the reviewer's tastes. They are like a kind of thesis statement. If you open your newspaper or something and you see a four-star review of the new Doom, then yeah, the score is basically meaningless - you don't know what basis the reviewer had for giving that score, or really anything about his opinion on the game other than that he liked it. But if you know who Arthur Gies is and what he likes and dislikes in games, and you see that he's (hypothetically) reviewed Doom and given it a 2/5, you can actually extrapolate why he gave the game the score he did even before reading the review.
So review scores are very useful in giving you a quick look into the tastes of a game reviewer and conveniently, quickly shows how he stacks some games against others, provided that he writes a decent amount of reviews and applies his scores in consistent ways. Of course, this does mean that scores lose value when look at them as though they are just coming from some organization rather than a person (a 9/10 review for any given game coming "from IGN" could mean anything depending on who wrote it), and once you go up a few levels and get to Metacritic's attempt to average all reviews across the whole gaming press they are completely useless. But that doesn't mean there isn't a lot of value in scores, as long as the reader interprets them appropriately.
