OK, here's the deal.
The scale originally was designed to rate books in particular Science Fiction. The key moment was when I gave Zeke a book and said "here read this" and Meg said "I need a book. Can I read if first?" And I said "no the book is not good enough for you."
You see meg reads about 10 or so fun books a year (and about 7000 books for work). The book I was giving Zeke had this one funny minor character but Zeke reads 100 or more books a year. That means that he is interested in books that are of a much lower quality than Meg.
As counter intuitive as it seems, the more prolific reader is less interested in quality than the lesser reader. And they are willing to get much less out of the books they read.
So we translate the system over, looking at the types of people who buy gaming books. And we rescale the numbers.
So we have:
0 - This person will never under any conditions buy a new book
1 - this person is interested in one game, learning one new game, brings one game back from a con or plays only one game at a time
3 - this person is interested in three games, learning three new games brings three games back from a con or or plays three games at a time.
10 - this person is interested in ten games, learning ten new games brings, ten games back from a con or or plays ten games at a time.
ALL - this person buys every game, picks up new games constantly, wants every game, plays all the games they can.
So note that there is no bad rating. In trying to simplify things for the podcast we realized that 0 and all are pointless to talk to. One of them buys everything anyway and the other never buys. So to avoid confusion we drop them.
We are about to publish a review and are taking a look at the Serenity game. A game with absolutely no redeeming value. It does not even have good pictures. I never considered that such a bad book would ever exist. So I say new category and call it, being a math nerd, the empty set. And just before we record the first review Meg and Zeke suddenly go "wait, empty set, what the hell is that?" So minutes before we record, we change it to zero. (my second choice was null)
In retrospect, bad choice.