IMO "gamed" is a bit of a strange choice of word. The whole point of score voting is to give each voter more power to express their true preference. If their preference is to assign top scores to several candidates, fantastic, thank you for your vote! If the next voter prefers to give more diversified scores, wonderful, thank you for voting! And if the next voter would prefer to rank order the candidates, you can do that too using score, so great, thank you for voting!

Yes, if you are highly strategic and acutely fear some popular candidate(s), you might give maximum scores to all candidates of which you approve to minimize loss risk. But again, great. That doesn't seem like "gaming" things to me.

With score, voters leave the ballot box feeling they were able to express their preferences and therefore have less regret about their votes. Incidentally, I feel in the long term, approval or score voting would do more to improve the satisfaction people have with voting thereby increasing participation than all of today's "get out the vote" drives have had.