After I wrote my blog about Dragon Age - Origins, I wanted to search the web to see what other people had to say about the game; whether they confirmed my observations, or whether I was the only person in the world that didn't think this game was the best thing since sliced bread.
I found the greatest wealth of information on Metacritic, but much to my dismay, many of the "respectable" gaming sources gave it very positive review.
So much for the experts.
Then I decided to look through the user reviews so I could really build a meta-analysis of what real users had to say. But then I ran into a whole new problem, which I should have anticipated; people don't know dick about shit.
On a scale of 0-10, 0 is essentially... well 0, and 10 is essentially 100%. By that logic you would think a score of 10 means the user found absolutly nothing wrong with the game, and conversely, a score of 0 should imply no redeeming factors of the game. This is of course, not the case. I saw countless 10-score reviews with sentences like "sure the game has its faults, but overall I think its good". That sounds more like a rating of 7 or 8 to me. Similar stories take place on the other end of the scale too. So overall I basically throw out any review with a score of 10 or 0, because for most games (a few exceptions... Deus Ex was one of them), these scores are outliers of the data set, written by people who have a grudge against the game, or are so smitten by it they cant write an unbiased review.
I performed a super-scientific study where I looked through some other games I've played, and read the reviews there too, and it seemed to support my discovery. Maybe sites like Metascore should provide a breakdown of what percentage of people rated which games at which number, rather than just the weighted average they do at the moment, and then the user could sort based on the criteria they wish to base their evaluations on.
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2 comments:
This is a well documented issue with game reviews. Essentially, the problem boils down to this:
You're a game review magazine. The lion's share of your ad revenues comes from game studios. You also write reviews about the games that these studios produce. Do you really dare put out a lukewarm review?
This is why individual bloggers are worth their weight in gold. You aren't taking money from anyone - your opinion is free of influence. You are more trustworthy.
That's a good point. Maybe we can find some coefficient to apply to something like a meta score to give a realistic representation of how good it is... like divide whatever score they gave it by 5 lol.
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