Thursday, January 26, 2012
Friday, January 13, 2012
Analysing the Distribution of Gamespot and Metacritic Scores
So, I spent an hour today graphing the distribution of Gamespot.com scores in a line chart. What we find is rather interesting.
Naturally, we see a spike in every whole and half number, which may also be attributed to Gamespot's previous practice of not using decimal values, but we also see that the chart is skewed with 7.0 being both the median and mode.
So does this mean that there are 70 degrees of badness, but only 30 degrees of goodness? In a proper distribution, we should see a traditional bell curve, with 5.0 being the median. Perhaps this means most games are actually better than average? Or perhaps Gamespot simply likes to give 7.0's for mediocre games?
Personally, I believe this goes back to the American education system which labels 70% as a "C" or "Average" There's nothing inherently wrong with this metric, since it's fairly consistent across all districts, but after 12 years of learning "70% is average" these students grow up and have that mindset throughout their lives. thus, a score of only 50%, which SHOULD be average, reflects an "F" score, and thus not worth their time.
Of course, this information and analysis is nothing new, but I think seeing it so clearly makes for an interesting conversation piece.
What are your thoughts?
And here are the two data sets overlayed:
We can clearly see a much more even distribution of scores between 85 and 55, without spikes on the halves. However, we still see the skewed bell curve with a mean around 73. While this shows that Metacritic is considerably more trustworthy in their scores, since it is collected from many sources around the internet, their data comes from the still-flawed "70% average" paradigm.
Naturally, we see a spike in every whole and half number, which may also be attributed to Gamespot's previous practice of not using decimal values, but we also see that the chart is skewed with 7.0 being both the median and mode.
So does this mean that there are 70 degrees of badness, but only 30 degrees of goodness? In a proper distribution, we should see a traditional bell curve, with 5.0 being the median. Perhaps this means most games are actually better than average? Or perhaps Gamespot simply likes to give 7.0's for mediocre games?
Personally, I believe this goes back to the American education system which labels 70% as a "C" or "Average" There's nothing inherently wrong with this metric, since it's fairly consistent across all districts, but after 12 years of learning "70% is average" these students grow up and have that mindset throughout their lives. thus, a score of only 50%, which SHOULD be average, reflects an "F" score, and thus not worth their time.
Of course, this information and analysis is nothing new, but I think seeing it so clearly makes for an interesting conversation piece.
What are your thoughts?
- Source: http://www.gamespot.com/reviews.html?mode=all&sort=score&dlx_type=all&sortdir=asc&official=all&page=0
- Games with multiple reviews (i.e. multiple platforms) are counted for each score, since the subject of this analysis is the scores themselves, not the games that receive them.
And here are the two data sets overlayed:
We can clearly see a much more even distribution of scores between 85 and 55, without spikes on the halves. However, we still see the skewed bell curve with a mean around 73. While this shows that Metacritic is considerably more trustworthy in their scores, since it is collected from many sources around the internet, their data comes from the still-flawed "70% average" paradigm.
- Source: http://www.metacritic.com/browse/games/score/metascore/all/all?sort=desc&view=condensed
- Games with multiple reviews (i.e. multiple platforms) are counted for each score, since the subject of this analysis is the scores themselves, not the games that receive them.
Monday, January 2, 2012
TZs Personal Top 5 Best and Worst Games of 2011
I don't tend to play games as soon as they come out, so my gaming experience is often on a few year lag. However, I did play a number of great and shitty games this year, so here are my thoughts on them.
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