No one believes game reviews. All those journos are bound to be on the take, no? Sure, we all knew they were way back when, but things are different now. Or are they? OR ARE THEY?
So here is a thing. This should follow a Gaussian distribution, given that you have awful games, brilliant games, and the great unwashed in the middle. But then again, most games rags seem to think an average score out of ten is seven, so there may need to be some manipulation done later. Later? What do you mean later? Are you getting ahead of yourself?
Yes, yes I am.
I screen-scraped Gamespot, collecting values of every review they have ever made. Srsly. Taking the cumulative figure for each review score, I plotted graphs. For all platforms, and for each individual platform. (If you want the data, in perl’s Storable format, you can has.)
See all my minutes of efforts displayed on one of my interweb pages. Yes, I should tidy the graphs. Maybe when I get the intertubes at home again.
Who’d have thought, eh? It comes out as a Poisson distribution.
How very boring. Have an (old) funny picture to lighten it all up.
This was my most hot-linked picture years ago
I remember that picture. From the dark, dismal days of 2003, IIRC.
I would like to point out that I didn’t hot link it then; I linked to it directly. Because I’m that nice a guy.
1
ejh
Mon 24 Sep, 4:00PM
Frippery, that’s right. I do believe that is how I found out that Randalstown had internets. And I remember the post you made, because it made no mention of the fact I was a mere ten miles away from you.
There you go.
2
Stray Taoist
Mon 24 Sep, 4:13PM
I was going to make a poor joke about a poissoned chalice, but let’s not go there. ho hum.
Re: the photo. It was fabulous then, it’s fabulous now. Some jokes just never get old.
3
Endrew
Wed 26 Sep, 12:27PM
It could be, could it not, that the (ab)normal distribution curve is due to the tendency for a magazine to appease rather than be truly obejctive? Like, when did you last read a bad restaurant review in a local paper?
4
Raymond Lesley
Wed 26 Sep, 1:25PM