So, after an unexpected vacation, work continues. Sort of. A common request was for the ability to compare an outlet internally against itself to see how it reviews games on different platforms. I’m still working on a dynamic means to do this, and one which will fit a smooth curve to the data points. But in the meantime I took the Gamespot data and did the necessary database query for PS2, ‘Cube, Xbox, and PC and slapped them together manually into this animated GIF.

Is Gamespot “BIAS”, as the kids who haven’t learned the adjectivial form of the root word like to say? That you’ll have to decide for yourself. I can tell you the 23 scores in there that have my name attached to them are individually the one true score for each game they were given to.

But check out the weird distribution on Gamecube scores. The most common score is 6.5, with 19 games scoring 6.5. But, the next most common review score is a tie between 8.0 and 7.2, with 18 games scoring thusly. There’s no clear tip of the curve, but one thing to keep in mind is that there are a lot fewer datapoints for Gamecube, with only 442 reviews compared. The average score per platform comes out to be almost the same— in between 6.9 and 7.0— except for PC, where it’s a lot more profitable to publish crappy budgetware.

Another weird thing you might notice is how certain scores tend to not be represented in the expected curve. In particular notice how no matter which console platform you look at, it seems particularly difficult to score a 7.7 or a 7.8. There’s a noticeable dip at 7.4 too. PC seems more immune to that phenomenon. Like I said, weird.

Anyway, have fun comparing and contrasting each and every point on the scale, to prove whatever point you think needs making.

—Matthew J. Gallant

• Your Guide To The Cherokee People (Look for “Your Guide To Ancient History” in the next issue of Computer Games Magazine)
• Videogames Are Art
• Alyx Is A Nerd Succubus
• Rockstar Cancels A Game
• Documentaries On Making Games: We Care
• Half-Life: 2, Episode: 1, Boats & Buggies: 0
• $600 PS3 Is Not A Toy; Therefore, $650 PSP Watch Is Not A Timepiece.

Well, it was significantly harder to grab IGN’s scores because of their tendency to throw interstitial ads at you. But it’s done. The histogram reveals IGN’s weirdo 20-point/100-point scale waffling. I’m tempted to round their scores to the nearest .5 and force them onto a 20-point scale.

Still, their most common score being an 8.0 is revealing. Not to mention there being almost as many 9.0’s as there are 6.0’s.

Now that I have two review outlets in the database, I’m going to spend more time working on the presentation of the site and the tools that will let users get more detailed information for one single site (like comparing score breakdowns by platform), as well as comparing between sites.

Related – Kotaku Doesn’t Read The Articles They Link

I spent the last day or so constructing the database and writing a script that would grab all of Gamespot’s reviews from their review list and massage the info into the relevant database tables.

Then I wrote the script that generates the image you see above. It’s a histogram of all Gamespot’s review scores for any game that isn’t for mobile phones, the Gameboy/Gameboy Color, the N-Gage, or the Neo-Geo Pocket. I’ll be expanding its functionality to make comparisons by platform as well as between two or more different sites. And I suppose I’ll have to make it look nicer, too.

I did this really quickly because I wanted to see if this was really worth doing. Out of the 7,244 reviews, 239 scored a 7.0. There’s some weird gaps, but you can definitely see the bell shape and how scores crowd towards the right of the scale. Now to figure out a way to determine which ranges of scores get translated to 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 stars. It looks like that a 3-star game may go as high as 8.1 or 8.2.

Hopefully review scores from other sites will be as easy to compile as Gamespot’s were. I don’t know if any other sites have a list of all their reviews like that.

The joke is this: lots of people love sites like GameRankings and MetaCritic. Publishers and fanboys alike use a game’s average score like a weapon. But really, these sites tend to not provide useful information about a game’s review scores. Why? For a couple of reasons.

Blame falls mostly on the reviewers themselves. Most reviewers tend to artificially inflate a game’s score. This has become known as the 7-9 scale, so named due to the industry’s stubbornness in holding onto a 100-point scale, and it’s further stubbornness in using any parts of it that don’t fall between 72 and 95. A famous “IGN 9.2″ tends to have a lot of noise in its signal.

Further fault, however, lies with GameRankings and its ilk themselves, though. They tend to be more than a little forgiving when it comes to who’s allowed to contribute to the “averaged score”. The criteria for GameRankings comes down to a site needing to have a lot of reviews and having a current output of a certain number of reviews a month. Very egalitarian, but there are way too many sites run by, shall we say, the overeager. There are 34 sites with an average review score of 80 or higher. I’ll rephrase that because it bears repeating: GameRankings has 34 sites— that it uses to generate a game’s metascore— for whom the average game scores an 80. Or higher— the creampuff champ is PSE Magazine, which has 817 reviews, the average score of which is 86.7.

Metafuture will improve the service that sites like GameRankings provide. Put a better way, we will create the service that those sites attempt to provide. First of all, we’ll cut down on the number of review outlets. There’s no need to have a huge number of reviews for a game to provide a useful aggregated score. Magazines and the top websites will be just fine.

Second comes the funny part. Games will still get an average score from all contributing reviews. But a site’s contribution to that average will depend on that site’s own individual normal curve— with the immediate left and right of the bell’s tip signifying three stars on a scale of one to five. Watch the drama as the biggest sweethearts see their 8.4 score for Gun and Car IV get pegged as three stars.

Continue to subscribe to this blog for status updates; the blog will only truly die when the new site is ready to launch, and compiling data is going to take a significant amount of time. If you’re an editor of a review outlet or otherwise have access to raw review data, please contact the site. I won’t blame you if you don’t, though.

Mark Rein is the vice president of Epic Games. His job is to get people to license the Unreal Engine. He goes about this by visiting conferences and sounding so out of touch that people will think the Unreal Engine must be really good to keep Epic in business with Mark on the team.

His latest trip was to England, where he kicked things off by announcing that “very little of [the episodic business model] makes any actual sense.”

He apparently didn’t elaborate on which parts of it do make sense— Metafuture guesses one part might be the statistics for Half-Life 2: Episode One, which show the game has been launched close to 1.5 million times so far.

Mark also told his audience that he hates Intel— their graphics chips are what’s really killing the PC gaming market. The second part about the PC games market getting killed, I can confirm that’s definitely true— I was at PC-only game developer Ensemble Studios on Monday and, well, the queso dip for their catered chicken and steak fajita lunch was frankly overspiced. And plastic forks and knives! I really needed to slap Bruce Shelley down, but I felt a little sorry for this captain of a sinking ship. Plus, one of his over a hundred employees probably would have taken me down eventually— probably somewhere between the studio’s private elevator and the elevators that could take me to the first floor of the building.

Getting back to the problem with Intel: according to Mark, it’s that they’re selling these wonderless graphics chips for $5 cheaper than a gaming chip would cost the hardware manufacturers. Mark can’t understand why companies would want to save a lousy five dollars on each the millions of computers they sell instead of supporting the games industry. I’m pretty sure this means he would also be completely OK with just giving Metafuture a mere ten cents for each copy of Gears of War that sells, because that’s just a lousy ten cents. You can just send a PDF of that contract via email, Mark.

However, the guide will be available exclusively in the next issue of Computer Games Magazine along with, coincindentally enough, another bit to do with Native Americans— though without all the cyborgs, ham-handed stereotyping, and gameplay gimmick flogging substituting for a coherent interactive narrative this time. Some sort of RTS expansion pack, Era of Commonwealths or something like that.

But as far as the guide goes, you’ll learn all sorts of neat things about ancient times thanks to me, and also Titan Quest. For instance, you probably already knew that in Ancient Greece, people in general were more accepting and enlightened when it came to homosexuality than we are today in Modern America. But only I (and Titan Quest) can show you just to what degree this was the case (pictured at right). It’ll be a very handy and useful guide to ancient cultures that is sure to make you sound smart the next time the topic is broached at your local chautauqua. Get the full info in CGM; knowing about the popularity of tasseled codpieces that dangled below the knee isn’t enough.

If you don’t currently get CGM, I recommend getting a Zinio subscription to obtain this upcoming plum of American writing. Zinio is an electronically delivered copy of the magazine, so there’s no trying and failing to find the magazine at Barnes & Noble, or depending on postage at the Magazine Rate to get it to you in a timely fashion. It’s not some cheap scan, either, despite how the samples on Zinio’s site look. Here’s how it really looks:

This is a sample of the resolution when you zoom in. Zoomed out, you can fit two readable pages into 1280×1024 resolution. The reader has some other neat features, like being able to click on an article’s title on the Table of Contents page and jumping directly to it, and automatic conversion of URLs to hyperlinks.

Ultimately, having an electronic copy of the only magazine smart enough to regularly publish articles by me will make all organisms in your house happy— except the cat, who really enjoyed sitting on the mag when you set it on the floor to answer the phone. What this proves is that when you have the option of CGM, a cardboard box is Plan B no matter what— it’s just the more obvious choice if you’re looking for a good read. I know what you’re thinking, but trust me, this rule is inviolate.

There shouldn’t be. I mean, I heard The Suffering was fairly decent, but I actually played State of Emergency 2, and its prison made you watch an unskippable in-engine cutscene every time you completed each button-y part of the mission to push the four buttons in each corner of the cell block. Meanwhile, as you were being treated to yet another view of a row of doors opening and prisoners aimlessly running back and forth, the regularly spawning guards would continue their mission: run to where you were and fire a shotgun into your face. Conincidentally, the cutscene was just long enough for them to get within point blank range of you.

But games set in a prison just aren’t a good idea— even before amateurish game design gets involved— because you’re at the breeding ground of the post-modern knock-knock joke: a reference to anal rape. Research has shown that there’s only two ways Larry the Cable Guy could be less funny: if he was named Larry the Prison Sex-Referencing Guy, or if he was 90% of the game designers making games today.

That’s decided, then. What’s up in the air, and what this article is about, is whether or not prisoners should have videogames while in prison. Game Politics recently highlighted the debate.

Reading that, it’s readily apparent that the decision makers haven’t thought about the ramifications very much.

On the one hand, you have the governor who banned games from his state’s prisons because prisons are “punitive institutions”. And my response to that is, “punitive to who?” Once the guy who got some kicks smashing someone’s face into a somewhat reparable pulp outside a bar gets paroled to make room for some dude who got caught selling pot to sorority girls, do I want him to be coming off of four to eight years of bench presses and 50 lb. curls? Or nothing but Gran Turismo and World of Warcraft?

On the other, you have the pro-gamer wardens that offer games as a privilege. Seems like a good idea. But these game libraries would likely offer sports and tycoon games. Prisoners shouldn’t be playing these games. It’ll only remind them that if they were better at sports or rich, they could have gotten away with whatever it is they’re in jail for, and build further resentment for society within them.

It’s a complex issue with no easy answer.