It seems like every Flash game website has a voting system. But I find interesting that the voting mechanism usually tells you the average vote score BEFORE you vote. So that got me thinking, what if the voting system hides the popular vote before playing and voting? For example, lets say that the vote bar appears after playing the game and asks you to vote. You would not see the votes or reviews of users… just the vote bar. Think of how different it feels voting based on your experiences alone.
Good. Now take a look at this next scale. This scale reflects a voting system that constantly updates as the votes come in.
Seems much different now, right? You have the popular vote to take into consideration. I think this has three major effects on your voting habits:
Effect #1) I may now vote based on my expectations of the game.
If you see the current score on the graph, you are going to get an indication of how “good” people think the game is. This is going to set your expectations before you even open the game. After playing the game, your vote may be effected by whether or not your expectations were met.
Effect #2) I may now vote based on the agreement or disagreement of others.
Instead of voting specifically for the value you think it deserves, you may vote in agreement or disagreement with the current popular vote. For example, if you think the game was better than the current popular vote, you will vote higher than the average. If you thought the game was worse, you would vote lower. Instead of voting in line with your own opinions, you’ll be voting in such a way to show your agreement or disagreement with how others voted.
Effect #3) I may now vote on the extremes so I can sway the vote with the greatest impact possible, in lieu of Effect #2.
More is better right? Since you are voting on a scale, there are extremes to how a user can vote: 0 or 10. An extreme vote is going to change the vote much more than one that hits closer to the popular vote already. Throwing a 0 at an average score of 7.5 is much more powerful on the popular vote than throwing a 7. The image below reflects the voting habits of individuals like this:
So now that these three effects might have altered your vote, does this mean that pretabulated voting is bad? Isn’t it better to get a score that is from personal experience instead of being effected by the crowd’s vote?
That’s a hard question. For a lot of users, seeing the popular vote helps them make decisions on what to play. It doesn’t make sense to buy a car without seeing the ratings and scores of auto reviewers and previous owners, right? Neglecting popular opinion may lead to the risk of getting the wrong car. The same thing goes for Flash games. People want to know which are the best games to play, and not everyone wants to spend their time playing both good and bad games in hopes of finding good ones. People just want to have fun.
However at the same time, I think it’s a genuine way to vote when you are not effected by other’s votes. Voting straight from experience is the purist way to do it. You like or dislike something based on what you think, not based on what you think and what the rest of the world thinks. And who knows, you may love a game that everyone hated.
It seems like voting is caught in a catch-22… more genuine votes or a better game-seeking experience? It’s hard to tell. What do you think? Do you want to spend time finding good games among the throngs of mediocre ones, or just get straight to the juicy stuff and know your vote may be affected by what you see? At Armor Games we have been discussing implementing both methods, so that users can choose their own way to vote. But we are curious about your opinions on the matter!
Tags: rating, voting, voting for games
Hmm, certainly a tricky one.
How about a middle ground? Before you vote, all you get is a written indication of the popular vote (‘Amazing’, ‘Good’, ‘Average’ etc.) then after you vote, you get the detailed score – you would vote to that scale too, voting out of 10 or 100.
That way casual users can see which games they should play, but you only give away a vague impression of exactly how good it is.
That also avoids the fourth effect you missed out – ‘I think game x is better than game y, but game y has 0.1 more score – I’ll vote 0 on y to fix that’.
Tom-
Yes this got me thinking. Maybe users should be able to get a choise too see the overall voting or not.
Or what tom said depending on the total vote it says certain things. But this still might alter votes in the same way.
You are very right, John.
They are lots of mean people out there who want nothing more than to lower the score of games just because they have super high standards due to excessive exposure to very nice popular commercial PC games and their irrelevant comparisons of flash games to the commercial company games that they play.
Some people have no backbone and will vote by following the majority or the current score that is already there. They don’t care about the game, they just want to get from Serf to Squire.
But there are some other guys who really finish playing a game and judging the game thoroughly. I commend these people.
And you are also right about this:
“However at the same time, I think it’s a genuine way to vote when you are not effected by other’s votes. Voting straight from experience is the purist way to do it. You like or dislike something based on what you think, not based on what you think and what the rest of the world thinks. And who knows, you may love a game that everyone hated.”
Some of my games are hated by a vast majority of people and yet I have quite some fans for those games. And I myself found some games that I like very much that the majority hated.
And I second Tom’s motion.
Thanks
Also, some people vote based on their own emotions, which has nothing to do with the game they are playing. If your mood is bad, even a super game is not good enough for you. But if your mood is good, as in your girlfriend just agreed to be your wife, even a mediocre game can give you a lot of fun. This affects voting too. After all, we are all human.
I have another idea… why not have 2 ratings like gamespot: Public rating (voted by viewers) and AG rating (rated by AG staff)
Just a suggestion
I think Tom has a good idea. If you just gave a generalized ranking of where the game is it would help you chose what to play and shield it somewhat from affecting your votes.
Maybe a rank for 0-2.5, 2.5-5, 5-7.5, 7.5-9, 9-10.
It wouldn’t be perfect because people could still vote to the extremes if they hated it or loved it, but it would keep the popular vote from affecting those who actually want to vote based on what the see in the game.
Excellent article, Cheers.
I have another idea which is to totally hide the score for new games and once they get enough votes, it shows the generalized rating, then when it has a lot of votes, show the true rating…
Just 2 more cents
Yeah as a Flash artist I’ve seen my fair share of unfair voting. Its very common for people to vote strongly against whatever the current average score is and it can be very damaging! (to, you know, scores)
The worst thing is when people vote 0 to lower a score slightly. They know its not gonna go all the way down to 0 when they vote so they’re happy to vote so low, even if they only want it lowered from a 4 to a 3.
I reckon we should just be really corrupt and mark certain games that are clearly half decent and then make it so the average ignores all the 1s and 0s voted on it…hehehe
John,
Your spot here, though I think you might be better served in putting your obviously high IQ into more gainful pursuits.
The rating systems however brilliant will only be as good as the infornation entered by the heaving masses of dope smoking, estranged teenage, and sad old game players who habit such game aggrigation websites such as these.
There is a door, there is a handle, open the door and step beyond…. Jon
I definately agree! you should only be able to vote after you play the game and after you vote then you can see the average and the comments!!! ^^ and i think Dim is right!!!
I think you brought up a great point.
As you said before , people’s expectaion maybe be high with alll the comment some 1 read and than when that person actually plays the game they think it sucks.
Yeah man i think thats a preaty good idea… cuz peopre just vote the avarage score and get points for it. thats not good. if the meter is shown after the game is played then its preaty usefull cuz well realy see is that game good or not.
thanx for the good articla and keep up the good work. Cheers from Macedonia
Hm. I think there’s got to be a Math function that can ‘correct’ the score you see. The current system just means that the better a game scores, the more people will vote it up (and the opposite when it scores low), so the curve is exponential towards both zero and 10.
But the things you see here is just human nature. People like to bandwagon, people like to show their opinion rather than an objective judgment. I don’t think any voting system can fix that.
Hey, I think that there shold be a Voting Power, Based on yor AP.
The problem with that, Jeffrey, is that there are probably some jerks with lots of AP that will still vote to lower the score, etc. Also it may make many people with low AP mad.
Also, if there are more hackers like the guy i came across, who had somewhere around 999999999 AP, then they may be able to completely throw the score.
The point of seeing the rating before voting is for people to see the quality of a game. Like, if a new game’s on the frontpage one hasn’t played, he/she wants to know the score to make sure it is worth playing. Games with a low score won’t be clicked that much.
The rating would be rather worthless when seeing it only if you have voted already.
I think that the votes of the people with lowest AP should have the higest Voting Power.
No way! Ive got 4000 and I vote fairly.
I still think that the AP shold have voting power thats higher, Or maybe Mods can cange the voting Power.
i think that if you dont see how it was voted before you play, you may stumble into a game you dont like and wait all that time for the game to load then go back out and have to find a new one,
just thought i’de throw in a whole different angle to this article