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I'm not convinced that the SWEs they hire in the video game industry actually are all that woke, that's at least not my experience with swedish video game developers. They're not anti-woke but they aren't really woke either.
The people that are woke and who are able to insert woke inte video games are the writers, artists and designers (and game journalists but that's outside of the developers), and i believe its that pipeline thats really rotten if any. What percentage of writers with a "relevant degree" are even non-woke? Anti-woke?
Furthermore even if you're non-woke, if the only acceptable culture in your industry is woke what are you going to do? You'll at the very least put in performative nods towards wokeness like "body type a/b" and inserting a girlboss here and there.
Devs overestimate the importance of Devs and a lot of non devs do as well.
To launch a game you have to pitch to investors and get millions in funding. Your game has to appeal to the funders and be something that they believe they will make money on. The biggest challenge is post launch . There are a bunch of games launched every day. The market is saturated to an insane degree. In order to break through you need to have influencers, journalists and other people pushing your game. The youtube algorithm promotes woke gamers.
Another underrated aspect is that in cut throat industries people will try to outmanoeuvre each other. If knocking out the opponent by discovering a transphobic tweet gets you ahead people will do it. The gaming industry is dirty.
You're right, and it's such a shame, and it's because marketing has grown bigger than the product being marketed. So for every dollar spend on making something of value, 9 dollars are spend trying to convince others that it have value. This tendency generalizes to most of society, which is why most things have become so fake.
There are reasons for this. A friend of mine is a VERY successful indie developer and publisher, and his business thinking is as follows:
The vast majority of people buy very few games every year. Even most ‘gamers’ might play five to ten.
So if you’re in the top ten in your market, whatever it is, you’ll rake in money. If not, you’ll make almost nothing.
Therefore, it’s worth spending whatever you have to on marketing, celebrity cameos, etc. Anything to shift you from 11th on the list to 9th.
I see, this feedback loop is to blame again. Viral content gets more viral, and less viral content disappears. This is because popularity is made out to be a metric of quality. All modern algorithms generally work like this, but it's a huge mistake. Merely changing the way the rating works from "Most plays" to "Best ratio of postive and negative reviews" should balance it better.
I actually want to make a game of my own. Guess I'll have to jump into a moral and social dilemma. Thanks for the answer by the way!
Ratio of positive/negative reviews is easily gamed and also selects for very niche things that has a loyal fanbase, rather than something with a wider appeal. I'd go as far as to say that positive/negative ratio on its own is worse than a pure view metric.
What you want is some kind of Bayesian weighting.
I don't see how it's easily gamed, but it does select for niche things. If these niche things are high quality to those that it appears to, isn't that fine? If less than 20% enjoy jazz, the better conclusion is "Of people who like Jazz, this one album is really good", rather than "Only 19% of all people like this album". Everything with a wider appeal has less depth, there's a sort of trade-off. I'd go as far as saying that everything good is niche. There's more people towards the middle of every standard distribution, but the best things (which are still popular enough to survive) are a few standard deviations to the right. And, if you allow those outside the niche to change what's inside of it, through the power of numbers, they will just destroy it or turn it into what they already like (which is plentiful everywhere). Hence why communities (like this one!) protect themselves with gatekeeping and rules and try to stay under the radar of outside political pressure.
I think the reason that votes aren't visible for a while on here is exactly to avoid starting a feedback loop (this one is the social one where people are influenced by other peoples votes). I also think that comments are sorted by "new" by default rather than by "best" (but I could be wrong), and that the "controversial" rating exists because the alternative is that the first decent comment to be made on a thread ends up being #1 simply because it started its exponential growth earlier.
Would your proposed weighting account for these things? (I don't know much about bayesian weighting)
You game it by controlling who gets access/early access to the game.
You can also review bomb other new games released close to your own release.
Given the quantity of games released this sort of score manipulation effectively turns that particular metric into a view of what has been released very recently, what is sufficiently niche to not attract non-fans and non-shills and what has most ratio manipulation behind it.
Controlling who gets access to the game (and therefore reviews) immediately devaluates reviews. I don't feel like this is an unintuitive exploit that we should guard against, but something so obvious that it goes without saying.
I wonder if text-only review would help the next problem. Instead of saying "this game is good/bad", you'd have to give information about the game. So if a game has 10 hours of gameplay, you'd write "I don't like that it's so short, only 10 hours!" but any reader who prefers shorter games would see it as a positive. Reviews like this would describe how the game was, and allow readers to judge the description, rather than merely access the judgement of the previous person.
Isn't this only if a new product gets a single positive review, putting it at 100% (perfect score)?
I do agree with the "niche" thing, but the opposite problem (niches being labeled bad because they don't appeal to a large amount of people) seems harmful as well, because it selects for watered-down content which is inoffensive and all-around unremarkable. If this sounds confusing, think about spicy foods: Those who love what is spicy wants the most spicy food available, but it's necessarily a small minority which enjoys this food, so any global rating would judge this food to be unappealing. If you place games (or other works) in a thousand-dimensional space, then all the edges and corners are maximums, and gives people who enjoy X the most X available. But across all people who judge the contents of this space, the highest scores will be biased towards the middle or possible the surface-area of the shape within the space. Less than 1% of music being listened to is Jazz, does this mean that it's universally hated, or that it should be banned? But that's the argumentation being used against controversial which has less than majority-support, for its removal is justified with the word "democracy". This is a bit of a rant, but I want to challenge the assumption that popularity is a measure of quality, and I think that rating systems may be inherently limited by the wrong assumption that there's one objective measure of good. I'm just theorycrafting, don't feel pressured to engage if it doesn't interest you!
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