Many people think the IFDB Top 100 is meaningful and that wouldn’t be possible without ratings without reviews.
I agree. Sometimes such games do not have quality but probably took a lot of time for the author to write.
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Well, I have to demonstrate what I’m talking about in this topic. There’s a lot of speculation about things in the topic, but I’m showing an account that has assigned a lot of ones without comment. The majority of their votes are ones. The few times they’ve commented, their comments have been judged unhelpful by almost all users. I hope what they’re doing is of use to them as I don’t think it’s of much use to others.
-Wade
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mha, albeit I can concur with “Denk” on troll-rating, I think that requiring comments on negative voting should discourage troll-rating, in the worst case (bots) ease the ID and removal of troll-rating, for obvious reasons (well, obvious for who code NPCs, anwyay 
)
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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I think that most of the internet has decided that requiring explanations for negative votes/scores doesn’t help.
Two common reasons I’ve seen is that it will discourage people from scoring at all because they’ll be concerned about getting push back from the author. And second is that people will just put nonsense in a text box in order to submit their scores.
I think what IFDB really needs is just a lot more people adding scores. But I don’t have a solution to that.
(Maybe one day Parchment could include a link to the IFDB page of each game to remind people they could write a score?)
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I don’t like to give a rating without leaving a review, but I don’t have time to write a lot of reviews. Consequently I don’t leave a lot of ratings, and I feel bad about that, because as an author I know how nice it is to know people are playing my games. I don’t know what the solution is.
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These comments put together pretty nicely describe my attitude towards rating and reviewing.
Rating goes first. I leave a star rating for every game I play (except when there is a good reason not to). This in the hope that my stars get alchemistically amalgamated with all other stars into something resembling a communally well-considered representative consensus.
I write a review for the majority of games I play (in comp-season this often winds up being a bunch of impressions here on the forum rather than an official IFDB review). I want to share my experience with the author, and especially with future players.
Sometimes life gets in the way though. I do keep an eye on the IFDB feature that tells me how many rated-but-unreviewed games I have (92/192 at the moment), telling myself I’ll get to those games sometime…
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I have similar feelings about leaving ratings of the ratings without comments.
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Sorry, I meant individually, in the sense that it’s not useful to try to read the tea leaves and determine what this one reviewless rating says about the game. Whether they’re meaningful in aggregate is a different question. (I would say the aggregate ratings do reflect a sort of community consensus, but that the community consensus doesn’t necessarily reflect quality—but that’s a different discussion.)
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No.
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I have the same problem. In fact, I only rate games if I do manage to review them, as a bald star rating without any context seems to me less use than no rating at all. What I do often do, though, if people are on here, is message them to say I enjoyed the game (and often promise a review, which I then fail to deliver - at least, immediately).
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As player, I think ratings can be helpful even without reviews, especially if there are enough of them to reflect some kind of consensus (rather than just one rating from an account whose ratings I never understand anyway). So from that perspective, I think it’s better to have ratings than not have them, regardless of whether there’s a review along with them. But the more different a rating is from the rest, the more helpful it probably is to know a reason for it.
I usually do not have a reason to give a game one star, because if there’s a game I strongly dislike, I probably won’t finish it, and if it looks ahead of time like something I will strongly dislike, I likely won’t play it at all.
I do run into a conundrum sometimes when the technical quality of a game is at odds without how much I liked it. I have never figured out how to resolve that, so if anyone has, please let me know! Supposedly IFDB recommends games based on the ratings of other people who have similar rating patterns to yours. And if you found someone else who had tastes similar to yours, their recommendations might be more meaningful to you. If everybody rates purely on “quality,” then it’s harder for me, as a player, to figure out which games I will actually enjoy. But if you didn’t like a game or would not recommend it, and rate it purely on that basis, then there’s always the possibility of people questioning your motives, drama, etc.
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I was just about to write this. I say a rating without a review is more valuable than no rating at all. Even a “I played this game” without a rating or review is valuable, in a way. Most feedback is helpful in some form.
Maybe you hang out in a different corner of Goodreads, but my experience has been that Goodreads reviewers tend to be harsher or more critical than other places, especially Amazon. (I’ve heard other authors say as much as well.)
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Interesting! The vast majority of books I’ve looked at on Goodreads have an aggregate rating between 3.5 to 4.2, with anything lower usually being from an author getting piled on via Twitter. I’d totally believe the contents of said reviews are harsher than average, but as far as I can tell most ratings given out are 3 or above.
Then again, I’ve never been the recipient of reviews anywhere except here and IFDB so I don’t have an author’s perspective on that.
That said, I really agree with this. Part of it is because I’m happy when my work is noticed at all, I think?
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I’m also wondering, how do people feel about having their reviews voted as unhelpful? I’ve noticed that my shorter reviews tend to get this more often, even if I just didn’t have much to say about a game, or it’s been so long since I played it that I can’t go into detail on specific scenes. Even a no-star review that’s just a comment on something potentially controversial a game has was voted unhelpful. You can’t see who voted against your reviews and why, and most of the time they don’t leave comments explaining it, so it’s a bit annoying.
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If it’s less than 3 people it’s basically random. I had one person on IFDB who downvoted every review I wrote for about a year. I had one review I wrote for the game 9:05 saying it creeped me out get so many downvotes (I think like 5?) that I deleted it and still haven’t rewriten it.
For your specific review, I think a lot of people tend to dislike reviews that are used as ‘comments’. In that review, you’re just discussing the controversial issue without providing a wider view of the game as a whole. I didn’t downvote it, but I can understand it.
It would be nice to be able to add comments to games that aren’t reviews. I think that’s part of the longterm plans.
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I think that in many cases, people want their own tastes affirmed. That’s not a knock; it’s just human nature. People are the same way with other sorts of video games, films, comic books, etc. In many cases, a review simply can’t please everyone. I don’t think it should, either. Or that shouldn’t be a goal, since reviews are mostly opinion (even when we’d like them to be objective). I often value minority positions more than I do conventional wisdom, so long as they’re well argued.
Somebody didn’t like one of my Zork reviews. I said some things that could be called controversial. That’s ok. I gave the subject a lot of thought, and I would say the same things today. If people disagree, I don’t mind.
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Thanks for the replies. I’ve realized that I shouldn’t focus on it too much, and there’ll always be people who disagree with me or my comments. It’s not worth worrying about, and a lot of my reviews get more positive responses than negative, so I want to keep writing them.
And yeah, comments would be a nice feature. Noticing the controversial aspect of the game kind of deterred me from playing any more, since it wasn’t in the description anywhere and I wanted potential players to be aware. The best way to do that just seemed to be an unstarred review, and the IFDB guidelines even mention you can do this if you haven’t gotten far enough into the game to form a full rating.
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If I’m writing a 3 star or lower review I brace for the possibility of one unhelpful vote since not all authors take criticism well. If most of my reviews are mostly considered helpful then not then that’s what’s important to me.
Looking at the review that I think you’re talking about, it’s easy to infer your opinion on AI art from it (and I believe it’s one I share). Since it’s a controversial topic the “unhelpful” votes could possibly come from people who disagree with your opinion rather than people who dislike the review. Since they’re anonymous they’re easily abused.
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I don’t have empirical data on Goodreads, but the similar site LibraryThing provides very extensive stats on the books you log and also has a “site vs. user” tab where you can see how your stats compare to the site as a whole. This is my site (grey bars) vs. user (colored bars) graph for star ratings:
Leaving aside whatever this says about me (I would’ve showed just the site stats if LT had that option, but I don’t think it does), you can see that on LibraryThing, at least, the 3-, 4-, and 5-star ratings are used far more than the 1- and 2-star. The two lowest full-star ratings*, combined, make up less than 10% of the total number of ratings on the site. It’s not necessarily generalizable to Goodreads, of course, but I have also anecdotally observed that most books on GR have an average of somewhere between 3 stars and 4.5 stars, which is consistent with the distribution of ratings seen on LT.
** The half-star ratings are super wonky both for me and for LT in general because I, like a lot of people, got started on LT by importing my GR reading history, and GR doesn’t do half-stars.
Edit: Of course, I realize that this is completely off-topic, I just got excited about statistics.
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