When is it appropriate to leave a negative rating or review?

mathbrush · July 5, 2025, 12:01am

Hello! I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.

When I started getting into IF, I thought it was a mostly dead field. My ratings and reviews were something I saw primarily as archaeology. My rating and reviews were there to indicate roughly how complete/enjoyable games are.

While I use a different rubric (listed on my ifdb page) for coming up with reviews, I typically see scores for a game as:

1 star – a game that is either grossly offensive, unpleasant to play through being buggy or something similar, or trivial (like the game uninteractive fiction)
2 star - A game that is missing some large piece of content that I typically enjoy. An example would be a game that has 0 choices and is over after clicking ‘continue’ a couple of times, and which doesn’t use any text effects or other interaction. Other examples include parser games by inexperienced authors where there are severe and numerous bugs that make completion very difficult or impossible. A lot of 2 star games could be better with a little razzle-dazzle.
3 star - Either an average game that most people would feel ‘meh’ about, or a well-made game that isn’t something I personally like very much, or a game with great writing but very little interactivity. Either run-of-the-mill or a combination of extremes.
4 star - A game I played and thought “I liked that game,” and “I think others will like that game.”
5 star - A game that represents what I think interactive fiction should be, and which I would eagerly share with others.

More recently, I have come to know a large number of authors, many of whom I could consider friends. In this situation, a negative review can carry a value meaning that it doesn’t for people I don’t know. It can be interpreted as “I dislike you”, or, “I don’t value your work.”

At times, this has been beneficial. I recently wrote a review poo-pooing an experimental game. If I hadn’t known the author, I would have just gone on my way. Instead, I was worried if I had done the right thing, and reached out to them, expressing my feelings and getting feedback on the author’s intention. This lead to me rewriting the review. In fact, this has happened three times recently, and in one of those times the author even changed the game to address some of my issues.

So I’ve thought of doing less negative reviews. On the other hand, as a player, I sometimes worry about ‘grade inflation’. I see games that I would rate quite lowly if I didn’t want to hurt the author’s feelings, and they receive very high ratings from numerous people, all of whom are close friends of the author, and I think, “Does everyone love this and I’m the only weirdo, or are there other people who aren’t rating this lower to try to avoid hurt feelings as well?”

I worry about this with my own games. Never Gives Up Her Dead is in the top 10 on the IFDB top 100. But is it really one of the top 10 IF games of all time? Could you really give it to a random IFDB user and have a good chance they’d like it? It’d be nice to say yes, but I know a few people who have played it and expressed dislike with parts of it, but never rated it. Are they holding off on giving a negative score to me out of fear of hurting my feelings, the same way I do with others?

On the other hand, in the past I’ve seen reviewers come by who give very low scores to many popular games, coming in with a sickle and giving out 2 stars to Counterfeit Monkey or 1 star to Anchorhead. I see them and think, “Wait, these scores aren’t fair!” and worry for the day they come for one of my games.

So, I’m interested in other’s viewpoints. Here are some hypothetical scenarios: how would you react in them, and what ratings would you give?

Scenario 1: You play a game from IFComp 1997. The game crashes if you try examining yourself. There are only 3 rooms. The brief text that exists contains a slur that you feel uncomfortable with. Do you give the game a low rating?

Scenario 2: You play a game posted on IFDB outside of competitions. The author has not received any ratings since posting it. You play it. You hate it. No one has said anything yet. Do you give a low rating? Do you give a review?

Scenario 3: You have a friend who makes great games. You’ve loved several of their past games, given them high ratings and praise-worthy reviews. They are supportive of you and like your games as well. They make a game you don’t like. Do you give it a low rating?

Scenario 4: An author makes a series of games that all follow the same format. You hate the format. You have given low ratings before. You’ve talked to the author about their format. They have no intentions to ever change it. Do you continue to rate all of their games low? Or do you stop playing them all together? Or something else?

Variant 4a: this person is kind, friendly, and supportive to you.
Variant 4b: this person is quite rude to you and others and very defensive.
Variant 4c: this person is over 80 and has said they just want to keep doing what they love until they die and not waste time on refactoring code.
Variant 4d: it’s not a person, but a competition where the rules are designed to include content you dislike (such as a Slow Text competition).

Scenario 5: You find a game that is extremely low-effort or very small in content. Your personal enjoyment of it is a 2-3 out of 5. The author is a friend of yours. The game has enough 5-star ratings to be in the top 20 of all games for the year it was published. All of those ratings are from mutual friends, who are the only ones who have rated the game. The author has been upset by low ratings before. They post asking for more reviews. Do you give a low rating?

Some of this is compounded by itch culture where you only give 5 stars or nothing, so bad games just get no feedback and good games are ranked by how many 5 star ratings they get.

I’m interested in hearing what other people think.

kamineko · July 5, 2025, 12:14am

Updated/edited below.

I only rate games to improve their discovery. If I’m not interested in helping people find it, I don’t rate it. But theoretically:

With no redeeming qualities or text to make the slur make sense fictionally, that would be a low rating. Maybe one of the few cases where I might give one.
I would do nothing.
I would do nothing, though I might tell them in private. Though chances are good that I playtested it anyway.
If I don’t like the format, the author is clearly not for me and I wouldn’t rate it. I don’t rate things based on whether they cater to my tastes. I wouldn’t rate a game poorly for not emphasizing narrative, for instance, even though I like narrative. This would be true whether I like the author or not.

EDIT

This is a detailed scenario! I would not rate a game that I did not think deserved four or five stars, friend or otherwise.

Since my focus in rating is discoverability, I give ratings to four- or five-star games that I think deserve them, and I only rate games with fewer than forty ratings. I don’t bother with lower ratings. I also don’t try to be scientific about things.

I try not to overemphasize my personal tastes. I hate word puzzles, but I would never give counterfeit monkey a low rating. Anchorhead has a miserable amount of dead-end states, but the writing is good and that kind of thing was the norm back then. I would not give it a low rating, either. I try to meet games where they are and see the best in authors.

I liked the way Eurogamer did things for a while, either recommended or not. But there’s less horseracing in that.

E: I see I’ve only talked about rating. My preference is to give constructive feedback during playtesting. Don’t be afraid to ask! I always try to make time for it. Otherwise, I really only write negative reviews under special circumstances. It doesn’t have anything to do with whether I’m willing to be honest or whatever. It’s just that my time is limited and I choose to spend it on things I like. I’ve never been interested in reviewing everything from an event and never will be. I’m grateful for those who do this difficult work, though

Lionstooth · July 5, 2025, 1:04am

This is why I’d rather just give a review without a star rating, to be honest. An explanation of someone’s thoughts on the game, its specific joys and sticking points, and why the reviewer did/didn’t like it is more useful to me than a numerical quantifier, especially when everyone’s working off a slightly different subjective scale. I don’t want to look at a rating and wonder “is this reflecting the work’s execution or the rater’s personal preference?” I definitely don’t want to consign someone to algorithmic irrelevance based on my own preferences. (This is also why I would just not play the games in scenario 4. I’m clearly not the target audience, and that’s fine! I don’t have to be!)

In general, I only rate games in the context of actual comp judging, and may or may not get around to transferring those ratings to IFDB. I might give a rating to something that really stands out as worthy of attention (or avoidance). I would like to get more comfortable with reviewing, though.

Encorm · July 5, 2025, 1:20am

Interesting! I think feedback (including negative feedback) is how people grow as authors, but in such a small community it’s also tough to balance that with not hurting feelings. So, my opinions as follows:

I’d leave a negative review as a warning to other people. The slur tips the balance here – other people can spend their time however, but an unwarned-for slur can ruin someone’s day if they’re the target.
Since it’s outside a competition I’d probably leave it be and not write a review, unless I felt the need to address any warnings that aren’t and should be included. (I feel that entering into a competition implicitly opts into a higher level of scrutiny although that’s competition dependent.)
It depends on why I don’t like it. If it’s just not my thing I’d tell them so privately and not leave a public review. If it is my thing but falls short in execution I’d post a negative review but a kind one. If we’re very close friends I’d probably message them ahead of time. (Note that I’ve been on the receiving end of this, and while it stung at first I was grateful for the time, consideration, and feedback anyway. Some of it was a matter of mismatched taste but there was real, useful criticism in there as well.)
I would (and have) stop playing and rating their games.
4a. If I had an opportunity I would make it clear that these games are not my speed, but that it’s a me problem.
4b. I’m petty and the temptation to give a bad rating that I otherwise would have held off on would be high, but only on the first offense. After that I’d stop interacting with them and their work in general.
4c. Good for them! I won’t say anything one way or another.
Theoretical answer: Write a thoughtful review and not include a star rating, assuming we’re talking about IFDB. I don’t usually rate games on Itch due to the all-or-nothing phenomenon you’ve described.
Honest answer: Pretend I didn’t see the post.

As an addendum to 4b, if someone’s behaved poorly on the forum I find I have trouble separating that from their work – It’ll consistently knock at least one star’s worth of enjoyment off my experience. I try to be self aware enough to either compensate for that or avoid rating their work altogether if I don’t think I can be fair.

alyshkalia · July 5, 2025, 1:44am

My answer to basically all of the scenarios is “It depends.” I don’t rate everything I play; I give four- and five-star ratings freely, but typically I only give one- or two-star ratings if the game already has several higher ratings, and I want to register a contrary viewpoint (and will also give low ratings sometimes if the game is just egregiously bad). Good ratings are nice to get as an author; low ratings are not, and I don’t want to make anyone feel bad!

DemonApologist · July 5, 2025, 2:03am

My IFDB participation is pretty scattered. I don’t really enjoy the implicit pressure to assign something a star rating (but I have done that with my reviews so far). Actually, I guess I have only done seven reviews total, so I could explain why I wrote each one and attempt to learn from that?

(1) idle hands. After it was a wrap on my IF Comp 2024 response thread, this game was suggested to me (after I was disappointed by the egregious lack of DemonApologist-core content in the competition) and I enjoyed my time with it and wanted to test out how it felt to do an IFDB review.

(2) Time Trip. I decided to try the “random game” suggester on IFDB and ended up at this game with no ratings or reviews, so I spent some time with it and found I had something moderately interesting to say about it. In hindsight, this is the review that I would probably most want to delete, because I don’t feel it was helpful to anyone (readers or the author) to jump in a decade-plus later to express mid thoughts about a decontextualized random game. It’s also my most negative review of the seven. It just feels like it’s not in the same spirit as the rest of my reviews (not that it matters or that anyone should care, really, but I guess it matters to me a little?)

(3) Paranoia. I actually don’t remember how or why I found this game, but I had an engaging experience with it and wanted to spend some time talking about those experiences.

(4) Eat Me. This was a game that got referenced constantly during IF Comp 2024, and I ended up playing it because of the author’s discussion of it in the postmortem for The Bat. I had a lot to say about my experiences so I organized it into a more formal review.

(5) The Swormville Sweep. I found this Google Maps scavenger hunt game looking through Tabitha’s catalogue and its unusual platform and formatting and connection to real-world historical concepts made me want to write up a full review about it.

(6) Portrait with Wolf. This was a game that I was very intimidated to review based on its literary/poetic focus, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it and felt like I had to try to write up something about it to resolve that tension.

(7) Sudden Death. This is a game that I played just prior to even knowing what IFDB was or participating in the community. I happened to remember it recently and was surprised that no one had reviewed it (I guess there isn’t much overlap between Domino Club and IFDB?). So I specifically wrote a review with the intention of drawing more attention to a project that I connected with.

Overall, I would say that having done this reflection, my guiding principles are to want to draw attention to something cool, or more generally, letting my curiosity guide me. As an author, I would most like to read reviews from people who found my projects interesting or thought-provoking in some way, and who had spent a significant of time mulling it over as a result. (This does not necessarily mean that it has to be a high star review—someone can spend a lot of thought to deliver difficult but accurate criticisms—though naturally, as a human person I prefer the more neutral-to-positive comments.) As a general database surfer, I would say that I also use the reviews to identify if a project seems like the kind of thing I would connect with or not, and so seeing someone who spent a lot time with a project due to some passionate reason can help sway me one way or another.

I would probably not bother writing a long negative IFDB review. Especially for a niche game that I was not a good fit for based on the type of things I like. Why go out of my way to say some nasty things about a work that’s not about me or for me at all? But if it were an older/more canonical/established game, I think I would be more comfortable registering a lower star rating to contribute to the overall sentiment on that piece.

That was a lot to say that I guess I am not rigorous whatsoever and am strictly going based on vibes. At any rate, I much prefer the forum thread/ratingless format to an Official IFDB Review™ as a reading/discussion practice.

severedhand · July 5, 2025, 2:10am

When I started to read the OP, I was kind of chuckling because I thought ‘I reached this stage ten years ago’ (the conflicts of interest). Or maybe it’s actually where I always was. But for that reason I haven’t answered the theoretical quiz questions

I blogged about ‘Why I review’ ten years ago, which has an emphasis on IFComp games, but I just re-read it and it still holds for me with addendums. If you want the whole long thing, it’s here. The bit relevant for this topic is:

One other weird factor is that this community is sufficiently small that if you both make games and review them, other people who both make games and review games, and whose games you’ve reviewed, will be reviewing your games at some point. This is hardly ideal given the frequency with which it has to happen. Some people can review as if they’re in a tower on the hill, and of them, some review like they live in the tower full-time, others as if they can at least move into the tower for the duration of the review. I’m crap at either in this close context. The more I interact with someone one-on-one, the less useful I am at reviewing their games for an audience. That’s not a tragedy – I just don’t review stuff for the outside world in any case where I don’t think I can do a sufficiently objectivity-infused job for any reason. Other folk will step in to review such things.

I think what I missed is that there are circumstances where, if my response is net positive or greater - or maybe even neutral - I’m still capable of reviewing their work. This is important if they come along writing a great game, they probably want the imprimatur of quality criticism, and it would suck if there’s no-one to provide it just because too many of the would-be reviewers have had personal interactions with them.

Context is always everything. In the space of a comp, it’s easier to stand in the place of judgment for anything, because everyone else is, too. You also have the excuse of reviewing a game you probably wouldn’t normally play, because it’s like a film festival. If I just come along and write a negative review of some game in isolation later, that can change the reception for the recipient if they’re active, but it’s worth remembering it makes no difference to the eternal anonymous public of the future.

I’m also more personally divided on the concept of objectivity these days. And I mean irreconcilably divided but living anyway. Knowing it’s there and why and being it, and at the same time realising, especially from IMDB where I have applied 5000+ feature film ratings, it is as capable of being a farce. For instance, there’s a way to review where you’re trying to assess if the project achieved its aims, and that’s all that matters. I often turn this way if I like the game less, and I articulate things in my words (which are the really important bit) but my score may be a star lower, because I definitely reflect my taste in my score. Really, anything I do with the star rating will have been accounted for in the writing. Looked at in the context of me, my star ratings broadly make sense against each other. Looked at in the sea of data, they contribute to the zeitgeist.

I do also try, I think, to take up what @VictorGijsbers described (I think! I could be a word or two out) as ‘the mantle of judgment’. If I am going to review well, I think I should be doing it fully, not worrying and sliding and self-warring. Or, if I do those things, they shouldn’t all be on the page; the result should be on the page. Unless the prime experience of the game is worrying and sliding and self-warring… See, reviewing is hard!

-Wade

severedhand · July 5, 2025, 2:28am

I read your review just now and it’s good and useful, and infinitely better than that game having nothing there. Though I think talking about something being dated will date your review’s perspective as quick as the target of your dating jibe But this review is in the same place a lot of my reviews are – the only review on a game. I like mining that untrod territory. And there’s value in having such games covered.

-Wade

pbparjeter · July 5, 2025, 2:31am

I’m a pretty low-volume IF player and reviewer. I usually only leave a star rating if it’s between 3-5 stars, but I often don’t leave a star review even if I like a game.

With that in mind…

Scenario 1. You play a game from IFComp 1997 … only 3 rooms … contains a slur

I wouldn’t rate it or review it because I didn’t complete it.

On the flipside, I’ve tried to write partial reviews for games I liked but didn’t complete, and it was really hard to do. I think the only partial review I’ve published is for The Trials of Rosalinda, which has very standalone chapters.

Scenario 2. You play a game posted on IFDB outside of competitions. The author has not received any ratings since posting it. You play it. You hate it.

If I disliked it but it held my attention anyway, I might leave a review that describes it fairly. I’d probably not leave a number rating, but if it’s well known outside of the IF community, I’d be more inclined to leave a low rating.

Scenario 3 You have a friend who makes great games … They make a game you don’t like.

Scenario 5: Your personal enjoyment of [a friend’s game] is a 2-3 out of 5 … The game has enough 5-star ratings to be in the top 20

They’re no longer my friend. No, actually, if it’s a game by someone I talk to regularly, I tend to review without leaving a number rating just to avoid bias.

Scenario 4: An author makes a series of games that all follow the same format. You hate the format.

I wouldn’t continue to play the games, so I wouldn’t rate or review them.

SomeOne2 · July 5, 2025, 3:45am

I’ll be honest, I think as long as there is enough comment in a review saying how I could improve my game, I wouldn’t mind a bad rating. Sure, I might be an outlier, but to give an example, Milliways got a mixture of postive and fairly negative reviews. I was happy when I got a negative review as well because they were all very well detailed and helpful in learning how to improve. Then I got a negative review from the IFComp website, like you know when you can leave a comment? And it just said something like, “This game was too long to play with IFComp. Sorry.” And I felt kind of confused, like “does that mean a bad rating? What?” But that’s just my opinion.

In short, I think if nobody gives the negative reviews, and well, then score inflation is going to be a problem. I know some people don’t feel comfortable leaving bad reviews, but I personally think it’s important. Now I just need to get better at reviewing.

DeusIrae · July 5, 2025, 4:25am

Oh man, this is a vexed topic. In general I only review games entered into events where reviews are part of the expectation, and then I review everything, which is partly about taking advantage of my weird completionist streak, but also helps simplify the question of picking which reviews to write - I basically don’t allow myself any discretion there!

I don’t really like scores in general, and don’t include them when I write forum reviews. I do typically include them when I transfer the reviews over to IFDB once the events are over, though, largely on a “if not me, who?” theory - since there are going to be ratings there, I think it’s better for both players and authors to have some ratings attached to reviews that are hopefully reasonably in depth!

I have considered just including stars for games I liked (4 or 5), but I worry that that would make people whose games I did like, even if I found things to critique, assume that I world rate them 1 or 2 when they were actually 3. And at that point might as well rate everything. Then since I do write a lot of detailed reviews, it’d feel off to me to just do drive-by ratings, so that also simplifies things.

With that said I do sometimes struggle with games where I feel like it’s extra hard to be - well, not objective, since I don’t believe that’s possible or even helpful, but let’s say fairly and consistently and transparently subjective. This often happens with games I’ve tested; usually my solution is not to rate then and write a notably lighter review than is typical for me. And then when I review something I don’t like that much from someone I know, I often try to split the difference somehow - I do sometimes err on the side of rounding a rating up rather than down, and make extra effort to to write a sympathetic, if not positive, review if the number is going to be low. I don’t always succeed!

Anyway, let’s see how that plays into these scenarios:

1+2) I wouldn’t review or rate them.

assuming this game is in an event I’m reviewing, I would try not to pull punches and rate low, but would also try extra hard to make sure the review isn’t just dumb jokes but has specific, hopefully-helpful feedback on why this one didn’t work.
yup, this is where my approach gets tough. I’d bloody-mindedly play and review all of them, probably giving them all two stars. By review three or four the tone would probably get jokey since everyone would know the deal at this point and hopefully that would take some of the sting out. Not much change across the potential variations except I’d presumably rank things higher if the annoying element were part of the point. EDIT: this actually isn’t much of a hypothetical, I can think of two or three examples where I’ve pretty much done this (though actually my ratings are more often three stars).
from the setup this is probably not something from one of the big, review-rich events I participate in so likely I’d sit this one out too!

BrettW · July 5, 2025, 5:19am

Sounds like a meta strategy is to either have no friends, or have everyone as your friend. To borrow a roguelike term, these are the conducts required for a perfect Reviewer run.

To add more spice to the thoughtful mix would you ever adopt an anonymous or different username to publish negative reviews? Mathbrush is a trusted brand with a huge investment. Bathmush is just some dude unafraid to speak truth to power and say, “Look, I didn’t really enjoy Photopia!” As long as it’s honest and generally constructive/informative, it should be okay, right?

Naarel · July 5, 2025, 10:17am

I only review when I feel like it. It’d be consistent within all the presented scenarios: do I feel like spending my time and energy on writing about it? Do I even have words for that? Would it just be better to move on without saying anything? Reviewing is tiring. Bringing up various points in a constructive manner is tiring. One day I might write up a long essay about why that slur usage bothered me, another I might just sigh and move on, only complaining to my nearest friends.

When it comes to the friendships thing, I feel like this is the double-edged sword of communities like this one. Of course it’ll be harder to tell your friend or someone with an especially good standing “yeah, that kinda sucked”. You’re scared of hurting some people – be it people you like or fans of a particular highly regarded author.

(Sidenote: one of the funniest things while being a newcomer here is trying to figure out who’s the “big names”. Like, who’s Emily Short, anyway? Is it a big deal if Mathbrush reviews my game? Isn’t Porpentine that animal that’s got sharp quills? Wait, no, that’s porcupine. Oh well.)

I’ll be honest: I don’t think there are authorities that can’t be questioned and I don’t think that your friends should be kept away from your real opinion, unless they specifically asked you to not voice it. I still remember when I started publishing my stuff on itch and one of the people close to me straight up told me “I only played it and rated it well because it’s yours, if it wasn’t, I wouldn’t bother with it” and it stayed with me for a long time. I don’t want people to interact with my work and give it good ratings because it’s mine. I want people to tell me if they didn’t like what I made because for me, a part of the “trade” is reading the reactions of others, good or bad. Art is a conversation and if the part of the conversation is “I don’t like what you did there”, so be it – I’ll take it over silence or blind praise. My work is out there available to everyone, be it a friend, an enemy, or a stranger. The latter two won’t pull their punches so I don’t expect people who like me – people who are supposed to be honest with me – to do so either.

DeusIrae · July 5, 2025, 1:51pm

Same animal, just a an older word for it! There’s a bit in Hamlet that mentions it, and my headcanon is that’s what inspired the pseudonym:

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part,
And each particular hair to stand on end
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine.

Encorm · July 5, 2025, 1:58pm

It’s also the name of an inn in The Comedy of Errors! Shakespeare liked his porpentines.

pieartsy · July 5, 2025, 2:39pm

I agree with this. negative reviews are valuable to me as an author, and knowing a friend lied to spare my feelings would upset me. in general I review and rate without other ratings, reviews, bonds, or popularity factoring into things. you are not your work.

with the caveat of “I only review if have the energy for it” and additionally that I try not to write belligerent reviews:

I’d review and rate negatively with a warning that there’s a slur.
I’d review and rate, maybe they’ll find it valuable.
Same
Only if they insisted on reviews. I’d probably have given up on playing them a while ago.
if someone gets that upset about negative reactions that they don’t want any at all, imo they shouldn’t put their game out there in the public. they should share privately with friends they know for sure will like it. I would review and rate it negatively, albeit phrased kindly.

EJoyce · July 5, 2025, 5:30pm

I’m an editor by profession and have a book-reviewing side gig, which gives me a pretty strong bias in favor of sharing my honest thoughts even when they’re not positive, because I strongly believe in how useful—indeed, necessary—honest feedback is for writers and am invested in people being able to make well-informed choices about what to play. I kind of see IF reviews as a hybrid between the feedback I might give a writer as an editor and a review for the public. I do see reviews posted to the forums during a comp as slightly more writer-oriented (at least if the writer has been active here) and IFDB reviews as more audience-oriented, so sometimes I’ll cut some of the writer-oriented parts of the review out when I crosspost to IFDB.

That said, I am taking into account that it’s a small community with people I interact with regularly and it’s not the same as when I post a review panning a book by a pro author who has no idea who I am, which mostly means that I try to be a lot more tactful than I would be in a published book review—I will always try to find a few things I liked and I won’t be unnecessarily harsh or snarky. But I usually will not avoid giving criticism just because I know the person’s around, even if they’ve been nice to me. The only time the “we’re all here on these forums talking to each other” thing plays into whether I say anything publicly at all is if I know the person tends to publicly flip out about criticism, because I don’t want to kick off any drama. Fortunately that’s not very common.

Ratings are a different question, and I will leave those off my IFDB reviews sometimes, but mostly because I have complicated feelings that I don’t think a numerical rating really encapsulates.

So having long-windedly discussed my reviewing philosophy, to actually address the scenarios in the OP:

I would write a review warning people about the issues with the game if no one else had done so. I would feel fine giving it a low rating.
This depends more on why I hate it. I would probably write a review if I was like “this has potential but there are so many areas where it could be improved” or if it was like the game in scenario 1 and I wanted to give potential players a heads-up about that. If it’s just not my cup of tea I might be more inclined to say nothing. In the first case (a well-intended game with some good ideas that just needs a lot more work), if I was inclined to rate it 2 stars I might hold off until it had some more ratings.
I probably would still rate and review honestly unless I had reason to believe they were very sensitive about this kind of thing.
I would stop playing the games in the base scenario and variants a through c, and in variant d I wouldn’t touch Timed Text Comp with a ten-foot pole to start with. I’m not a completionist about reviewing events, so why spend my time on stuff I know I won’t enjoy?
Seeing a game with only the most glowing ratings and reviews that I thought needed a lot of work is definitely the kind of thing that spurs me to write a review to share my dissenting opinion in the hopes that it may be helpful to other potential players to triangulate whether or not they will like it, but the added wrinkle of “this person is your friend and gets upset about criticism” does make it tricky! If they just asked for ratings and you know they only want good ones, I would at least not do it right away because it would seem passive-aggressive. If they take criticism better privately I might give them my thoughts that way instead.

AmandaB · July 5, 2025, 5:37pm

Brian, you had some criticism for my first game and although that naturally disappointed me, I took it seriously and I think it was quite constructive. I thought about it in subsequent games I wrote because I felt it was fair criticism. That was one of the first reviews I ever got, so it impacted me, but definitely not in a negative way.

And I think it’s appropriate to take the author’s status into consideration. Writing a negative review of a Veeder game is a different beast than writing one for a new or young author.

Honest reviews matter. I think most people can probably decide if they hated something so much that they are just going to be mean in a review. But I often check out reviews/ratings before I play something, and as a player I rely on you especially to steer me right. As an author I rely on you to help me be better. No pressure or anything.

mathbrush · July 5, 2025, 5:58pm

I appreciate everyone’s comments and they have affected the reviews I’ve written in the last few days.

Amanda, thanks for your response. I wanted to mention to you that my school’s middle school English teacher assigned the poem that Spectators is constructed around to all the students to memorize and I excitedly sent her your game and explained interactive fiction (I don’t think she played it) and spent 30 minutes or so explaining the whole story of the game to her and to the students. It was a lot of fun.

(to everyone:)

Seeing the wide variety of opinions on here has given me at least three major ideas: one, that I don’t need to be completionist on competitions or authors where I might expect to be broadly negative.

Two, that everyone has a different opinion on what reviews are for and what they value in them. Instead of coming up with a blanket plan I think I’ll have to try to remember information about authors and handle them on an individual basis.

And three, that games entered in ranked competitions can expect more criticism than games entered outside of competitions or in unranked competitions.

This does mean that I might fudge the numbers on some reviews for people that I think will be hurt by lower scores or who stay out of ranked competitions and generally leave only positive reviews for others, except in cases where it might lead to outsized IFDB rankings. When some Chooseyourstory people were banned from IFDB, it was for asking friends to purposely upvote their games to give high rankings, and it only took 6-8 scores to zoom to the top. While no one at all is doing that now, I don’t want to contribute to a situation where ‘algorithms’ are determined by popularity and not by game quality. So if I do end up giving a higher rating than I really feel for a game that already has a lot of rankings, I might just mark the ‘do not include this review in the rating button’.

bg · July 5, 2025, 6:55pm

When I’m looking for games to play, I appreciate reading helpful reviews, even if those reviews are negative. (I’m not talking about reviews that are harsh or mean.) Negative reviews sometimes get backlash, and not everyone has the desire or energy to deal with that, so in my opinion it’s fair to opt out of writing a review. Though I’m glad that not everyone opts out, or we wouldn’t have any negative-but-helpful reviews.

This confuses me. Are you saying you would give ratings that you don’t think are accurate? If you don’t want to give a low rating for whatever reason, another option would be to just not give a rating.