Research Intro
As in all things video games, who’s the best of any given category is a very contentious issue. I’d like to take a minute to explain where my results are coming from so that the process is at least transparent.
All the data I have comes from MetaCritic. MetaCritic is a site that evaluates the ‘journalistic quality’ of various review sites for an assortment of media types (the one we care about being video games). They have a list of approximately 100 sites which they feel are up to their standards. Whenever one of these sites reviews a game, they convert the score that site gives a game, and add it to a MetaScore, which is the average of all the scores from any review sites on their list who have reviewed that game. MetaScores do not appear unless a sufficient number of sites have reviewed a given title. In this way, MetaCritic effectively averages out the biases any given site may have for or against a title by aggregating them together.
What I have done is effectively mined the MetaCritic site for information on the MetaScore, Developer, Publisher, Release Date, etc. for each game. The information was entered into a local database on my own system, which then allows me to construct queries in order to arrange the information in a different way than metacritic presents it. I’ve simply taken those queries, and uploaded the results along with a little analysis to this site. Effectively this means that much of this data is a more realistic portrayal of who the players are in the game. Of course, the queries I run will change the results, and I’ve only run a certain sub-set of the possibilities that interest me.
If there’s any queries you’re interested in seeing, or have any commentary or questions about the process, please feel free to contact me.
