AGS Games page review

[AGA]

Maybe whoever put RL&BAT on the games page should change the link so that it points at the windows version instead of whever it's pointing at the moment?

Either you're silly, or someone changed it just now, 'cause when I went to edit the link (I moderate the games page) it was already set to the windows version...

[Pumaman]

Immersion x/5
__Can you settle into the game world? or is it always drawing attention to it's limitations ("I can't do that"), interface (Oops. That wasn't MODE_USE.), or making external references (e.g. to popular culture)?

I'm not sure about that - some games, particularly humorous ones, don't really want to immerse you in the game world, but rather to give you laughs. They'd be penalised for no real reason.

Pacing x/5
__Is the level of challenge and progress maintained throughout? or is it always oscillating between being totally stuck and going through the motions?

That's an interesting alternative to just a "puzzles" rating, and it might make it easier for people to express their vote this way.

Variety x/5
__How much change do you experience, both in problem solving and feeling? Did you feel as though you were exploring diverse ideas? or just the same thing in a different costume.

Interesting idea, though I'm not sure if it merits its own category - I would think this could come under the overall 'enjoyment' of the game, since if you have to repeatedly solve similar puzzles you won't enjoy the game much.

? Music x/5 (Needs N/A option too)
__I don't know what to say about this. Should we judge it on its own merits, or by its relationship to gameplay? Should it be separate, or incorporated into Enjoyment (where it has a major influence already)?

I'm not sure about this one. Perhaps it could be part of some sort of 'atmosphere' rating, or perhaps as you say it comes under 'enjoyment'. Any other opinions anyone?

I can see a very clear problem there too. I don't think I was too serious with my suggestion though. I just think it would be weird to say a game is medium or full based on how many hours you sat and played it. Some people are better than other at solving games too, who gets to decide?

Perhaps it could be a measure of how long the game takes to play from start to finish if you know the solutions to all the puzzles? That should then fairly reflect the relative amount of time it will take new players to solve the game, not allowing for puzzle difficulty obviously.

Also, breaking down the score that way fails to show how good the game is as a whole. It's hard to understand just how good a game is by seeing a bunch of numbers regarding to each of the game's aspects. One big rating for the game makes the whole thing less complicated, and, at least too me, tells more about the game as a single piece of work than a rating broken down to parts.

Well, I was thinking that the main game list view would still display a single overall rating, made up by perhaps averaging the sub-ratings for the game. If you opened up the game detail page, you'd see the individual ratings.

Maybe whoever put RL&BAT on the games page should change the link so that it points at the windows version instead of whever it's pointing at the moment? Does anyone remember who it was?

I have no idea who it was. I've updated it now, but Captain feel free to PM me to get a password for the RLBAT entry.

Just curious...if the rating system changes, what happens to all those old games that have accumulated ratings throughout the years? Do they start at zero again?

Well, assuming that there was still an overall "x/10" rating displayed on the main game view, the old votes could be absorbed into that.

[Pumaman]

Either you're silly, or someone changed it just now, 'cause when I went to edit the link (I moderate the games page) it was already set to the windows version...

Bwahahahaha, you were pipped to the post on that one!

[After]

oooh... is "After" heading full tilt into dissapointment town?!?!?

No way!
Ok, the interface was frustrating -- (The door, Richard. Go -through -the -door. No, not your clothes - get out of the way! : ) -- but it was a fun adventure.

Meanwhile, back on topic...
Yes, I realised humourous games weren't well represented.
There are some cases in which I'd rather see a bipolar scale, rather than one that enforces an idea about what is good. No, we don't always want immersion, but it is a big deal when it applies. How about -
Light - Deep (Avoiding derogatory terms)
This doesn't distinguish dramatic genres, which should be obvious from the game's blurb. Both ends of this scale are 'good' in their way.
(But this omits the 'atmospheric realisation' part, which I'll have to find a new home for.)

I see Variety in much the same way. The appeal of many games is that you get to excersize what you are good at frequently, whereas others require a more mobile appreciation. I still think there's something worthwhile in a category like this, but I'll have to rethink it.

I only put in Music as an acknowledgement that it is often the work of a different artist. But really, I should've seen immediately that the game rating is not the place for doing that.

[Pumaman]

Ok, I've tried to reduce it to four categories to adequately cover everything - let me know your opinions people if there's anything you think should change.

Visual
How well did the backgrounds and sprites suit the game? Did it go that extra mile by providing unexpected animations?

Immersion
Was the level of immersion right for the game? If the game was serious, did you feel like you were in the game world, or were there annoying reminders that you were not?
If the game was more light hearted, did that come across nicely?
Were ambient sounds and music used effectively?

Puzzles & Pacing
Was the game too easy, too hard, or about right? Did puzzles just involve pixel hunting and randomly combining items; or did they make more sense?

Enjoyment
Everything else aside, how much did you enjoy playing the game? Couldn't wait to come back for more; or did you find it dull and boring? Did the game leave you feeling satisfied?


Also, as suggested I think I'm going to add a special icon to games which won an AGS Award.

Here are my proposals to re-define the game length categories:

Short games
If you know what you're doing, you can complete the game within 15 minutes

Medium-length
If you know what you're doing, you can complete the game within an hour

Full games
Over an hour to finish, even if you know all the solutions.


Any opinions?

[Vel]

No "Sound" category?
I think that it is vital for the game. Of course, it may fit immersion, but it is not exactly the same.

[MillsJROSS]

Perhaps sound should  be a rating, but it shouldn't be averaged in. Because who refuses to play a game if the sound rating is low? Who decides to play a game because the rating is high? Sound is important to the atmopshere, but it usually does not make or break a game. I think the best thing to do would be just to comment on what you think of the sound/music, and explain if it helped create the atmosphere or damaged the atmosphere.

Perhaps when an author puts his game onto the game page he should put what the games focus is, and people could rate it accordingly. So if his focus is to make a comedic game, then the reviewers will review the game based on that. If he was going for drama, same thing. This allows for a more accurate review of the games set goal, and whether the author did a good or bad job of it.

I think I agree with those four categories to rate a game. Only I think that whenever a person reviews a game he should explain why he/she thinks that this game deserves that rating in each category. If this take up too much space, you could make it so that the reviewer will make a short comment and put it onto the games page, and then send an explanation to the author via e-mail.

I think we have to start from scratch for the review of the games, because how can we convert this old scale into the new one? With the knowledge that the old scale doesn't do an accurte job of showing people how good or bad the game was, it should be scrapped. Or, as an alternative, you should show the old score , but not use it to average in the new scale. However, do keep the responses that people have written.

I think the scale for judging a game's length is mostly accurate. But I only wonder, does the gameplay include cut-scenes and dialog. Because some games I could beat very qiuckly if I skipped dialog and just went straight to puzzling.

And last. I think it should be made clear to any person who votes for a game that they must complete it before voting. I've thought of two ways in which to make sure the reviewer has done this. One they take a five question little quiz that asks them relevant information dealing with the game, that anyone who finished should know (but don't make it trivia, like "what color was the toothbrush?"). And the other idea, which I think is the best, is perhaps that there should be a set password to vote for each game, and the password is only given upon the completion of the game. The author can make the code, and have the engine, upon completing the game, make a text file with the code on it. This idea, of course, requires the most work. Because, CJ, you have to either add it into AGS, or have all the authors do it manually, and then we have the question about older games.

-MillsJROSS

[Pumaman]

Perhaps sound should  be a rating, but it shouldn't be averaged in. Because who refuses to play a game if the sound rating is low? Who decides to play a game because the rating is high? Sound is important to the atmopshere, but it usually does not make or break a game. I think the best thing to do would be just to comment on what you think of the sound/music, and explain if it helped create the atmosphere or damaged the atmosphere.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. If the sound is *really* inappropriate then it will affect your enjoyment of the game, and thus the rating will be affected - otherwise, just a text comment seems fine for this one.

I think I agree with those four categories to rate a game. Only I think that whenever a person reviews a game he should explain why he/she thinks that this game deserves that rating in each category.

Whilst I'd like to see that too, I think that if we make the rating process that time consuming, very few people will actually bother to do it - and therefore we'll end up with no votes for anything. It could recommend that the person voting should also add a user comment explaining their opinion.

I think we have to start from scratch for the review of the games, because how can we convert this old scale into the new one? With the knowledge that the old scale doesn't do an accurte job of showing people how good or bad the game was, it should be scrapped. Or, as an alternative, you should show the old score , but not use it to average in the new scale.

Yeah, you're probably right there - it just seems a shame to abandon all the votes people have already given. But yeah, leaving the old rating there as a read-only thing is probably the best solution.

I think the scale for judging a game's length is mostly accurate. But I only wonder, does the gameplay include cut-scenes and dialog. Because some games I could beat very qiuckly if I skipped dialog and just went straight to puzzling.

Well the definitions aren't supposed to be absolute - most of us know whether a game was short, medium or long. But the it's the creator of the game who's probably least likely to get it right, since they've been working on the game so long they'll probably have lost perspective on it - therefore, some guidelines should be provided.

And last. I think it should be made clear to any person who votes for a game that they must complete it before voting. I've thought of two ways in which to make sure the reviewer has done this. One they take a five question little quiz that asks them relevant information dealing with the game, that anyone who finished should know (but don't make it trivia, like "what color was the toothbrush?"). And the other idea, which I think is the best, is perhaps that there should be a set password to vote for each game, and the password is only given upon the completion of the game.

While I like the idea in principle, we have to accept that very few people are going to be willing to go through all that effort, just to cast their votes for a game. So we need to keep it as accessible as possible - if nobody votes, the ratings are useless anyway.


In other news, I've now added the AGS Awards info to the Games page. Let me know if I've made any mistakes transferring the info from the AGS Awards website into the game entries.
Also, I'd appreciate it if someone could draw a small new logo (about 15x16 pixels) to replace the one I'm using at the moment to represent AGS Awards, which looks a mess because it's been radically scaled down.
http://www.agsforums.com/games.php?category=102

[After]

This post is mainly an argument against combining factors into a single rating (by any formula).
(Sorry, if this sounds terse and dogmatic. I'm a bit rushed right now.)

Enjoyment corresponds to a subjective (or subconscious) overall assessment. How it relates to other factors depends on the individual. It is, already, a kind of 'weighted average' by an unseen rule.

(We can expect that this correlates quite well with a generic single valued rating system, as is currently used, and can therefore absorb it without much error.)

The average Enjoyment rating is therefore already an implicit weighted average, with weightings adapted to the community rather than prescribed in advance.

The other factors are also treated independently, with an average for each one.

We can now, if desired, discover the average weightings that people are actually using in their assessment. It's not needed by the system, but we can, for example, use the data to design games for 'the market'.
We can also see how well the other factors reflect the general impression, and whether there is something else going on that isn't represented.

More importantly, we can get a clear idea of a game by having the independent factors available to us. And we will soon pick up certain patterns on our own, and learn to read more into them based on experience.

Any attempt to combine these values effectively overrides the judgement both of those who rate and those who search.

[Pumaman]

Ok, well let me make it clear that you will definately be able to see the individual ratings when you open up the game detail page (ie. it will give an average Visual rating, average Immersion rating, etc).

However, for the main game list pages, it would look a bit messy to have lots of ratings on there, so for that particular place it would create an overall rating.

Is your main point though that this overall rating should just be an average of the "Enjoyment" ratings rather than combining them all? That sounds fair enough to me, actually - might be the best way to reflect it.


Now, another thing somebody mentioned was to have some sort of "If you liked this game, then try these" bit on the game detail page. How would you like to see that work though - should the games page moderators decide how to link games together in this manner, or should everyone be able to vote for which games are 'similar' (but that could get very complicated).
Places like Amazon don't have this problem because they just work off what other books people bought as well as this one - but we don't have those kind of stats.

Finally, I've added a right sidebar thingy to aid navigation, because finding your way back to the main page was becoming a bit of a pain.

[After]

Is your main point though that this overall rating should just be an average of the "Enjoyment" ratings rather than combining them all? That sounds fair enough to me, actually - might be the best way to reflect it.

That's it exactly.

[MillsJROSS]

I think the moderators should choose which game is similar to another one. If anyone else feels that something is wrong, or finds a game they feel is similar and isn't listed, they can PM a moderator with the reasons why the feel this is so.

About finishing the game thing. I think the least we should do, is tell people who vote, that if you haven't finished the game, please don't vote.

Yeah, and that average Enjoyment thing makes sense. It only stands to reason that that would be the only reason to play a game, and that it is a mixture of all factors from the game anyway.

Now, I'm wondering, should we have some sort of bug report? So people, when playing the game, can report a bug, and the author can find the bug and hopefull fix it. Or, if the author is finished with the game, and doesn't care to fix the bugs, than at least the person playing the game can see what bugs have already been reported.

-MillsJROSS

[Panda_unplugged]

I love the idea of "games like these" Moderators ought to be able to deside, or the game's author.

[After]

Now, another thing somebody mentioned was to have some sort of "If you liked this game, then try these" bit on the game detail page.

Also my doing (although  implied by others, too).
I was mainly thinking to inspire different approaches here - I don't see a practical implementation off-hand.

In my experience, a good range of factors is enough to identify areas of taste. So I'm not actually pushing for this feature.
It could be nice, but I don't even use Google's relevancy system, so it's pretty unlikely that I'd be among those who'd find it indispensable.

I think the moderators should choose which game is similar to another one. If anyone else feels that something is wrong, or finds a game they feel is similar and isn't listed, they can PM a moderator with the reasons why the feel this is so.

I think that this is expecting too much from the moderators.

About finishing the game thing. I think the least we should do, is tell people who vote, that if you haven't finished the game, please don't vote.

You don't need to have finished a game to have something to say about it.
I think that a Finished/Abandoned checkbox would provide immensely useful information. Abandoned replies could then do a poll indicating why they didn't finish instead of the ratings.
*Oh yes! I'm very pleased with this idea.*

Now, I'm wondering, should we have some sort of bug report? So people, when playing the game, can report a bug, and the author can find the bug and hopefull fix it. Or, if the author is finished with the game, and doesn't care to fix the bugs, than at least the person playing the game can see what bugs have already been reported.

Good thinking.
The moderators will have to ensure that known bugs are listed, but if people are aware at the outset, a lot of disappointment and board-noise could be avoided.
(I think that script-automated bug recording would actually be more trouble than manual editing in this case).

[MrColossal]

um, wouldn't you say it's up to the person who made the game to keep track of their own bug reports not make a database for them? and a finished/abandoned message could easily be added to the description of a game by the author instead of having to have a little checkbox set aside for it.

*
Hey this is a demo of my game! Enjoy it and email me here for bug reports: email@bugreports.org

update: Sorry this game isn't going to be finished.
*

eric

[MillsJROSS]

Yeah, upon thinking about moderators picking, it would imply they've played all games, which we know isn't the case. So perhaps user voting would be best.

I think it would be nice if a person is playing a game, if there were a list of bugs from the game, that were hopefullin avoidable, and how to avoid them. Because not everyone gets the luxery of playing these games while the thread is out in the open, instead of buried somewhere. Whether this is done manually or not, there should be some way to report a bug from the games page, and allow people to see the found bugs.

-MillsJROSS

[After]

um, wouldn't you say it's up to the person who made the game to keep track of their own bug reports not make a database for them? and a finished/abandoned message could easily be added to the description of a game by the author instead of having to have a little checkbox set aside for it.

Sorry, I may have been ambiguous there. I meant that a player's rating could begin with the notifier Finished or Abandoned (as in gave up, was sickened to death by it etc.), and then progress onto the appropriate detail evaluation. So Finished does the rating, Abandoned does the why-I-quit poll.
[EDIT]Although, I do agree that some developers could be more courteous about providing valid information. At least one game on the games page has no screenshot and no game related content in it's blurb.

[MillsJROSS]

That reminds me, I wanted to edit somethings about my game a year ago, but I couldn't log on. I think this was after we had a few bad crashes and the games page had to be rebuilt. I don't beleive I forgot my password. So....help me...please?

I think an abandoned check of thing would work well.

So...uh...when are we going to see results CJ. wink wink...nudge nudge.

-MillsJROSS

[Pumaman]

Right, here's a preview of how the voting page could look:
http://www.agsforums.com/games.php?action=newvote

I've tried to quantify the ratings, so rather than a "1-5" scale there are actually descriptions for each number, to hopefully get more consistent ratings. The descriptions were just off the top of my head, so please do recommend any changes you'd make to them.

Any other comments on the page overall are welcome.


Mills: PM myself or AGA to get your password reset.

So...uh...when are we going to see results CJ. wink wink...nudge nudge.

Hehe well once we've all agreed on the way it'll work, I'll get started on it properly.

[MillsJROSS]

Works for me. (Sorry for the one sentence post, but I think it says everything I need to).

-MillsJROSS