Investigating Bias In Videogame Review Sites

jvm writes "We've all read comments that some videogame sites are allegedly biased for or against some games, consoles, or companies. So, Curmudgeon Gamer has investigated whether bias can be seen in the review scores over several games on each console. The review sites in question are GameSpot, GameSpy, and IGN, each of whom are compared to the game review averages on GameRankings. Additionally, a selection of review scores for crossplatform games are examined. While solid conclusions are difficult to draw and improvements can admittedly be made, perhaps people will find these results interesting to examine and discuss."

Comments

Openoffice

[BrookHarty]

The spreadsheet I used for my computations and graphs can be downloaded here. It's in OpenOffice format.

Nice to see people use opensource software, he could of released the data in excel.

Re:Openoffice

[Vaevictis666]

People who splinter standards in an effort to standardize are hypocrites whether they know it or not.

Keep in mind that nobody but microsoft really knows what's going on inside their office files. It would be really hard for someone (such as Open Office) to backward engineer the file formats reliably enough to save in them.

OTOH, he could save it as a .CSV file (comma separated values) which is pretty universal.

Re:Openoffice

[Michael Spencer Jr.]

OK, I'm reading an Excel spreadsheet.

I'm now reading in the next chunk of data. Its header identifies it as a formatting attribute applied to a range of cells. I'll apply that info to my internal representation of the spreadsheet.

I'm now reading in the next chunk of data. Its header identifies it as...well, something unknown. Prior research suggests this kind of data block is totally irrelevant, so I'll skip it. It seems to be two integers, zero padded out to 4 KB, but other than that I have no idea what it does.

I'm now reading in the next chunk of data. It's a list of cell values.

etc etc.

It's possible to read a data file and get *most* but not *all* of the meaning out, and yet still be able to do useful things with the data. If you attempt to write a data file using this same incomplete knowledge of the format, your file will look weird.

For a non-native English speaker, it's kinda like the difference between reading proper English and writing proper English. If you ignore order agreement and articles (a, an, the) you can still understand almost all of an English sentence. But if you try to write English with that same strategy, your lack of number agreement and improper articles will stand out.

In Excel's case, "stand out" == "won't read".

--Michael Spencer