Our review scale goes from 0 to -10. Why then, with the recent public release of easy to reach statistics based on our reviews, is our average not -5? It’s a question I want to answer now rather than later as it’s an inevitable basis for criticism and I would rather have it debunked before it’s used.

Before I go on I want to take a quick side-track to explain why I’ve made this data so easy to access; most sites don’t. My reason to list this information is basically because I can and I’m interested to know it myself. If I’m interested to know what the standard deviation of our reviews is 1.9 then chances are somebody else out there is too.

When more people than just me started writing reviews Negative Gamer I needed a way to track people’s reviews more accurately: who is reviewing which game, what format is it being reviewed on, etc. Previously all of the review information was saved in one spreadsheet and while practical, wasn’t ideal. As more reviewers, reviews and games were added it was clear it wasn’t going to scale well. Because of this I created a new review system built directly into Negative Gamer that does most of the admin stuff automatically. The review page is simply the public interface for it.

I also don’t happen to agree with the most frequent reason other sites hamper the gathering of equivalent data from their sites; it causes arguments. It’s the same reason many sites don’t disclose their freebies, like a holiday resort based review day for Modern Warfare 2. I call bullshit on that. Reviewers are worrying about a small minority of readers misunderstanding the data and commenting with some silly reason as to why said reviewer probably likes men. They really care about these idiots? I don’t, and I don’t think they do either. I think the real reason is fear that they would have their integrity called out. Just being open and honest does that.

That’s enough about why I’ve made the data so easy to get at, now to the important question: why is the average score not what is described in the score breakdown as the most average rating? (Note how I’ve used the description of the score rather than just the number. The words are the meaning behind the numbers. An interesting point:  our scoring goes from 0 to -10 inclusive so there’s actually eleven different scores a review can take and the average of those is -4.5 [and I am bad at maths - thanks for the correction ParaParaKing].)

We prefer to play games we think we’re going to like and most of the time we’re right with our assumptions. If every person on staff reviewed every game, I think you would find the average closer to -5. As it is only one person reviews each game. That person is probably the person who most wants to play the game, thus highly likely to know what the game is about and like it. Simple.

It’s probably also worth mentioning that the mode (most common score) is, at least for now, 5. We give more games an “average” than any other score.