Ha! I’ll bet you thought I’d forgotten to post a game of the year article for 2009. I mean, January is halfway over already. Well, after I spent so much verbiage defending review aggregation, it’d be disingenuous to leave those descriptive statistics just lying there. So get ready to hedge and prepare to evade personal responsibility, because it’s time to bow to the wisdom of crowds.

In case clicking this link is too much trouble, here’s the idea in brief. When you have an unknowable quantity, like how many ball bearings are in a fishbowl, it’s very unlikely that you’ll be able guess it accurately. However, if you gather 10 of your closest friends together and average all their guesses, the average guess is often very close to right. This works because their guesses fit a normal distribution around the actual number of bearings in the fishbowl. So as you average more guesses, the mean of those guesses gets closer to the number of bearings.

Applying the wisdom of crowds game reviews gets you review aggregators like Gamerankings. Applying it to game of the year gets you this article. Some people hate applying statistical principles to subjective numerical scales, but we’re not curing cancer here. If this is wrong, you’ll have to trade $60 down to $45 at Gamestop. If it’s right, you’ll get to play the coolest game of 2009.

So here’s how this works: I’ve taken the Game of the Year articles from six major critical outlets (Time, Gamasutra, Gamespot, Spike, Joystiq, and Gamespy) and awarded one point to each nominee and a bonus point to each winner. We’re trying to identify the most outstanding game of 2009, so it makes more sense to use summation than averaging as an aggregation technique. However, just to be on the safe side, we can use the top ten games of 2009 as listed by GameRankings to see if there’s any overlap in critical estimation. This gives us the following:

The Wisdom of Crowds:

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves: 7
Batman: Arkham Asylum: 6
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2: 6
Assassin’s Creed II: 5
Dragon Age: Origins: 4
Demon’s Souls: 3
New Super Mario Bros. Wii : 3
Borderlands: 2
Left 4 dead 2: 2

Honorable mention (1 point):DJ Hero, Flower, Forza Motorsport 3, Geo-Defense Swarm, Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, Halo 3: ODST, inFamous, Killzone 2, Little King’s Story, Plants vs. Zombies, Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time, Retro Game Challenge, Scribblenauts, Shadow Complex, Splosion Man, The Beatles: Rock Band, The Sims 3, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn Of War II.

GameRankings:

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
Street Fighter IV
Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars
Batman: Arkham Asylum
Forza Motorsport 3
Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story
Assassin’s Creed II
FIFA Soccer 10

And now for the interesting trends:

• Uncharted 2 went home with all the marbles, and the whole list was more smoothly ranked than last year. Of the games that scored more than one point, only six were ties. This is contrasted with last year’s ten ties above one point.
• Sequels are down from last year, but still account for half the games above one point.
• Somewhere, Ken Kutaragi is screaming “I told you so!” The PS3 finally hit its stride this year, landing half again as many nominees as the Xbox 360, nine of which are PS3 exclusives, and seven of which rose above honorable mention.
• Portables still can’t get any respect. The sum of nominees across all portable platforms just barely ties the Wii, which also got schooled.
• Of the nine games exceeding one point, four made the GameRankings top nine games of 2009. So there’s overlap, but the Wisdom of Crowds is certainly tapping something different than the initial impressions of professional reviewers.

It’s fun doing this; it’s like having secret knowledge.

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