Single Comment

Christine Bagley-Jones wrote:

I understand how this question can tell how popular a game can be, but as far as indicating how a great a game is, that is another question. I still see it as being a bit unfair to many games.

No rating system will automatically reveal how great a game is. But having a rating system gives the truly great games an opportunity to prove themselves, and that's how we can come to recognize some of them. Popularity is one measure along which great games can prove themselves.

It's in the nature of any rating system that some things being rated will have an advantage over others besides mere quality. No rating system is going to magically distinguish games on nothing but quality. Even if I dropped the question on popularity and just asked about quality, it would not work better. For one thing, some people rate games without playing them, and having not played a game makes someone less qualified to judge its quality. The main purpose behind asking how much someone has played a game is to better gauge how qualified he is to rate the game and to make it easier to separate ratings based on experience from ratings based on speculation. Another purpose behind it is to distinguish playtested games from untested games. Also, popular games, whether or not they are the best, usually have something going for them. A game's popularity may reflect its age, its presence in tournaments, or active promotion from its creator, but if it's an inherently flawed game, it probably still won't rise so high in popularity. So popularity is a sign of quality, making it something to look for when looking for games of high quality.