Ever wonder what makes a great game? Fear not, for science has the answers. I did a Linguistical analysis of all the written reviews (361 and counting) on Giantbomb using python and looked at the top usage of: unigram (one word segments) nouns, adjectives and adverbs, simple bigrams (two word segments) and simple trigrams (three word segments). Below are some of the highlights from my work, everything on this list has appeared at least 5 times in reviews. I split the scores up into three groups: bad (one/two stars), OK (three stars), and good (four/five stars). I presented this at PAX to the Giantbomb crew and thought others might wanna see my results too.
*This is a work in process, I'm hoping to get more sweet nuggets of knowledge as time goes on.*
Brad
- Good: “production value”
- OK: “the fist game”
- Bad: “Basic”
Jeff
- Good: “technically efficient”, “jet pack” and“rocket launcher”
- Bad: “it's hard”
Ryan
- Good: “20 hours” and “experience”
- OK: “the first few”
Vinny
- Good: “fire” ('cause fire is bad ass)
Dave
- Good: “PC” (sadly “Russian” was nowhere to be seen)
Alex
- Good: “variety” and “various”
- OK: “over and over”
Everyone:
- Good: “grappling hook”, “new” and “good”
- Bad: “hard”, “boss fight”
- Everyone used the adjective 'different' often, no matter what the score was, “frame rate” is also used for any score, but less often.
This does not imply that any game with grappling hooks will get five stars, just that some good games have grappling hooks in them and most importantly all these words are out of context. Though I think it's safe to say Jeff likes rocket launchers.
This is for fun and shouldn't be viewed as proof of anything, least of all my ability to program.
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