Data Dump: GOTY 2018 Staff & Guests Breakdown

Hey yo! I love stats. And if you've been around here at any point over the last decade, you probably already knew that. Unfortunately, I don't have as many opportunities as I did in the past since it's been years since site data was easily accessible. You may remember the good ol' days of monthly Data Dumps, achievement tracking, and annual reviews data. Game of the Year is one of the few chances we have to put some spreadsheets together these days, so let's do this thing!

First off, some ground rules. Since not everyone decides to do a nice and tidy one through ten list, I had to get a little creative with how to tally everything. And I'm doing it slightly differently from last year.

• A "regular" ranked list results in a total of 55 points available. (1 point for 10th, 10 points for 1st, etc.)
• If a person gave 10 games but did not rank them, each game gets 5.5 points.
• If a person gave less than 10 and did not rank them, they still only get 5.5 each.
• If a person gave less than 10 and did rank them, they forfeited their points available for 10th, 9th, etc. (i.e. a list of 8 ranked is a total of 52 points)
• If a person (@matt) is a weirdo and doesn't rank their list but specifically says the last game they talk about is their GOTY, then that game gets 10 points and the rest get 5.
• If a person (@will) is a bigger weirdo and gives two games their #1 spot, yet doesn't rank anything else...I made it work.
• If someone gave a spot a tie between two games, I split the allotted points. For example, if someone put two games in their 9th place spot (2 points), I gave each game 1 point. If you can't make up your mind, your choices take the hit. Sorry.

So, what are we actually doing here? Well, what if we good ol' mathematics to determine the site's GOTY rather than hours and hours of arguing? Sure, the deliberations are fun, but if we deployed a spreadsheet, how different would the final results be? As I've said before, I don't necessarily believe this is how it should be done, but it's just fun to compare the cold, hard stats to what went down in that hot, sweaty room.

Staff's Top 45

As you can see, nine of the top ten games from the math are also in the official list that came out of that hot, sweaty room a couple weeks ago. They're in a slightly different order, but it's still pretty cool that it was that accurate. Especially since the only outlier was the #9 spot.

Despite ending up in seventh on the real list, Marvel's Spider-Man got votes from eight out of the ten staff members; the most of any game.

East vs. West

@mnzy brought up in the comments that they thought the West vs East split would make wildly different lists, so I broke out the spreadsheet again to have a look. And here's what we got:

As you can see, eight games appear on both lists. The outliers are Moss and Astro Bot Rescue Mission in the East, and then Destiny 2 and Monster Hunter: World out West. Also, nine of the ten West games got on the official site list while eight of the ten on the East list made it. So, even though the eight games shared between the two lists are in a different order, the lists are quite similar.

Guests' Top 25

Now let's take a look at those guest lists. There's way more data to wade through with these. And since guests have no rules, I have to get a little more creative with the math sometimes.

God of War mostly ran away with it here. Not as much as Zelda did last year, but still convincingly.

• 205 different games were voted for by the forty-eight guests. That's four more games than last year.
• Nine games got a 1st place vote with no votes from anyone else: The Banner Saga Trilogy, The Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth+, Gris, Kentucky Route Zero, Life Is Strange: Before the Storm, Octodad: Dadliest Catch, The Order: 1886, TimeSpinner, and Undertale.
• God of War got the most 1st place votes with seven. The next closest were Celeste and Dead Cells with three.
• God of War also had the most votes overall with eighteen.
• Just twenty-eight of the guests actually gave a ranked list of ten.
• Marvel's Spider-Man was the highest ranked game that got no first place votes.
• @aurahack and Xeecee's lists were soundtracks, but I ranked them anyway.
• Zodiac's list was games he hated, but I ranked it all the same. As far as I'm concerned, the lists might as well be called "Top 10 Games I Felt Strongly About."

That's all for now. Hopefully I'll have another opportunity to share a bunch of stats in 2019.

Sav'orq, 2018.

Always love your spreadsheets, Marino.

Very good

I love data. Spider-Man sticks out as the game everyone liked, but nobody loved. No #1 finishes between staff and guest lists, but it was on a TON of lists.

"The only list I couldn't include was Dave's."

Dave did say at the end of his list that his GOTY was Heavy Burger, narrowly beating Madden. You could maybe have included that as his #1 and #2 choices.

Man I was doing this independently while listening to the podcast.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Vl8skoHQom7RsCymWKWNynDTQR9GwNQDVxgi6W7MsI0/edit?usp=sharing

I used 10 points for #1, 1 point for #10. Counted any unnumbered lists as an "Honorable Mention." Comes to the following list, only for the Guests:

Overall 233 games are recommended by all these fine folk. Over 100 of these only 1 time. Some games don't appear, like my and Jasons favorite OnRush. Some games got added only by the final guests, like MegaMan XI, a game that got a lot of praise. Many were not released in 2018, and there's an album, a movie and a boardgame on there.

This cements to me how good of a year 2018 was, not only in its best games, but in its spread of good games.

Maybe it really is the best time toying videogames

Beautiful!

I’m glad Celeste is well represented here. Disappointed the staff wasn’t that hot on it collectively.

I counted it as God of War, which is what his real #1 is. It was a good swerve though.

STATS. Interesting to see how the numbers list changed from their own. I think it was done right. Good times!

For the past few years, seems like there was always a game that stood out and that would be the clear number one. Mario Maker, Hitman, and PUBG come to mind. This year, I didn't get that impression. There simply was no consensus, at least not at the beginning of the deliberations.

I’m wondering how things would shake out if you played with the points system, such as making the points be a curvilinear payoff. A simple linear payoff makes it so that a #1 is only slightly better than a #2, but a #9 is twice a good as a #10. This might benefit games that are widely liked at the expense of games that are very beloved by a few. I think making it so that each rank is worth a percentage more then the next makes things more cnosistent compared to having each rank be just 1 more than the next.

Has anyone tried to see what happens if you put the ranked lists for the top 10 games (or the whole list somehow) into one of the various preferential voting systems?

Huh, I think GB East GotY and GB West GotY would be widly different, looking at that table.

Per your suggestion, I've added an East vs West section.

Ah, finally, the real game of the year.

Interesting that the Top 3 of East are more narrative focused while the Top 3 of West are almost completely mechanics focused. I mean, I probably could have guessed that would be the breakdown, but it's nice to have it in chart form.

Spider-Man was this year's Horizon in a lot of ways. An amazing game that most people liked a lot, but got lost in the shuffle.

Thank you for the spreadsheets

Was wondering how Leon Chang's list of two Star Ocean 2 entries would reflect on the guest list but I guess since it wasn't a list of 10 it wasn't counted. :P

Unranked lists were given 5.5 points per game.

@marino: I clearly cannot read. :P

May have been answered elsewhere but is this the first year that a game that wasn't Number 1 on anyone's individual list the GOTY?

2016 - No one had Hitman #1.