Hey everyone. We've officially launched the Game Census. It's awards and rankings based on your votes, reviews, and posts. There are several categories, and we're planning on adding more as more reviews keep coming in.
What is Game Sense?
Game Sense is a gamer review site that's designed to do more with reviews. It also aims to take reviews and posts and make them more readable, and more like a traditional gaming site as opposed to a traditional user review site. The goal is to allow gamers to create their own alternative media by writing reviews, posting, and voting. We have some neat ideas planned for the future to push the site closer to our vision, and those features will roll out the more Game Sense continues to grow.
How does it work?
We invented our own ranking algorithms that are far more flexible and powerful than typical up and down votes or generic 1 to 5 star rankings. It allows us to get more information out of reviews as well as to get much more meaningful scores and information. The math and algorithms have even been looked over by some well educated people, including a PhD in Physics, and they all got thumbs up.
What's the Game Census?
The Game Census is Game Sense using the advanced features it has to categorize games based on gamer input. It allows for categories to be created for game rankings. Currently, we have rankings set up for select platforms as well as for 2015 and $currentYear. More platforms will be added once they get reviews Game Sense isn't even three months old yet. So if you want to see a platform that doesn't have a Game Census added, just write some reviews and it'll manually be added.
Game Sense takes all your votes, posts, and reviews and calculates both score and ranking and determines where the game should be ranked.
Why?
Most of you suspect most gaming awards are rigged or games are chosen to win based on sketchy reasons. Game Census is completely transparent, you can directly see the reviews, posts, and votes of the winners and losers. So you instantly know why games are ranked or placed where they are. This is an award and ranking platform designed entirely around gamer input.
Older systems are opened up as well. One of the goals is to make sure that gamers not familiar with older gaming systems like NES, SNES, Genesis, etc have a database of which games are good and which are bad. The Game Census for the older platforms functions as a list of gamer recommended games. It's similar to those /v/ recommends graphics I see passed around, but it's interactive. The rankings depend on gamer input, and people interested in those games can go to the page for that game and get all the information they need.
How can I help choose winners and losers?
We know not everyone likes to write reviews. The easiest thing you can do is vote on existing reviews and use the star ratings. Those will affect scores, which then affect ranking in Game Censuses. You can also post things like good or bad music, glitches, good gameplay, etc. They are very similar to reviews, but they aren't entirely the same. They only require a small amount of text, and they do help with the score and ranking. Some posts, like posts for "good music" show up in the Good Music Channel and go into the playlist for good gaming music.
If you wanted to, you could go around and make posts for the best NES game music, and it would help. There's room for lots of people to help, even if they don't like writing reviews. We want to make sure Game Censuses are able to be used by as many people as possible, so a wide range of gamers have input on how the final rankings will stand.
The biggest help you can do is to write actual reviews. All games are open, and we'll add more Game Censuses once more reviews for interesting categories keep showing up.
If you are more interested in watching how it plays out, you can help raise awareness that the Game Census is happening by sharing links to Game Sense and by helping us reach more people on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/GameSensedotCo/status/741311387754893314
We'll be in and out of this thread to answer questions and take suggestions.