Re: Steam's Revising Reviews

On Sun, 18 Aug 2024 14:22:49 -0000 (UTC), rridge@csclub.uwaterloo.ca
(Ross Ridge) wrote:

Spalls Hurgenson  <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:

From my understanding, the sort of review you suggested WILL remain
available. As Valve pointed out, some people aren't good at expressing
themselves and -honestly- I think there is some merit to a short
comment like that. Even _I_ tire of overlong reviews sometimes and a
quick, pithy comment can be a useful indicator.

>
I really like what Valve has done here.  The reviews they're hiding now
are pretty much the same reviews that I would occasionally go through and
downvote as unhelpful.  All the useless joke and ASCII art reviews that
get highly upvoted because apparently there's some weird minority of Steam
users that think that user reviews should be some sort of entertainment.
>
But I also deliberately didn't downvote the "useless" short reviews that
often didn't say anything more than "good game".  Sure they might not be
all the helpful in their description of the game, but like you said not
everyone is good at expressing themselves.  It's easy to overlook how
hard writing can be for people when you spend most of the day reading
stuff on the Internet written by people who are very good at writing.

Similar here. I think that there's also a feeling of (unstated)
obligation when people review a game. After playing it a while, Steam
says, "Hey, you've played this game for 16 hours, wanna share your
opinion?" and then gives you a thumbs up/thumbs down option, and a
heck of a lot of white space beneath that to write something. So they
write something, but for whatever reason they don't say anything
substantial.

   [It could be, as Valve suggested, that some people just are
    bad at expressing themselves. Or it could be they are
    reviewing on a phone (who wants to type out long-form messages
    on a phone?), or perhaps they just don't have the time, or
    maybe it's a form of social anxiety (not everyone is
    comfortable openly sharing their opinions). It could even be
    that they (in a mindset completely foreign to me! ;-)
    earnestly dislike long rambling diatribes about the advantages
    and disadvantages of a game and think a review should just be
    "I enjoyed it" or "I hated it".]

These short "I like it it was gud" reviews certainly aren't going to
win any up-votes from me. Individually, they'll certainly have less
impact on my decision to play or not play. But in aggregate, they
certainly are useful. If I skim a game's user-review page on Steam and
see dozens of "Is good, will play more" style reviews and almost no
"suuuuuuxxxxx!" type reviews, it indicates to me that --on the whole--
the game is being positively received. At that point I'll usually seek
out the longer NEGATIVE reviews to see what people think is wrong. If
it's the other way around (lots of "shit game!" reviews, few "heheh
fun!" type), then I'll look to see what the few people who liked it
and wrote long reviews thought made it worth playing). It's a quick
short-cut telling me what sort of lengthy review I should be focusing
on.

Your mileage may vary. I'll certainly grant you that these short
reviews aren't individually helpful. But I wouldn't call them useless,
and I'm glad they're there. It allows hoi polloi to express
themselves, allowing us, as potential buyers, to get a broader
overview of a game's reception rather than limiting our viewpoint to
those who trend towards the overly wordy. ;-)

I also don't have a problem with people posting negative reviews of games
they fundamentally aren't going to like.  So what if someone who hates
RPGs posts a negative review of an RPG?  It's an honest expression of
their honest opinion of the game.  I don't think there needs to be be
any other qualification to review a game other than to have played it.
And it's not completely useless to say a game isn't one of those rare
exceptions that non-fans of the genre can enjoy.

I generally agree. After all, I myself often try games in genres I
usually don't enjoy (mostly in hopes of discovering that now I /do/
enjoy that genre. I'm usually disappointed! ;-). Saying I don't like
this game but that's probably because I don't like that STYLE of game
in general may be helpful to others who have similar tastes. My review
may not be useful to FANS of the genre, but that's why I make them
aware of my negative bias from the start. My review isn't really for
them. It's for the genre-curious. ;-)