Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Better Aggregator of Reviews (Movies, Games, Tv, Music)

Recently I've started to see more discussions about "review aggregator" sites like metacritic. (mostly concerning Video Game reviews)  Some folks have even mentioned that review scores should be done away with...  As an alternative, what if we could have an aggregator for reviews based on an individual's taste rather than a generic "score"?... 

The great thing about scores... is that they are easy to understand... (4 stars is "better" than 3 stars) but reguardless of how we represent a review (1-5 stars, 1-10 score, 1-100 score) there end up being a large majority of things that end up in the meaty 3/4 stars range... and sometimes a person might be intrigued by those (movies, games, etc.) and the score doesn't (really) help... then (as a customer) what do you do? You probably take a look at the "most popular" reviewers to or reviewers who seem to have the same tastes as you and see if they say the right things that get you interested in purchasing the item/ going to the movie, etc.)

Wouldn't it be cool if we had a site that would give you recommendations based on what you like, rather than just give  (think NetFlix's recommendation system or Amazon's "...if you liked this... you may also like ..." system?  

This blog is going to discuss how this might be accomplished and some concepts and ideas that will go into the creation of allpointsreview.com.



What (website, publications, lack) as far as review scores:
1) Fludity (Ability for the review score to change) : two scenarios, 

  • a game is released with bugs (and receives a low score because of the bugs) but is patched (The ability to change scores)
  • a game which has a strong online component (MMO) and the community (mods, etc.) which can impact the game in a positive (Dark Souls PTD Durante's Mod) or Negative (MMO where the community dries up) impact
2) Singular Voice (or why Tom Chick will never going to get hired by any large media outlet to do reviews)
Dispite the fact that Tom Chick
...is a good writer
...has a long track record
He is known
He has personality
He is photogenic
...But 
He's polarizing (He LOVES or HATES things... and is not afraid of giving a video game a 1 star review regardless of what other review outlets based on his taste)
Media Outlets don't want to be associated with (what they consider "extreme" views)

They are looking for reviewers with Moderate/ mainstream tastes rather than highly opinionated people who Love some things and Hate other things


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