A Game of the Year 2013 Poll: Results
CLICK HERE TO JUMP TO THE PRETTY COLOR-CODED FULL RESULTS
This explanation will look a lot like that of previous years, but:
Every year since 2004 I’ve been hosting this Game of the Year poll for the users of some forums I read. There are a lot of GOTY polls out there, but this one I think is kind of special. Most polls, you’re given a list of four or five options and you’re asked to pick the one you liked best. This poll, people are given a list of a couple of hundred options, consisting of every new game released in the previous year– and asked to rate their top ten or twenty.
This does a few interesting things. First off, we get to see all the information about what people’s second, third etc choices are. Second off, because the second, third etc choices count, people are more likely to vote for the game they want to win, rather than the game they think is likely to win– they’re less likely to engage in “strategic voting”. Finally, because we have all this information, we’re actually able to provide somewhat reasonable rankings for something like the top hundred or so games of last year.
The full results– showing the exact number of voters who ranked each game first, second, third place etc– can be found here. In the meantime, the final results were:
- Gone Home (3426) *** GAME OF THE YEAR ***
- Bioshock Infinite (3373)
- Papers, Please (2506)
- Saints Row IV (2497)
- Tomb Raider 2013 (2490)
- The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds (2440)
- Pokémon X and Y (2423)
- The Last Of Us (2263)
- The Stanley Parable (2187)
- Fire Emblem: Awakening (2161)
- Animal Crossing: New Leaf (1924)
- Grand Theft Auto V (1721)
- Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (1631)
- Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (1554)
- Rogue Legacy (1547)
- Super Mario 3D World (1393)
- Antichamber (1334)
- Gunpoint (1302)
- Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (1214)
- Kentucky Route Zero (1130)
The numbers in parentheses are the final scores each game got under the poll’s ranking system. Thanks if you voted, and some more elaborate analysis of the results (plus an explanation of the scores) can be found below.
NOTEWORTHY WINNERS
GOTY 2013:
#1, Gone Home
Top-ranked PC Exclusive:
#1, Gone Home
Top-ranked 3DS Exclusive:
#6, The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds
Top-ranked PS3 Exclusive:
#8, The Last Of Us
Top-ranked WiiU Exclusive:
#16, Super Mario 3D World
Top-ranked Browser Game:
#24, Depression Quest
Top-ranked Mobile Exclusive:
#46, 868-HACK
(OR)
#56, Ridiculous Fishing, if you disqualify 868-HACK because of its PC prototype, “86856527”
Top-ranked Vita exclusive:
#67, Tearaway
Top-ranked PS4 Exclusive:
#85, Resogun
Top-ranked 360 Exclusive:
#104, BattleBlock Theater
Top-ranked XB1 Exclusive:
#124, Killer Instinct
Top-ranked Ouya Exclusive:
#166, Towerfall
Top-ranked Wii Exclusive:
#189, Pandora’s Tower
Top-ranked FPS:
#1, Gone Home
Top-ranked “Indie” Game:
#1, Gone Home
Top-ranked RPG:
#7, Pokémon X and Y
Top-ranked Sports Game:
#45, Divekick
“Cult” Award (see below):
#46, 868-HACK
NOTEWORTHY LOSERS
Best game of 2013 which somehow nobody considered to be their #1 pick: #30, Guacamelee!
Worst game of 2013 that at least one person considered their #1 pick: Three-way tie between three games tied for the #326 slot: “I Hate the Dark”; Wizardry Online; and “Heroine’s Quest: The Herald of Ragnarok”. Each of these games got only one vote, but each of these voters considered it their game of the year.
Worst game of 2013: Two-way tie between the games tied for #402: “Composition 62” and “Ultionus: A Tale of Petty Revenge”. Both of these games scored only one vote each, each from someone who considered it their 20th best game of the year.
There were a whole 57 games on the nominations list that no one voted for at all.
ALTERNATE SCORING METHODS
The rankings listed above are based on a version of the Borda count voting method. Each vote cast for a game gives that game a certain number of points. If someone ranks a game #1, that game gets 20 points. If they rank it #2, the game gets 19 points. If they rank it #3 the game gets 18 points… and so on. I have a script that checks a couple of alternate ways of ranking the same data, though.
For example, if we rank games only by the number of first place votes they got, the winner remains the same but almost the entire rest of the list changes dramatically– a lot more movement than usual this year, it seems like. I bolded entries that are different in the first-place-votes count:
First Past the Post
- Gone Home (52)
- The Last Of Us (51)
- The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds (38)
- Saints Row IV (35)
- Bioshock Infinite (33)
- Fire Emblem: Awakening (27)
- Papers, Please (23)
- Pokémon X and Y (23)
- Grand Theft Auto V (19)
- Dota 2 (19)
- The Stanley Parable (17)
- Animal Crossing: New Leaf (17)
- Kentucky Route Zero (16)
- Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (15)
- Tomb Raider 2013 (14)
- StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm (12)
- Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (11)
- 868-HACK (10)
- Super Mario 3D World (9)
- Hate Plus (9)
Most years when I look at the first-past-the-post list a “cult” game emerges that received very few overall votes, but where an overwhelming percentage of those votes were #1 votes (I think of this as the “Persona award”); this year the standout was 868-HACK, which managed to grab #18 in the first past the post rankings despite being all the way down at #46 in the overall rankings. Also of note here are Hate Plus, which jumped from #33 to a tie for #19; and DOTA 2, which jumped from #22 to #10; and The Last Of Us, which jumped from #8 to #2 (actually, if it had received one more #1 vote, it would have tied Gone Home for first place).
I also did two more ways of sorting the rankings: an “approval” vote, where nothing is counted except the number of votes a game received (i.e. a first-place and a twentieth-place ranking count the same– all the matters is if the game was on someone’s list); and an instant runoff vote. Usually these two track the main count very closely, but this year, something rare happens in IRV: The first and second place games switch place! If you are qualified to comment on the differences between instant runoff and Borda-based ranked voting, feel free to tell us what that means.
APPROVAL
- Bioshock Infinite (223)
- Gone Home (205)
- Papers, Please (176)
- Tomb Raider 2013 (162)
- Saints Row IV (157)
- Pokémon X and Y (155)
- The Stanley Parable (149)
- The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds (144)
- Fire Emblem: Awakening (140)
- The Last Of Us (136)
- Animal Crossing: New Leaf (125)
- Rogue Legacy (117)
- Grand Theft Auto V (113)
- Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (108)
- Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (107)
- Gunpoint (98)
- Antichamber (91)
- Super Mario 3D World (84)
- Don’t Starve (83)
- Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon (82)
IRV
- Bioshock Infinite (223)
- Gone Home (205)
- Papers, Please (176)
- The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds (144)
- Saints Row IV (157)
- Pokémon X and Y (155)
- The Last Of Us (136)
- Tomb Raider 2013 (162)
- The Stanley Parable (149)
- Fire Emblem: Awakening (140)
- Animal Crossing: New Leaf (125)
- Grand Theft Auto V (113)
- Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (108)
- Rogue Legacy (117)
- Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons (107)
- Gunpoint (98)
- Antichamber (91)
- Super Mario 3D World (84)
- Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (77)
- Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon (82)
FINALLY: PER-FORUM BREAKDOWNS
Okay, so this is where things get… interesting.
When this poll first started, it was run out of the forums for Penny Arcade, and historically, that one forum has totally dominated the results. I traditionally link on a couple more small forums, but these usually only provide a handful of votes– and anyway, most of the forums I tended to target were themselves spinoff from the PA forum community. The final results invariably look almost exactly like the PA-specific results.
Except not this year. This year, for whatever reason, my efforts to promote the poll on Twitter took off like crazy; one of the tweets about it got 51 retweets. The result was a HUGE voter influx, to the point where PA was almost outnumbered– in the end PA contributed about 300 votes, whereas Twitter contributed about 250.
And PA and Twitter voted *really differently*. My vote script tracks “where votes came from”, and lets me run results isolated to votes from a particular source. The tracking isn’t perfect, but ought to be able give us some idea how different internet communities voted. Here’s the breakdowns from the different major vote contributors with their respective color-coded listings linked; here’s what we find:
Penny Arcade Forums (296 voters)
|
Twitter (244 voters)
|
Platformers.net (32 voters)
|
Tigsource.com (22 voters)
|
Looking at these breakdowns, the most pronounced difference between the big two voting blocks– Twitter and Penny Arcade– is how they treated the top two entries from the combined results: Twitter put Gone Home at #1 whereas PA put it at #13, and Bioshock Infinite was voted #1 by PA but ranked down at #12 for twitter. One thing that might have hurt Bioshock here is that although Twitter voted overwhelmingly for Gone Home, the PA bloc did not vote for Bioshock Infinite nearly as solidly; in fact, going by “first place” votes alone, PA actually preferred The Last Of Us (39 first place votes to Bioshock’s 23).
The voting differences get even more interesting when we compare the Twitter results to the Tigsource results– the Twitter results seem to show a very heavy influence, and Tigsource is an indie community, but these are apparently slightly different parts of the indie community because a few of the games that made strong showings on the Twitter list (in particular, Gone Home and Depression Quest) didn’t rank at all among Tigsource’s 20 or so voters.
Anyway, that’s it, thanks so much for voting and I’ll be doing this again next year!
January 14th, 2014 at 7:09 am
Thanks for doing this, Andi 🙂
And apologies for not thinking of Electro-Primitive Girl and Class Of Heroes 2 before the deadline.
January 14th, 2014 at 9:20 pm
Hmmm look at that. Interesting differences by board.
And also interesting how the results changed due to using the alternate methods.
I think the only one of mine that made the list was Last of Us. Oh well (^_^)