A Game of the Year 2008 Poll: Results
CLICK HERE TO JUMP TO THE PRETTY COLOR-CODED FULL RESULTS
I’m just gonna copy and paste the explanation I gave last year:
For the last few years 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:
- Fallout 3 (8780) *** GAME OF THE YEAR ***
- Left 4 Dead (6626)
- Grand Theft Auto 4 (5032)
- Super Smash Bros. Brawl (4321)
- Rock Band 2 (3290)
- Dead Space (3151)
- Gears of War 2 (2942)
- Fable 2 (2751)
- Braid (2729)
- Metal Gear Solid 4 (2666)
- Little Big Planet (2520)
- No More Heroes (2241)
- Audiosurf (2152)
- Castle Crashers (2083)
- Valkyria Chronicles (2027)
- Mario Kart Wii (2014)
- The World Ends with You (2000)
- World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King (1914)
- Penny Arcade Adventures: On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness Ep. 1 (1910)
- Sins of a Solar Empire (1850)
The numbers in parentheses are the final scores each game got under the poll’s ranking system. (The scores in general were a lot closer than last year–basically all the rankings 14-18 are within a couple votes of each other!) 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 2008:
#1, Fallout 3
- Top-ranked Wii Exclusive:
#4, Super Smash Bros. Brawl
- Top-ranked 360 Exclusive:
#7, Gears of War 2
- Top-ranked PS3 Exclusive:
#10, Metal Gear Solid 4
- Top-ranked PC Exclusive:
#13, Audiosurf
- Top-ranked DS Exclusive:
#17, The World Ends With You
- Top-ranked PSP Exclusive:
#39, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII
- Best FPS:
#2, Left 4 Dead
- Best RPG:
#1, Fallout 3
- Best Sports Game:
#27, Burnout Paradise
- Best Game Only Available Through A Console Download Service:
#8, Braid
- Special “Cult” Award (see below):
#26, Persona 4 & #15, Valkyria Chronicles (Tie)
NOTEWORTHY LOSERS
- Best game of 2008 which somehow nobody considered to be their #1 pick: #33, Spore
- Worst game of 2008 that at least one person considered their #1 pick: #179, Midnight Club: Los Angeles (Only two people voted for this)
- Worst game of 2008: #203, Mystery Case Files: MillionHEIR (Only one person voted for this; it was their #20 pick)
There were also ten games which were listed, but which no one voted for at all.
ALTERNATE SCORING METHODS
The rankings listed above are based on what was intended to be an approximation of Condorcet voting, but which I’m told is actually closer to the Borda count. In my Borda-ish 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 post votes they got, we get a wildly different list:
First Past the Post
- Fallout 3 (182 first-place votes)
- Left 4 Dead (109)
- Super Smash Bros. Brawl (42)
- Metal Gear Solid 4 (42)
- Valkyria Chronicles (39)
- Persona 4 (39)
- Grand Theft Auto 4 (35)
- Dead Space (31)
- Rock Band 2 (30)
- The World Ends with You (30)
- World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King (30)
- Gears of War 2 (23)
- Little Big Planet (21)
- No More Heroes (19)
- Braid (15)
- World of Goo (14)
- Spelunky (12)
- Sins of a Solar Empire (11)
- Fable 2 (10)
- Prince of Persia (10)
Every year when I do this there’s some game which scores horribly low in the objective rankings but gets a really startling proportion of first-place votes; last year the standout game in the “cult” department was Persona 3; this year the standout was, interestingly enough, Persona 4, which only got 87 votes at all, placing it at #26 in the overall rankings– but nearly half of those votes, a full 39, ranked it in first place, putting it in sixth place in the First Past the Post ranking above. Tying Persona 4 in the First Past the Post ranking is Valkyria Chronicles, which did a little better in terms of how many people voted for it (117 votes) but which still gets a pretty great cult ranking since one in three of those voters considered it their #1 game. (Honorable mention in the cult category should probably go to “Spelunky“, a wildly obscure but kind of awesome freeware pixel art game released in the last two weeks of December, which came in way down at 51st place in the overall rankings but managed to come in 17th in first-pace votes– with again nearly one-third of the people who voted for Spelunky at all rating it #1.)
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. Most years I’ve done this the Instant Runoff and pseudo-Borda rankings have been almost the same, but this time there were some interesting differences (with the biggest one being, for some reason I don’t understand, World of Goo somehow jumping a good seven spots in the rankings?!). Your eyes are probably starting to glaze over at this point, so I bolded the places where these two votes differ from the normal rankings:
Approval
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IRV
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FINALLY: PER-FORUM BREAKDOWNS
As mentioned before, this poll mostly exists for a handful of video game forums where some people I know post. Since last year when I started posting the results on this blog, I’ve tried to actually run some extra results, in each case counting only those voters who– as far as one could tell from looking at the logs– had come to the poll from one particular forum or other.
So, here you have it– these numbers aren’t totally accurate because my logging method is not entirely trustworthy, but here’s an approximate by-forum breakdown of these results. Links go to color-coded full listings.
Penny Arcade Forums (806 voters)
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Platformers.net (42 voters)
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360Arcadians.net (37 voters)
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Mechanically Separated Meat (6 voters)
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January 9th, 2009 at 8:12 am
on some of the noteworthy losers, you’ve got ‘2007’ instead of 2008
January 10th, 2009 at 12:22 am
Matt, thanks. The initial version of this post was made very late at night and contained a number of typos :O
I think I’ve got them all now though.
January 10th, 2009 at 3:24 am
i feel so out of touch with “the masses”
January 10th, 2009 at 9:45 pm
aw………. only 6 voters
February 18th, 2009 at 11:05 pm
Hey ray… don’t feel too bad, my top two votes were Mega Man 9 and World of Goo and I ran the poll D: