I was fortunate enough to have been invited to take part in Hide & Seek’s Wonderlab a few weeks ago: ten invited participants, three days, and a remit to explore and experiment in the world of games and play. It was fascinating, exhausting, and a great deal of fun.

Of course, it deserves a bit more explanation than that. I’ve written a much fuller exploration of what the event really was, and what I got out of it, over at the BERG website.

I mentioned I was thinking about Games Literacy a lot at the moment. Here’s a rough braindump of what I wrap up in that phrase. This is crudely written, half-formed thought – exactly what blogs are designed for – but by god, I’ve got to get it out in order to start refining it.

Firstly: understanding games – board games, card games, especially video games – as systemic media (to quote Eric Zimmerman) is vital, and whilst there’s more coverage and criticism than ever – from a swathe of informed if slightly self-important bloggers, myself included, to increasing column inches in serious publications – I’m not sure about the quality all of it. I’ve ranted about this before with regards to a particularly poor example, which managed to totally ignore What Made Games Games, for instance. Jason McIntosh has a great article on criticism not being about personal enthusiasm, but about a canonical understanding.

Historiography is particularly lousy when it comes to games. There are loads of great games still to be made, and loads that have already been made, but if you’re going to make one – or even criticise one – it helps to have that sense of historiography. I’m concerned by the poor knowledge of the medium that so many creators have – giant gaps in their memory of the medium, both analogue and digital. I don’t know what the fix is, but this is something that needs sorting soon, and in the meantime, my only solution is: play more games. Not just new games, not just videogames: anything and everything. Study the form; apply that knowledge.

If literacy is about both reading and writing in a medium, then it’s important to address games-literacy as it relates to games making. Or, more simply: understanding games through making games. The best way to explain something about a medium isn’t always to talk about it; you’re often better off explaining by making.

A great example of that is Ian Bogost’s recent Cow Clicker. Rather than detailing all his problems with Farmville through writing alone, Bogost made a game. The game is definitely satire, but it’s a systemic satire. There’s no fakery; it’s not a gag pretending to be a game, or a series of “what-if” screengrabs; it’s a real set of rules and systems that slowly make the absurdity of Farmville et al evident. You can play it. That’s what gives it its power: feeling the systems in action; seeing those clicked cows appear in your activity stream.

Of course, it strips some of the fluffy surface layers away from Farmville to expose nothing but the systems underneath – which is where the bite of its satire lies – but it’s very much satire embodied as a ruleset. Bogost calls this “method design”. For me, it’s very much criticism-through-making. And, of course, through the process of making such a thing, you come to understand it better as well.

By contrast, a classic example of poor-literacy exposed in the writing-mode is the problem of harvesting the Little Sisters in BioShock. The game is, nominally, about choice and free will; one particular system – choosing to spare or harvest the Little Sisters – is supposedly a clear embodiment of this. Except, when you look at the benefits for taking one or other course throughout the game… numerically, at the systems level, there’s barely any difference. Doesn’t matter what you do; you still get loads of ADAM, and with almost no difference in the long-term.

One name for that is “ludonarrative dissonance“, the story and systems being out of kilter; my name for it is “lousy design”. Games are about systems; if the system doesn’t say what you mean to say, why on earth would any number of layers of aesthetics salvage that?

Soren Johnson’s excellent GDC talk Theme Is Not Meaning covers this exact area, and it’s great. At the same time: I wish talks like that didn’t need to be written. Because it’s not an advanced topic for really advanced game designers; it’s fundamental.

How do you fix that? I think one major, major part of the solution is: you make more games.

I’m serious. Just make more. They don’t have to be big, you don’t have to sell them, you just have to make the damn things. I met students on computer-games courses last year, and, whilst my opinion of those courses has risen somewhat, I was horrified by how few games they were actually making on them. Many of them would have a mere handful in their portfolio (aside from their year in industry), some as few as two or three. Purely by dint of turning up at the 48-hour game jam I was helping judge, they’d made one more game than their contemporaries.

How many games could they churn out if they made much smaller, much simpler things, on the side? How many card games, for instance, had they made? Denki prototyped Quarrel as a boardgame, simply for speed of iteration. You learn a lot by making games and playing them with people, even if they’re barely more sophisticated than Snap; and then, you make them better, or you make them again. Putting all your knowledge into one or two titles – even if, as with the slowly dwindling AAA-console market, they take several years of your life – just isn’t a viable way of learning.

It’s so important to remind people that games are not one very slight thing; games is a thousands-year-old discipline, with culture, and heritage, and so much prior art. It’s important to understand that they’re not reserved for special, hallowed creators, with development studios or bedroom-coder legacies; anyone can make them, and anyone can make them better.

I think the way you understand games better is that you make more of them. And it doesn’t matter how you make them – be it in XNA or Dvorak, or LittleBigPlanet, or Inform7, or GameMaker, or Flixel or a deck of blank cards or a packet of balloons. What matters is that you do make them. Because that’s how you’ll come to understand them.

So I’m thinking about this a lot, and where to apply the patches, or what to do as a result – if there’s anything other than vague hand-waving and ranting here, and the vague conclusion: play more games, make more games. And yes, for someone who talked about understanding-as-making, that was a lot of chat. I’m working on it.

I haven’t written up Wonderlab yet. Mainly because my brain’s still spinning, still exhausted from those three days, and threads are coming together slowly.

So, rather than one beautiful, succinct post… everything is dribbling out in pieces, I’m afraid.

I’m thinking a lot about what I term “Games Literacy” right now – more on what that means in the future, I guess, but suffice to say: it’s about knowing how to both read and write, and being able to read games rather than just consume them. But, in trying to explain my frustrations with the relatively low literacies of many games creators (real or someday), I couldn’t help but return to a speech from Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, so beautifully delivered by Toby Stephens in the Old Vic production that I was fortunate enough to see a month ago.

Henry is a writer, and his partner – Annie – is trying to get him to look at a script written by Brodie, a young man. Henry explains that Brodie can’t write; Annie is furious, and tells Henry that he’s being a snob – just because he’s a writer, why does he get to choose who gets to write or not?

Henry reaches for his cricket bat.

HENRY: Shut up and listen. This thing here, which looks like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together in a certain way so that the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. It’s for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel two hundred yards in four seconds, and all you’ve done is give it a knock like knocking the top off a bottle of stout, and it makes a noise like a trout taking a fly… (He clucks his tongue to make the noise.) What we’re trying to do is to write cricket bats, so that when we throw up an idea and give it a little knock, it might … travel … (He clucks his tongue again and picks up the script.) Now, what we’ve got here is a lump of wood of roughly the same shape trying to be a cricket bat, and if you hit a ball with it, the ball will travel about ten feet and you will drop the bat and dance about shouting ‘Ouch!’ with your hands stuck into your armpits. (Indicating the cricket bat.) This isn’t better because someone says it’s better, or because there’s a conspiracy by the MCC to keep cudgels out of Lords. It’s better because it’s better. You don’t believe me, so I suggest you go out to bat with this and see how you get on. [quoting from the play] ‘You’re a strange boy, Billy, how old are you?”Twenty, but I’ve lived more than you’ll ever live.’ Ooh, ouch! (He drops the script and hops about with his hands in his armpits, going ‘Ouch!’ ANNIE watches him expressionlessly until he desists.)

The analogy stands alone, I think. But, were I to attempt to summarise: the goal of any kind of literacy is, you could say, understanding that you ought to be making cricket bats. And then you really only need the gentlest touch to make an impact.

(and of course: it’s a marvellous play, and the rest of this scene is just as relevant as these scant moments. Do see it if you get a chance).

Alice has a list of things she’s thinking about at the moment. Number four on that list:

Romance/love, the genre, is spectacularly underexplored.

Alice and I have batted emails about this topic around before. And now, as I look at that sentence, I think I have an issue with just one word in it: I’m genuinely not sure “romance/love” even is a genre yet.

So far, the takes on it I’ve seen are: Japanese dating games, which definitely is a genre and well-established and just doesn’t float my boat in terms of games about romance; the Western, simplified takes on that that you see on the DS and are very much watered-down versions of that trope; and, then, and most-to-my-tastes, the more experiemntal/thoughtful/niche/weird things. For instance: the Radiator mods for Half-Life 2 which (in part) are very much about love (in the context of a long-term relationship/marriage, or IF games such as the lovely Violet.

Games about love in all its forms, not just the fetch-quest that dating is so often reduced to: that’s genuinely interesting. But I don’t want that to be a genre, or a formula to be trotted out. I want it to be a broad topic to be explored, wrapped around everything. After all, if you look at other media, compare the volume of work which broaches the topic of “love” versus the volume that professes to be only about that. I want John Donne, but I don’t need Mills & Boon.

So: as a theme/topic/source-material, people have barely scratched the surface. As a genre: I genuinely don’t believe it’s a genre yet, and there are far more interesting things to be said in this space than are said by J-dating games. I’d rather “romance/love” never became a genre for games.

As far as “spectacularly underexplored” goes: agree entirely. I keep thinking about this too, from time to time.

I really like Carcassonne.

I like it because it’s as interesting with two players as with four – just a very different game in each case. I like it because of the various scoring methods it combines: simple play-piece/gain score for roads/abbeys/towns; longer-term risks with potentially higher rewards for farmers. I like that it forces you to juggle a limited number of scoring opportunities.

But I like it best because it’s about making pretty landscapes.

photograph: “Carcassonne: Inns & Cathedrals” by SimDawdler

When The Coding Monkeys (who, a good while ago, wrote the excellent SubEthaEdit), released their iPhone version of Carcassonne, I had to check it out. After all, if they can make a multiplayer text editor as good as SubEthaEdit, they might well be an ideal fit for an asynchronous, multiplayer boardgame.

Turned out I was right: they’ve really put some time and thought into their iP:hone version. The UI is lovely, as simple as possible, but rich where it needs to be: it’s very clear what’s going on and what the options available to you are. There’s also a nice focus on playing asynchronously – multiple games, taking turns as and when – which is only enhanced by the “next table” button that lets you ripple through open games without constantly returning to a menu.

But best of all is this screen:

The tile-layouts of each game are the thumbnail used to represent them.

As the games go on, this screen updates, their icons evolving from single green dots to sprawling landscapes. Of course the layout is the element of the game you place front and centre when it comes to navigation; it’s the most iconic part of any single game, and it works as a lovely aid to recognition.

Nicely done.

I’m as much an apologist for fighting games as I am a fan of them, and so when I saw Quintin “Quinns” Smith’s latest post for Rock, Paper, Shotgun pop up in my feedreader, I got ready to suck my teeth. A cursory skim hinted at the content: Starcraft II as a better “e-sport” than (Super) Street Fighter 4.

By the time I’d finished reading the article, I ended up agreeing with Smith a great deal. I’m still a fighting game apologist, and you can pry my arcade stick from my cold, RSI-crippled hands, but when it comes to e-sports, I’ll agree that fighters aren’t your best bet.

The most obvious reason why is Smith’s strongest point: sports of any stripe are about more than the ninety minutes on the pitch.

The formats that have evolved for competitions don’t help. Starcraft has evolved into a game of ladders and ongoing series; SF4, and other fighters, focus on tournaments: events covering a single day, usually with a form of knock-out structure (but with added complications to keep people playing). And an SF4 bout is short: 90 seconds per round, five rounds per match as a maximum. And between tournaments? Contestants return to their home arcades, to online services, to the Shoryuken forums and Youtube, trading combos and demonstrations, building reputation until the next official event. From this description alone, you can already see why RTS games – and Starcraft in particular – make better “e-sports”.

The longer format of the individual games have also helped Starcraft commentary become genuinely useful, and to augment what’s going on. There’s time to get some words in, for starters; not just colour, but also analysis. Smith’s complaint about SF4 commentary –

If you listen to commentaries of SFIV tournament matches, despite the fact that each match plays out much more quicklyyou still hear the commentators filling seconds by talking about what the players might be aiming for, or what their chosen characters are good at, or simply calling out special moves as they happen. “Oh! Sonic boom! Oh, EX-flash kick! Yeah, Guile’s a very defensive character, he wants to keep Balrog way out of range.”

is a fair one, but I think he’s wrong on one point: there’s not really time to do analysis right; if you actually bothered to explain and what’s happening (“oh, and Hart goes for a super jump cancel rather than a focus dash cancel“) you run the risk of running out of time. And: it’s not a game you can analyse in real-time very easily; it takes a few seconds of reactive analysis, thinking about what you saw, to actually say something meaningful. I’m not going to defend SF4 commentary too much: I do wish there’d be a bit less “colour” and more analysis, but it doesn’t lend itself to real-time analysis. The best thing you can do is just re-watch the match a few times, and work out why he went for that super jump cancel on your own.

It may be a rapid game, but that doesn’t mean the whole thing comes down to reflexes.

For all the talk of high level SFIV play being like a chess match and any obvious parallels with, say, boxing, there’s no escaping that the game is primarily down to honed reflexes.

I definitely disagree with that. It’s a lot faster than chess, I’ll give Smith that: it is lightning-quick and demands honed reflexes in execution. (Much, in fact, like Starcraft – you should see the speed professionals can micromanage and click around that UI; their speed with a mouse terrifies me). But when you get over that speed-of-execution, there are a great many similarities to chess that both explain the appeal of such games, and why they’re such terrible spectator sports.

Chess and SF4 are about having innate knowledge of a game’s mechanics. System knowledge – basic rules, more complex rules, exceptions, building combos out of these, testing knowledge. The system becomes so big you can’t calculate it all – instead, you combine a great deal of factual recall – simply learning combos/openings, mix-ups/mid-games, FADC/end-games, rather than working them out – with a bit of human intuition (which chess computers lack). The skill in SF4 then becomes about taking that knowledge – factual recall, knowledge of the system, a bit of intuition – and speeding it up. There are fewer possibilities to take in than chess – at any one time, you’re looking at low/mid/high/throw/counter/focus attack (and chains thence), and realistically, not even that many – but the speed makes it hard enough.

That sounds like a great game, but a lousy spectator sport. Chess and SF4 are both good analytical sports.

How many column inches are devoted to analysis of chess games? Not commentary, not colour pieces; just move-analysis. There’s one every day in most broadsheets. How many books are there on openings, mid-games, endings? How many Youtube videos providing tutorials for characters, or even individual techniques such as kara throwing?

There are many, because these games – games that reward and require analysis – become more enjoyable to watch the better you know the system. Chess columns are for fans, not novices; the SF4 videos are for enthusiasts. They expand on what happens on the screen, not merely reporting it. And you can understand the analysis to a level higher than you can play it: I can explain the Focus Attack Dash Cancel, for instance, but I sure have difficulty pulling one off.

Games like these that afford – and demand – analysis don’t really support the ebb and flow of seasonal league. It’s not about the victories and losses, supporting a team, as much as it is about seeing players trying new things, pushing the enevlopes with new combos (or strategies), pushing a character beyond the limits of their tier (or seeing if opening x really is viable against opening y). The long goal of playing the game is making everybody better at the game; making the game better.

Street Fighter’s great red herring – which, indeed, it shares with all fighting games – is that it shows two human beings in mortal combat. But really, they’re not people at all; they’re rulesets, two giant boxes of cogs and clockwork being manipulated to produce a higher number in a shorter time. Strip away the aesthetics, get down to the mechanics, and that’s what there is. You might call that soulless, and I would forgive you for that even if I don’t agree: the real magic of fighting games is watching a player wrestle with their own box of cogs and defeat their opponent with it; watching mastery of the system.

That’s not a kind of game that everybody gets; analytical, systems-oriented, analytically studied, and mechanically driven. And all those adjectives make for a terrible sport, e- or otherwise. A far more understandable game would have longer dynamics, beyond matches and across tournaments; be complex enough to demand analysis, but that analysis would be understandable enough in real time. And the game played at its highest level ought to resemble the game you play with your friends and pick-up partners. Football in the park is identifiably the same as football at Wembley, even if the skill levels on display are wildly different.

And so, given all that, it’s only fair to agree that Starcraft is the better sport – by a long way. That’s my analytical brain speaking. But Street Fighter 4 is the better game, and the one that has my heart, rulesets, clockwork, cogs and all.

Frank Lantz on “The Truth in Game Design”:

…eventually this tiny detail, this thoughtful little adjustment of the pillow beneath the player’s head, became emblematic of something big and important at the heart of game design: Shouldn’t games be an opportunity for players to wrap their heads around counter-intuitive truths? Shouldn’t games make us smarter about how randomness works instead of reinforcing our fallacious beliefs? Shouldn’t games increase our literacy about interactive systems and non-linear possibility spaces? Isn’t contemplating the elusive truth about these things one of the most powerful cognitive benefits of a life spent gaming?

Yes, it should.

Lantz is right about Poker: there’s a surprising moment when you start to study opening hands in Texas Hold’Em, and you finally come to know – in your gut – the relative value of opening hands. Two cards never feels enough to make an informed bet, but it usually is. When you first learn the relative value of opening hands – either from experience or, more likely, a book – it doesn’t quite sit right; it doesn’t feel intuitive even when you’ve learned it.

It takes the application of that knowledge – a series of hands betting based on the numbers, not on your feelings, to learn what that list of probabilities really means. You begin to see just how some opening hands, being better than others, lead to better results at the turn and the river. And then the numbers become bound up in your gut, the system internalized, and the game becomes intuitive – until the next series of numbers and calculations need to be internalized.

It’s the same in Virtua Fighter, or Devil May Cry: games based on highly rigorous systems, punishing at first, that demand you understand the rules to understand the game. No player really bases their in-game judgment on frame advantage; they base it on their gut, on what they see on the screen and hear from the speakers. The secret is that the system – the windows for counters, the execution time of moves in frames, the incoming attacks signified by various sound effects – is in their gut.

You learn the system to forget it again, and in doing so, are presented with an entirely honest game: a game that makes its system clear and consistent, never beats you unfairly, but never makes life easy.

The best Lost Cities games I had were not the highest scoring, but those with the most entertaining narrative and best banter. The best Street Fighter IV games I’ve played weren’t the most technical, but the most entertaining. The best Left 4 Dead rounds I’ve played were the most haphazard and messy. And yet all of these games are based around rules engines of varying complexity: the rulebook, the movelist, the AI Director.

Games are clockwork, logical engines that are fun to play with. The very best are rigorous in the systems and fairness, and yet not to the point of destroying that fun. And, if we’re very lucky, offer a glimpse of the “computational heart of the universe.“

Internet culture talks often about the moment some piece of media “jumped the shark”; I’d say that Mordin moment, is the inversion of this, the moment when games stepped up from being puerile, simplistic and arbitrary constructs of a moment’s pleasure, to fully-fledged self-sustaining, confident and internally coherent worlds of their own.

Dan Griliopolous has some good stuff to say on That Mordin Moment: The Unusual Case of the Singing Salarian.

The belly-laugh I got from that moment was totally unexpected, and tickled me the more I thought about: a relatively obscure gag, that you’d only discover if you spent a while digging into Mordin’s personality (or the conversation trees that stand for it), and even then (not wanting to sound snobbish) you might not get it. Of course the Salarians are ideally suited to patter-songs. Of course Mordin feels like a character from a comic operetta anyway – it’s that serious, slightly po-faced character combined with a knowing and devilish wit.

Not all the content in Mass Effect 2 is for every player. Some players might never see the bad endings; some might never see the good endings. Some players might not see certain quests, or conversation branches. That doesn’t mean those assets, or that development time, is wasted: this is how Bioware have chosen to make games. Those choices are choices they value.

And so when I got to that joke, I recoiled: in laughter; in surprise (that someone had even bothered to make that gag – to write it, to animate it, to record the VO); and, most of all, in the wonder that I thought that the joke was written just for me.

A magic moment that, in the way it combined genuine characterisation with seemingly-private easter-egg, felt suitably game-ish. A totally optional dialogue moment, totally ephemeral in the course of the plot, became not only a moment of a humour, but also a further tight bond between my Mordin and my Shepard (for it is never “Shepard”, but invariably my Shepard, when you talk Mass Effect). They were not comrades not only in arms, but also in the Great Intergalactic Glee Club. It wasn’t just a gag; for me – and my Shepard – it became role-playing.

Dan’s right: it’s this little ephemeral moment, its unnecessary detail crafted with no less care than plot-critical dialogue, that reminds you how well filled-out the Mass Effect universe is. Characters don’t just have stats and firearms; they have hobbies and histories, too. World’s aren’t just created in the macro, but also the micro. This was one of the many tiny moments in Mass Effect 2 that made me love the game as much, if not more, than the tubthumping, huge moments.

And it made me guffaw.

There is an ongoing argument about whether games can be considered as literature, and this one presents by far the most compelling case yet for "yes".

A quotation from the Guardian review of Bioshock 2. It’s a cracking example of a style of games writing that I hate.

Why don’t I like this kind of writing? Because it never addresses the gameness of a game; it breaks it down into component parts – story, graphics, sounds – that feel familiar from other disciplines, and are inevitably criticised as such. “Gameplay” – a catch-all term describing rules, mechanics, the systems present in a work that is inherently systematic – is separated out from these other elements. This review simply disguises its formulaic, old-fashioned style with some breathless hyperbole and purple prose – “some of the best combat dynamics in the business” is simply a tarted-up version of the meaningless “the gameplay is really good“. This is usually – I say usually, having dipped into this style myself – an attempt to make the writing seem more “worthwhile” to a mainstream audience, perhaps even a non-games audience. But Nicky Woolf’s writing, despite its ambition, is a far cry from my favourite “mainstream” games writer: John Lanchester in the LRB. Though I don’t always agree with him, Lanchester’s writing is smart, informed, and never once defensive.

But what really, really ticks me off is that this article doesn’t deliver on its message: why is it that ‘story’ is considered the key element of games’ “maturity”? After all, story isn’t the only thing that contributes to game-ness. Bioshock 2 is a shooter – a very good shooter, sure, with some tactical elements harking back to Halo‘s balance of left-hand/right-hand, direct/indirect – but it’s still a game where you spend most of your time shooting monsters in the face.

And it is difficult to explain how such a (relatively) generic style of gameplay contributes to a “compelling case” for this “being literature“. After all, playing – or should be – the majority of what you do in a game.

I am not complaining: “involving shooting” does not make a game bad; it does not even necessarily make it immature – and I’d rather be shooting monsters in the rich, well-realized, faded-deco world of Rapture than as another identikit Space Marine. Rather, there’s a much simpler issue at stake:

I don’t want my games to be literature.

I want them to be games. I want to know why a game is good as a game, not as an alternative to reading a book or watching a movie. When I want to read a book, I will, because I like books and I like them for things only they can do. When I want to watch a movie, I will, because I like movies, and I like them for things only they can do.

When I want to play a game, I will, because I like them for things only they can do. I do not want games to become literature, just as I do not want them to become cinema. I expect Woolf’s use of the word literature was meant to be a statement of quality, rather than of medium – but I think the fact that Woolf uses it qualitatively is telling, and perhaps even defensive. And that’s why I bang on like this: there’s no need to be defensive of a medium in the criticism of an artefact. You won’t have to reach for the thesaurus quite so much, or remind the reader that the medium might be worthwhile, if you celebrate things as themselves, on their own merits. Celebrate game-ness.

I really liked last.fm’s end-of-year charts. I also really liked this analysis of Pitchfork’s scoring in 2009, just for the statistical fun. And then I thought about my favourite score-oriented website, and wondered why no-one’s done this for Eurogamer yet. I’d be the first to argue that scores in reviews aren’t that important – but everybody loves arguing about them in comments threads, and besides, they make for interesting statistics. What I’d really like would be something like the Pitchfork analysis, but looking a bit more like the last.fm site.

And then after two days I just decided to build it myself.

It’s relatively straightforward: a small app to explore a year’s worth of review scores, built around the pillars of reviews, writers, and scores. Most blue things are clickable; writers have pages that show their reviews, as well as their own averages, deviance from EG’s norm, and the scale of their contribution to the overall average. That latter figure is something I call influence; it took a long while to get to, and I write about it more here. Here’s Simon Parkin’s page as a good example of a writer’s page.

Reviews also have pages – here’s one for Modern Warfare 2, which show how the review compares to the site’s average, the writer’s average, and also to Metacritic. And, of course, you can see just how many games scored 7 – or any other score – if you want. Basically: have a click around.

I started two weeks ago, and guess I stopped committing in the middle of last week, but towards the endit was just front-end tweaks. It’s not been a big project at all – about an hour or two’s work a day on average, in evenings, and lunch-hours, over about ten days.

It’s not a very advanced project, and touches lots of bases I’m working with a lot right now – data analysis, visualisation, scraping. That said, it’s got some interesting stuff under the hood. I’m using Typekit for the attractive type, and it’s been a pleasure to work with. The graphs are a combination of the Google Charts API and gRaphaël, which I’ve had reasonable results from recently. gRaphaël’s strength are beautiful visualisations, rather than ultra-accurate charting, so the pair of tools are used for their strengths. Finally, it’s all deployed on Heroku, which has been a joy as ever; cloud deployment of databased apps, on dynamic hosting, as simple as pushing to a new git repo. And, for the scale of the Eurogamer tool, totally free.

So there you go. A little exploration of some numbers, which bring some interesting figures to light, and was also fun to build. It only felt right to share it. As the site says, scores aren’t everything – you should read reviews too, folks – but when you’ve got numerical data, it seems a shame not to do anything with it.