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Online user reviews have come to play a vital role in our decisions about which products to buy, which TV to watch, and which games to play.
But after initial enthusiasm, many platforms have backed off against them. Netflix’s star ratings and written user reviews are a distant memory, and even YouTube no longer shows the number of “dislikes” a video receives.
Negativity in particular is a no-no. Instagram and Facebook let you “like” a post, but if you don’t like it, they don’t want to know. Steam, the world’s largest distributor of PC games, has also suffered from negative reviews, especially coordinated negative campaigns known as “review bombing.”
However, in recent research published in The Internet and Higher Education, we made a video game available for community review. After thousands of players and hundreds of written reviews, we found that user feedback, managed properly, can lead to significant improvements.
Rate bombing
One of the reasons community reviews have become less popular is the rise of “review bombing,” the coordinated practice of leaving large numbers of negative user reviews on a game or product to lower the overall review score.
Most review bombing seems to stem from more than just not enjoying a game. They may be driven by ideological disagreement with the game’s content or an aversion to a developer’s actions.
Other times, this activity is automated by bots to suppress media or send a warning to companies. For example, a gaming review YouTube channel called Gamer’s Nexus recently reported that one of its videos exposing a scam had received an onslaught of coordinated “dislikes”.
Is deleting reviews the solution?
When community reviews work, the consumer benefits by getting real-world information from a product’s users.
On YouTube, for example, removing dislike numbers makes it difficult to quickly assess the quality of a video. This is especially important for DIY or craft videos.
Removing dislikes also makes it more likely that a viewer will be caught by clickbait or tricked into watching a video that doesn’t contain the content promised.
When the system works
Our new study demonstrates the benefits of community reviews. It shows how, when handled carefully and objectively, community feedback can make a big contribution to the development of a game.
We have created an educational game called The King’s Request for use in a medical and health science program. The goal was to crowdsource more feedback than we could get from students in our classes, so we released the game for free on Steam.
Out of 16,000 players, 150 have written reviews. We analyzed this feedback, which in many cases provided ideas and methods to improve the game.
This is an example of where feedback from the gaming community, while idiosyncratic in many cases, can really help the development process, benefiting all stakeholders involved. This is especially important as ‘serious’ or educational games are a growing part of modern curricula.
Censoring community reviews, even if the goal is to prevent misinformation, makes it harder for developers and educational designers to receive feedback, for viewers to get information quickly, and for paying customers to make their voices heard.
What’s next for community reviews?
The trend has been to remove negative community reviews. YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki defended the removal of disapprovals earlier this year, and Netflix doesn’t seem interested in bringing back the five-star rating system.
However, not all stores follow this trend. TikTok has tested a dislike button for written contributions in a way that allows the community to filter out useless posts.
TikTok states that once released, this will promote authentic engagement in the comment sections.
And the Epic Games Store, a competitor to Steam, recently implemented a system of random user surveys to maintain community feedback and avoid rating bombings. Google has also tried new things and found some success in tackling review bombing through artificial intelligence.
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Provided by The Conversation
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Quote: Review bombing is a dirty practice, but research shows games benefit from online feedback (2022, August 18) retrieved August 18, 2022 from https://techxplore.com/news/2022-08-dirty-games-benefit- online- feedback.html
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