Mastodawn

I wonder why boardgame commentary has gotten worse over time. I checked out the popular reviewers and didn't see anything as thoughtful as, e.g., the reviews in The General back in the day.

E.g., the most popular reviewer panned Sniper Elite because you can "run and gun", but the player who did that lost. If there's a degenerate, unthematic, strategy that works, that's a legit criticism, but saying that a game sucks because you can do a bad strategy that fails is silly: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2879013/shut-and-sit-down-podcast-was-really-negative-it-a

Shut Up and Sit Down podcast was really negative on it - for all the wrong reasons | Sniper Elite: The Board Game

I am rarely upset with SU&SD, but their podcast treatment of Sniper Elite made it sound like it's a cashgrab. They were critical that you can just run and gun - which Matt did while LOSING the game - thus being upset about the game where your losing strategy is

BoardGameGeek

Dan Luu Jun 8, 2023

That reviewer also didn't like that you can't draw a goal where you already are. There were move-to-objective games that let you do that 20+ years ago and getting a series of objections in the same zone was an automatic win, people don't design games like that anymore.

The same reviewer also panned the game as too light, but loves Whitehall Mystery, which is lighter and has a similar objective system. The most popular boardgame reviewer today literally doesn't know what they're talking about.

Dan Luu Jun 8, 2023

The 2nd most popular reviewer is a lot better, but if you listen to their commentary on games, it's clear that they only have a superficial understanding of the game and will give reasons they like or dislike games that are objectively wrong.

There are some niche reviewers who are ok, but I haven't found anyone who's the equivalent of Rogert Ebert or some of the old board game reviewers, who actually understood the general topic.

Dan Luu Jun 8, 2023

Board game strategy is another place where there's been a huge decline for reasons that aren't obvious to me.

If you look at BGG strategy posts in the heyday of PR/RftG/Caylus/Le Havre/etc., they were often written by top players and correctly described how to play well.

If you look at the popular games today, like Ark Nova, strategy suggestions are different from top play and, IMO, wrong (e.g., standard advice is to almost always rush 2nd break CP, but top players often defer much longer).

Dan Luu Jun 8, 2023

The reason I find this mysterious is that, unlike a lot of people, I don't think that scale automatically creates some kind of "Eternal September" and/or "lowest common denominator content wins" race to the bottom, e.g., for car reviews, the information available on youtube channels in much better than anything you could get 25 years ago (and this is even more true for niche automotive content, like tire reviews).

Why is (just for example) car content better but boardgame content worse?

Dan Luu Jun 11, 2023

After looking into this further, there are multiple factors, but I think the biggest is the sheer number of games one has to review to appeal to both "the algorithm" on youtube (YT highly favors frequent releases) as well as to appeal to the largest audience.

A reviewer from a mid-sized channel (50k subs, makes ~$50k/yr, half from YT and half from Patreon) said they play 350 new games a year.

That's very different from when a reviewer might've reviewed a few games a year for a magazine.

Dan Luu Jun 11, 2023

Reviewers checking out 350 games a year also explains something I was wondering about, why reviewers do reviews that have the content one might expect if someone had just played the game once and didn't think really hard about how to play well (heavy focus on theme, explain some of the mechanics / rules, but generally don't try to point out what the meaty decisions are and are wrong about what's important on the rare occasions where they try to point out what's actually important in the game).

Scott Perry Jun 11, 2023

@danluu the nature of the incentives encourages trading depth for breadth :/

Kyle Loveless Jun 12, 2023

@numist @danluu

Just because of YouTube Algorithm? It's not clear to me based on what (some) users want.

Scott Perry Jun 12, 2023

@kylepl @danluu Not alone (though it contributes!), the very nature of feeds that consumers subscribe to rewards more frequent releases. Same is true of Mastodon.

You can see a related effect in commodity polls where people report they're willing to pay for higher quality only to be contradicted by their actual spending habits. A classic example of this is airfares, but trading quality for quantity seems one of the grim conclusions of the attention economy.

Renée Jun 11, 2023

@danluu I have this half baked theory about the missing margins that analytics and gamification of eyeballs and clicks have destroyed. In the margins of perceived value (e.g. magazine circ numbers to justify ad prices that paid a whole staff a living wage) went an entire sector of creative and critical voices, because compensation drives behaviour and what you measure is what you incentivize.

But we've been measuring what's easy to measure, not what matters.

@danluu when you are searching for the reviews are you remembering to end your google search with site:reddit.com ?

@danluu more seriously, I do think that it’s actually quite hard to tell if you’re doing a good job in a lot of circumstances, and the introduction of opaque ML into this feedback loop has probably made us worse off.

@danluu How-to videos on YouTube don’t suffer from this as much because there’s quite a good feedback loop there (my tiling job looks nice and it’s the 20th one I’ve done this year).

@danluu how do you measure if your review of a board game is good? I suspect for the average person it’s something along the lines of how many people find the review helpful, which is a combination of an opaque alg (how many people see it) and %of people reached that find it helpful.

@danluu those two things are /almost/ unified in word of mouth/human gossip networks, and really quite separated in search/recommendation settings.

Sebastian Sylvan Jun 8, 2023

@danluu side note but I really don’t think reviews today are nearly as good as they were before the content farm click bait era. The number of times I’ve bought a product where basic features are missing or straight up broken for every single customer where zero reviews mention anything about it is high. Incentive is to get views early, not to actually spend days or weeks throughly testing the product.

Fernand Pajot Jun 8, 2023

@danluu what are some of your favorite 2 player board / card games? Specifically some with < 3.0 ish “weight” scores.

kouhai, of the health issues Jun 8, 2023

@danluu maybe this is because with board games, it’s harder to distinguish good from bad review

Janne Moren Jun 9, 2023

@danluu
Possibly because reviewing cars is expensive, time consuming and greatly rewards access to the manufacturers. That gives an edge to publications of a certain minimum size, age and budget, organizations with an incentive to stay good over the long haul.

Boardgames are far more accessible and can be reviewed by anyone with a webcam and a credit card. Long term operation and trust is not important, so the race to the bottom takes over.