"Formal" definition of a popular game

[Zaldron]

fraggle already pointed this out, but without a concise, consistent and reflective of reality way to apply a number to these subjective variables there is no way to garner any relevant results from functions depending of them.

Perhaps a better solution would be to let a computer figure out the interrelationships on account of a massive list of personal opinions regarding a variety of titles. Even then, you have to carefully construct your form to stop as much bias and internal contradiction as possible.

[TheeXile]

fraggle said:

No matter how much thought you put into it, or how carefully you construct your equations, any model derived in this way (ie. guesswork) is doomed to failure. They are not based on reality, only your preconceptions and assumptions.

But if I were a game developer forced to make a predictive decision about my game in a hurry with only subjective information on hand, I would consider this better than nothing. What I mean is that it could be valuable in the sense that I'd rather use it (being an attempt at a structured, premeditated subjective judgment) than a gut feeling (which is an arbitrary, spontaneous, unstructured, also subjective judgment) to make such a decision. Assuming a rigorous and thorough debate attempt went into its construction, of course.

That's not to say gut feelings are without value. I just think you stand to go further through an intelligent judgment attempt than you could through an emotional one through mastery of making intelligent decisions (which admittedly can be very difficult to do effectively, depending upon the problem). To which I consider something like this a sort of exercise at doing.


It'll never be perfect, and only with extensive and reliable data to use to construct the model and fill in the variables could it be even remotely usable professionally (objectively, I mean). But even in that case, it stands to reason that an effort to professionally model the equations could at least be simplified with some preliminary guesswork modeling to use as a base.