Game of the Year 2010: Introduction

This year, TheSixthAxis has a larger active staff than ever before. There have also been a greater number of top quality games released in 2010 than any previous year we can remember. So, we’ve done something a little different with our Game of the Year awards.

Starting tomorrow, we will be showing you a number of platform-specific categories which each have individual winners. We wanted to explain a little bit about how we arrived at these winners and why we thought categorising was a good idea.

A few weeks ago everyone on the core staff team nominated a list of several games in each of the categories – Multi Platform, PS3 Exclusive, Xbox 360 Exclusive, Wii Exclusive, Download Only and Other (for PC and handhelds). We compiled those nominations into lists and then we all voted on our first and second choices in each category.

The reason for having a first and second choice is simple. If everyone has one equal vote, given the diversity of tastes on the team, it is far too likely that we will end up with a multi-way tie for positioning. Interestingly, this was the case with the Download Only category where there was, at one point before all second votes were counted, a nine-way tie for one of the top positions.

This brings us nicely to the formula used to calculate the worth of votes. Each first choice vote is multiplied by three and each second choice vote is multiplied by one point seven five. We felt that this was a fair representation of worth for each vote. In this way, two second choices are slightly more valuable than one first choice. This seems sensible to us because it demonstrates that a game with a wider appeal is more likely to get a bit of a boost via the second round of voting. We think that broadness of appeal is important when choosing a Game of the Year contender. When we have final scores we will display them as a percentage of the total vote share available.

When it comes to the final, overall winner, we added a third round of voting (not multiplied) so that we could further limit the chances of a tie for positioning and maximise our likelihood of finding a clear winner and some distinct runners-up. For the overall GotY winner we also invited the five members of the TSA Community Team to vote. Once the vote was finalised, we removed all titles outside of the top ten.

When we show the overall winner’s list it will be the final top ten list as a percentage of the vote scored within those ten games. This was simply an effort to keep the data simple when we display it. There were twenty-nine games that all received votes so you can see why there was a need to simplify.

So, why the platform categories? Well, there are more people on staff at TheSixthAxis who are primarily PlayStation 3 users than there are Wii or Xbox 360 users. Even fewer of the staff members are active PC, DS or PSP gamers. We wanted all the main platforms we cover to get some recognition for the most notable titles they’ve seen. We didn’t want excellent games going unrecognised simply because several of our staff members don’t have access to that title’s platform.

Over the coming days, you will see a spread of games across a range of platforms. We think this is the most fair method of naming our favourites from the year and we hope you will join in with the discussion and let us know what some of your gaming highlights were over the past twelve months.

One final note that it’s important to keep in mind when looking at these lists. A Game of the Year nomination or vote is much less reasoned and objective than a review needs to be. As a result, the winners of these awards may not be our highest scoring games of the year but they are probably the ones we enjoyed the most as we played them.