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JAZZ.
THAT’S RIGHT FRIENDS it’s Game of the Year season!
Which means it's time for us to hop on those message boards, chat about our favorite games,
and tear out each other’s throats when someone expresses an opinion
that is slightly different from our own.
By this point, pretty much every gaming publication has announced their Game of the Year...
uhh...
which means that I'm a bit late.
Anything that I say is just a drop in the ocean of discourse.
No one wants to hear my opinion.
WHICH IS WHY I AM NOT EXPRESSING AN OPINION.
I AM STATING A FACT.
That’s right, I have devised a statistical, analytical, number-crunching formula
that will SCIENTIFICALLY PROVE
THE GAME OF THE YEAR.
*hype 80s music plays*
They said it couldn’t be done.
A bias-free formula to calculate the game of the year?
That's a fool’s errand, Brian!
You are a fool!
They called me a fool!
But do I look like a fool to you?
I’ve done it, and with the knowledge I have found, I can go ahead and assuage any arguments
you might have with your friends.
There is nothing to debate anymore, there is only the truth, that the best game of the year is...
hidden somewhere, um, in these spreadsheets.
I'm gonna be honest with you, I haven’t...
there are a lot of numbers.
And I haven't had the time to, uh, do them all just yet.
But it’s only December 14th.
This video is set to go up on the 30th, which means I still have two weeks for new games
to come in before I can really call which game is the game of the year.
But I've at least finished the formula, and I’ve tested it on a few to make sure it
runs correctly.
And everyone knows that you can’t get full credit unless you show your work.
So let me show you how I made it.
First thing you gotta do when you're making a GOTY formula is find your list of games.
And obviously we're going to have to choose every single game that was released this year
in order for us to say that it is scientifically accurate.
So if we just go ahead and take a look at Steam and see how many were released since
January 1st 20-hmm.
That's over 15,000.
You can't make me do that, legally.
That's not in my contract.
Right?
I can't... they can't legally make me do that.
Look, as much as video game reviews can be an imperfect reflection of the person who
is writing them, they are still a pretty solid baseline for which video games mattered in our culture.
Even if a review is bad, it still means it was good enough for someone to spend time on it.
So I went Metacritic and I took all the games that were rated 80 or above, and at
the time of writing this script, that was 181 games.
So I'm gonna do the formula for all of those.
Some of these games were DLCs or re-releases onto new platforms.
The Switch alone resurrected about a dozen candidates from years past.
But since they were released this year, they are still technically in the running.
Fight me.
Now that we have the list, it's time to make the formula, and it might surprise you to
hear this, but I have not been in a pure mathematics class in about five years.
So I reached out to some scientists.
And then none of them got back to me.
So I called my old roommate.
“Hey, I’m Nicholas.
I’m a graduate student studying exoplanet atmospheres.”
Nick is working toward a PhD at MIT, and though I was a bit worried about reaching out to
him since his specialization is in astrophysics and not stats about video games,
he assuaged all my fears.
Brian - "Would you say you are a math expert?”
Nick - “No.”
We chatted for about a half an hour, diving deep into the scientific method and the selfless
goals of discovery.
Brian - “If I invent a unit... can I trademark it.”
Nick - “I think your final score should be, like, in Gilberts or whatever.”
Brian - "OK!"
And we finished our chat with the reassurance that this formula was not only going to help
the gaming community, but the scientific community at large.
Brian - “Do you think if I wrote this up, I could get it published in, like, Nature?"
Nick - “No.”
So where to do we go from here now that we have been scientifically rejuvenated?
It's time to build the criteria.
What specifically makes a game of the year?
Number one, what is the game worth?
We're not just talking about monetary worth, we're also talking about the amount of enjoyment
you get while playing the game.
Number two, how them graphics?
We’re trying to find specific numbers associated with these games, and graphics is just a bunch
of numbers anyway, so this will be a useful part.
Number three, how did it affect the cultural miasma?
Look, it’s all about those google results, how many people are talking about the game?
And most importantly, is the game art?
I've figured it out.
Which means that no one has to write any more goddamn thinkpieces about this topic ever again!
Given these four criteria, I sat down with Tara Long, former bioinformatics researcher
and also my current boss.
She and I figured out a formula that will end up with a numerical value that will tell
us the game of the year.
The higher the number, the better the game.
We’ll start with game worth.
Now it’s hard for us to find how worth it a game is to play from a numerical standpoint,
but if you take Metacritic’s score as a percentage of the game you enjoy, and you
multiply that by the average amount of minutes each playthrough takes using the stats from
howlongtobeat.com, then you end up with a number of minutes you have spent enjoying said game.
Now, to tie in material worth, we want to go ahead and take in the original listed price
of the game and divide it by this number so that way we can end up with a DPM: dollars
per minute enjoyed.
Now, it’s hard to decide if you want a high or a low DPM, because some people want the
most bang for their buck, while others are willing to spend a little bit more for a really
well-enjoyed minute.
But just to standardize this, I'm going to assume lower is better — that means you've
paid less per minute you've enjoyed — and that way I can use it to divide literally
the rest of the equation.
HOW BOUT THEM GRAPHICS?
In the past few years, people have cared less and less about how many
polygons you've got on the screen and more about the style.
But one thing that hasn't changed is frame rate.
People want the most frames per second.
So, factually, the more frames, the better.
That means we're going to go ahead and take the highest frame rate available in the game
and we're gonna multiply that by the seconds of average playthrough, again from howlongtobeat.com.
And that will give us the amount of frames per game.
The game frames mainframe.
But how many frames does a gamer game in the gameframe mainframe?
That's a good question.
Now if you go ahead and you take your frames per game and divide it by the number of gamers,
I’m talking about however many copies have been sold or however many number of downloads
there have been, then that's going to leave you with frames per game per gamer, and that’s
a really important number, because if you have 200,000 frames per game and you have
200,000 gamers, that's 200,000 gamers that have only had one frame per game per gamer.
And that is no good, is it?
Is it?
I actually have... um, I'm a little confused now.
We're gonna take frames per game per gamer and we're gonna put it on the top of this
equation, because we want it to be the biggest number possible.
And now it’s time for cultural relevancy.
We want our games of the year to be big and brash and bold and boisterous, letting people
outside of the gaming world know,
Hey!
This is a thing!
So how do we judge a game’s effect on the world at large?
Well, we go ahead and we take all of the Google results that come up when you search
the game's full name and the word game.
But that’s not everything, right?
That's just the bare minimum.
It's like saying, “This dude’s bad haircut is important just because a lot of people are talking about it,”
which I know isn’t true from personal experience.
So I went on twitter and I asked you lovely folks what descriptors you expect to see in
descriptions of games of the year.
And you gave me a lot.
So I went ahead and I plugged all those into Google’s advanced search along with the
game's name, and I took those results and I multiplied it by the base Google search.
And I got very big numbers.
But don't worry, we're going to bring these numbers down to size, because some of the
descriptions you sent in were actually pretty negative descriptions of games.
So I did a Google search using those descriptions, and then I multiplied those results by one
plus the number of Funko Pops made of characters in the game,
which is objectively a terrible thing.
Now this is going to leave you with BCE, or your base cultural effect, and we're gonna
multiply that by our FPGPG in order to get a pretty big number.
But before we’re done with cultural effect, I want you to ask yourself, is this the culture at large?
Does this go outside of our gaming bubble?
There’s really only one way to tell that, and that's by using the M.O.M. variable,
which stands for: "My Own Mother."
So I called my own mother for help.
"Hello, Brian, I'm a follower and a subscriber as well as your mother."
Brian - "That's very good to hear.
I... you support me so well and I appreciate that.
I should ask you, Mom, would you consider yourself a gamer?"
Mom - "When I play Mario Kart with, like, grandchildren and things like that, I always
go off the road."
Brian - "That's, but, on purpose to let them feel better."
Mom - "Very similar to my real-life driving skills, I find."
Brian - "I have a list of 181 video games, now I know that's a lot.
I'm basically gonna run through this, and I'm gonna ask you if you have heard of this game.
Red Dead Redemption 2."
Mom - "No."
Brian - "God of War."
Mom - "Yes!
I have heard of that."
Brian - "Oh, OK!"
While subjecting my mom to a litany of 2018's best games,
it became clear that she was very interested in the topic.
Brian - "We're only 57 in, so we've still got another 130 to go."
Mom - "I can't tell you how, what an exciting time this is for me."
Brian - "Now you get taste of what it's like to do my job."
Mom - "I tell you what, this is a lot of research into things that really have very little meaning."
Brian - "You're right.
It is."
So once I had asked my mom about all of the games from the game of the year list, I was
able to throw it into a boolean function.
If mom knows game equals true, then that’s a plus one here.
And then I could raise our base cultural effect to the power of mom, so if she doesn't know
it, that's just to the power of one.
If she does, that's to the power of two.
Finally, it’s time for our fourth, and perhaps most important criteria: Is this game art?
And when you start asking if something is art, then you really end up asking,
"Why should we even be defining what is and isn't art?"
And the only thing worse than discourse about "are games art?" is
the discourse ABOUT the discourse of "are games art?"
Look, art is experiential and that's a beautiful thing that should be allowed to flourish without
having some pseudoscientific proof of greatness thrust upon it.
Which is why I'm not proving greatness.
Instead, this part of the formula is so revolutionary because I am proving art.
So let's go ahead and throw this into...
Shit, I ran out of space.
You know what, this part wasn't that important.
We're just gonna cut it.
This big GOTY equation ends up with very large numbers, which would be too hard to show all of.
So I needed to make a new unit.
Something I could reduce them all down to.
I plugged in my favorite game of the year, Celeste, and I used that to be our new baseline.
Celeste equals one BDG.
Or Big Determinant of Game.
Everything else will be reduced down using Celeste’s score to a scale of BDGs.
So that's it.
That’s the entire formula.
And if you'll excuse me, I have to go do my dark bidding on these spreadsheets and I will
come back to you right now.
December 30th.
New year is at our doorstep.
Knock knock!
Who’s there?
It’s 2019!
Come on in, hope you're not as big of an asshole as the past few of your friends!
I spent the past two weeks crunching the numbers, and it is my honor to announce that
2018’s scientifically calculated game of the year, with 19...
trillion BDGs...
is Fortnite.
That can't be the right number, I'm gonna...
No, that's right.
You remember when Pluto stopped being a planet, and the scientists were like,
"Hey, that's just what the definitions say!"
And we were like,
"Hey, scientists, maybe your definitions are busted!"
Maybe my formula is busted.
The fact that God of War got 2.1 million BDGs and Red Dead Redemption 2 got 0.1 BDG...
Maybe I shouldn't have made my mom's knowledge of the game an exponential factor.
Brian - "You know Tetris.
You would really like this Tetris..."
Mom - *sings the entire Tetris song*
No, I stand by that decision.
Let’s be honest, the stats I was using definitely favored cultural importance, and Fortnite’s
cultural effect was orders of magnitude larger than any other game this year.
And though I've never played Fortnite
— which proves my lack of bias and also that I’m professionally irresponsible —
there can be no denying that it has made a lasting impact
outside of the video game world.
It’s the only nonseries game that my mom knew about.
And regardless of how you feel about the Fortnite, it drew together a collection of people that
might not have otherwise connected, and that’s a valuable thing.
And even when your Uncle Devin comes up to you at the holiday get together and says,
“HEY BRIAN, WHAT IN THE HECK IS THIS FORTNITE THING?”
it gives you a common ground to chat,
and you really haven't chatted with Uncle Devin in a while.
You should call him more often.
He wants to show you his Civil War books.
And his collection of swords.
But if you’re upset, and you didn’t IMMEDIATELY close this YouTube tab to send me an angry tweet,
I’ve got an extra little gift for you.
It's a new formula.
GOTY equals x times 1 quadrillion.
And x equals your favorite game.
Of this year.
Now you can go ahead and tell your friends that Brian scientifically proved that my favorite game
is the game of the year, and then you can share them this link,
and then they won’t click on it because it’s a 15 minute video, so your secret is safe with me.
And to be honest, your favorite game deserves it,
because if you liked it enough to call it your game of the year,
then it must be pretty meaningful to you,
and no one can take that away.
So congratulations, Fortnite, and congratulations, your favorite game.
Here’s hoping 2019 is full of wonderful games and even more wonderful experiences.
*wink*
Happy New Year.
OH.
OH MY GOD THAT IS SO HOT.
OHHH MY GOD.
IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE PROP WATER, PAT.
OH I PROBABLY JUST LIKE RUINED THIS MIC, TOO.
JESUS, PAT.
I TOLD YOU IT WAS PROP WATER.
GOD.
I'm okay.
Mom - "Does enthusiasm count or anything like that?
Should it just be, or just be, just bare bones..."
Brian - "Mom, to be honest, I don't think you can do this not enthusiastically, so,
you're gonna be fine."