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From: buzzard@TheWorld.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: bad reviews for foreign language games (like Begegnung am Fluss)
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Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2001 19:27:11 GMT
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<tina@eniac.stanford.edu> wrote:
>I don't see any big call defending the Windows challenged[0] from games
>not playable by them[1], yet somehow this whole "1 game in the history of
>the comp entered in German" thing has become a raving flame-fest! I don't
>get it.

We don't have some small fraction of the "windows-challenged"
all voting the windows-only games a 1. If we did, you'd
cerainly be seeing the same reaction from me.

>It's not like this is a trend leading to more and more division
>between the monolingual and the multilingual.

No, it annoys me because it pushes the ambiguity of the
"score games however you want" to an even higher level:
"judge whether you should vote the game however you want,
and then discover that other people aren't applying the
same rules".  Somehow, to me, the latter is really
irritating in a way that the former isn't.

Perhaps it's because of one of these two things:

 - There's nothing I can do to offset their vote.
   I could submit my own vote for the game that's
   in a language I don't understand, but what am
   I suppose to vote it? I can't collect any data
   on its quality. It seems like the only thing
   a non-german speaker could ever vote it would
   be a 1.

 - If the only thing a non-german speaker is ever
   going to vote for a non-german game is a '1',
   then at that point the comp isn't collecting
   data about the *game*, it's collecting
   data about the makeup of german speakers in
   the audience.

If "you have to play to vote" became more formalized and
solved the problem, that would be plenty for me, but I
don't think it will solve the problem, since Adam
seemed pretty Adam-Ant that he had played it.

SeanB
