There are lots of video game ranking sites out there. They judge games on a wide variety of criteria, ranging from graphics to replayability. However, there isn’t much information about how much freedom the user has when playing various games. This is highly relevant in the digital age, where “code is law” – the game’s code, whether intentionally or unintentionally, often limits what players are able to do in a way that was never possible in the era of board games. Additionally, companies are sometimes very eager to protect their intellectual property by imposing restrictions on the user’s freedom and creativity. Sometimes a user cannot actually play a game he has purchased – what kind of “ownership” of a game is that?
We sought to create a new rankings system that judges games on five freedom-related, digital-age criteria : accessibility, customizability, ease of sharing, game company control, and cost. For each game we looked at we assigned scores for each of these metrics, on a scale from 1 to 10.
More information and, of course, the actual rankings can be found at our blog.
This is the final project for Brian Senie, Benjamin Gossels and Wesley Wilson.
Yale Law Tech 