Are video game user reviews kinder than pizza user reviews? The short answer is “yes”. The long answer is this 27-minute video in which I cross-analyse the linguistic patterns of 500 one-star Yelp reviews of famous New York pizzerias and 500 “zero” Metacritic user reviews of acclaimed triple-A video games.
The medium-length answer is that haters on Yelp use almost three times as many exclamation marks, per average, as haters on Metacritic, though Metacritiquers ask twice as many rhetorical questions as Yelp users.
I go into deep detail on a wide variety of words and phrases in this video. I tell you about a selection of words my Year 12 English teacher, Mrs Parker-Davis, banned from any assignments. One of the words was “very”. The punishment for using any of the banned words was an F for the semester.
Clearly, Mrs Parker-Davis has had some impact on the adult I grew up into, because here I am a few weeks from my 40th birthday literally photoshopping red pen over a guy’s insistence that Red Dead Redemption 2 “looks just like a PS2 game”. Man, it absolutely does not.
If a half-hour lecture on this topic, complete with rapid-fire charts, graphs, facts and figures appeals to you, buddy, you’re going to want to click that play button.
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