Quick question on tallying votes

Monaro

I'm organizing a LAN party here for a number of people (about 30)

I have given out a form for people to vote on what final 5-6 games we will play, and have asked them to number them 1-12 from best to worst.

It might be a stupid question, but to get a true representation of popularity, is adding up the scores an accurate way of getting an order priority? Haven't done statistical stuff in a very long time.

IShallRiseAgain

Adding up the scores and dividing by number of voters per game gives you a good way to determine the most popular.

ZackSchilling

Monaro wrote: »

I'm organizing a LAN party here for a number of people (about 30)

I have given out a form for people to vote on what final 5-6 games we will play, and have asked them to number them 1-12 from best to worst.

It might be a stupid question, but to get a true representation of popularity, is adding up the scores an accurate way of getting an order priority? Haven't done statistical stuff in a very long time.

Statistically speaking, there's not really a simple way to do this, but make sure that you don't end up playing all mediocre games that no one really likes all that much because the more popular ones were polarizing. For example:

Game 1 gets the following votes:

1
2
12
11
12
1
3
12
1
2
11
4
7
12
2
1
1
11
10

Seems like people either love it or hate it. The straight average of votes is 6.1.

Game 2 gets the following votes:

7
7
6
5
5
6
5
6
9
5
7
8
6
5
4
5
6
7
6
4

It's not particularly popular among anyone, but no one really hates it. It's average vote is 5.95.

According to straight averages, game 2 is technically more popular. This is the garbages. All it really is is mediocre.

However, according to geometric means [ =geomean(range) in Excel ], game 1 has a geometric mean of 3.92 because so many people felt strongly about it while game 2 has a geometric mean of 5.82, reflecting its mediocrity.

As long as no one feels like they want to leave when you play their #12 game, geometric means will make sure that you play the games that people most often marked as their favorites rather than those people marked as being just ok.

Monaro

That's what I'm after! And yes, I'm using Excel to tally up (just didn't know how to formulate)

Thanks for the prompt replies guys