I Like the Opinions of Other Humans

A strange thing has happened over the last few years.

Whenever I want to know something, I no longer search for what other people think.

I ask a robot.

“What's the hardest Metroidvania?”
“What are the most difficult RPGs ever made?”
“Is Hollow Knight harder than Elden Ring?”

And within seconds, an AI produces a polished answer. It's coherent. It's well-written. It's often correct.

But lately I have realized something:

I don't actually want the robot's opinion.

I want your opinion. Or rather, I want the aggregated opinion of thousands of people who have actually played the game.

The internet used to be great at this

For a while, the internet got really good at collecting human opinions at scale. IMDb ratings. Rotten Tomatoes. Steam reviews. Metacritic. Stack Overflow. Reddit upvotes.

It was kind of magical.

A million people could independently experience something, and the collective result would often be surprisingly useful. If a movie has a 4.2/10 on IMDb after 50,000 votes, that is probably telling you something. If a game has “Overwhelmingly Positive” on Steam after 100,000 reviews, that is probably telling you something too.

Game difficulty has always been underserved

We have ratings for quality. Ratings for graphics. Ratings for story. Ratings for whether a game lets you pet the dog.

But difficulty? Historically, your options were:

• Ask a friend.
• Search Reddit.
• Read a game journalist's opinion.
• Open seventeen browser tabs and compare conflicting answers.

Now AI has made this easier. Sort of.

The problem is that every AI answer feels like an amalgamation of the human experience filtered through a very confident machine. It isn't really telling you what people think. It's telling you what it thinks people think.

Sometimes that is enough.

Sometimes I just want the raw human data.

I want the messy stuff

I want thousands of players arguing over whether Cuphead is harder than Celeste. I want passionate disagreements. I want bias. I want flawed opinions. I want actual humans.

The internet became amazing because it allowed millions of people to contribute tiny pieces of knowledge and experience. We should not lose that just because AI can summarize it.

In fact, I suspect AI makes crowd-sourced opinion systems more valuable, not less. The better AI gets at generating answers, the more I find myself wanting to see the source material. The humans underneath.

On this site, Cuphead has over 50 difficulty ratings averaging 8.35/10. Hollow Knight has dozens more. Those numbers mean something different than an AI saying “Cuphead is widely considered very hard.” They are the actual, collective, argued-over verdict of real players.

So yes, I still use AI. A lot.

But every now and then, I'd rather hear from 10,000 gamers than one very confident robot.