What is this

PlayChart is a forced-choice ranking site for video games. You see two games at a time and pick one. Every pick updates your personal Elo ranking and feeds the global one.

The idea is borrowed from Flickchart, which does the same thing for film. Rating things on a 5-star scale is unreliable; head-to-head comparisons aren't. Most people can tell which of two games they prefer in a half-second, and the math takes care of building a ranking from those instincts.

How the ranking works

We use a standard Elo system, the same family used by chess. Each game starts at 1500. When you pick A over B, A's rating goes up and B's goes down — proportional to how much of a "surprise" the result was.

The global leaderboard aggregates everyone's duels, but weights them by how experienced the player is. A brand-new account can't move a game very far on their own; long-time players move things more.

Game data

All metadata, covers, and genres come from IGDB.