Noita is a game about the procedure.
The Q Score is a measurement of familiarity and appeal of a brand, celebrity, company, or entertainment product. The higher the Q Score, the more popular a person, place, or thing, is. This is how advertising, marketing, media, and public relations make decisions.
Panelists are chosen as representative samples of the population. The way they respond to an athlete, brand, celebrity, or entertainment offering (ex. a TV show), or licensed property create a metric that decides if that thing will continue to exist.
Panelist populations are segmented by demographic groups such as age, education level, gender, income, or marital status. Respondents are given choices for each item being surveyed.
A. One of my favorites
B. Very Good
C. Good
D. Fair
E. Poor
F. Never hear of
Q Scores are calculated by counting how many respondents answered positively (A-C) relative to the number of respondents that answered negatively (D or E).
Q = liked/known x 100
Q = disliked/known x 100
Jack Landis created the Q score in 1963. Who was Jack Landis? Was Jack Landis a good guy? Nobody knows, he doesn't have a Q score.
Everything else does, tho. George Clooney, The Smurfs, Shaquille O'Neil, Game of Thrones characters, The revolution in Hong Kong. There is a popularity score attached to them provided by your racist uncle because he had time to pick up the phone or to take a Facebook quiz.
The scariest thing to happen to a creative in the entertainment industry is for a product to get popular. That means it becomes measurable. That means there is a meeting on the horizon. In that meeting, there will be you, the producer(s), and a room full of suits.
In that room, they will talk among themselves. When they get tired of congratulating themselves they will move on to you. They will say, "X is doing so well. Can we get more for X to do on the project?" You worked a long time creating a product that told a story. You did that work because you are a fan of the thing and want to do right by it. The project's hypothesis proved itself through success. Now, these people are saying, "Fuck all that, the people know what they want. Don't take a risk on what they haven't seen yet."
You know you can't change anything and keep the project on track. Lotta assets need to be changed, a lot of hurt feelings, a lot of betrayed fans. The thing they want more of isn't even that interesting in the long run. It was interesting in juxtaposition to that few moments in the story. They are asking you to scuttle the ship because some random person professed to "liking" boats with holes in them at some point in the past.
So you, as that creative. Do know what you say? You say, "Yeah, we can."
You say that because you don't want to sit in that car outside your house waiting to tell your S/O that you lost another job "Fighting the good fight." You don't want to go back to set to tell a team of 200 people depending on you that their kids can't eat because "Art." But most of all you say yes because you know you lost the minute you took the job. This was always the job.
They say numbers don't lie, people do. I'm sure that idiom has a high Q Score because it does a perfect job of saying something that sounds smart but gets exponentially dumber the longer you think about it.
When I see fans losing their shit on the project leads over how the project played out over time, I don't feel a type of way for anyone anymore. I just wonder if there will ever again be a time art isn't a metric.
Anyway, shouts to info. Rip TB rip TC rip Tall-T. Love is wise, hatred is foolish. Get out there and do great things, we believe in you. Also Jobz.
The Protoculture Mixtape : Issue : People : Accrue
