Types of ratings on Itch

So far as I have been able to tell from other jams, there are 2 rating systems on itch.io, a global, generic rating system that is rated through the game page of any game you can play or download on the platform, and a Game Jam Rating System that is specific to a game jam and can be configured by the hosts to use categories for voting.  This information is voted/submitted on a game's submission page in a game jam.

To see how many people have rated your game in the jam

To identify how many people have rated your game in a game jam, you need to look for the information on your game's jam submission page.  These ratings do not show up in your dashboard because they are specific to the game jam you have entered and appear to use a completely different system to the global ratings, that do show on your dashboard.

During the voting period in any jam, you can only see how many people have rated your game, not the full results.  These are aggregated at the end of the game jam and will show on your game's game jam submission page.

When the Results are In

This is the point where there can be some difference between game jams.

For some game jams, you will get an "Overall" rating, and ranking for your game in the jam, and this can be the only overall ranking provided or considered.  In other game jams, you can get an Overall ranking, and a ranking for each category that is voted for in the jam.  For example, if your game had brilliant and terrible gameplay, and categories are voted for separately, you could get a good ranking in Art, but a terrible rating for Gameplay.  Your Overall rating would be balanced between the 2, but your rankings in each category would be different base on how people voted.

The rating system also does some maths in the background to try to balance the disparity between games that had a very low number of ratings and games that had a very number of ratings.  Normally for games with the highest number of ratings, the vote results tend to be considered as what was voted for, because with the greater number of votes, the average results for each category are considered to be providing a truer representation of the community's view of the game.  For games with a low number of ratings, the background algorithm appears to look at how the game has been rated, and tries to provide an overall result as if the game had received more ratings.  It might do this by looking at we have rated other games, and how others have rated those games, and then as you may have rated a game with a low number of ratings, it might try to apply a final rating based on how your voting pattern compared to other members of the community.  It's a bit of a black box for this part, but I could see it working this way or something similar to this.