| Mr Khan said: This goes back to the question of reviewers and their integrity. Who the hell picks the oscars? Granted, it's a more refined field than games' journalism, if only for the far greater age of the medium, but ultimately you still have a small number of people in their ivory tower, isolated from reality, and sometimes quite hostile to it
Sales is the closest thing to an objective, level playing field of quality we have. It's certainly skewed by many factors, but ultimately it is the best way to guage the opinions of the masses on something that is otherwise unquantifiable in a world where there is very little consensus on exactly what makes something worthwhile. There is no standard of an absolute good, just a strength of public opinion. Example: i dislike the Godfather movies, quite sincerely, and i love League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The former regarded as one of the best sagas of all time, the latter widely regarded as rather bad, but that's different people applying different value sets to determine why Godfather is great, or why LoEG is bad, and my value set holds the Godfather and films like it in low esteem. Similarly it will apply to games, that there is no standard of values, and therefore there cannot be any level playing field of quality determined by reviews. |
My problem with this point of view, that several persons seem to share with you: just because measuring method A is better than method B doesn't make any of them acceptable.
Ordering objects by weight by looking at their size from ten meters away is a better measure method than doing so by looking at their color. And yet, none of them is an acceptable weighting method, in the sense that with a palette of common objects both will have errors much greater than what you're measuring. Color will be worse than apparent size, but in the end who cares since none remotely does the job.
