| tarheel91 said: Looking at something objectively in the arts means looking at it from a more technical nature. You take your personal reaction out of the equation. With more traditional art forms, it's relatively simple. For example, with a piece of literature, you can look at the prose, symbolism, diction, etc. The abilities of the writer and how well they accomplish whatever goals the author has for that piece of literature. The same thing can be done with paintings, sculptures, movies, etc. However, the problem with video games is that their fire and foremost goal is to entertain. Thus, while we can look at things like level design, controls, art design, etc., it's very hard to analyze how well they accomplish the main goal because it's all about entertaining, and that's inherently a personal reaction. Thus, in a sense, you really do have to look at how the majority of players enjoyed the game (although these people must be within the target audience). It's not really relevant that some FPS junkie hates Zelda because it lacks guns. |
This is a well-thought-out post and I appreciate you taking the time to make it but this isn't strictly true, either.
The thing about art interpretation - we'll take literature as an example since I am a literature student - is that little to none of it is really objective. The thing about symbolism, diction, and prose is that we can only quantify one (maybe two) of those, and interpretations of works are still immensely subjective. There are schools of criticism - probably the largest ones, actually - that say that the author's intent is not nearly as important as the interpretations of critics, which define the dialog around it, so the author has little or nothing to do with the meaning of a work. THere are certain objective criteria, yes, but htat's true in games too.
I appreciate what yo uare saying, bu I don't think that the arts in general are as fine-honed or objective as you may believe.
