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MTZehvor on 25 August 2016
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KLXVER said:
MTZehvor said:

And what exactly determines what makes gameplay, design, story, and whatever else "great?" It's entirely based on subjective notions (with the possible exception of how well it runs). Granted, these are subjective notions held by the majority of the gaming community, but they're subjective all the same. There isn't a single thing you can point to in gameplay that you can find a purely "objective" foundation for; everything comes back to a set of presuppositions that most people agree are "good."

If you disagree with me, then I'd invite you to come up with a definition of what makes a good game without referring to any subjective qualities. That means that your definition needs to be something that everyone could apply equally across all games and come to the exact same conclusion of which games are good and which games are not. In other words, you can't use something like "it is a fun game," because what people find "fun" will vary from person to person.

(Here's a hint: It's not possible)

1. How well the game runs

2. Impact on the industry

3. Originality

 

If everything about a game was subjective, then we wouldnt have any idea what a quality game is.

 

Well, congratulations. By that definition, we have officially declared Wii Sports as the greatest game of all time. It runs completely fine without any drops in performance, it had arguably the biggest impact on the industry being both the best selling game of all time and bringing motion controls to bare, and was a completely original concept in implementing motion controls into sports. As a runner up, Minecraft for second place.

In all seriousness, I should probably replace "it's not possible" with "it's not possible to do very well." Yes, you can boil a game down to things that could, theoretically, be measured objectively (assuming there was some standardized measure of industry impact and originality), but you would end up with a list that would look like TIME's best games of all time. 

Almost everything that we take into account when evaluating a game is subjective, though, and yet we can still have an idea (or, at least, a broad consensus) on what a quality game is, because we as humans are wired to enjoy similar things. What we declare as "good" is what we as a video game community can generally agree on. The vast majority of us enjoy consistent character development, so we like games such as Deus Ex while disliking games (or, at least, stories) such as Other M. The vast majority of us enjoy a sense of accomplishment, so we enjoy playing games such as Devil May Cry while we get bored pretty quickly of Wii Sports. The baseline of what we enjoy is what we as a community can come together and agree on. That is what 90% or so of reviews are made up of, and that's simulatenously why if someone doesn't buy into that baseline, they can just as easily claim a game is bad and still be entirely correct.