Actually, no. Literature and literary critique are very mature endeavors. Video games and their critique are still in their infancy.

Losing sight of great works doesn't negate the greatness of the works that are still recognized. If you don't see why "the same process that has taken many years" can't be applied to work "in a few months" then you're probably surprised that Super Mario Galaxy didn't come out on the Atari 5200. It took, what, 50 thousand years for people to figure out how to draw in 3-D perspective.

Fair enough Bod. Your line seems fairly reasonable to me now. Mine probably isn't as far from yours as I originally thought.

That's a poor analagy. General literary or video game criteria change much less than what's socially acceptable.  Diciton, Prose, Mood, Rhetoric, Plot, etc. have all been important.  Granted, their relative importance has changed, but most are judged within their time period.  You don't evaluate a Romantic book from a Modernist perspective, and likewise you don't evaluate a NES game from a Dreamcast perspective.  Video games have similar standards: controls, level design, story, graphics, audio, etc.  While their relative values change, they're still judged by their time.  My point is that time does not lead to miraculously new perspectives from which to accurately assess games.  They are judged in relation to the time they were created in.  Thus, judging games that are made today should be no more difficult.

No. They are not judged in relation to the time they were created in. They are judged against the other greats. Great works of art transcend the time they were created in and become part of the canonical works.

Try evaluating a romantic book with modernist values.  It doesn't work.  That's my point.  You don't gain some different appreciation for a book because of the passing oftime.

But Metacritic and average scores don't a "best library" make, because you can't say for certain that all those games aren't derivitive, nor does it take into account exclusive games, which boulster a library more than multiplats, not to mention its cherrypicking, because you could say "top 10 games highest rated" and I could say "top 5" you could say "most good games" and I could say "best overall game" or "best puzzle or platformer."

You simply can't say which game system has the best library by looking at metacritic and doing math, imo. Its heavily reliant on taste, and other factors which can't be included in the entheusiast press scores averages, am I wrong?

Doesn't the word "best" describe an opinion, and the word "most" describes a fact? 

I agree, read my last post for full revelation to the masses!

I you dont want to bais it on slaes go to another site becuase this sit is all about sales

What great work of literature would that romantic book be? I feel you're trying to push the question of context into the framework of aesthetic critique in a way that isn't really that relevant.

My analogy is that of video games to the movie industry. I think we've moved out of vaudeville and are near the end of the silent picture era. Talkies are happening or just around the corner. It's a very imprecise analogy but the aspect I'm thinking of is the cataclysmic change that happened with the advance and new uses of technology both in and outside the movie theatre. The in-theatre things are obvious like sound, then color. The out of theatre things would be something like the automobile that let people from further out get to a movie theatre.

Most silent pictures that are even left today are the better ones. If you look you can find some that are so crude they look like a bad youtube video made by a five year-old. Then there are those silent films that have become recognized as great works of art.

Whatever sort of rigorous system of identifying great video games that could be constructed now would probably just identify what was currently esteemed and/or popular. That's fine. My position is that 95% (or some large number) of what is identified as great now will be relegated to the status of "pretty good" but not classics to be sought out. Much is lost as the field is winnowed down to be sure.

I have a feeling we aren't discussing this at cross-purposes. I apologize for the tortured sentence construction and language.

Metroid Prime 3 is a perfect example.

I expected its WW sales to be much better than they are.

This despite it getting quite good reviews.