| Kantor said:
So if somebody invents a new food, and the large majority of the world likes it, and you don't like it, that makes it bad?
Sure, it's bad in your opinion. But in most people's opinions, it is good. Therefore, it is good food.
Sorry if that annoys you, but that is how the universe works.
If quality couldn't be measured objectively, why would reviews exist? Why would people listen to them? Why not just ignore them and make up your own mind?
Because when you do that, you end up with God Hand.
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Hope you don't mind me changing the example to illustrate my point; my apologies if you do. Allow me to address this one point at a time.
No, consensus does not mean that something is good or bad. In order for us to come to that point, we must leap beyond the idea of objectivity, and put forth that reality itself is defined by the perceptions of the majority. That's patently ridiculous, and I reject it on principle. Another person's opinion cannot make something good or bad.
When we call something "good" or "well-made" it is speaking to what we, as the speaker, assume to be common values shared between ourselves and our listeners. When we make value judgements about certain things (but not necessarily others, this is important and I will get into it below) what we are doing is speaking to a shared set of principle values. These values are not objective, but their shared criteria for subjectivity creates the illusion that they objective to the average speaker and listener.
"This is a good apple," says I, referring to an apple in my hand.
"Yeah," says you, because you agree based on certain presuppositions about what makes an apple good. These tend to be based on objective, measurable qualities - firmness, ripeness, sweetness, color, texture, what have you.
But that's not necessarily the way it goes, either.
"This is a good apple," says I, referring to an apple in my hand.
"Nah," says you, "I like 'em with a bit more green."
What we have her is a divergence in the subjective quality of "goodness" based on the objective qualities that define the state of the fruit. Reality is objective, yes, all matter is as it is and all games are ultimately pixels rendered on a screen and us interacting with those pixels, but interpretations of objective qualities into a whole, "good" or "bad", is almost always a subjective process. For some things that's not true: there's good math and bad math, good carpentry and bad carpentry, so on and so forth, but those things rely on an agreed-upon set of values for what makes each thing good.
In art, that's almost never the case.
Art is always subjective in terms of quality - Transformers got slammed by many reviewers but Ebert loved it because he said, as a popcorn movie, that it was excellent. Critics rarely, if ever, agree on naything. The most hardcore PS2 gamers lauded God Hand as one of the best games of the last generation, often giving it the Best Action Game crown without hesitation, but the IGN offices hated it all around and gave it a 3.5.
I don't ken to what Yahtzee says a lot of the time, his aversion to multiplayer is a load of hose pucky, but what he gets right about reviews is what reviews out to do: they are not meant to communicate absolute values. Reviews are supposed to, at the very least, communicate complex opinions that capture the spirit of whatever they're talking about. At their best, and he never said this but I do, they should be an analysis of how games function as iterations of the art form. Some reviewers manage to do that - the 8's and 9's that No More Heroes got tended to be from the games-as-art crowd - but they always falter in that they try to assign absolute values to complex ideas.
See where I'm coming from with this?
(Former) Lead Moderator
