this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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Most of us over at [email protected] seem to agree that the author is either trolling or picked the wrong dump stat for an aspiring game critic.
I wrote a more detailed response over there.
This is such a absurd statement I'm inclined to agree about the trolling.
To be fair, soccer is a terrible RPG.
Depends how much you like to RP in football manager I guess.
I mean, what does he think makes a good game, if not sorry, characters, and world? Must a game only be evaluated by it's rules and systems? Then guess what, BG3 is built on DND 5e, arguably the most successful RPG system of all time. What even is his complaint?
It sounds like his teacher thinks games should be evaluated for their development of tension and consistent messaging. It sounds like they would penalize a game for having a story with twists and surprises, because those either break messaging consistency or deflate tension. And, of course, quicksaves are evil.
I can kind of see where they're coming from, but it feels like a very academic, navel-gazing place, akin to pretentious art critics talking about color, composition, and allusion to past masters, or a film critic talking about Dutch angles and long takes. Things that may contribute to the artistic quality and even the enjoyment of a piece, but are not components that us rubes actively look for. The fact they try to lump BG3, soccer, and chess all together under one system of evaluation tells me that they're going to use some really bizarre criteria.
I agree with them that it isn't an objective measure of quality, but who rates any form of art or entertainment by objective measures only? The whole point of them is to be subjective.
Gaming media has a difficult time differentiating their thoughts on games as a consumer product and games as art. For the former, it's useful to have objective measures. For the latter, subjective.
Even as a consumer product it's not really possible to boil it down to objective measures. Just like clothing follows tastes and fashions that are inherently subjective, or books, movies and TV shows etc.
But what is an objective measure for game quality? You'll often see things used like total hours needed to complete it and things, but those are not measures of quality. Enjoyment per hour should be, but then it's back to subjective. There isn't an objective measure for a game being good. You can look at things like framerate and such, but it still doesn't measure quality you can make your game very simplistic and get high FPS, and graphical quality is mostly subjective.
Viewing games outside of their context as a product for entertainment, which is inharently subjective, is always flawed.
The 100% Objective Review
Those are in fact all objective measures of a game's quality. FPS on certain hardware, game length, frequency of crashes, the presence of microstuttering, lists of features, these are all things that can be quantified, and by being quantified they are made objective. You can take this information and compare games against each other to make purchasing decisions, critique them, etc. Those decisions are subjective, yet they are based on objective data.
But I didn't say that we should only use objective measures to evaluate games, nor do I agree that we can only evaluate games subjectively. We need both, gaming media should give us both, but we both need to be able to distinguish between them.
Yes, those are objective, but if we run a PS2 game in modern hardware it'll have high FPS. What does that mean for quality?
There are objective measured, but they're useless without context that requires subjectivity. Do you like retro-asthetics? You may like the PS2 looking game with high FPS. If you don't then you might not.
Bugs existing I guess is a useful objective-ish measure. It depends on what happens, how often, and when though, not just the number of them or them existing.
I agree we need media looking at both, but purely objective reporting should not be giving a game a rating on overall quality.
(I'm nit arguing with you. I'm pretty much agreeing. I just wanted to clarify what I meant.)
That he doesn't a fraction of the talent required to make a game this good.
I can feel the saliva-moistened Cheeto crumbs being sprayed into my face.