As a Game Connoisseur, Your Friendly Neighborhood Satanist is always striving to find better and better games. When titles like Bastion, Toy Soldiers, and Orcs Must Die! come around, I'm on top of them, controller gripped tightly, and mental notepad at the ready, taking notes and criticizing appropriately.
However, I've been thinking about something concerning game quality. Many people on ArmorGames, when backed into a corner, will declare that the game they were arguing about is good "In their own mind" because game quality is based on "opinion". Hm. Interesting. I took the time to ponder this for a moment.
My opinion is not totally in formation yet, so I can't quite state my stance on the issue yet, but I want to hear what you guys think. Is the quality of our games subjective, or are there truly "Good games" and "Bad games", from an objective standpoint?
For people who just don't know what subjective/objective thinking means (I had to dictionary.com it at one point too)
Subjective - Thinking with the opinions and feelings of one subject to form statements. Not hard truth.
Objective - Thinking with the solid facts in mind purely for stating facts and getting the truth across, fufiling an objective.
Ratings are facts made up of opinions (as in personal view on things, not the other definitions), so you can check those to see what good and bad games are to the general populous. So take Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3: CoD is rated 7/10 while BF3 is rated 9/10 (random ratings, probably not true), BF3 is a better game to the general populous. But not everyone will think it is a better game. However, it is true that BF3 has a higher rating. So it's a little of both.
If that makes any sense, it sounded better thinking it.
Game quality can't be subjective. Either it is of a proper quality or it is not. Whether someone is tolerant enough to consider a badly constructed game fun and challenging is, however, a point of subjectivity. Obviously not everyone will agree with a certain genre, a certain setting, a certain art style, but if any of those appeal to you, you are more inclined to find the game better than the rest of the community. So the "In my mind, this is good quality" won't go anywhere. Rather, it should be "I enjoyed playing it, and you can't take that away from me."
