Quality Vs Popularity

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Realitycrash

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Zachary Amaranth said:
Realitycrash said:
Is CoD a high-quality franchise?
They spend a lot of money polishing Call of Duty games. There's no doubt it's a high-quality franchise, even if that quality is applied to "the masses."

On a similar note, Oprah books are often not quality because the books she picks are often cheap cash-ins and the like. At least, based on the few book club books I'm aware of and have any knowledge of. Are they good? Well....I don't think so. But again, what is good?
Why would 'more money spent on' equal "higher quality"?
Why would 'cheap cash-ins' be 'low quality'? If quality is not 'what people enjoy', then why would it be 'what a lot of money and time was spent on'? I can spend a lot of money and time on building an outhouse out of excrement. Does it make it a 'high-quality' outhouse?
 

DANEgerous

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If i had to draw an analogy I would say look at beer. Budweiser, Miller, Coors. The are The favorite beers of people who have tried those three and perhaps five others and that is likely all they will ever care to. People who have really got into the subject and tried twenty, fifty or one hundred and those three likely do not even make the top 10.

Is this to say Budweiser, Miller, Coors are bad? Well... No. But they are rather dull and average, offer nothing new and have been sanitized of anything not mass market friendly.

CoD is generally the same. Is it bad? Nope it is just kind of par for the course, the difference is mass produced beer can not polish out their art form while CoD can they can improve graphics, balance, maps add guns and features and have more or less the same game. I mean you can go "TROLLOLOLOLOLOLOL!" at someone that says CoD has hardly change since Modern Warfare or Madden is just a roster update and a few tweaks but it will not make them any more wrong. The problem is this is viewed as being inherently insulting but it just means they are doing what every one with an ad budget grater than their production budget is doing taking out anything that does not have mass appeal.
 

Something Amyss

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Dec 3, 2008
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Realitycrash said:
Why would 'more money spent on' equal "higher quality"?
Yes, why would more money spent on polish equal higher quality?

I notice you left the important part, the part that kind of inherently answers your question, out.

That's kind of like if I said "it should be legal to strike someone in self defense," and you responded with "why should it be legal to to strike someone?"

Yeah.

Were you serious about this question?
 

Realitycrash

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Zachary Amaranth said:
Realitycrash said:
Why would 'more money spent on' equal "higher quality"?
Yes, why would more money spent on polish equal higher quality?

I notice you left the important part, the part that kind of inherently answers your question, out.

That's kind of like if I said "it should be legal to strike someone in self defense," and you responded with "why should it be legal to to strike someone?"

Yeah.

Were you serious about this question?
Why should POLISH equal higher quality, and who decides what POLISH is?
That's the inherit problem here. If these things aren't decided by popularity, i.e by the fact that most people like it, then who gets to decide what 'polish' is, and why 'polish' is good for a product?
I'm saying that quality is subjective, and popularity is simply a sign of what people overall consider to be quality.
 

Uhura

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Aug 30, 2012
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Realitycrash said:
But if quality is not dictated by popularity, then how on earth do we determine quality? By referring to reputed scholars and experts? But what gives these experts the right to determine what is 'good' and what is 'bad', as this is in essence just 'quality by popular vote of scholars and experts'?
Well yes, it often is just a popular vote by the experts (= a consensus comprised of subjective quality assessments). I don't see any inherent issue with that. The reason why the experts have that "power" is that people give them that power. People are interested in expert opinions and hold expert opinions to a higher degree than layman opinions. ("Quality" can obviously also refer to your own subjective assessment of the quality of an art piece). (Sorry if this doesn't make any sense, I have a headache.)
 

rednose1

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"Quantity has a quality all it's own."

Everyone reads Oprah's book recommendation, almost everyone likes them because she says so, more people read them because everyone reads them, and the cycle repeats. Meanwhile, hardly anyone reads the best book ever written, so it goes unnoticed. That's the way things are, the more widely recognized/known something is, the better it is, even if this can't be said at the beginning.
 

BarkBarker

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Consensus of opinion that is as unbiased as possible (nothing is unbiased, face it) with intelligent, sensible and reasonable reasons to define and support said opinion is what I might consider quality with, if someone can barely define why they like it, it can't be accepted, if it appeals to you because of personal reasons rather than something we can all relate, that doesn't count either, and so on and so forth.
 

Something Amyss

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Dec 3, 2008
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Realitycrash said:
Why should POLISH equal higher quality, and who decides what POLISH is?
That's the inherit problem here. If these things aren't decided by popularity, i.e by the fact that most people like it, then who gets to decide what 'polish' is, and why 'polish' is good for a product?
I'm saying that quality is subjective, and popularity is simply a sign of what people overall consider to be quality.
My bad, I took it as a serious question.

Quality for the large part really isn't subjective. That's kind of the thing. Whether something is good or not is another thing.
 

Savo

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Jan 27, 2012
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Depends on what you consider objective. The basic idea of objective quality is that we have set standards of what we consider "good", and things that don't meet those standards are labeled "bad". The problem is that these standards are often arbitrary and up for interpretation when we start applying them to different works.

We can objectively point out plot holes or continuity issues with a story, but other areas of a product such as dialogue, pacing, or even acting are grey areas where large amounts of subjectivity exist. Even some plot holes can be interpreted away by saying "They meant for you to use your imagination", which can actually be a valid argument sometimes. There are a number of different ways to approach any given work, which makes saying "This is objectively bad/good" tricky at best. I've seen quite a few discussions on the quality of a story collapse due to running into situations where it all came back to subjectivity.

However, I don't think there's much wrong with using more extreme examples, such as saying The Room is an objectively bad film (barely a single person would disagree with you on that) or saying that The Shawshank Redemption is a good film. If you take a great film and compare it with a low-budget schlocky direct-to-dvd film, there's just no comparison. There's a certain level of careful craftsmanship, excellence in storytelling, and visual flair that you don't find in "lower" works of art. It's because of that that I'm hesitant to dismiss objectivity entirely, since it's apparent that some works do receive more care and talent than others.

That all said, I just about refuse to engage in a debate about the objective quality of a given work, due to how retarded those discussions often become.