What exactly constitutes as "Objectively" good/bad or "Subjectively" good/bad in games?

[scorptatious]

Or, what exactly is the difference between "liking a game" or "thinking it's good".

I've been reading up on a discussion on this thread:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.401346-I-like-Aliens-Colonial-Marines

And some people talk about how just because some people happen to like a certain game, does not change the fact that it is bad.

Part of me is sorta torn on this kind of thinking.

On one hand, with games like Sonic 06, I found the game to be horrible due to it's bugginess, it's bad game design choices, and it's bad story. So yes, I definitely consider the game "bad". And I'm not sure how some people would like the game.

Then there's games like Mirror's Edge, a game that I also dislike, but by contrast is much more functional than Sonic 06. I hated how half the time I wasn't sure where to go, and during those times I was often being chased by the cops, resulting in many a frustrating death. It didn't help that I wasn't overall invested into the game's story. And yet despite that, the game still has a bunch of people who are able to look past these issues and enjoy the game overall and wish for a sequel.

So, even if I dislike said game, it is still considered a good game by other people. I can't find myself believing that it's a good game, because I personally didn't enjoy it. I'm not saying the people who do like it are wrong, I'm just saying I don't think it's a good game.

Then there's games like Skullgirls. A game I sorta have a love/hate relationship. I love the art style and characters in the game. But I can't get my head completely around the fighting mechanics. Maybe it's because the game was intended for those who actually had a deep history with fighting games, games that I had little experience with. So overall, I would consider it a good game, but others hate it for the reasons I mentioned.

I don't know, this whole thing seems very confusing to me. I'm not really sure what would constitute as "objective" or "subjective" when it comes to the games like Mirror's Edge or Skullgirls. Because some people may have a particular mindset that works better for those kinds of games.

So anyone here able to make heads or tails about this kind of thing? And, please, let's be civil about this.

 

[shrekfan246]

Beyond things like bugs in the code, tightness of controls, quality of script/voice acting, animation quality, sound design and graphical fidelity there's very little you can really definitively state as quantifiably "objective". And even then, there are a lot of things that can be called "objectively" bad that people find subjectively good. In survival-horror games, people can overlook clunky controls if they add to the tension of the atmosphere. Or weird, stiff animations of monsters if it makes them seem more creepy and unreal. A lot of JRPGs have rather eccentric scripts and voice casts which, depending on the person, can be either annoying or charming.

For instance, Crysis is a very good-looking game. Objectively speaking, someone would have to make a damn good argument for why, as a video-game, it's not graphically beautiful. But, at the same time, from their subjective standpoint they may not like the artistic direction and aesthetic that the game holds, and therefore they may not think it's as "pretty" to look at as, say, Okami, which has much lower overall fidelity but a significantly different art design.

There's a really thin line differentiating all of these things, and I feel that most of the time people fail to use the distinction between "I didn't like this game" and "This game was terrible".

Much like your Mirror's Edge example, I find God of War to be rather tedious and repetitive. Despite owning all five of the games currently released, I've only ever completed the two released for the PSP because I tend to get bored when the action slows down and I'm presented with the slow, monotonous puzzle segments. But, I'm not going to call God of War a bad series of games. They've got very high production values and copious amounts of polish, and I can see why other people who aren't me might enjoy them. It's just not a series that really holds my interest.

 

[Able Seacat]

I guess one could argue that you cannot truly have a bad game. As long as one person enjoyed a game, then that game has done it's job.

But of course when we play games we decide on whether it's bad or good depending on how and why we enjoyed it. A lot of the time, it's not always black and white. I like FFXIII but I can definitely see it's flaws and therefore understand why others do not like it. I'm not a massive fan of Fallout but again I can understand why others enjoy it.

The objectivity part comes into the things that don't fall under someone's opinion. Such as bugs, glitches excreta. Just because some games do have these kind of flaws such as Skyrim, it doesn't make it a bad game. So overall I think it really does come down to your own opinion and a game is very rarely just good or bad but a mixture of both that will weigh out your own thoughts on the game.

 

[Pink Gregory]

UGH.

'Good' and 'bad' are not objective qualities.

 

[Vegosiux]

"Objectively good" does not exist. "Objectively bad" is a game so defective it's not (reasonably) playable.

So basically, a game that is released without major game breaking bugs shouldn't be considered "good" as much as it should be considered "the minimum of what the devs should have done in the first place".

From there, we have a variety of tastes and preferences, so there's no way to discuss what's "objectively good" past vague definition. I mean, "Engaging gameplay, thought-provoking, etc etc" are all well and good, but they're not the same thing to everyone...

So yeah while there definitely is a possibility for a game to be "objectively" bad, I doubt there's a way for it to be "objectively" good.

 

[The Wykydtron]

I'm finding myself thinking about the new Aliens game... Yeah. Broken, buggy and the most unpolished thing you have ever seen. The funny thing is the Alien-y locations are the best parts of the game for most people.

Bad across the board, nobody can reasonably say it's a well-made or good game. NOBODY. The cool Aliens'y stuff might hold it together for the fans but that's about it. Have you SEEN the enemy animations and AI and everything? God.

Oh and UMVC3 gets some love/hate stuff. Ignoring the old "OMG they remade MvC3 in like a month Crapcom LOL" complaints, people can get really pissy when it comes to stuff like X-Factor. UMVC3 is the most broken game of all time, largely thanks to X-Factor. Anyone who has played the game for a decent amount of time knows what i'm talking about.

The fighting game competitive scene even raised the amount of games needed to win a set. THINGS just seem to happen at random sometimes.

I don't think broken automatically means a game is bad, when broken refers to gameplay not actual bugs anyway. It's just a lot more unpredictable I guess.

As for Skullgirls, the lack of people online and the fact that it was a 6 button game put me off a bit. It was still good with the characters and art and stuff but damn a fighting game with no online community at all is a sad sad thing

Oh and the online guide to BlazBlue CS:EX is: Get them in the corner, press your buttons, win game. Repeat for round 2. I LOVE THE GAME BUT GODDAMMIT!!

I thought it was just me being shit but apparently that's the meta for the Extend edition.... I mean what the fuck am I supposed to do? I'm stuck in this fucking corner, maybe getting combo'd still, maybe it reset half a second ago I dunno, Oh i'm dead again thanks game.

I'm in the habit of saving my two Bursts and using them in round 2 for two "get out of corner free" cards. It works pretty darn well. Though I doubt the game was designed with that logic in mind...

I just pick Hazama now and just do what the fuck ever. Even if you lose, Hazama still wins. It's hilarious.

 

[Twilight_guy]

As with all art, there is a set of rules for evaluating and judging art. It's usually based on a set of previous pieces that have been marked as "good" combined with the work of critics and the general feeling of the public. It's not an exact system and what constitutes good and bad are in constant flux which is why an artist can go from not selling as single painting to being one of the most famous ever. Really the deciding factor over objective good and bad boils down to public opinion and hundreds of influences on it. It's kind of like the value of objects, in that its worth what people are willing to pay, in the same way art is good if people believe its good.

One's personal opinion can vary from this and often does. what is canonically "good" and "bad" may have no influence on your opinion. You can hate OoT and think ET is the greatest game ever.

Now some people like to think that there is some god given law on how to evaluate games as good and bad, when really the set of regulations is entirely subjective. There is no objective good and bad since there is no objective way to evaluate art. However, there is a distinction between the canon "good" and "bad" and good and bad in your opinion. One is unique to each person the other is a shared set of classifications that people who value games as an artistic medium (i.e. everyone who is a 'gamer') share to some extent.

(Really this is all kind of wibbly wobbly and many people will probably claim I'm crazy. I don't care because I studied this shit in college and heard it from people far smarter then me or random people on the internet so I'm inclined to agree with them.)

 

[BrotherRool]

Okay, there's no hardcore 'objective bad' but it's also not true that everything bad is entirely subjective. If we showed ET the game to everyone, the vast majority would independently say the game is bad. Since we can make some level of statement as to a games quality that will apply to more than 50%, there's clearly something you can say that's sort of subjective. Don't sigh and moan that someone used the term, because it's not so clear cut that you can dismiss it offhand, the matter deserves more thought


For example, here are thing that very rarely will people call a good aspect to a game

*Bugs
*Bland environments
*Repetitive uncreative actions
*Mechanics that are narratively dissonant/narrative that is mechanically dissonant. If you have an RPG about a man succumbing to old age, but the mechanics are levelling up and become stronger as time progresses, then although the game can still be enjoyable, it is almost always a bad pairing of story and gameplay
*Cutscenes that strongly conflict with gameplay and take away power from players in a cheating way.
*Bosses who you have to defeat and then once you've beaten them, will win against you in a cutscene
*Emotional blandness
*Poorly responsive controls
*Games that don't understand their core engagements and don't consistently provide for any of them

 

[Bad Jim]

"Start to Crate" is an objective review system. It measures the time it takes for a player to see his first crate or barrel once the game starts. It represents the point where the creative team ran out of ideas.

http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/39.html

Needless to say, in Aliens : Colonial Marines there are crates and barrels visible in the intro.

 

[scorptatious]

"Start to Crate" is an objective review system. It measures the time it takes for a player to see his first crate or barrel once the game starts. It represents the point where the creative team ran out of ideas.

http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/39.html

Needless to say, in Aliens : Colonial Marines there are crates and barrels visible in the intro.

Well what about Crash Bandicoot? A large part of his games involve smashing crates.

 

[ClockworkUniverse]

The most obvious objective trait is whether things in the game work. Less obvious, but still present, is whether a given design element supports what the game is trying to do. For example, if a fast-paced action game features a mechanic that grinds the game to an abrupt halt at times, that's a flaw. Whether that flaw spoils the game, though, is subjective.

 

[Little Gray]

There is very little that you can call objectively bad in games and I dont think anything that you could call objectively good. The only things I would call objectively bad are bugs in the game that literally stop it from working. Other things like grammar, spelling, sentence structure, translations, etc can be judged objectively as well to an extent. Pretty much everything else is subjective. Since we are all different people and not a hive mind our views on what is entertaining are all different.

One is unique to each person the other is a shared set of classifications that people who value games as an artistic medium (i.e. everyone who is a 'gamer') share to some extent.

Excuse me but I dont give a flying fuck about games as an artistic medium.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Beyond things like bugs in the code, tightness of controls, quality of script/voice acting, animation quality, sound design and graphical fidelity there's very little you can really definitively state as quantifiably "objective".

Pretty much this. I argued ME3's original ending was "objectively bad" due to gaping plot holes, shoddy production values and logical continuity errors, but it has since been patched to be merely subjectively bad.

Ultima IX or Big Rigs or E.T. are all games that qualify as "objectively bad" for numerous technical, production value, or (in Ultima IX's case) internal consistency issues.

"Objectively good" is a lot tougher, since that often comes down to game play preferences or artistic merit, which are all highly subjective. Crysis, for example, had objectively high quality graphics, but bland art direction, and it was an utter chore to play.

I don't actually think there exists a game that is objectively bad, and the same goes for all creative mediums. There is always going to be one person who finds some kind of enjoyment out of something, therefore it cannot be objectively bad.

I have to disagree. Someone enjoying something doesn't automatically make it "good". I enjoy some things I will happily admit are pretty damn bad despite my enjoyment of them. It's why we have terms like "guilty pleasure".

 

[sammysoso]

Usually when I see some saying "Well, objectively speaking" about a game they are talking out of their ass.

Anything objective is not influenced by personal opinion, and video games (like movies, books, tv) are inherently subjective.

HOWEVER

There are a few things in games that you could criticize "objectively." Usually are on the tech side.

- Glitches
- Long load times
- Unresponsive controls (unless that was the intention)
- Bugs
- Poor optimization

Basically, how the game actually plays , these things really aren't subjective, as you can't really argue that they aren't there.

 

[Bad Jim]

"Start to Crate" is an objective review system. It measures the time it takes for a player to see his first crate or barrel once the game starts. It represents the point where the creative team ran out of ideas.

http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/39.html

Needless to say, in Aliens : Colonial Marines there are crates and barrels visible in the intro.

Well what about Crash Bandicoot? A large part of his games involve smashing crates.

Since you start the game staring at a couple of crates, it's pretty bad. Though it's actually not uncommon to start the game staring at a crate. Metal Gear Solid starts you off in a warehouse full of them. And the less said about Sokoban the better.

 

[Apollo45]

Honestly, the majority of games can be judged objectively. One of the only things that's actually subjective about a game is whether or not all the piece-parts of it come together to make something that you enjoyed. Everything else has a way to be judged objectively, and the amount of people yelling "everything is subjective!" or "that's opinion!" is ridiculous.

 

[sethisjimmy]

I'm pretty much 100% on the subjective side of things. I don't see any game as objectively bad. It may be largely perceived as bad, and it might even fail to accomplish the goals set out by its creators, but I don't think there are objective things that make a game inherently good or bad.

Even glitches can be argued as improving the game in some cases.

Saying games have objective qualities is just creating arbitrary rules around a flexible medium that can always flip those perceived negatives into positives.

 

[Trollhoffer]

Beyond things like bugs in the code, tightness of controls, quality of script/voice acting, animation quality, sound design and graphical fidelity there's very little you can really definitively state as quantifiably "objective". And even then, there are a lot of things that can be called "objectively" bad that people find subjectively good. In survival-horror games, people can overlook clunky controls if they add to the tension of the atmosphere. Or weird, stiff animations of monsters if it makes them seem more creepy and unreal. A lot of JRPGs have rather eccentric scripts and voice casts which, depending on the person, can be either annoying or charming.

I think you bring up some really good points here, so I'd like to have a crack at expanding on them.

What I think we can take from the paragraph I've quoted is that "good" can be judged in relation to the objectives of the game. If a horror game's objective is to make you feel disempowered, then clunky controls (within reasonable limits) directly aid in that objective. The "tank" controls from games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill are the go-to examples, given that there is no strafe, movement is deliberate and slow, and you have to remain stationary to use a weapon. That approach to player mobility would be wildly out of place in something like an Alien game when you play as the xenomorph, since the roles are completely reversed and you're supposed to be the thing others are scared of -- something that every Aliens vs. Predator game has actually nailed pretty well.

A lot of game designers these days use different audiences as their guidelines for design, possibly even moreso than genre. For instance, you can have an exploratory FPS (Metroid Prime) or a more competitive one (Modern Warfare). Both of these games use the same camera perspective and similar fundamental mechanics, but each one is designed to cater to a different kind of audience. In this case, the design in relation to audience pretty much overrides the genre influence -- to such an extent that even if the two games share a mechanical genre, they have a different genre of player experience, which is why you get arguments occasionally about whether Metroid Prime is actually an FPS or not.

Then there's strange in-betweens like Metal Gear Solid and Dark Souls. Both of these games thrive on the disempowerment of the horror genre while also being action games. In the case of Metal Gear Solid, you're "trading" positions of the victim and the monster, being the latter whenever your stealth gameplay is going to smoothly but becoming the former temporarily after a stealth failure. I've never played a game that does that kind of mood juxtaposition in gameplay as well as Metal Gear Solid, but all good stealth games use it to some degree, which is no doubt a significant part of the genre's appeal.

Anyway, just some thoughts.

 

[Lilani]

-snip-

Oi, if you want to talk about my posts, then just come out and ask me ;-P

But to answer your question, there are several things that can be named objectively bad in a game. Bugs, glitches, poor controls, poor level design[footnote]Indicated by the player losing their way easily or not knowing what their next goal is[/footnote], graphics, aesthetics[footnote]Indicated by either a lack of or simply bad aesthetic planning and consistency[/footnote], bad voice acting, and bad narrative or bad narrative pacing. And as was an issue with Aliens: Colonial Marines, a misleading demo or trailer.

On the other hand there are lots of things that are subjective, as well. Aesthetic style, type of story told, archetypes used, gameplay structure, game "type"[footnote]FPS, TPS, platformer, tower defense, RPG, RTS, etc.[/footnote], mood, themes, how much of a reward and/or satisfaction the player gets from the game, and how that reward and/or satisfaction is earned. As an example for the last one, a lot of the pleasure the player derives from a Pokemon game is tediously building your team and building them up one level at a time. In Half-Life, there is no leveling, and that progressive satisfaction comes from completing setpieces and learning more about the story.