this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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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.
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.
The 100% Objective Review