Opinion: What Makes A "Good" Video Game?
A love letter to gaming.
Being a good man requires daily quiet choices, while a great man is often forged by the loud demands of history and crisis.
I have tried to Google this quote about 10 different times, without any luck. I won’t be so foolish as to claim responsibility for this poetic wisdom; however, I will highlight its truth.
When the conversation comes up of “What makes a game good?” more often than not, the easy answer is that beauty is in the eyes of its beholder, art is subjective, or something along those lines. While I don’t fully disagree, the question of good is not just a matter of taste; it is a matter of some sort of objectivity. The reason for my belief is that if everything were purely subjective, then we could come to no moral absolutes. The idea of murder, for example. If everything was simply based on subjective belief, there would be no logical conclusion for penalizing someone for committing such a heinous act. However, as human beings, there is something that breaks cultural, ethical, and historical boundaries that shows that literally every society since the dawn of time has recognized that the taking of an innocent life is something that cannot go unpunished. It does not matter whether we are talking about Americans in the year 2026 or tribal groups in Australia in the year 3000 B.C.; there is something that objectively makes human beings frown upon this action cross-culturally and across time. With that in-depth philosophical dilemma out of the way, can the same objectivity be said about something as mundane as “What makes a good video game?”
I could go on for hours about a game's look, feel, and story to back up this hypothesis, but for individuals like myself, I would be left so unsatisfied. For starters, using the criteria of graphics (look), gameplay mechanics (feel), and thematic plot (story), then games like Grand Theft Auto would surely be disqualified. Yes, that game looks and feels great, but pretty much no one is saying “The plot to GTA V is one of the best examples of storytelling I’ve ever seen.” With one of the three main measurable criteria lacking, it can’t, by definition, be considered a good game. Obviously no one believes this. Grand Theft Auto V is the second best-selling video game of all time, with 225+ million copies sold. The first is Minecraft, which has no plot and has some of the most primitive mechanics and graphics in the modern age of gaming.
If we can’t measure “good” using the individual qualities represented across all games, then surely we can use something like monetary value or the number of copies sold. That would represent how many people spent their hard-earned dollars to play a game or, at the very least, show how many people own it. That would have to make a good game, right? Peeling back even more layers of the onion, I don’t find this credible either. There is one game in particular that I know every human I’ve ever met has played, and no one has bought it. The “snake” game. The game where you simply try not to have colorful lines bump into each other. That “snake” game. Before the age of the smartphone, Snake was preinstalled in over 400 million Nokia phones, by default making it one of the most owned games ever made. Yes, we all have used that game to kill some time. In school, on the bus, in a work meeting, but no one, and I mean literally no one, today is wishing to get done with work so they can go play Snake for hours on end, by themselves or with friends.
Since I have exhausted myself trying to find the objective reality that makes a game good, I hate to revert back to the arguments that I mentioned earlier, which make my head hurt. Good, to a certain extent, is, like beauty, in the eyes of the beholder. God Himself created all things and saw that it was “Good”. Even though I personally agree with God, obviously there are people that disagree with that statement. For me, the biggest thing that separates this conversation is multiplayer and single player games.
Single player games are perfectly critiqued by the three categories I mentioned earlier. Look, feel, and story. To spend my time gaming alone, I need to be truly captured by those three categories. The Arkham games, Spider-Man, God of War, Legend of Zelda—all of these titles are examples that gamers unanimously agree carry those qualities and keep people in their game. Sure, those games might not be your cup of tea, but everyone appreciates and understands where the love of those games and others like them comes from. I personally spend most of my time on multiplayer games for one reason and one reason alone. My friends. The ability to play and communicate with your community over the most simple objectives that games have to offer is why so many indie games hold so much weight. It’s not about their production budget, studio, or abundance of content they offer; it’s the fact that you create memories with other people that you would also go to the bar with.
As Lex Luthor and Ready Player One (my favorite Spielberg movie) once said: “Some people can read War and Peace and come away thinking it's a simple adventure story; others can read the ingredients on the back of a chewing gum wrapper and unlock the secrets of the universe.” A good game is simply decided by whether you play, and keep playing.
“I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” —Jeremiah 31:33
Just like morality, we can have games that share no similarities, but as people, we can know what makes a good game when we simply play.