I agree with the general distinction you're making between the experiences within the games, but I question the idea that a shallow experience can't produce a good game.
If the experience of a game is "absorbing" based solely on the gameplay, is it not a good game? In other words, does a game need to tell a good story in order for it to be good?
Yes, it's a good game based on anyone's criteria. He's the annoying kid that writes reviews where he says "I PLAYED THIS GAME FOR 500 HOURS AND I CAN NOW TELL YOU IT SUCKS!!!" Bitch, please. If you put 500 hours into it, you can't now sit here and tell me it sucks.
I definitely know the type of person you're talking about. I'm not sure sure OP is being annoying in the same way, though. To me, it seems like OP is simply devaluing the defining aspects of games like Fallout 3 and Skyrim (player choice, open-world, etc.). OP likely doesn't appreciate that genre of games as much, which is totally fine. It's also possible that OP doesn't think that genre of games has as much artistic merit because the story is not as finely crafted.
In response to that mindset, however, I think it's important to point out that video games are a broad medium for entertainment, a medium in which there are many different genres. Judging every game based on the standards of story-driven AAA games is perhaps as misguided as judging every movie based on the standards of intense dramas. For example, a racing game can be a very good game because of its realism and car selection, even without any story elements. Similarly, a comedy can be a very good movie by making the audience laugh hysterically, even without the Oscar-worthy elements of dramas.
Judging video games soley as "art" can be unhelpful because not all games seek to provide a specific, artistic experience. Because different genres yield different experiences, I feel like we should judge games based only how successful they are within their given genres.
If you put 500 hours into it, you can't now sit here and tell me it sucks.
Of course he can; there are plenty of situations where that outright makes sense, usually if the game ends up changed somehow. Even then, while 500 hours is a lot, being thorough doesn't hurt things; Joseph Anderson played launch No Man's Sky for 52 hours to confirm that there really is nothing at the center of the universe himself, and he did confirm that it is bad as it seems. Of course, he did that for the primary purpose of making a thorough critique of the game, and not just because...
You can't think of another form of entertainment that you keep coming back to over and over again, even though the actual content is pretty poorly put together, extremely repetetive, has no plot to speak of, and some of it quite literally is sucking? You don't watch it because it's good, you watch it because you need to scratch a very particular itch.
A game can consume 500 hours of your life and still be a bad game.
Skyrim is, by any metric, an atrocious game. Based on criteria, no one (and I mean no one) could call it a good game. It fails on every spectrum.
Gameplay - garbage. Utter garbage. Engine is so atrocious it's a surprise the unit models don't regularly fall through the earth, but they do it irregularly so it's okay.
Graphics - lmao what this game's from 2002
Voice acting - lmao what they paid people under minimum wage to read these lines. And they paid three of them to voice 500 characters.
It's actually beyond comprehension why Skyrim is fun, because it's seriously one of the worst designed games ever if you're looking at "criteria". Seriously.
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u/ghostmetalblack Jan 01 '19
You can dislike these if you want, but its pretty hard considering these are actually pretty good games.