I don’t think one should have to be able to justify why they like something.

Yep, and neither do I, generally speaking.

See the parts where I said its fine if you just like a game and either don’t really understand precisely why, or you can identify why, but you don’t use that knowledge to promote false ideas about how games actually work and what differentiates them.

It’s by definition extremely subjective.

An individuals tastes and preferences are of course subjective.

However, what actually constitutes a video game is objective.

There are a wide variety of complex, but definable elements and features of a game. It is code, it is models, it is animations, it is gameplay elements and loops, graphical styles, narrative styles and themes… all these things exist objectively, and are designed with intent, crafted by human designers.

Similar to how a movie… is a movie. You can have opinions about a movie, or a game, but if they directly clash with that actual source material, they’re not factually based opinions, thus, they are irrational and misleading.

In a similar vein, both movies and video games often have a social element to them. Buzz, hype, popularity, discussion around a game or movie before and after it is released tends to strongly influence people toward having one kind of opinion or another, regardless of the actual content of the media.

This is further complicated in multiplayer games where the kinds of people you are playing with can dramatically improve or detriment an actual user experience, and quite often people will genuinely enjoy a game because they had a good time playing it with friends, or a very bad time maybe, and this will also often influence them to make factually false comparisons with other multiplayer games.

You could have all the best arguments in the world that some game is on paper superior to another one, I may prefer the first cause of when I played it, or who I played it with, or just what it made us feel at a certain point in time.

Yep, people can argue about whether an apple is superior to an orange.

Doesnt mean theyre not both fruit. Doesnt mean they both dont have skin and are generally able to be held and thrown by an average human being.

Doesn’t mean that they arent different kinds of fruit with different chemical characteristics that combine with the physical experience of chewing differing material consistencies differently that are objectively understandable in great detail, but which people will have different preferences of the overall consumption of fruit experience about.

Yep, you might really like oranges because of nostalgia.

But if you start saying that apples dont even count as fruit because they arent as squishy and juicy to bite into as an apple, now your nostalgia has led you to make an objectively false statement.

Music Example

I mean basically I can ‘yes, and’ this.

Just as you have a more technical understanding of music composition and theory than most, you can admit that you know what sometimes i do just enjoy a less creative, but still fun and enjoyable song… a gamer /could/ say that while they normally enjoy a complex, slow paces grand strategy game, from time to time they enjoy some dumb fast flashy action in a team based shooter or something like basically a comedy of errors game like fall guys.

Fall guys is vastly more simple in concept and design than say, a very technical Mech Combat game. But that doesnt make one better or worse of course.

What you run into all the time with gamers is people making up objectively false reasons why one game is better than another, or vastly, vastly mischaracterizing a game, usually because it bears superficial resemblance to another.

So basically, now ive been able to see a good deal of PalWorld gameplay.

Uh, to me this is an open world survival craft game that features capturable basically cute monsters, aka pokemon analogue.

(and also a good deal of forcing them into slave labor)

Theres no rpg style turn based combat.

There does not appear to be a complex rock paper scissors to the 5th power of strategy involved in matching attack move types against pal types, no leveling system, no complex underlying stats system.

Theres definitely a totally different tone and pace than pokemon games.

It isnt really a pokemon game at all.

Its more like Conan Exiles but with an art face lift, with pals taking the place of thralls, and far less well balanced and intricate combat and leveling mechanics.

But, how many people right now are acting as if this is ‘pokemon with guns’ when its more like ‘rust with pokemon’?

Thanks!

The wild part is… I could have written this sams comment for nearly any decently popular game currently uh, in play.

I managed to avoid getting bogged down in the stereotypical actual horrible conversation with die hard fans of a game, which i would not do well in, having never played palworld.

But… this kind of thing is so common these days that if you think a bit higher level, its not hard to broadly see whats going on.

Long time gamers by now whove grown and matured loathe and despise the nonsense that was the rhetoric and misinformation thrown around during the era where CONSOLE WARS was what defined you as a gamer.

But… the same basically toxic videogame fandom nonsense still happens, just in a slightly more subtle form, and its actually so widespread and easy to manipulate that for over a decade competent AAA studios have banked on it when making business decisions, and its even so easy to illicit and provoke that we are awash in an era of basically trash scam games built more on nice sounding dreams that anything that actually makes sense or is even realistically possible, or not obviously contradictory and thus impossible at a fundamental level, in terms of promised gameplay and features.

Unfortunately, as video games became massively popular, theyve been managed as a new form of bread and circuses, and new way for people to argue endlessly about extremely technical but hardly ever meaningful statistical differences between sportsball teams, as a means to foment devotion.

Consumerism, basically.