The Source Code of Great Games for You

In this project I went to answer a very simple question ‘what makes a video game good,’ you might be saying that it is impossible to quantify that it is all about preference but I disagree on that sentiment. I say that there is an objective way to quantify the quality of video games, if that is not the case then critics would not exist. That point aside I think the traits of a good video game are pretty simple. That being that they should bring something new to the table, they should also have an interesting story and characters, lastly and most importantly they should have good gameplay. Now a game can be good without these things (except for gameplay you really need that) but they can add to the experience and immersion of the game. Aside from those three big ones there are some others that are some ‘minor’ traits such as; good music and sound design, good game and level design, good visuals, unique graphics, and a good mixture of learnability and complexity. There are obviously many more aspects and traits you need to make a good video game, but why is all of this even important? Why should we know what the specific aspects of good video games are? Well, in short you really don’t need to know. There are many topics far more pressing than video games. Yes, all of that is true but what is also true is that video games have engraved themselves into our modern society. A recent estimate put that a little more than 2.5 billion people play video games, that is nearly half of the entire population of the planet. That is why this topic is important because there are so many people playing video games more now than ever, and I can say from experience that no one wants to play a bad video game or a lazy video game or even a greedy video game (cough cough EA). And yet every year triple A games seem to get lazier and more boring, we should know the basic attributes to good games so we can steer clear from these games and to tell big game companies that we just want good games to play. In this post I may not have fancy graphs or pictures but what I do have is a passion for video games and a hope that one day we will get more good games than average ones and especially bad ones.

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