A Universal Definition of Quality

The next time you’re having a conversation about video games with someone, I want you to try something. First, ask the somewhat boring question “can you tell me 3 of your favourite games of all time, unranked”. There’s a chance that the person answering the question is really into a very specific genre or even franchise; their answers could be “Zelda X, Y and Z” or “Dark Souls, Bloodborne and Nioh” – so see if you can convince them to broaden the range of their answers a bit. Perhaps you can ask “try to mention games that you like and that are as different from each other as possible”. This should prompt most gamers to give a wide range of answers.

Next, ask them what it is they like about these games. You’ll likely get passionate, articulate answers to that question. They will mention “immersion” or “atmosphere” or “realism” or any other quality or combination of qualities. They will provide examples of set pieces that they liked, dramatic twists in the story and incidental emergent behaviours unique to their personal way of playing these games. Most importantly though, because we’ve ensured that the games are different from each other, the qualities and anecdotes provided should be quite different from one game to the next.

Finally, ask the most deceptively simple question of all:

“So what makes a game good, then?”

Optionally, or if you need to further clarify the point:

“Is there a common denominator of quality that applies to all of the games you just described?”

Don’t be surprised if the answers you get to this last question range from stumped silence all the way through to ill-concealed frustration. “What do you mean, ‘what makes a game good’ – a good game is a good game, duh!”

You might be reacting in that same way right now. It most likely stems from the embarrassment of not knowing how to articulate something that you understand intuitively. That’s okay; I hope that at the end of this post I will have equipped you with a practically applicable, universal definition of quality. One that will serve you whether you are a gamer, a games writer, an influencer, a developer, a publisher, or any other professional working in or near the games industry.

The Need for Common Ground

First of all, I acknowledge that not everyone needs to be able to explain what counts as quality in a video game. For most consumers, it’d be perfectly fine to go through life with an “I know it when I see it” attitude. If you’re that kind of person, then this whole topic most likely seems academic at best and pretentious at worst. I get that.

But suppose you’re a game developer or publisher. If you knew how to articulate quality for the product as a whole, then everything from the design of individual features to the project roadmap and the advertising campaign would fall into place much more easily. It’s quite distressing that most developers and publishers I’ve worked for or interacted with had no better answer to the question “what is quality” than the average gamer.

The same goes for the games press. For people whose whole job it is to form and then communicate an informed opinion about games, they quite often write reviews that could simply be boiled down to saying “I liked this game – here are some of its qualities and things I enjoyed doing”. There’s nothing wrong with this in itself, but as a method of communicating whether a game is good or not; whether people other than the reviewer will like the game, it’s more than a little bit flakey. Because – and this has happened more than once – there are several games that fail to be the sum of their parts (let alone more than that). Games that, when compared to one of the giants of its genre, would seem to tick all the boxes necessary, but that somehow fail to entertain their players. Most reviewers will try their best to explain why, but without a benchmark for quality it mostly boils down to calling out individual problems and adding them up. While this is in no way illegal, it’s not an exercise we usually engage in with games that we do like, but that may also have these very same problems. So clearly, this method doesn’t necessarily get at the core of why a game is good or not. If you want further evidence of this, note how even critics of a given game don’t necessarily agree on the individual problems that they bring up to justify their dislike.

Assessing a game’s quality cannot simply be reduced to a quantitative exercise of stacking likes and dislikes against each other. The specific things you like and dislike about a game are generally secondary to whether you like the game as a whole or not.

The Answer

After an intro like this one, I would understand if you were hoping for a truly mind-blowing and/or complex answer to what makes one game better or worse than another. Well, the answer isn’t complex, and as for mind-blowing, I’ll leave that one up to you to decide. Here we go:

The quality of a video game should be defined in terms of how well it delivers on its promises.

That’s it. That’s the whole silver bullet, right there.

Mind blown. Right?

There’s a chance you’ll go “huh, yeah I guess that makes sense”. More likely, you’ll want to challenge me on it. So let’s take a look at some of the most common objections.

The first one is “what, do you mean simply living up to the marketing hype?”

Well, yes and no. If you’ve managed to reach a 1:1 relationship between the marketing campaign and the game’s inherent promises, then yes. If not, then it’s possible your marketing campaign is an inaccurate or maybe even dishonest one, and you’ve got a whole other problem on your hands.

Here’s the thing: your game makes promises. The marketing campaign is about communicating and amplifying these promises in a selling way to people who otherwise might not even know your game exists. But the promises are inherent in the game itself. They are communicated through the box art, the tutorial, the intro cutscene, individual mechanics, level design, art, the player character’s backstory – everything. And yes, this communication can be more or less effective, more or less explicit. It’s possible to make a game that is so abstract that it’s impossible to know what to expect from it, making the promises harder to pin down – but that’s nonetheless a different issue than failing to deliver on said promises. Tetris’ promise might be really difficult to understand by simply looking at screenshots of the game, but once you understand what it’s trying to be it can nonetheless be assessed accordingly.

More likely than not, a game’s promise is going to be about something less abstract than that of a puzzle game. It’s going to be about “being someone” and “doing something somewhere”. For instance, “being a British special agent, using stealth, gadgets and trickery to pull off dangerous missions behind enemy lines – and using outright violence only when the sneaky approach fails”. Basically every aspect of this hypothetical game can be evaluated against this promise. If, for example, the game rewards you for playing it like an action game, killing everyone in sight and using no stealth, the game’s design clearly goes against its promise. Note that by “rewards”, I include “making it too difficult to play the game the way it should be played”. A good game will ensure that the play style it encourages is the one most consistent with its fiction; the promise made to the player.

In More Detail

Individual features and content can also be critiqued in light of the game’s promises to the player. A clunky control scheme may be more or less of a problem depending on what the game is trying to do. One example that I hope isn’t too dated by now is that of the older Resident Evil games that used pre-rendered backgrounds for their environments. Those backgrounds all had their own camera angles, meaning that utilizing camera-relative controls (i.e. “push left to go towards the left of the screen”) was tricky. Instead, the developers opted for so-called “tank controls”; pressing left or right on the control pad meant rotating your character, pushing up meant walking forward and pushing down meant walking backward. Now, I’m not going to pretend that this control scheme was in any way perfect or didn’t put people off. Indeed, even before Capcom abandoned the fixed-camera, pre-rendered backgrounds, they made several improvements to the scheme. No, my point is another one; in the grand scheme of things – and at that point in time – this control scheme was the least bad way of ensuring that the game as a whole delivered on its promise.

Resident Evil was a horror game. To deliver on the promise of horror, Capcom wanted to display the most advanced graphics they could. By using pre-rendered graphics for the environments, the game could look better than if the console was forced to push realtime graphics. Meanwhile, the remaining rendering horsepower could be spent on the things that had to be realtime-rendered, for example player characters and enemies. This meant that the control scheme was secondary in priority to graphics and audio. At the same time, much of the game was about dodging rather than killing enemies, in order to save ammunition. In light of that, the movement that would have been possible with camera-relative controls on the D-pad of the original PlayStation (basically your standard 8 directions) would no doubt have been frustrating in its own right, especially when transitioning between different camera angles and what used to be “right” was now “up”. The best compromise was the counter-intuitive “tank” control scheme that provided 360-degree movement once mastered. Some have also argued that the somewhat awkward controls heightened the feeling of horror, which I can certainly accept, though I would consider that a happy accident rather than something one should shoot for when designing a game.

Ultimately, these were a series of decisions that made sense in light of this game’s ambitions and its promises to the player. If the ambitions and promises would have been those of a Super Mario game, all of the above would have gone out the window. Features and content can rarely be assessed in a vaacuum – it is, once again, about how well their design and implementation help the game deliver on its promises. Even bugs and other things that everyone will agree are “objectively bad”, can be assessed according to this principle. Is a rare crash to desktop that big a deal in a game where progress is continuously mirrored on a server? Are dropped frames and the occasional stutter a huge deal in a turn-based strategy game? Are frequent and long loading times getting in the way of your feeling like a badass Dragon-slaying warrior?

Yes. Yes they are.

Of course, a developer can intentionally choose to “trick” the player, promising one thing and delivering another, accepting all the risk that comes with such a decision. Such a game can end up being liked in spite, or in some sense even because, of breaking its promises. But you’ll usually find that when that happens, the game nonetheless delivers on its promises at least in part. Doki Doki Literature Club is an example that comes to mind. Sure, that game is dishonest as all hell – but at no point does the visual novel turn into a first person shooter or racing game. It picks its battles; intentionally targeting an audience that the developer clearly hoped would appreciate the game’s twists and turns.

Then there are the games that are liked in spite of how poorly they live up to their promises. Games that are “so bad that they are good”, of which there are many examples. But those exceptions usually reinforce the rule; it’s precisely because they fail so hard that we laugh at them. Their failure is so extreme and so obvious that the end result is outright humorous. This doesn’t happen with mediocre games, only with exceptionally bad ones. The ones that make you go “damn, they must have actively been trying to make this truck driving game feel nothing like driving a truck”.

Final Thoughts

Instead of providing further examples and trying to account for every possible anomaly, I’d rather you chew your own food. Try applying this way of thinking about quality in games and see how it affects you in your day-to-day. If you’re a consumer it might simply be an interesting thinking exercise. But if you make your living from games – however that may be – you may find that your understanding of your craft might be changed for the better by applying this way of thinking.

Finally, for developers and publishers, adopting this perspective on game quality yields a surprisingly actionable process for achieving one’s goals. Roughly something like this:

1.) Articulate a promise
2.) Figure out if how many players are interested in that promise, and what they are willing to pay to have it fulfilled
3.) Make a game that delivers on the promise, scoping it so that you don’t spend more on its production than the players are willing to pay for
4.) Let everyone know that your game exists, and how well it delivers on its promise

This still leaves us with all of our hardest work still ahead of us, no question. Difficult problems still need to be solved, assets need to be produced and mechanics need to be iterated until we can’t stand to think about them anymore.

But if most of us were to think back on our careers in games and ask ourselves “how many problems, conflicts and dead ends stemmed from the people involved not agreeing on the definition of quality”, we’d probably come up with quite a few examples. The corollary should then be obvious: “how much better would our past projects have been if those things could have been avoided”?

If your answer to that question is as depressing as mine is, then you owe it to yourself to give my definition of quality a try.

I promise it will serve you well.