Castle Paradox

[The Drizzle]

I didn't say words have no meaning. I said that not all words have concrete meanings. Words are capable of describing the concrete and the abstract.

[Moogle1]

My impression is that, deep down, you and I are in agreement.

Words can represent abstracts, but abstracts themselves represent concretes. "Good" and "bad" are abstract concepts until we assign them to real things. We call graphics good when the light produced by the computer monitor is transformed in our eyes to chemicals that, when processed by our brains, activates a certain area of the brain that causes us pleasure. Or something. The point is, everything at some point has a concrete, physical representation or else it doesn't exist and is meaningless. Our current lack of ability to gauge it notwithstanding, the things we are talking about have some static quality values.

Now, how we go about determining whether something is good is a question for debate, but once we have that determined, we can say that things are good or bad or somewhere in between.
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Slime Salad :: Independent Game Design

[Artimus Bena]

[Moogle1]

"Thought of apart from" does not mean "has nothing to do with." It takes some leap of logic to say that the point of abstract ideas is to talk about things that are unrelated to reality.
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Slime Salad :: Independent Game Design

[Artimus Bena]

Either way, it's an idea that originates independently of "concretes".

edit: anyway, the point is, something like art, whether it has "physical representations" or not, is not a concrete, and does not behave like one. It is the people who perceive and interpret it that give it any meaning at all. Therefore there are no objective scales on which to judge the art, because the only judgment an objective entity would have, at most, is: That's art. Might not even say that, considering there are people who consider concretes "art".
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[Moogle1]

Based on what do you say that? I look up "concrete," the first definition I get is:

1: naming a real thing or class of things <the word poem is concrete, poetry is abstract>

Example included as given. The thesaurus lists "concrete" as an antonym of "abstract." This suggests a relation between the two words.
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Slime Salad :: Independent Game Design

[Artimus Bena]

Sure, everything is related in some way. I was merely suggesting that abstracts don't always yield a "physical representation".

edit: err, don't have to*
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SACRE BLEU!

|||Compositions!
|||Eldardeen Soundtrack!
|||Red Mercury!

[Rya.Reisender]

Wow this really went off topic.

Sorry, Moogle1.
But I also would just wish you wouldn't worry so much about the details.

If you read my posts in the future, just replace "good" and "bad" with "I like it" and "I don't like it" so you don't have trouble reading them.

I'm also automatically doing this always. Like if someone posts on a forum "Wow this game is awesome you should play it" I'll interpret it as "I played this game and liked it so much that I have to post about it" and never as "He objectively analyzed the game and came to this conclusion".

I don't think it's useful to discuss whether a story can be measured objectively or not. Even if it could, I don't think humans have the potential to do it. They're too much emotion-driven and also never can know all the facts they'd need to know to judge the story objectively.

Like for example some rpg designer makes an rpg that contains ALL of the 100+ rpg clichés on that one list (forgot link). Is that a good story? Hell yes, it's a genius masterpiece. Will player say that it is a good story? No, if they either don't like traditonal JRPGs or don't know the fact that the clichés were put into the story intentionally.

The only way for humans to evaluate something in general is to take the opinion of all humans on the world about it and take the average of it.

[Moogle1]

[Rya.Reisender]

[Onlyoneinall]

[Rya.Reisender]

But stability is a different issue. A better comparison would be asking all humans if the building looks good or bad.

In the sense of terms, experts can evaluate if a game runs stable, doesn't contain any viruses, won't hurt the computer, etc., but everyone can decide if the game is actually good or bad.

Nobody can really be an 'expert' in judging games this way.

[Onlyoneinall]

I suppose so, although I'm sure it is possible to be an 'expert' in judging games in that sense. Perhaps they're skilled in making sure of a game's compatibility, cleanliness and organization of code, etc. When you said however the average opinion of the sum of a population was a good way to tell whether or not something in general was good or bad, I was just implying that it wasn't true when you make a statement so broad.

As far as judging whether a game's story is good or bad though, it's possible to say that it is good or bad. Generally if a story is structured well, planned out and organized with consideration of other people's reactions in mind (appealing to the target audience), it can probably be a good story. I think it's easier to say what a bad story is. Something that doesn't make sense, is in disarray, full of unexplained plot holes, poor grammar and spelling, lacking appropriate emotion, etc., then the story is going to be pretty bad. This isn't accounting for when it is done intentionally and with the right thought and idea put into it.
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[Artimus Bena]

[Moogle1]

Assuming that's your answer, people who believe in God believe he exists in reality.
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Slime Salad :: Independent Game Design