Opinions, criticism, and feeling yours is above everyone else's...

I very lightly touched upon this subject in my earlier post about fanbases. Opinions are a very awkward thing to talk about, and I'm not going to pretend I know much about how the brain forms such opinions. One thing I do know, however, is that opinions are different.

Whether you prefer Halo or Half Life is perfectly valid as an opinion. It simply reflects what you prefer to have in the games you play. What I'm struggling to understand is the way certain people feel their opinion allows them to state that the game they prefer gives that person a higher status in life in comparison to the person who enjoys a different game more.

I mean, seriously, it's a game, you like it, someone else does. Get over it.

There's also the use of opinion within a debate or arguement. While opinion heavily influences whether you will like a game or not, it is NOT a suitable tool to use in debate or even just a review of a game. Both Halo and Half Life are good games, although I repeatedly bash Halo for its highly simplistic gameplay in comparison, and I gladly admit to that being my opinion. Surely I can't be right among the six or seven million people who have bought and love the three games of the Halo series (even though most of those sales can be attributed to the advertising the game received on release of the XBox, or gamers who dislike Halo in an attempt to see if the series has gotten better yet).

The most common use of opinion from what I have seen is "Well that's just your opinion," as if this is a suitable way of ending an arguement. If anything, this should be something used at the beginning of said arguement, and even then, there are aspects of games that are pretty much objectively bad, if only because they are not suitable in an interactive medium.

Poor controls would be a big one, and no amount of 'you can get used to it' arguements beat good old fashioned good controls. This would be the difference between having a bajillion buttons that do everything the player could need to use, while good controls would be the more and more popular 'context sensitive' controls, with a 'use' button allowing the player to do everything the character needs to do, but only when they seriously need to do it to continue with the game. True, this limits freedom of the player somewhat, but most games are linear anyway, where context sensitive controls make sense. Even sandbox games like Saints Row utilise them, such as the 'climb on cars' button performing an action which I have currently forgotten when not near a car. Probably reloads or something.

Unskippable cutscenes are another one, although then again this may be a statement influenced by opinion. But here's my example: Metal Gear Solid, filled with so much bullshit I could grow several crops of food with it, allows you to skip the cutscenes. This is especially useful on multiple playthroughs. I don't want to sit through the same bullshit again because I'm playing through again. Even if it's something as simple as having lost the save file. This sways my opinion of Half Life a little, because it has a total lack of cutscenes, with every bit of story within gameplay and therefore unskippable. The amount of times I've had to sit and listen to, "Wake up, mister Freeman... Wake up and smell the ashes..." is gradually wearing on my mental capacity, but I digress...

Leave opinion out of review and out of debate when talking about games. In fact, remove it from every entertainment medium. There's many Youtube videos calling out rap as being unskillful and boring in comparison to other genres such as rock, and using this as an example as to why rap lovers should stop loving rap. But a person's opinion is based on a totally different set of attributes, a reflection of that person's personality, a reflection of their history, and the same can be applied to games. If people want a game to challenge their intellect in quick paced strategy, they would play a real time strategy. If someone wants to blow off some steam, or simply relax after a long, hard day, games like Halo or Timesplitters will seem more compelling with their much simpler approach to gaming.

Until gamers can realise their own opinions are not useful in swaying other peoples' opinions, we'll always have fanboy wars. It's just annoying that most of the gaming population are either elitist dickweeds who can't stand their precious 'hardcore' games being blashphemed (Most PC gamers), or 12 year old kids with shrieky voices who demand people don't kill them so they can kill other people (Most console gamers).