Majanew said:
Why can't gamers just like a game because it is fun to them?
For me, personally, it's important to differentiate between what's fun and what's good. I enjoy almost every loot-based ARPG but almost none of them are actually good games and I'm not ashamed to admit that. They have shallow game design, uneven pacing, awful narratives, and most of them have no clue how to balance content/character abilities...but I love character building; the more complicated the better.
The problem is when people claim that what they love is objectively better than other things just because they love it. Probably the most frustrating thing on this board for me is the lack of conversations strictly dedicated to objective analysis/comparison of games; when you take out personal feelings and get to the nitty-gritty (Actual concepts such as pacing, fluidity, difficulty (Yes games can be too hard), narrative etc.) you start to be able to have real discussions without offending people's sensitivities.
Many games trigger extreme dopamine responses (or lack thereof) in people; it becomes really hard to separate our reactions to these stimuli when seeing people 'attacking' things we have positive responses too. This creates that fanboyism reaction and divisive nature of discussions about 'controversial' games...and the sparseness of median line responses about most things.