A good game allows for skill expression. For players to reach victory through means as distinct as personality can be. This is especially true with PVP (player versus player) where variance in strategy can keep a game fresh for players regardless of its age. To some, winning isn’t as important as playing creatively. And the inverse is true. But for a game to continue, to persist requires more support than can be received from simply this group and that. The games that truly endure, that reach legendary status are those which are played by the most people.
A good game is quality. The experience it provides aligns with expectations like confirmation bias, and requires attention and development to maintain.
A good game is an expensive investment, but one without limit on return. There is potential for infinite exploitation. Live service. So long as people are willing to play there exists a price-point they are willing to meet. To pay. To play, firstly, but also to win. Even the creatives, having sublimated actual victory to self-expression, reinterpret losing efforts as moral wins, akin to a junkie justifying their high.
A good game offers satisfaction in the form of self-harm. Addiction, an engaging fiction maintained by whatever means are necessary. And any mind given to the persons behind the curtain, who they are and the games they play instead of just the words they say would break immersion (God can’t be a person) and is therefore avoided.
A good game is manipulated from the shadows. Developer’s work, unnoticed, is done right. They work on the game’s seamless integration into a player’s reality in attempts to replicate the Tetris Effect, an infection of dreams. Subconscious idolatry but not holy, or ethical, subservience to a mainly amorphous deity determined, not by developers but by erosion, the ever-shifting and changing flow of money, payment, participation.
A good game is nothing too specific. It’s a system that survives the test of time.
And we’re all players. Some games we choose, others are thrust upon us. There’s always a price to win. Digital penance, absolution from original sin – creative whims and other coping mechanisms – enough.
Vincent Santino Smarra 
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