Tekopo posted:

It's me, I'm the guy that says 'fun' shouldn't be used in order to review games. It actually lead me to create my own reviews in order to avoid using the word altogether. I actually think that subjective criticism of something is unavoidable when discussing games/films/etc since biases do appear even when trying to be objective, but subjectivity isn't a bad thing as long as the reviewer recognises that he has inherent biases and that they are going to colour his review of a particular game. I think there are way too many people that do not realise this and mix up 'stuff that I don't personally like' with 'stuff that is objectively bad'. That is not to say that there aren't objective criteria that we can use to review a game and decide if the game is badly designed: for board games it mostly relies on rules interactions, production values etc. I think someone in the board game thread made a good point of how in isolation, lengthy games don't make bad games, but if you add to that things like highly random results or 'screw-the-leader' situations that artificially lengthen the game, the length of a game can be a problem. I think that although currently board game reviews don't really go into enough analysis of how rules interact with each other, it's an important step in making the review of board game more objective.

I haven't really played an RPG in quite some time, but I think the above would be more difficult to do with RPGs than for board games. Although it is still possible to analyse rule interactions in an RPG, due to the fact that RPGs are more open-ended (and that a part of the community actively campaigns against attempts to make RPGs more tightly regimented), it would be difficult to analyse rulesets without descending into subjectivity, since things that are considered bad design by some can be actively liked by others (f.ex. caster supremacy). Within board game, it's hard to find someone that likes getting elimated early in a highly random 2 hour long game.