Forum - View topicQuality and Entertainment: A Fine Line.
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Key
Moderator
 Posts: 18247 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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Completely preventing personal tastes/biases/preferences from influencing interpretations of quality is extremely difficult, even for something which should be objective. For instance, I would never rate the frenetic animation style of a series like Kill la Kill as highly as some others do because it looks ugly to me, and how one rates the "it's high-quality animation when things are animated, but it takes shortcuts elsewhere" kind of situation varies a lot from person to person.
That being said, I've always held that one should either make the best effort possible to evaluate something neutrally or else acknowledge when personal like/dislike may be heavily influencing their decisions. (The exception to that would be Preview Guides, where gut reactions are expected.) Two great examples of where I think people make too little effort to do this are in two of the biggest flashpoint series of recent years: SAO and Cross Ange. |
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Kruszer
 Posts: 7987 Location: Minnesota, USA |
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Yeah, people need to be able to separate whether the flaw they perceive is their own personal issue or a real issue with the show. Often people have these inflated expectations of what a show will be, and then they watch it, complain, and blame the show, for their own mistake when it doesn't conform to their vision, which is absurd. |
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Alan45
 Village Elder Posts: 9875 Location: Virginia |
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Which circles back to the idea that liking or not liking a show does not determine if a show is good or bad. A good show can be about something you don't want to watch and an entertaining show can cover a lot of faults.
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Night fox
 Posts: 561 Location: Sweden |
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Exactly. Quality is objective, and something that can be measured in a coherent script, character development, detailed artwork, or fluid animation. Entertainment is subjective to each individual's personal preferences. |
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jl07045
 Posts: 1527 Location: Riga, Latvia |
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And I'm still skeptical that quality cannot just be broken down to what people enjoy. Why does the script need to be coherent? The answer is obviously to better convey the story, to make it more understandable. But then the next question is, why is that better? And isn't the answer here - so that people may enjoy it better? Only instead of talking about yourself, you're generalizing and assuming that this is what people would want.
If what I said is true the only difference between "of high quality" and "entertaining" is that in the first case you're talking about what some group of people would/should like and in the second case you're talking only about yourself. |
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Night fox
Posts: 561 Location: Sweden |
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^
Well, if characters repetitively contradict themselves, or if I can't see clearly what's happening on the screen, or if I can't make our what the voice actors are saying, I'd say that the quality is low. I guess it's possible that some people actually like it that way, though, but does that automatically imply high quality? |
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dtm42
Posts: 14084 Location: currently stalking my waifu |
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Precisely. We all watch the same story; we all see the same characters, plot, themes and direction. The quality of an anime (or any storytelling medium) is objective because the anime itself is a real thing that exists independent of how people perceive it. How the audience reacts to an anime is entirely due to our own personal preferences and beliefs, so the entertainment value is very much subjective. Therefore we are all looking at the same thing, but because we are all different, what each of us sees differs from person to person. |
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Blood-
Bargain Hunter Posts: 23883 |
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Ugh. No, quality is not objective. It is literally impossible for anything that cannot be measured by a literal (as opposed to figurative) tool to be objective. That, in fact, is what distinguishes an objective thing from something that is subjective.
The 100 metre dash is an objective sport. That's because its results can be measured, both with the human eye (assuming no one finishes in a dead heat), with a camera (can help to determine who was slightly ahead in a dead heat) and a stopwatch. Figure skating is a subjective sport. Results in figure skating cannot be measured by any tool. Results are "measured" by human judges watching a performance and subjectively attaching scores to that performance. It is the same with artistic critcism. There is no objective way to measure Beethoven. There is virtual unanimous consensus that he is a musical genius, but even that isn't an "objective" measurement. An alien could come to earth and judge that Beethoven creates sounds that are unbearable. Whereas I could use a ruler to measure a banana slug and that same alien could get the same result using that same ruler. That's objectivity. I wish people would learn what words actually mean before bandying them about. |
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jl07045
Posts: 1527 Location: Riga, Latvia |
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But what it may imply is that high quality is determined by what a lot of people enjoy, which is what most people in this thread will vehemently deny aka popularity=/=quality. Meaning, there must be some standard of quality determined not by how many people enjoy it but by something that people can agree with when using reason. Assuming that quality is something objective that is. |
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Touma
 Posts: 2651 Location: Colorado, USA |
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But that does not answer the question of what "quality" refers to if it is not entertainment. If a show is not entertaining but is still "good" what is it good for? If it is not entertaining somebody what purpose does it serve? |
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Alan45
Village Elder Posts: 9875 Location: Virginia |
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Touma wrote:
The fact that a show is not entertaining to you doesn't mean it isn't entertaining to a lot of other people. The anime we get is all professionally made. Even the worst of it is entertaining to someone. That is why we have all those people arguing that reviews should be done by "someone who likes this sort of show". @Blood- Like ice skating, film has rules upon which its quality is judged. Also the judges are not being completely arbitrary. While I agree that the decision of a reviewer or film critic is largely subjective it usually has a reasonable basis. It is likely that the language needs some word that describes a middle point between objective and subjective. Even if you hold that all evaluation of media is entirely subjective opinion, some opinions are more worthwhile than others. Touma's idea of "I like it so it is good or I don't like it so it is bad" is fine for him but is applicable to only one person at a time. |
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Touma
Posts: 2651 Location: Colorado, USA |
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What is even more significant to me is that the alien could get the same result using his own ruler. His would be graduated differently but it would be easy to compare the rulers and create an equation for converting the units, just as we can convert inches to millimeters. Anybody can make the measurement with his own ruler and get the same result as everybody else, because the rulers are made to a standard. There could be no valid arguments about who had the longest slug or the thickest slug or the heaviest slug (though that is a different measurement) because those are all objective and everybody can measure them. You could still argue about who has the prettiest slug, because beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It is subjective. You could still argue about who had the best slug because "best" would not be the same for everybody. For some longest would be best. For others heaviest would be best. "Best" is subjective unless you establish which quality is most important. Objectivity requires a standard that everybody can use to get the same results as everybody else, every time. Opinions and personal preferences do not influence the result. If you do not have that standard then you do not have objectivity.
I know that. I am one of the people who has been arguing that entertainment is subjective. I was talking about the concept of entertainment and quality being different. But I think that I have been misunderstanding the concept. If people who say "it is not entertaining but it is still good" are actually saying "it is not entertaining to me but it is entertaining to a lot of others" then I have no argument with them. We still have the "objective quality" debate, but that is somewhat different. Last edited by Touma on Wed Apr 29, 2015 9:14 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Blood-
Bargain Hunter Posts: 23883 |
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Exactly so. Although I do like Alan45's idea of coming up with a word that denotes that there are some widely held common agreement on what constitutes "quality" without using the inaccurate word or notion of "objectivity." Qualjective, anyone? "Qualjectively speaking, Beethoven is a genius." 
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jl07045
Posts: 1527 Location: Riga, Latvia |
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There is a word, it's "intersubjective". It refers to our shared biological make-up and social environment making our opinions and interpretations of facts similar in a lot of matters. Isn't it better to say that instead of there being things that are entertaining or of high quality, there are things we can agree upon because we're similar, and things that we can't because we're different? Objectivity comes in as far as 1) us keeping to facts, that is, we talk about what we can actually see, hear, etc. in the work of art, and 2) not committing logical fallacies while using those facts to form opinions that may or may not be different from those of others'. |
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Blood-
Bargain Hunter Posts: 23883 |
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Re: use of intersubjectivity.
Hmmmmm... no. I vote we stick with "qualjective." |
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