Hi Malstrom,
Your previous emailer asks whether the Backstreet Boys are better than Iron Maiden under the ‘sales = quality’ mantra. To quote their concerned comment:
(Backstreet Boys are) ” Better, according to you, than bands like Iron Maiden, who still goes on tours and preform in front of millions of pepole, sell millions of albums every year, yet, their grand total of albums sold is less than The Backstreet Boys?”‘
I must say I agree with your respose:
“The answer is that the people decide what is the quality of a product. We know it has value because people give something they have of value to get it (their money). If they didn’t value it, people wouldn’t be paying for it.”
The thing is, your view and that of the emailer don’t cotradict each other on that point. As the emailer writes, people still buy millions of Iron Maiden albums each year, still go to see them play live and listen to their old music. I highly doubt that Backstreet Boys cds sell that well in comparison after their few years of ‘fame’. So it would seem to me that under that definition, which you both agree on, if more people appreciate something then that indicates it is ‘better’.
(That said, I think it is trivial to argue over who is better over Michael Jackson, Freddy Mercury or Elvis etc. But I would expect they can sing better than you or else you may have to start another career!).
So the cliffnotes version is that if something is popular, it will sell, but if something is genuinely good and popular, it will keep selling for a long time. That works for both Iron Maiden, Queen, Michael Jackson, Tetris and Super Mario Bros.
We were absolutely not talking the same things. The entire premise behind the reluctance of letting ‘better sales mean better quality’ is the idea that ‘sales’ defines quality.
Ebert has said that video games are not art, e.g. are not quality in comparison to movies. But this was said about movies not being seen as quality compared to literature and stage plays. Movies became defined by quality due to sales. It was sales of movies that eventually made it into quality.
Television was also not seen as ‘quality’ compared to movies. What changed it was sales. People enjoyed watching TV. This meant TV had some sort of quality.
Personally, I don’t know why someone would like Just Dance. But I know it is a quality game because people keep buying it. It is of value to someone. It becomes quality to someone.
There is much about Human Nature we do not understand. Quality cannot be some fixed definition. If something sells and keeps selling, we re-define quality. This is why I mentioned Shakespeare and Mark Twain because their work was not considered quality in the idea but their works became massively popular, not after they were dead, but while they were alive.
However, there are many cases when a work sells very strongly during the present and is completely forgotten about later on. Why is this? Well, we know it was quality at that time period. But during the next time period, it wasn’t considered quality.
It is no different than a game selling because of its ‘awesome graphics’ back in 1990 only to be seen as ‘trash’ in 2010. What was considered quality graphics in 1990 is not quality graphics in 2010.
This is why it is best for video games to target Human Nature instead of targeting computer technology. When you target computer technology, the product becomes obsolete as soon as computer technology changes. But if you target Human Nature, it remains eternal because Human Nature never changes.
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