One of the great things about the internet  – and let's be honest, there are many great things about the internet  – is that it is gradually shifting the burden of objectivity from media producers to media consumers.

Take game reviews as an illustrative example. Before the internet came about, the games press – then consisting almost entirely of monthly magazines – was obsessed with objectivity. Reviews in rags like CVG, NMS, and Super Play (as well as all the American ones I didn't read) would usually be accompanied by a jumble of numbers and graphs, each providing a precise qualitative assessment of some specific aspect of the game. For example:

Intro: 81
Graphics: 92
Sonics: 4.2%
Presentation: WIZACE!
Reviewer's Tilt (Right/Left): 45° Right

Overall:
77 RED
Cumslag wot innit! - Jezza

The (correct) assumption being that data, no matter how arbitrary and meaningless, makes reviews look like SCIENCE. And if the reviews in your magazine look like SCIENCE, then the readers of your magazine will be pleased, because it means they didn't pay 5-10 bucks to read opinions. Kids (as most readers were back then) don't want opinions. They want FACTS. They want to KNOW that Super Metroid is awesome, so that when they spend their pocket money renting it this weekend, they KNOW they aren't going to end up with a piece of shit.

Thankfully, the videogame media's enthusiasm for this sort of thing has decreased significantly in the last decade or so. There are holdouts of course, but by and large the numbers and graphs and so on have all but disappeared. Why? There are a couple of reasons.

The first is demographic: the people who read game mags as kids have grown up. We've grown up. We've found jobs and have disposable incomes. As such, it's not a huge deal when we buy (or rent) a shitty game because some dumb reviewer told us to. Annoying, yes, but nowhere near the world-ending tragedy that it was when we were kids. Basically, readers now are less invested in the objectivity of reviews, and the format has changed to reflect that.

The second reason is technological. 20 years ago (fuck I'm old), magazines were the only source of videogame news and reviews we had, and even then, only when we could afford them. Now, as you all know, it's a whole different deal. Experts estimate that there are roughly 30 trillion videogame websites on the internet that are both free to read and regularly updated. We're spoiled for choice, basically, and as a result we're not compelled to assign undue weight to any single source of information. Reviews have stopped being monthly decrees and have instead become more like voices in an ongoing conversation.

So where does this leave objectivity? Exactly where I said: in the hands of the consumer. In our hands. It's not "objectivity" in the empirical or logical sense of the term. It's more like the objectivity you get in ethics and aesthetics. It's consensus objectivity – if enough people whose opinions you typically share say something is good, then there's a better-than-average chance you'll agree. And that's it.

Not good enough for you? Tough cookies, mang. We're talking about videogames, not atoms and quarks and magnets and shit. So far as matters of taste are concerned, this is about as good as it gets.