Finally a thread I can sink my teeth into.
My first argument as to what makes a good game is a good aesthetic.
Not even close. Doesn't even matter if it's the actual graphical capability or the art design. All a good aestatic can do, is improve an already good game, but aesthetic is not someone that actually makes a game good. If you have a crap game, but awesome aesthetic, people will describe your game with "The game looks good, BUT..." (Final Fantasy XIII is a good example of this).
Pong didn't have any sort of aesthetic. Neither did Pacman or Tetris. Yet, those games were amazingly succesfull, which suggests aesthetic does not make a good game.
As for Minecraft, I'm not sure I'd call this a specific aesthetic Notch chose. It seems more likely to me the "block design" was chosen because it was the most functional for how the game is supposed to work (which by the way, is the only job the graphics need to fulfill). Having a full HD Minecraft with perfect shapes AND a near endlessly generated world just wouldn't work. And this makes adding to the game much easier, since all blocks have the same basic template (you only need to make a new texture).
Let's talk characters.
Generally, people want to love their characters.
Do they really? Why do you think Link or Chrono don't actually talk? What about Samus (excluding Fusion and Other M)?
We want to be able to recall each character's personality vividly and expect how they're going to respond to each situation because of their character type. Delta Squad, Bad Co, Garrus, Price, Ezio, and John Marston, stand as characters that were crafted to be emotional, detailed, and emotionally attachable.
You know what personality I could relate to even better? How about my OWN. If you have all these *deep* and *complex* characters, you'll inevitable shift focus away from the game to those characters, making the game more like a movie than an actual video game. By not having these characterisations, a player can associate himself much more to the game as he plays it.
And to reference Extra Credits myself, you can still define a personality without having a single line of dialogue.
In Dead Space 2, Isaac was given a voice and more face time, a fantastic choice by Visceral.
I'm confused. You said how having a silent protagonist added to the game, yet you still think giving him a voice was a "fantastic choice" (which sounds like think the silent treament was a bad design choice).:S
Gameplay can be simple, like tetris or space invaders or Minecraft, and still be fantastic. Gameplay can be as complicated as Crysis, Total War, Civilization, or all those **** sports games I can barely play offensively in and still be fantastic.
Everyone of those games, except Crysis (then again I don't know sinc e I haven't played it), have one thing in common: Freedom of choice, by which I mean those games offer a variety of ways you can play it with all choices being acceptable. Let's take Civilization as an example: You can try and be very agressive and try to take over all the countries, or you can try a peaceful approach and win the game with scientific advancements. Both of those choices are ok and there's no right or wrong way to play the game.
Even in a simple game like Tetris, you have different kinds of strategies. Do I clear the rows 1-for-1, or do I wait for that I-Block to clear for rows at once, at the risk of screwing up?
So in essence, what makes those games good is that the personality of the player itself affects how they experience the game (which is also why open sandbox games like Fallout or Baldur's Gate are loved by players). By not designing your game around a specific player personality, you'll have a game that is much more accesible and therefore more enjoyable in general.
There's 2 more very important factors that make a good game: Simplicity and Replayability.
I'll start with the simplicity argument. Looking at how games have evolved over the past years, it's easy to see that games have become more and more complex. But is that really a good thing? Tetris and Minecraft prove you don't need super amazingly complex gameplay to be successful.
Shooters these days are very complex (with cover systems and all kinds of other additions) but look at
Doom, arguably one of the most important shooters ever. It's by no means a complex game. You don't even need to aim up and down. xD
Yet, Doom is a blast to play.
I'll even go so far as to say that making games more "simple" again, is a big reason for why the Wii was so massively successful. Even if someone never played a video game before, it's easy for them to start playing Wii Sports and the like.
You'll also notice that the same things works if you give them an old NES or SNES game.
It seems that somewhere along the way, a lot of games lost their simplicity which just makes it harder for non-gamers to get into them.
"Easy to play, hard to master" is a good keyword in that sense.
Now onto replayability, a term I'm sure I don't need to explain xP.
From personal experience, I notice that most modern games that I finish land on my shelve, never to be replayed again. Mind you, I'm talking about the main campaign. If a game has a good Multiplayer, I'll shift to only playing the game for it's Multiplayer and nothing else.
So why is it that lots of games lose their appeal after being completed once? It's because they lack replayability. A good game doesn't need to rely on its Multiplayer component to enhance replayability when the Singleplayer is something fun to go back to.
Again, most of the games you listed fit this description, with loads more being the ever-so-popular old-school games of yore.
So what can be done to increase replayability? I already mentioned one factor up above. Another would be to stop using cutscenes and generally relying on story to carry your game. Once you get rid of all the bloat (because once again the story should only server a functional purpose similar to graphics) you can go back to making games revolve around the more important things again.
I think there should be a distinction between stories similar to how you seperated aesthetics with actual graphics.
One being a "story", while the other is a "narrative". Look at something simple like Super Mario Bros. People often say Mario games have no story, but they DO. Granted it's the cliche "Hero rescues princess" scenario, but it's a story nonetheless. What Mario DOESN'T have is a narrative (with rising action, falling action, etc.). By the time you make your game focus on the narrative too much, you stop making a game and instead start making a movie.
And that's my massive thought wall.
To close off:
Duke Nukem's over-the-topness
...doesn't seem to help Duke Nukem Forever. ;D
