The problem with using this type of argument is that your personal experience is entirely unrelated to the experiences of others. The game you played was not the game that other people play.
Here's a question: How do you know that the bolded is the case?
Take, for example, your Bioshock story. You say that you got a great deal of fun playing in a particular style that created a unique experience and was fun for you, and that realizing it was a unique experience means you can't apply it to an overall impression of the game as a whole. But not only did the game allow and in some ways support your play style, to the point you apparently forgot that it was so different it would create a totally unique experience, but enough people who didn't play the game in that way (played it closer to the expected method by your reckoning) got a
great deal of enjoyment from it... enough, at least, that it's generally considered a critical and financial success.
If someone hands me an tool, tells me that it will cut down trees with a swiftness, and I then manage to cut down a great many trees with a swiftness you can imagine that I will be a bit leery of another person later coming up and telling me that the tool I used couldn't possibly be efficient enough to cut down trees with a swiftness and that my experience must be a fluke or edge case. Especially when I'm far from the only person using that tool and getting that result.
Or, for another approach: If someone tells me that, after examining it, my car can't possibly start because it's missing parts necessary for road travel and engine activation... well having driven it there, and
then driving it away, I will unavoidably be led to doubt the strengths of their position no matter how well-developed or otherwise convincing it may seem to be.
Does my personal experience have a greater weight than someone else's by default? Not at all. But is it immaterial by default? Hardly.
Despite this, I maintain that we should tell our stories. They are subjective, they represent only a single subjective perspective on the game in question, and they are not real arguments, but they should still be told. If you really did play a game for nine years, that could be a valuable thing for other people to know, especially if you go on to describe how you made that game work for all that time.
Totally agreed.
Anecdotes can be valuable as examples, but cannot be used as evidence to judge objective value or worth. The very thing that makes them interesting read, removes any weight that they might have. They are as varied as the people who experianced them.
It depends on the standards you use to judge worth. My primary metric of a product's worth is how much entertainment it gives me balanced against the time and effort put into it, so I quite often find that examining a person's experience with a product is more useful to me than any other information.
Basically I can entirely understand your position, but I think it needs to be recognized that not everyone sees the same qualities as important.
