The Dumbest Question

In retail, you get asked a lot of stupid questions. It's something you learn to deal with; you try not to laugh and you help the customer as best you can. However, it's not always easy to help customers with some of their dumbest, least thought out questions. Case in point (and a question I hear at least once, if not ten, times a day):

"What's the best game?"

This question infuriates me. It's like the people who ask me have no concept of subjective opinion. "Best" in video games is not an objective quality. If it were, my store's product presentation would make it blindingly obvious which games were best to buy, with a pricing scheme to match. In retail, when something is objectively the best, it costs more than the stuff like it that is not as good. When quality can be measured, price reflects that measurement.

If someone asks me "which is the best shooter?" I can at least produce an easy answer. When comparing similar types of games, one can make an objective statement of quality (or at least reflect my own subjective assessment as well as subjective reviews). But I am not often asked "what's the best shooter?" or "what's the best racing game?" This is retail, after all, and you can't expect to get off easy. Ever.

When I'm asked the dumbest question, "what is the best game?" I usually try to narrow down the kind of games the customer enjoys playing. This invariably fails. I get answers like "I don't know, action games" or "good graphics" or "with the animals." The problem is that most people who ask me the dumbest question are almost always buying the game for someone else. A word of advice: if you are buying games for someone and they didn't tell you what game they wanted, or you're buying it as a gift, buy them a damn gift card and save the both of us the unnecessary hassle of trying to figure out what game to get. Seriously, if you buy them a game you think they like, the odds are good that you're just going to have to return it when it turns out they either don't like it or already have it. Of course, if they open the game first... good luck returning it, sucker.

I think next time I'm asked "what's the best game?" I'm just going to ask how much they'd like to load on a gift card. See how that goes.