On who's authority?
On the basic of simple psychology and game theory.
The most simple version (which you probably won't believe) is that games teach, and that good teachers don't just give people simple problems with a limited set of answers, but rather give users/players problems and give them a means for the user/player to discover their own way of solving said problems.
Watch_Dogs has the former, and so do many other "games". It's at this point they become meaningless simulations. This bothers me more than the minor and insignificant bugs do, even though they are entertaining to watch.
I'm probably sounding like a crackpot at this point and derailing the topic, so I'll stop, but hopefully you can kind of see where I'm coming from. Basically, I want to achieve things as a game designer, but currently the market is setting the bar so low that I won't have any credibility with the ideas I want to showcase.
EDIT: It doesn't help that this game had a pretty cool premise. Moral ambiguity in a world completely overrun by technology that everyone is synced to, which ultimately means it's extremely frail and prone to collapse at any second. Whether you want to believe it or not, I was once in love with this, but it wasn't too long after I got hands-on that I saw I wasn't going to get what I wanted and so I got some pretty major disappointment over it.
