I think it's unreasonable to expect that even a masterpiece (which Bioshock is not) would appeal to everyone. Any creative work's impact is measured by its app

I think it's unreasonable to expect that even a masterpiece (which Bioshock is not) would appeal to everyone. Any creative work's impact is measured by its appeal to its core audience, who are often people who live and breath the medium or genre. For instance, one of my favorite movies is Kill! (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063186/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063186/), which is a brilliant and quite funny re-imagining of the samurai flick. It's a pretty good movie in its own right, but what makes it truly masterful is how it subtly twists the norms and tropes of its genre. These little touches are not aimed at a broad audience, they're aimed at people who are predisposed to like samurai movies, and have already seen a few dozen samurai movies in their life. That's not cheating, either, it's just knowing your audience and giving them what they want. As to the bad dialogue, voice-acting, etc. I think it's hard to break it down into anything so specific. A story is good if it allows you to suspend your disbelief. Bioshock didn't, but it wasn't necessarily because of any of the things you listed; you could just as easily have liked the game in spite of them. For instance, one of my favorite games of all time is Deus Ex, and it had absolutely laughable voice acting (check out http://ispeeeelmydreeenk.ytmnd.com/ http://ispeeeelmydreeenk.ytmnd.com/). Any great creative work is going to be more than the sum of its parts, and just because video games involve computers doesn't mean that they're somehow more quantifiable than painting or poetry.