One good rule of thumb for analysing entertainment is that millions of people can’t be wrong. Not that everything that is highly popular is brilliant - after all, lots of people buy Celine Dion CDs. But it is a good idea to keep in mind as insurance against the unproductive snobbery that immediately assumes that everyone who buys million-selling product X is an idiot. It is far more useful to ask ourselves what these popular but despised products have that seems to gratify so many people.

There is a reason, for instance, why grinning convict Jeffrey Archer sells so many books. The products (coaxed and rewritten into readable shape by many unseen hands) that bear the Archer brand, while being far from beautiful in a purely literary sense, are crammed with narrative suspense and surprises. That is what many bookbuyers want, and it is what too many fey “literary” novelists signally fail to provide. Archer, John Grisham, David Baldacci et al are hardly masters of stylish prose, but they deliver something else that most people want more.

Similarly, adults can sit around knowingly and sneer at the tweenies who send S Club 7 and Britney Spears to number one, but one evening a crafty DJ will put their record on in the club and they’ll dance their faces off, because the programmers behind S Club Party or Baby One More Time are evil techno geniuses who know exactly how to make a popular dance record that bypasses the judgmental intellect and works directly on the spinal column.

The same holds true in the field of electronic entertainment. No videogame becomes massively successful without having anything to recommend it. This view is anathema to that of the so-called “hardcore gamers” who regularly moan that the people who buy Who Wants to be a Millionaire? or Fifa football games or Tomb Raider, etc, are total morons, and what is worse, that they are actually ruining the industry.

But those games are not irredeemable garbage. In some respects they are superior to many videogames that are more widely admired among the cognoscenti. Now of course, the market isn’t always right. It was presumably commercial pressures that led the designers of Kengo: Master of Bushido to throw away what made Bushido Blade such a fascinating and unusual product - the tactical stances and one-hit kills - and turn it into yet another beat-’em-up with health bars and button-bashing combos. But let’s assume that the profitable franchises must be doing something right.

EA’s Fifa cash cow seems to have become a byword for all that is despicable about the mainstream videogaming culture. Sure, the unstoppable tsunami of Fifa “sequels” seems like a pretty cynical way to rob gamers of their cash once a year or more. And yet… Back in 1998, during the World Cup, my flatmate and I had many sessions of beer-fuelled videogaming football. We had a copy of ISS Pro, and we had a copy of World Cup 98. ISS, we agreed, was the beautiful game: it had better play dynamics, better controls. But despite that, we both fastened on to World Cup 98, and played that religiously for our thrice-daily fix.

Why? Because World Cup 98 had better atmosphere. It had better music, better crowd reactions, better commentary. It had the real World Cup teams (although the inclusion of Gazza among the England squad was a comical error). My flatmate and I could play England versus Argentina in advance, which we couldn’t do in ISS.

Great gameplay cannot succeed in a vacuum. And this works in two senses. Firstly the gameplay needs to be backed up within the game as a whole by ancillary production values, such as those that Fifa does so well. Consider gameplay as analogous to the role of the script in the cinema industry. A good script is a necessary condition for a good film. But it isn’t a sufficient condition. You also need good actors, good cinematography, good direction, and so on. Similarly, although gameplay is central to the success of a videogame, without good animation, good architectural design, a good control interface and good atmosphere, it cannot make a great product by itself. GT3 has highly playable driving physics, but what makes people’s jaws drop in HMV? What sells it? The replays. Dripping with non-interactive atmosphere. Contrarily, Freak Out has very interesting gameplay mechanics, but it lacks the rhythmic ebb and flow or the design variation that would make it a truly great game.

This isn’t the argument of a graphics tart. It is just as true for Tetris on Gameboy - which marries an intuitive HCI with crisp design and irritatingly great music - as for Jet Set Radio, which has perhaps the most consistently achieved audiovisual design aesthetic of any game in the last couple of years. Meanwhile, the multi-platform success of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? shows that the proper atmospheric package can afford to farm out most of the actual gameplay beyond the limits of the hardware itself. WWTBAM is a social game with the console or PC as scorekeeper, and so is no more contemptible than a Monopoly set. It certainly isn’t harming sales of NCL product.

Secondly, videogames don’t exist in a vacuum as cultural products, either. They are competing for our attention with other forms of media. So for something ostensibly modelled on the real world, such as a football or driving game, it helps to have some interpenetration between the facts of the real world and the facts of the videogame experience. Back in the old days, it was exciting just to see black stick figures running around a bright green pitch in Match Day. But these days gamers expect a more rounded audiovisual package for their £40. Rather than dismissing EA’s satisfied customers as cretins, we should demand a football game that marries the mechanics of Winning Eleven Five with the atmosphere of Fifa 2001. Then everyone can be happy.

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