Often when reading reviews, I tend to see that a lot of the time, it is the subjective experiences of the reviewers that determine the score of a game.  Some try to convince you that even though a game has some technical flaws, it makes up for it with something compelling either in narrative, gameplay, or in another area.  
 
I don't think they have the authority to rule out any technical flaw based on a subjective experience.
 
Most people seem to be under the impression that games in general are just as subjective as movies, music, books etc.  This is a false notion.
Most people think that a game is still good if it provides subjective experiences that will be good enough to ignore the bugs.  This is simplifying the medium too far.
 
A game is made up of two very distinct parts - The technical half, and the artistic half (for lack of a better name sorry).  All programs that perform functions are judged on how well they perform the tasks they claim to do, as well as the quality of the overall package.  For the most part, programs are easy to review without bias, because they either work well, or they don't.  Games, believe it or not, inherit this trait to some extent.
 
If a game works well, then the final review will be a subjective one, as the only thing that can make or break the interest of consumers is the feature set, narrative (if any), setting and artistic direction of said game.  No one can definitively call the game poorly-developed, though can fairly say that they are not happy with the feature set options, or subjective elements like narrative.  Even in the most extreme of situations where games seem to have unquestionably horrible characters, art direction, narrrative and/or setting, those variables are still within the realm of subjectivity, and isn't quantifiable by any possible means.
 
On the other side though, if a game was poorly made and is riddled with bugs or experience serious performance issues, we can objectively say that a game is poorly-made.  If there are problems with gameplay, there is no way to ignore it or see it in a nicer light.  Same goes for frame rate drops, incorrect values, poorly-calibrated control schemes, visual artefacts that were clearly not intentional, bugs that will hinder or even halt a player's progression, corruption of data, failure to retain a recent state of a player's current game, sound issues and many more that I can't think about right now.  An accumulation of these problems can greatly determine the quality of a game on this aspect of a game, and often enough it is poor quality control that will gaurantee a negative impact on a game. 
 
Most people may argue that bad forms of the subjective elements of a game will also guarantee a games demise.  I would then have to remind these people that no subjective element can ever "guarantee" anything.  They can be used to make a calculated guess, but guesses are hardly definitive in the first place, let alone these elements.  They were never able to guarantee, and they never will.  So many people rate Starcraft 2 so highly for being an excellent game, but in the end the only thing that can be gauranteed is that Starcraft 2 is a well-developed game at its core.  You cannot convince people who were never interested in RTS games to like Starcraft 2, simply because it isn't their cup of tea.  However they cannot deny that the game is polished and well-developed to the point that only subjective elements will determine whether or not it is worth their money.  I could say that I do not need chat rooms, but that is my subjective opinion that will differ to another person who might want the feature added.  The addition or removal of a feature does not affect the games overall performance and reliability to perform as best as possible to make the subjective experience an error-free one.
 
As games continue to evolve, there will be many more subjective experiences that will be made possible by the advances of technology, as well as the continuous push for innovation by creative minds.  These will result in many more discussions revolving about many topics, like artistic quality, questionable feature additions, removals or alterations, the dollar-per-hour debate and whether or not it is an acceptable line of thought for deciding the worth of a game, and many others.  As we explore these questions though, we must never forget.
 
Games are still programs, and they cannot be completely subjective until we can guarantee a level of quality in the technical aspects that will prevent any game issues from occurring in the future.  Theoretically, this is an impossible variable to keep constant, and thus there will always be a level of objectivity that will definitively separate good games from bad games to some reasonable extent.

" @ShiftyMagician: Great post - only a few typos! I would comment about the actual ideas you've presented, but it's not really relevant. "

" @ShiftyMagician: ...we don't reference these when talking about our subjective experiences of the movie (I mean I go to IMDB to read movie mistakes but I never notice them, and when I do I am rarely distratcted from my subjective experience), book or song (I do more with a song but I would argue that's a bad subjective experience as opposed to a technical flaw) so why do that to games? "

" @ShiftyMagician: Perhaps this question requires an answer of too large a scope, but how much do you find a knowledge of coding informs your reception of video-games? Does it provide useful criteria for judging a game's merits?  I was considering, out of interest in video-games generally and how they work, reading about the fundamentals of game design and coding, although my knowledge of mathematics isn't wonderful. "

Yeah then you have gamerankings and metacritic that is like a compass pointing in different directions. With more reviews, it goes from subjective, to statistical (even though most ppl don't like it or like being told what to like even if they sort of have bad taste in games. Look there are good games and there are great games, your confusing good games with great games if you disagree with AA scores) We know from the compass, treyarch can't make an AAA 90% and over gamerankings game this gen, neither can isominac. We know uncharted 2 and mass effect 2 are over 90%. With more reviews, you get statistics, I just want to stress the point. Even if you disagree, statistics becomes mathematics, the score becomes statistics if you ignore all the written words and look at the numbers.  
 
The technical side of programing is their responsiblity, let's say if you make a 3d movie and it doesn't work, or even normal movies, the special effects doesn't work, they shouldn't get a score on it, they should by quality control finish it. It's the same with videogames, that's what game testers are for.  
 
As an artist myself, I know art can be subjective like fine art and non subjective art is like commerical art where everything can be judge from skill and mistakes. The subjective side doesn't really make a difference when you have an audience and you want to be specific with their experience and make money from it, same with videogames.

I think you're kinda over simplifying things.

Sure, games are programs. But unlike other programs, they're first and foremost an entertainment medium. 
 
Programs like Word or Filezilla or Photoshop or Skype all have very specific purposes. If they don't work on a technical level, then they can't serve that purpose. They're broken. The only purpose a game has is to entertain - and what qualifies as entertaining is 100% subjective.   
 
I think any responsible reviewer should at least acknowledge a game's glaring technical flaws, but if they enjoyed the game despite those flaws, then a positive review is justified. 

As others have said, this is a great post. To play devil's advocate, though, you assume that poorly-designed equates to a poor game, even though that's not always the case. Take RDR or Oblivion, for example. They're not well-designed, leaking glitches out the ass, but somehow, the glitches don't detract from the game, most of the time. They can be funny random.

Another thing to keep in mind about technical problems is that they don't necessarily present on every playthrough - if a reviewer doesn't experience any bugs, they can't comment on them.  For example, RDR has a ton of strange glitches, but I never encountered any floating cowboys or donkey women in my game.  The only bugs I ran into were a scripting glitch in a side mission (the game wouldn't update my objective, so I had to restart), and one instance where background textures didn't immediately load.

I completely agree, this is something that I think about a lot. It kind of bugs me when people say reviews are opinions, and it kinda bugs me when reviews ARE opinions. 
 
Don't get me wrong, I completely understand that parts of games are going to be subjective, and that games will always rub reviewers either the right or wrong way sometimes. 
 
But the majority of the pieces to a game are technical that do have a quality level. Let's take graphics for example, this is pretty much not subjective at all. Even if it's an artistic game, and you'd make the argument "well whether or not you like the graphics to this game with an artistic edge is determined by your subjective opinion of the art style". True, to a small degree. But regardless of that, it should be judged by reviewers on its technical merrits. Are the textures blurry or not? Are the models high polygon (or if the art style is to not have that, does it work well?) Does the game run slow because of that? 
 
And so on. Games should be judged by reviewers (at least by high profile sites, obviously sites where you want to hear the actual persons opinion shouldn't be run this way) based mostly on their technical merrits. The graphics are either good or not. The control is either tight or it is not. The game either has a lot of content or it does not. The game either has good voice acting or it does not. The story is either well executed or it is not (Story is probably the most subjective, but again, either it is executed well or it isn't.) 
 
For example, I don't like JRPG games at all (minus chrono trigger which is my favourite game of all time, but other than that), but if you gave me a really good one and a really bad one, I'd know the difference and if I was a reviewer, I'd try my best to rate it purely on its technical merrits.