Are bad games by definition low-scoring games?

[Rain Man]

I was pondering this in light of the alleged game last night.

We obviously had poor play by the offenses, and nobody crossed the goal line. It's hard to tell if the defenses were good or bad because the offenses were self-destructing without much work by the defenses.

Then we hear this morning in the media about other "bad games" in NFL history, and they're always games where a smattering of field goals was the only scoring.

So I have a two-part question based on that discussion.

First, if you have a game that ends up with a 59-48 score, either the offenses were completely dominant or the defenses were terrible. Is that a "bad game"? Or is a bad game solely the realm of bad offenses?

Second, if you have a game that ends up with a 12-9 score, is it always a bad game? Can you have a game where the defenses are amazing and they're shutting down adequate offenses? Is that a good game?

Last night's game was obviously bad, and after thinking about it, I've concluded that it was bad in large part because the two quarterbacks spent a lot of time chucking the ball into empty parts of the field or into the sidelines. Is that what's really the identifier of a bad game? I can kind of see that, because it's a non-productive play that probably wasn't the result of good defense and probably was the result of uncontested errors that essentially waste time.

What do you think? What's the driving force that makes a bad game a bad game?