Backstage - OOC Forums
General Discussion => The Speakeasy: OOG/Off-topic Discussion => Topic started by: Kala on 13 Oct 2014, 03:13
-
So there's a few things that have come up tangentially that I'd like to discuss in more depth - as well as ideas that have been rattling around my brain. Hopefully avoiding anything too contentious or stepping upon the conversational landmine that is gamergate :) Can't really see the need to discuss gender, either. (though, y'know, say whatever you want to say if you think it's relevant)
(warning: I'm likely to get very nostalgic for the games of yesteryear) The main question:
:arrow: What is a game?
I think this has come up in the game journalism thread (in relation to Gone Home not being a real game and/or an example of corruption in the gaming press) and the depression quest thread (ending up with the same reasons) - and it's definitely come up elsewhere with 'casual' games not being 'real' games compared to 'hardcore' games.
So, as people who play them, how do we define them?
There's been some definitions offered so far in those threads; I think Lynn suggested something that had a win or lose state? I'll try and dig them up and copy pasta them below to springboard from. I know some of you work in the industry so definitely interested in the viewpoints of those who make them (as well as those who play them).
There are some tangentially related questions - is there a disparity between what games are and what they could be? How have they changed - how have our expectations changed? (we'll stay away from the 'who are they for' question if poss, as that ends up being controversial)
Some thoughts and definitions:
I'd have to go with TotalBiscuit's definition in that it needs to have a success and failure state. A way to win or lose, not simply completion. Everything else around it is up for grabs, within story-telling, mechanics, visuals and so forth. If you're just tapping away from point A through the alphabet to Z without the possibility to fail it's really not anything more than say a book with pretty pictures.
According to definition of a game, Dear Esther doesn't share the core of what a game is : something at which you can either win, or lose. Thus, it falls into the interactive media category I think.
I don't think that 'something at which you can either win, or lose' is by any stretch a good definition of 'game'. You can win or loose a knife- or gun-fight or even a war. These are no games, though. Interestingly enough Wittgenstein showed that there probably is no definitional 'core' to what it means to be a game.
I'm not sure how I would define it personally, other than I would want a definition as broad and all-encompassing as possible.
Even 'something you play' doesn't necessarily seem broad enough, as there are many games that seem like chores, that you continue engaging with because there's 'one more thing to do' rather than it being necessarily 'play' (MMO grind, I look at you).
Re: Depression Quest, simulation might be a better fit than game. It's like a depression simulator. But then, we have many simulators, flying, transport planning etc that are still considered games. Why not have a simulation of a mental illness and the difficulties that poses?
It has some pictures and music, but there aren't really graphics to speak of. But then again, MUDS don't have any graphics, either.
Sometimes maybe playing games, in the simplest sense, of amusement/pastime or "a competitive activity involving skill, chance, or endurance on the part of two or more persons who play according to a set of rules" doesn't seem to encompass my experience of video games. But 'exploring and interacting with virtual worlds and spaces' sounds a wee bit more pretentious than 'playing a game.' (as 'virtual world explorer' is more wordy than 'gamer') I think it might be closer to what I'm actually doing most of the time, though.
(Obviously mine needs work, as I basically said 'I'm not sure' and then ruminated :| )
-
Pixels.
(Couldn't resist. I have nothing of value to offer as it's 5am and I'm just not wearing my srs thnk hat).
-
A game is an interactive media where you come up with creative ways to inconvenience the antagonist. It is also something you can upload on Youtube to show off your creative ways of inconveniencing the antagonist. In the absence of an antagonist, it must allow you to create an antagonist of your own for your inconveniencing need. Also, the antagonist must attempt to inconvenience you with the same gusto as you in inconveniencing it. Both antagonist and yourself must be able to inconvenience each other until one of you falls over and breaks a leg as a result of the inconveniencing, resulting in defeat.
-
I'm the one who mentioned the implied failure state and I still stand by that. It's not unique to gaming, by any measure, but it is a vital component of a game or it's just not a game anymore. You couldn't fail at Dear Esther. At best you could stop playing and not finish it. You play a game and you can succeed or you can fail. If the only possible outcomes are completion or just not finishing it, then there's no game.
Visual novels aren't games, they're just electronic versions of a "novel" with some pictures. Dear Esther (to repeat the example) is pretty much the same except the pictures are a lot fancier and you can navigate them in 3D, with far less words involved. All this said, I loved Dear Esther. It was a great experience. I bought copies for friends just to get them to experience what I did. But I wasn't playing a game. I was "playing" a book with pretty graphics. A weird artsy fartsy movie I could navigate myself.
The thing is, I don't feel it's even remotely useful to push everything that's interactive in any way into the "games" definition. It makes the term useless, because you have no bloody idea what it's actually referring to. "Oh this is a "game". So. Do I get to do anything? Can I play this or am I just supposed to stare at a fucking mountain in space for hours on end?" It's better to have different terms for these things, because it doesn't make them any less worthwhile for those who enjoy them (like I loved Dear Esther) but it does make it much easier to differentiate between them. If I want a game, I want a game. If I want an interactive landscape, or an interactive story told, I'll look for those. It helps no one to call them all games.
You wouldn't call a movie a game if you had to hold W down to play it, or it just paused. Dear Esther (which I know I keep harping on about, but it's such a great example of these non-game games) is damn near exactly that.
I have yet to see any "required" features of a product fit gaming more than implied/direct failure states. It applies to every card game, board game, computer game etc etc that I would ever consider to be such and it's missing from every interactive media I would not call a game so TB hit the nail on the head with that one as far as I'm concerned.
-
So. Do I get to do anything? Can I play this or am I just supposed to stare at a fucking mountain in space for hours on end?"
So, do you agree that the space rocks should be able to crash into exhumers and break them in half?
-
I think there's a lot of overlap with comics here in some respects. Comics fundamentally are the juxtaposition of text and image on a page. The mechanics of that obviously don't dictate the content (more suggest what sorts of things will work better; e.g irony works great, as you can play with how the text and image contradict each other) - but there is this association that they have to be stupid, less literary, for children. The word 'comics' kind of harks back to the funny papers as an association. So 'graphic novel' became a term to try and show this, but ends up sounding horribly forced and pretentious. Comics is more inclusive and less snooty as a term...but still has that association that it's simplistic.
I think games have a similar stigma to comics attached; playing games is something that children do, before they have to grow up and face the serious adult world. Then we stop playing and start doing. I remember there was that hoohah a few years back on Fox News, as an example, of someone complaining sex in games was like showing porn to children (despite the fact she freely admitted she hadn't played the game - was it Mass Effect?) and the dev very patiently explaining how it wasn't. And the news people seemed genuinely shocked that games hadn't stayed in the 80s - that they weren't just pacman anymore; as if they turned away for five minutes and games had become this whole other thing. Which is a bit surprising for an industry so huge.
So, in a way, like comics I think games maybe isn't the right term, but 'virtual worlds' is as pretentious if not more so as 'graphic novel'; seems like trying too hard, or trying to ignore it's roots.
I wonder about games needing to have a win/lose state though - I can understand why; as in 'playing a game' much like chess - there is a competitive element, a way of keeping score. But then I wonder about MMOs - where it seems in the developers interests to prevent or prolong the idea of a win state, to keep the players interest in a continual loop (because to finish the game would be to lose interest and subscribers) - or games that have the ethos of 'the journey is the reward' where there is no real win state; or if there is, it doesn't seem like the key element (subjective). I'm thinking more sandbox than linear games, here.
But then again, the lose states in MMOs are there - you do die (with varying consequences). Getting resurrected, then (or cloned) seems like the equivalent of an arcade machine 'Do you want to continue? yes/no? 10...9...'. I'm just not sure you win. Or, perhaps, you have the ability to define your own win states; or at the very least, your own goals.
Which is also true of sandbox games. Certainly something entirely free-form like Minecraft - when you can get yourself and all your stuffs blown up (lose state), but you can't necessarily win - the point is just to make stuff. Playing it is winning, the journey is the reward. I think it's also true of the Elder Scrolls games to a degree - again, yes you can die, and you can win by completing the main quest (though it doesn't roll to credits) but essentially it's the same ethos - the journey is the reward. (and honestly, sometimes the main quest seems sort of tacked on for completionists more than The Point, but as I said, subjective).
So I think there are games where you have a win state, but it's self-defined. I also think, then, that perhaps you do have lose or win states; just that they are not overtly stated or have any...framework?
Back to Gone Home - Jim Sterling:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/jimquisition/9765-Its-Not-a-Video-Game (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/jimquisition/9765-Its-Not-a-Video-Game)
Where he talks about Gone Home (he doesn't actually seem to like it, "not something I would ever fall over myself to play again") and severely dislikes Dear Esther; but still thinks they should be termed video games.
He offers:
the modern definition of a video game is simply an electronic game that involves human interaction with a user interface to generate visual feedback on a video device; basically, you make it do things. If your interaction is compelling it to act and unfold, it's a video game.
(Which ends up being a fairly impassioned rant for broad definitions).
Just look at those who defend the likes of Dear Esther by saying 'you just don't get it, man' - they have failure states apparently, not dying in game, but apparently 'failing to comprehend their brilliance', I for one am ok with that being a failure state, one I don't think I'll ever fucking beat.
And he said that to point to people evidently being pretentious and elitist...but...
It perhaps depends on what the game is doing - i.e the point of it?
I'll admit that sort of was my (inner) response to seeing someone say this about Gone Home:
The game she has promoted the most is Gone Home, a game you can barely call a game because everything but interacting with objects is taken away from it. And all in all, it's just about runaway lovers having a homosexual twist to it - nothing really original about that.
Because what was the 'objective'- if you like, to Gone Home? You are the eldest daughter, coming back to a new house after a gap year. Your family are missing. There's a note that sounds worrying from your younger sister. It's pissing down with rain and the new house is creepy as shit. Your objective is to find out what's going on, find out what's happened to your family - as that character. I'd also suggest, as the player playing that character, a further objective might be to find out who you are and who they are.
Which is not overtly stated, really, at any point. But I think if you came away from Gone Home thinking it was 'just about runaway lovers having a homosexual twist', then you didn't fulfil most of those objectives. You played through the content, but you didn't really 'win' the game. You kind of failed it.
...And of course the same nebulous definitions of states not overtly stated could easily be applied to books (you failed Shakespeare because you didn't get it, man). But then again - these are fairly simple objectives; to find out stuff. It's not heavy or weighty literary material to be snobby about understanding or not. You just need to establish what happened, and what drove your disparate family members to do whatever it is they've done that mean they are not here.
And if you don't...is it the games fault? (should it have held your hand more, stated it's objectives more clearly, made things more obvious?) is it your fault? (for 'not getting it' - which, really, is a bit silly as people like what they like and that's all fine) or is it more down to expectation...? We expect certain things, so we proceed a certain way, whether they actually are or not?
(I'll carry on later on the point of changing expectations and how that may effect how we see games, as this is getting enormous :P But there's some points I want to make about how my personal expectations have changed over time; things bother me now that I used to see as normal e.g trying to figure out how to leave a room, or background scenery combining with foreground or it being difficult to tell what's interactable with... and also how, I think, certain ideas go out of fashion or because we have better technology to produce alternatives, for example, hand crafting things instead of procedurally generating them, and the effects - some unintended - that has on titles in the past compared to current ones; e.g elder scrolls, e.g x-com)
-
I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say. Let me just touch upon a few minor points though.
MMOs have implied failure states. You die. You fail at a task. You perform worse than your competitor/team-mate, whatever. You win when you attempt something and succeed. If you do better than someone else, etc etc. There are implied and direct failure/win states in games and in MMOs it's generally implied wins and direct failure states.
It also doesn't have to be the key element. It will very rarely be the key element in a game. Be it the story, the visuals, the crafting, the exploration, the precision platforming, the scorepoints, the stats going up once in a while, whatever... games usually have other elements we focus on as the key element we're enjoying, and in many cases you'll find two different people focusing on two different elements in the game as their own "key" element. However, if there is no implied or direct failure state involved, it still ceases to be a game. It's not key to the experience (like Dear Esther again is an example of. The experience is great.) but it's key to the definition.
I've never played Gone Home so can't comment on that, but I don't consider "not getting it" to be an implied failure state. That's just shit storytelling and a failure on the developer's part or the player. The failure state is not a part of the game as such. Again, Dear Esther did the same as a lot of people "didn't get it" but that's not a failure of the customer, and even if it were it wouldn't be a failure state of the game but of the player. You can "not get" a book but that doesn't make it a game. It makes it either a poorly written book or a dimwitted reader.
I don't quite see what you're trying to get at though.
-
Thanks for the replies so far, before I got out my, ahem, large one. Apart from Hav, your one sucked :P It's about 11am here, but I'm not well, so you get ALL MY THOUGHTS.
(http://data.archive.moe/board/a/image/1337/19/1337191787209.png)
PIXELS: NOT A GAME :P
A game is an interactive media where you come up with creative ways to inconvenience the antagonist. It is also something you can upload on Youtube to show off your creative ways of inconveniencing the antagonist. In the absence of an antagonist, it must allow you to create an antagonist of your own for your inconveniencing need. Also, the antagonist must attempt to inconvenience you with the same gusto as you in inconveniencing it. Both antagonist and yourself must be able to inconvenience each other until one of you falls over and breaks a leg as a result of the inconveniencing, resulting in defeat.
Heh :)
Re: being antagonised and inconvenienced, though, can the level or game world itself produce that, or do you require an npc?
And different game modes where you can't create an antagonist? (I'm thinking like, Minecraft on creation mode). I think in MMOs the other players are always antagonists, even if they can't have any direct way of hurting you. Pick up groups are almost entirely a massive pain the arse resulting in inconvenience and defeat :evil:
I'm the one who mentioned the implied failure state and I still stand by that. It's not unique to gaming, by any measure, but it is a vital component of a game or it's just not a game anymore. You couldn't fail at Dear Esther. At best you could stop playing and not finish it. You play a game and you can succeed or you can fail. If the only possible outcomes are completion or just not finishing it, then there's no game.
You both did :) I think I quoted you first in the OP, but I didn't put who the quotes were from in the quote heading as I'm...not very good at that >.>
The Jimquisition thing mentions Dear Esther (he hates it) but he also comments by that criteria Animal Crossing isn't a video game either (yet is normally considered one) as there's no way you can fail or die at it.
Visual novels aren't games, they're just electronic versions of a "novel" with some pictures. Dear Esther (to repeat the example) is pretty much the same except the pictures are a lot fancier and you can navigate them in 3D, with far less words involved. All this said, I loved Dear Esther. It was a great experience. I bought copies for friends just to get them to experience what I did. But I wasn't playing a game. I was "playing" a book with pretty graphics. A weird artsy fartsy movie I could navigate myself.
Hm. Novels don't generally have pictures, though :) Comics do, but not interactable, and films could produce 3D worlds, but again, not ones you navigate yourself. I guess an electronic choose-your-own adventure picture book would be closest to some of them? (as I think someone said in the previous thread). But then again, while that covers some of the...choice making mechanisms, you still do not actually have the ability to physically explore the world you inhabit in those books.
(as you don't in a lot of things that could be termed electronic novels...like games made in twine where you're fundamentally selecting words on a background, but you do in Dear Esther)
Re: your last point - so aside from win or lose states, the 'playing' as an action is a criteria for being a game? Also I think "A weird artsy fartsy movie I could navigate myself." sums it up really nicely, but I'm unsure of any other medium, besides games, where you could navigate yourself...? Also, can games not be artsy fartsy?
The thing is, I don't feel it's even remotely useful to push everything that's interactive in any way into the "games" definition. It makes the term useless, because you have no bloody idea what it's actually referring to. "Oh this is a "game". So. Do I get to do anything? Can I play this or am I just supposed to stare at a fucking mountain in space for hours on end?" It's better to have different terms for these things, because it doesn't make them any less worthwhile for those who enjoy them (like I loved Dear Esther) but it does make it much easier to differentiate between them. If I want a game, I want a game. If I want an interactive landscape, or an interactive story told, I'll look for those. It helps no one to call them all games.
No, I do see what you're saying when you want clarity. That's perfectly valid. It's just the question then becomes, if they aren't games (and aren't comics, films, movies, books) then what are they?
And is it a question of pushing everything interactive into a games definition, or wanting to separate interactivity into a definition outside of games? Again, in the Jimquisition thing, he talks about how some of the makers of these...products? don't actually want to classify themselves as games, they want to hold themselves to some kind of higher standard. To be something separate in order to be 'artsy fartsy'. Which very much reminds me of the 'comics' vs 'graphic novels' thing.
You wouldn't call a movie a game if you had to hold W down to play it, or it just paused. Dear Esther (which I know I keep harping on about, but it's such a great example of these non-game games) is damn near exactly that.
Is it? I'll admit I've only seen it played, rather than played it myself. But I'm pretty sure you direct where the character goes in Dear Esther, he is the avatar through which you explore your surroundings and decide the order in which you do things and what you interact with. Which is more than holding down a button while a movie runs.
I actually suspect that might be a criteria for my definition of games... something where you have some form of agency in the world and it's surroundings that other mediums do not allow. An element which is not passive.
(It's also the key reason why Wan hated Final Fantasy - too many cut scenes you just click through, I think he certainly considered that...if not 'not a game' then not in the spirit with which he views games - or how games should be. Though it's certainly how a certain type of game used to be - to quote someone else, "Remember when 'lots of FMV cutscenes' was a reason to buy a game? 'Skippable cutscenes' weren't a thing, because who in the world would want to skip, like, the best parts?" My FF7 case boasts 'over 120 minutes of mind-blowing cinematic sequences').
-
I wish there was an application for "das raciss" here, but sadly there isn't.
However, I concede that pixels: not a game. Pixels: srs bsns.
-
@ Miz again
I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say. Let me just touch upon a few minor points though.
No worries, neither am I a lot of the time. That's why it tends to get a bit rambley.
MMOs have implied failure states. You die. You fail at a task. You perform worse than your competitor/team-mate, whatever. You win when you attempt something and succeed. If you do better than someone else, etc etc. There are implied and direct failure/win states in games and in MMOs it's generally implied wins and direct failure states.
Sure, but the key word you are using there is implied. There are no overt game overs (though, as you say, and as I said, there are the equivalents). Likewise, there is no overt completion of the game - you can win when you attempt things and succeed, but that seems to come in two flavours; direct goals such as quest completions (which are more overt) to complete, or goals you set yourself.
So to extend a bit from that - if the win/fail states can just be implied (and not directly stated) - how obvious or subtle do they need to be to qualify? Same sort of thing when you set the goals yourself (as in EVE - or well, before agent missions became a thing anyone cared about anyways).
Which is a bit what I'm getting at with the 'not getting it' bit. And yes, you're quite right in that 'not getting it' is either a failure of the developers (as your example, shit storytelling) or a failure of the player (as your example, dimwitted player) - but can you not have an implied but not stated win/lose criteria on a narrative basis? For example, the implied win objective to discover something - and if you reach the end of the content without discovering it as a player, it's an implied lose state.
...Which does have the elitist pitfall that there is only one correct way of seeing or doing something, mind.
-
...If I'm honest, not on a technical level or any kind of working definition that's useful, but I kind of see (some) games as akin to lucid dreaming.
By which I mean having direct control in an imaginary world that behaves as if it were real (by whichever internal logic, including dream logic).
I don't think anything else can really offer that, not that I can think of off-hand anyways. And some games are more on-the-rails than others, obvs. But you still direct things, can move freely within that space, etc?
But I'm aware that's a bit of an esoteric slant on things :P
-
I'm the one who mentioned the implied failure state and I still stand by that. It's not unique to gaming, by any measure, but it is a vital component of a game or it's just not a game anymore. You couldn't fail at Dear Esther. At best you could stop playing and not finish it. You play a game and you can succeed or you can fail. If the only possible outcomes are completion or just not finishing it, then there's no game.
You both did :) I think I quoted you first in the OP, but I didn't put who the quotes were from in the quote heading as I'm...not very good at that >.>
The Jimquisition thing mentions Dear Esther (he hates it) but he also comments by that criteria Animal Crossing isn't a video game either (yet is normally considered one) as there's no way you can fail or die at it.
You can't die, but you can certainly fail. You can aim for a goal (enough this to pay for that or get a particular fish or bug or whatever the hell) and not reach it. Don't get me wrong, it's a horrendously shitty game, but it's a game nonetheless.
Visual novels aren't games, they're just electronic versions of a "novel" with some pictures. Dear Esther (to repeat the example) is pretty much the same except the pictures are a lot fancier and you can navigate them in 3D, with far less words involved. All this said, I loved Dear Esther. It was a great experience. I bought copies for friends just to get them to experience what I did. But I wasn't playing a game. I was "playing" a book with pretty graphics. A weird artsy fartsy movie I could navigate myself.
Hm. Novels don't generally have pictures, though :) Comics do, but not interactable, and films could produce 3D worlds, but again, not ones you navigate yourself. I guess an electronic choose-your-own adventure picture book would be closest to some of them? (as I think someone said in the previous thread). But then again, while that covers some of the...choice making mechanisms, you still do not actually have the ability to physically explore the world you inhabit in those books.
(as you don't in a lot of things that could be termed electronic novels...like games made in twine where you're fundamentally selecting words on a background, but you do in Dear Esther)
Well it is a "new" medium so we just have approximate comparisons. TV is just like radio, except with pictures! It's really nothing like radio, but it's what we have to compare it to. Same with virtual experiences and books, etc. I won't define Dear Esther as a book, but that doesn't mean it falls into the games category either.
Re: your last point - so aside from win or lose states, the 'playing' as an action is a criteria for being a game? Also I think "A weird artsy fartsy movie I could navigate myself." sums it up really nicely, but I'm unsure of any other medium, besides games, where you could navigate yourself...? Also, can games not be artsy fartsy?
Of course games can be artsy fartsy, but they still need the implied failure state to qualify as games. Being artsy fartsy does not a game make. I would be careful adding "playing" as a criteria without some modifiers though, because you play a movie or a soundtrack too. Interaction is a better word. It doesn't make it a game to interact with it, but if you don't it's not a game. So, so far we have two criteria: Interaction and implied or direct failure and/or win states.
The thing is, I don't feel it's even remotely useful to push everything that's interactive in any way into the "games" definition. It makes the term useless, because you have no bloody idea what it's actually referring to. "Oh this is a "game". So. Do I get to do anything? Can I play this or am I just supposed to stare at a fucking mountain in space for hours on end?" It's better to have different terms for these things, because it doesn't make them any less worthwhile for those who enjoy them (like I loved Dear Esther) but it does make it much easier to differentiate between them. If I want a game, I want a game. If I want an interactive landscape, or an interactive story told, I'll look for those. It helps no one to call them all games.
No, I do see what you're saying when you want clarity. That's perfectly valid. It's just the question then becomes, if they aren't games (and aren't comics, films, movies, books) then what are they?
A new genre of media. Interactive Experience, Virtual Experience, whatever. We haven't come up with a good name for it yet, but that doesn't mean lumping them in with games is a good idea.
And is it a question of pushing everything interactive into a games definition, or wanting to separate interactivity into a definition outside of games? Again, in the Jimquisition thing, he talks about how some of the makers of these...products? don't actually want to classify themselves as games, they want to hold themselves to some kind of higher standard. To be something separate in order to be 'artsy fartsy'. Which very much reminds me of the 'comics' vs 'graphic novels' thing.
I don't necessarily see it as being about a higher standard as much as about a different standard. It's not quite the same as with graphic novels and comics though, as both of those are the same medium but different genres. Interactive Experiences as I prefer calling them are different media than games, as far as I'm concerned.
You wouldn't call a movie a game if you had to hold W down to play it, or it just paused. Dear Esther (which I know I keep harping on about, but it's such a great example of these non-game games) is damn near exactly that.
Is it? I'll admit I've only seen it played, rather than played it myself. But I'm pretty sure you direct where the character goes in Dear Esther, he is the avatar through which you explore your surroundings and decide the order in which you do things and what you interact with. Which is more than holding down a button while a movie runs.
I actually suspect that might be a criteria for my definition of games... something where you have some form of agency in the world and it's surroundings that other mediums do not allow. An element which is not passive.
Again we run into the problems of comparing a new medium with older ones. You can't be entirely accurate about it. Yes, there is more to it than just holding down W but you're not actually having an effect on anything. You're just moving along preset paths hearing preset triggers. You can't fail, you can't win, you can just complete it. A through Z.
(It's also the key reason why Wan hated Final Fantasy - too many cut scenes you just click through, I think he certainly considered that...if not 'not a game' then not in the spirit with which he views games - or how games should be).
No comment, really. Final Fantasy certainly qualifies as a game, but the latest iterations are certainly shit games.
Sure, but the key word you are using there is implied. There are no overt game overs (though, as you say, and as I said, there are the equivalents). Likewise, there is no overt completion of the game - you can win when you attempt things and succeed, but that seems to come in two flavours; direct goals such as quest completions (which are more overt) to complete, or goals you set yourself.
So to extend a bit from that - if the win/fail states can just be implied (and not directly stated) - how obvious or subtle do they need to be to qualify? Same sort of thing when you set the goals yourself (as in EVE - or well, before agent missions became a thing anyone cared about anyways).
Which is a bit what I'm getting at with the 'not getting it' bit. And yes, you're quite right in that 'not getting it' is either a failure of the developers (as your example, shit storytelling) or a failure of the player (as your example, dimwitted player) - but can you not have an implied but not stated win/lose criteria on a narrative basis? For example, the implied win objective to discover something - and if you reach the end of the content without discovering it as a player, it's an implied lose state.
I can't really point at a certain threshold and say "This is where it goes from implied failure state to not a game", but that's a problem with damn near all definitions. I can link you an image where there's text going from red to blue but pointing out which letter is the exact transition between red and blue is pretty much impossible. (The point of the image is actually demonstrating gradual evolution, but hey) But we certainly can define red and we can define blue. We'll have fuzzy borders between a lot of things in any media, be it music, video, writing etc but we still use the various media definitions because they're really useful.
Setting the goals yourself is all well and good, but if you can't fail but instead just stop moving towards the goal, it's no longer a win/lose state, implied or not.
The lucid dreaming bit gets so vague and all-encompassing that I feel it becomes completely useless as a definition of anything to be honest. That would simply be "Interactive Media". Under that you have "Games" (implied failure states, interaction) and "Interactive Experience" (no implied failure states, just completion. Interaction.) and more esoteric stuff like those websites where you create music videos by drawing a frame or three and it's slotted in with the drawings from other people on the websites, all coming together in a music video etc.
I think one of the main things here is that many are trying to make Games the top of the definition pyramid and then just set out genres underneath it, like Music is the top of the definition pyramid with genres (metal, classical, pop) underneath and subgenres (death metal, viking metal as examples) underneath that again. This isn't the right way of thinking about it, I think. Games fall under the Interactive Media bit of the definition pyramid, which itself falls under just Media. Next to it we get the Interactive Experience, with its own subgenres (Staring at mountains sim. 3D audiobook exploration with graphics, etc).
-
Heh :)
Re: being antagonised and inconvenienced, though, can the level or game world itself produce that, or do you require an npc?
And different game modes where you can't create an antagonist? (I'm thinking like, Minecraft on creation mode). I think in MMOs the other players are always antagonists, even if they can't have any direct way of hurting you. Pick up groups are almost entirely a massive pain the arse resulting in inconvenience and defeat :evil:
In Minecraft survival mode, the antagonist is the game itself. It's rigged to ensure your ultimate inconvenience and defeat. The objective thus is to delay defeat and frustrate the game's attempt to defeat you.
In Minecraft creation mode, well, it's not a game. It's just playing around.
-
Minecraft creation mode does have the implied failure state of trying and failing to create/build what you want. Fucking redstone, man.
-
Minecraft creation mode does have the implied failure state of trying and failing to create/build what you want. Fucking redstone, man.
Therefore the game has inconvenienced you, making the game the antagonist, proving once and for all that it's a game.
Also, despite all the enemies, I have always considered the real antagonist of all platforming games to be the games themselves. The game's level is designed to have you fall into a death trap or several.
-
Which is an implied failure state. I don't really think you need an antagonist though. It'd broaden the antagonist definition too much. Just because something's frustrating it's not necessarily antagonistic. There's no antagonist in Animal Crossing for instance. There's inconvenience, there's tedium etc but calling them antagonists sort of makes the antagonist definition too broad and useless just like using "game" as the overall definition for all these interactive experiences broadens that to the point of uselessness.
-
Which is an implied failure state. I don't really think you need an antagonist though. It'd broaden the antagonist definition too much. Just because something's frustrating it's not necessarily antagonistic. There's no antagonist in Animal Crossing for instance. There's inconvenience, there's tedium etc but calling them antagonists sort of makes the antagonist definition too broad and useless just like using "game" as the overall definition for all these interactive experiences broadens that to the point of uselessness.
Eh, in Animal Crossing every NPC ever is an antagonist. In Harvest Moon the weather system and the field is your antagonist. So long as there is something giving you problems and potentially making you fail, that thing is your antagonist. It can even be the game itself. It's always the game itself.
Yes, I play a game so I can stick it to the game.
-
And all in all, it's just about runaway lovers having a homosexual twist to it - nothing really original about that.
And all in all, Mass Effect is just about a testosterone terran hero saving the galaxy - nothing really original about that.
And all in all, Zelda is just about a male teenage hero saving the princess that got kidnapped by a bad guy - nothing really original about that.
etc. etc.
Just crawling out of my hole to say that I find that commentary you quoted ludicrously stupid in itself, because tastes and all that. :)
So yes, I agree anyway.
-
I guess I define it similar to TB or Lyn, in that I feel that a game has a definite end that the player works toward achieving. The software (or ruleset in a board game) determines the mechanism for achieving that end, while also providing obstacles and variables which provide a challenge that enhances the sense of accomplishment when the end is achieved. It is also possible to fail to achieve that end, a possibility which further reinforces the value of the achievement, driving the desire to repeat play.
This is why I see KSP as a game, but EVE as a tool, in the same way that I see CandyLand as a game, but Mage: the Ascension as a tool. EVE and Mage provide a mechanism by which actions may be taken in an imaginary environment, but the uncertainty introduced by the 'troupe' and the ambiguity of any achievable end create a distinct division from the binary nature of a game.
-
Well it is a "new" medium so we just have approximate comparisons. TV is just like radio, except with pictures! It's really nothing like radio, but it's what we have to compare it to. Same with virtual experiences and books, etc. I won't define Dear Esther as a book, but that doesn't mean it falls into the games category either.
Well, it's not just comparisons for like-for-like, it's more for the distinctions. We can say 'this is x because it contains y' and we can say 'this is not x because it contains z (or doesn't have y)' There are things each medium can do that another can't, which dictates (to some degree) which medium to use or what content would be more suited.
Books (novels, scripts, short stories) are words on a page, you read the pages to produce the image in your minds eye.
Radio is sound, and can utilize music, sound effects and dialogue, but the 'action' (e.g from a radio play) is produced in your head. It's a bit like a cross between television and a novel in this regard.
Television and film are moving pictures (and now we don't have silent movies, with sound) that produce the images for you.
Comics are the juxtaposition of pictures and words arranged in panels to direct how you read it. It's a bit like a cross between books and film in this regard (you have words, and pictures are depicted in a similar way film uses camera angles, so it's a bit like a film reel, but it doesn't move for you).
Games...? Games can produce images, and words, and sound but we direct those things - to a degree, or interact or move through them in a unique way that no other medium shares. We are not passive, we are not simply receiving information, we are an active participant.
So that becomes a key feature for me, with games, because it's the thing it does that the others can't. It's the unique feature of it, in terms of a narrative form anyways.
If I want a game, I want a game. If I want an interactive landscape, or an interactive story told, I'll look for those. It helps no one to call them all games.
But games take place in interactive landscapes, and their stories are told in interactive ways; to me that is the key feature that games have an other mediums don't. I take your point that without an implied failure or win state they would not be games, but an implied fail or a goals you set yourself that you could either achieve or not, are also broad enough to encompass almost anything. As is Elmund Egivand's suggestion that something must inconvenience or annoy you, when the very level design itself can do that.
I don't necessarily see it as being about a higher standard as much as about a different standard. It's not quite the same as with graphic novels and comics though, as both of those are the same medium but different genres.
...Are they? :) I think they're mostly interchangeable terms.
I mostly saw it as a marketing gimmick to make comics more sound literary. F.ex Sandman had collective volumes bound together and then called 'a graphic novel'. But before then, they were released in a monthly issues. (and, initially, in terms of genre, more of a horror comic and later turned into something else).
If you talked to Gaiman, though (who I'm referencing again >.>) he would say he wrote comics. I seem to recollect Alan Moore being a bit snooty about the 'graphic novel' term as well. Wiki describes it as "an American comic book series written by Neil Gaiman and published by DC Comics," whereas Norman Mailer described Sandman as a "comic strip for intellectuals".
So there is, really nothing different about a graphic novel than a comic - in that it can be any genre really, and is still the same medium, other than one is defined for the riff raff and the other one is for 'intellectuals'.
Which, I think, is also what would happen in a similar way if you had a clear cut distinction between 'game' (comics) and 'artsy fartsy movie where you interact' (graphic novel). I think you'd end up saying less about how the medium works, and more about who the game is deemed to be for.
No comment, really. Final Fantasy certainly qualifies as a game, but the latest iterations are certainly shit games.
:P Well, subjective (though I wouldn't disagree).
I'll bring up how much games, and our expectations of them, have changed over time later though, as I think that's a really important factor for how we view what a game is now (or what a game should be, in order to qualify).
But we certainly can define red and we can define blue. We'll have fuzzy borders between a lot of things in any media, be it music, video, writing etc but we still use the various media definitions because they're really useful.
We'll have purple!
And yes, also I think fuzzy borders are where the interesting things can happen.
But yes, I think we can define different mediums (well, my definitions are somewhere at the top of the page there in bold) though there's overlap in both form and content. It's just when we're defining games based on implied win or lose states, and unable to draw the line of where those are, it could get a bit...hair splitty? as to what is deemed a game and what isn't. When we already know it's not anything pre-existing (an old medium), and then have to create a new term. (though your suggestion is a really interesting one).
Setting the goals yourself is all well and good, but if you can't fail but instead just stop moving towards the goal, it's no longer a win/lose state, implied or not.
...Isn't it? If you couldn't progress either due to difficulty or lack of interest it sounds like an implied fail to me? (just not an overt one where the game says it is). I mean, I can understand winning or losing because the game signifies it overtly in some way - by completing the game, or game over, for example. I can also understand overt goals the game has set in place - completing a quest, defeating a boss, or failing those things.
But if we're moving outside of what the game specifically says are wins or fails, and going with both goals you set yourself (which could be anything) or implied wins or losses (which is extremely broad). Such as an implied but not overtly stated or mandatory objective (find out this) and getting to the end of the game and not having found that out.
In your Animal Crossing example (which I haven't played) you said:
You can't die, but you can certainly fail. You can aim for a goal (enough this to pay for that or get a particular fish or bug or whatever the hell) and not reach it.
Is that not the same?
The lucid dreaming bit gets so vague and all-encompassing that I feel it becomes completely useless as a definition of anything to be honest.
Oh yes, clearly. I admitted that does not work as any kind of a definition ;)
That part was more exploring how I felt about games, and their uniqueness, compared to other mediums. How they behave, what they allow you to do. To articulate that, lucid dreaming was the comparison I used.
Because regular dreaming, you're on rails - however absurd things are, you rationalize them away, and you watch yourself doing whatever your doing with no control over it. (In that way, dreams are like films).
But when you realize you're dreaming, and don't wake up, you can grasp control and agency of your dream. Which is when it becomes like a game; as you can explore your dream world, change it, interact with it, create within it.
Basically, yes, I do want to define what make a game 'a game' to different people - but it doesn't have to be purely functional working definitions, people are free to discuss how games make them feel, how they are special to them, etc and explore ideas. That was one of mine :P (quite possibly because lucid dreaming was something I did as a kid, and never got back).
A new genre of media. Interactive Experience, Virtual Experience, whatever. We haven't come up with a good name for it yet, but that doesn't mean lumping them in with games is a good idea.
[...]
Interactive Experiences as I prefer calling them are different media than games, as far as I'm concerned.
[...]
That would simply be "Interactive Media". Under that you have "Games" (implied failure states, interaction) and "Interactive Experience" (no implied failure states, just completion. Interaction.) and more esoteric stuff like those websites where you create music videos by drawing a frame or three and it's slotted in with the drawings from other people on the websites, all coming together in a music video etc.
I think your pyramid idea is an interesting one - where instead of 'types of games' we would say 'types of interactive media' and form larger groupings. Because one of the things I find difficult when people say "this isn't a game, it's an interactive experience" is that games are interactive experiences! So the pyramid idea still acknowledges that aspect of games and doesn't try and make that artificial distinction.
Also, many of the things I've read lately, say 'this is not a game!' as an equivalent of saying 'this is not what I'm used to, and I don't like it'. What they are essentially saying is, this isn't good enough to be a game. As you say, therefore it seems they would like 'proper' games to be at the top of the pyramid, and more 'experimental artsy games' to be far on the fringes by comparison. Your concept avoids this by having 'Interactive media' as a catch-all term that games that fit a criteria are included within.
The only thing is, the criteria of interactivity and implied win/fail states as 'a game' does still seem very broad. But I'm quite happy with broad definitions and fuzzy lines, really.
What could trouble me is the connotation, as with graphic novels and comics, that one is for intellectuals and one not when there's so much potential overlap between 'game' and 'interactive experience', though. (Though honestly, it's not like we don't already have that social divide to some degree, either from people being deliberately pretentious about their 'interactive experience' and not wanting to call it a game, or others saying games cannot or should not be art either due to limitations of the medium or because they aren't interested in that. It's whether or not the labelling of that distinction would make it more pronounced).
-
This is why I see KSP as a game, but EVE as a tool, in the same way that I see CandyLand as a game, but Mage: the Ascension as a tool. EVE and Mage provide a mechanism by which actions may be taken in an imaginary environment, but the uncertainty introduced by the 'troupe' and the ambiguity of any achievable end create a distinct division from the binary nature of a game.
That's really interesting.
Would you mind elaborating a bit on the distinction between game and tool there?
So it's that EVE and Mage give you the tools to construct an experience for yourself (hence the ambiguity), whereas games already provide it in a binary nature (which has a closed ending to the narrative)?
Would that also make any sandbox game (rather than linear games) in general tools?
-
EVE is a game, we play it. I really do not understand people that try to define games as something else.
Chess is a game, but there are people that take it incredibly seriously. As it is with many other games. Game ≠ Frivolous.
-
I define a game as something very simple.
A game is something the connects with the mental concept of play.
Play is in and of itself a "tool" -- practice for RL actions without having to deal with the RL consequences. But it is that distinction -- that in general play does not have strong life changing impacts within the context of the game (ex. playing House doesn't make you a "mommy" or "daddy" forever, only for as long as you are playing the game, playing army doesn't mean you're literally killing people or being killed), but can train you on some level for those activities.
In a more poetic sense, a game is a "life practice" dream while awake. One the 'dream sequence' is over, the game is over.
As serious as one takes their play or not, it does not change the definition of play or the games we play.
-
Yeah, I quite like the 'games as playing' - as in trying on imaginary roles and experiencing things through that.
Some are arguably more 'play' than others, but yeah, however seriously it's taken (or presents itself) that is what you're doing in the imaginative sense in every game I can think of.
Which shifts the definition from what the game might contain mechanically, to how you use it.
-
...So the other thing that's been rumbling around my head is how our understanding and expectations of games may have changed over time.
Because I've heard people saying 'Gone Home' either is not, or barely qualifies as a game, due to the lack of action. I.e in terms of the mechanics of how you play, you are essentially moving around a house and clicking on objects.
But this makes me wonder - have they not heard of point-and-click adventure games? Discworld, return to zork, day of the tentacle, monkey island, broken sword...etc? Because I think there's a nod to that bygone era there. Maybe they missed that era entirely and that's simply their first exposure to a game like that - which is entirely missing whole elements they have come to associate with (modern) games. Therefore barely a game due to the comparative lack.
I think things come in and out of fashion, as well. I was reading this article http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/10/10/labyrinths-deep-in-the-dungeons-of-daggerfall/ (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/10/10/labyrinths-deep-in-the-dungeons-of-daggerfall/) comparing dungeons in dark souls and daggerfall. I quite liked this:
The entrance to each is like the door to a Lewisian wardrobe leading to a delirious new world.
Daggerfall’s incidental dungeons are chaotic, preconfigured as part of the game’s data but assembled pseudo-randomly from a cluster of components.
and this:
The layouts can be frustrating, particularly when a quest object is in a distant corner, separated from the entrance by flooded passages and spaghetti junctions, but there has been nothing quite like those ominous charnel labryinths before or since. I find it a shame that their unnerving perplexity is caught up in a fantasy RPG – albeit one that is itself unusual and superb – rather than a Lovecraftian property akin to Eldritch, where the confusion and anguish that the dead-ends and dead spaces create would be thematically appropriate.
I think randomly generated stuff was more of a feature in old games - perhaps because it was just too hard to design everything from scratch in them days (?). Certainly in Daggerfall, with the 'faceless crowd' NPCs, it would've been too intensive to hand craft them all, give them their own dialogue etc - they were too vast.
So with later iterations - Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim - we got handcrafted dungeons (well, caves in Morrowind mostly) on a much smaller scale and NPCs that had their own unique names, lives, identity and dialogue.
Which in some ways makes the world more, and in some ways makes it less.
I think the thing ultimately, with the randomly generated stuff (and mobs not scaled to you in terms of difficulty) is the risk and the fear of the unknown - you don't actually know what you're going to get. Same with the remake of X-Com, which I very much enjoyed, mind. But in making it more handcrafted and linear rather than random - as we'd expect these days I think, removing the randomness of it somehow makes it seem less...threatening? difficult?
So aside from Minecraft, I think maybe procedurally generating content is a fairly dated thing that we do less of now? Or, in the mainstream, anyways? And I wonder if we have the expectation now that if we can hand craft things individually, we should, to make the world more realistic, static, concrete...embedded? I dunno, I'm struggling a bit with concepts here.
I talked a bit about FF7 earlier, and how sitting through FMV cut scenes were actually like a reward; they were a selling point. Because it allowed you to get a better idea of what the world you were in would actually look like if it were real (rather than shitty polygons). Now, of course, most things look real all the time anyways and cut scenes are chores to be skipped; an enforced pause that pulls you out of the action, rather than rewarding you for an action.
I've been replaying FF7 and I've noticed things are bugging me now that never bugged me before. Sure, I've gotten older (and more crabby) but I think my expectations of games have changed as they've developed, too. All sorts of little things have annoyed me that never posed a problem. Like, well, figuring out how to leave a room. Distinguishing between background and foreground. And largely those sorts of minor irritations have gone away now, particularly as graphics have improved to the point where things are less symbolic depictions and more photo-realistic ones. We tend not to encounter them so much.
Which makes me remember the old spectrum and atari games, where part of the point, straight out of the box, was to figure out what the game actually was and how to play it. Because you often couldn't tell just from looking. And it wasn't annoying at the time - that things were so obtuse or unintuitive was completely normal and even part of the joy of discovery. The central and immediate puzzle was the game itself.
I read recently someone's comments on 'A Vanishing of Ethan Carter' - by all accounts a very pretty game. And this passage struck me particularly:
There’s actually a fair amount of gameplay here - puzzles, light stealth, the aforementioned narrative-building - but it’s unclear how to play most of it. There’s a difference between not holding players’ hands and just being unintuitive, and Ethan Carter falls too often on the wrong side of that line. When gameplay mechanics go unexplained, or vital clues hidden away invisibly, it’s more frustrating than liberating. I’m all for games that allow self-directed play, but if you don’t know something is even playable, it’s hard to enjoy.
Because I thought...is it?
I would agree with him now, of course, but once upon a time this was not the case in my most early gaming experiences. I didn't know things were playable and had to struggle to understand how the game worked and what its (often contradictory) rules were. And finding that out was part of the fun!
But I think my expectation of games has changed, as games themselves have. My expectation of modern games is that this will not be a problem, that it will be inherently and immediately obvious how it works, what it's rules are, with little effort on my part to grasp the fundamentals or understand what it is the game wants from me.
I only really realised how much my expectations and attitudes had changed over time by my own impatience playing FF7 from a retrospective position - navigating rooms often seems awkward, clunky and unintuitive, trying to figure out things that should just be obvious (WHY am I able to walk on this particular green bit when all the others look the same and are completely inaccessible?!).
I think we are hand held a lot more now... We expect to be able to immediately figure out what's going on, and there'll be things to help smooth that along, tutorials, quest markers, checkpoints, etc. We expect a certain level of immediacy and - fluidity?
But I definitely think there are...accepted or preferred ways of doing things. Ideas that are fashionable now, maybe, and others that went out of fashion. I think some of those attitudes and expectations can colour how we see games, anyways.
-
Sure, there is the 'gamer' (whatever that term means these days) mindset that there has to be a certain level of action and/or competition for something to be a game. But that's just the attitude of a specific group of people, it has nothing to do with the broad concept of a 'game'.
-
Well, my view of games has changed over time (as games themselves have changed); there's things that used to seem normal that I wouldn't tolerate or expect now, so I'm more theorizing that what people are used to seeing in games may effect how they define them.
(I.e I'm used to games containing these elements, so if something doesn't, it's not a proper game)
So it's more it affects their concept of 'a game' rather than the concept of 'a game'.
It's more addressing the tangentially related bit of the OP:
There are some tangentially related questions - is there a disparity between what games are and what they could be? How have they changed - how have our expectations changed? (we'll stay away from the 'who are they for' question if poss, as that ends up being controversial)
Actually, I've seen this a lot with MMOs.
There's a set of vocabulary with MMOs that people use - levels, raids, epics, end game content etc. And people are bemused (I've seen this a few times in EVE) if an MMO doesn't contain these things, because it's become so engrained in the very concept. To the extent that if a game apparently doesn't have those things, how can it be an MMO?
And I'm thinking...Were they not aware of Ultima Online?
(and I do understand that the massive success of WoW made MMOs more accessible and popularized that template, and this informs an expectation, but still. Not only are other templates possible, but alternatives predated it).
-
And I'm thinking...Were they not aware of Ultima Online?
No, they weren't. For very reason you mentioned right after this sentence. MMOs were not a 'mainstream' gaming outlet for a very long time. A significant amount of the players were/are literally unaware of UO and that era.
-
Yeah, but knowing that doesn't make me any less grumpy at the idea that's all MMOs can or should be when they've already been other things :P
But yes, I think that awareness/context/era informs our expectations of what games are or should be, then.
-
That and the business model for MMOs is different now. Large amounts of players that they can hopefully keep playing for a year, and a barely large enough amount they can keep after that. That's the current business model. No MMO is released now expecting to keep a high player base for years and years. It's just not how the genre works anymore.
-
On things like FF7 and how our perception has changed, I totally agree, though would you also see it that way if it was your first time playing it but right now ? Probably not. There would be the novelty factor. Don't forget that replaying something again and again makes that go away and the magic vanishes a little too. When the game is awesome it gets replaced by good old nostalgia.
But if you played it right now for the first time... You would see it differently. And differently from the first time you played it in the past too !
Not sure if i'm really clear in what i'm trying to say...
But this makes me wonder - have they not heard of point-and-click adventure games? Discworld, return to zork, day of the tentacle, monkey island, broken sword...etc? Because I think there's a nod to that bygone era there. Maybe they missed that era entirely and that's simply their first exposure to a game like that - which is entirely missing whole elements they have come to associate with (modern) games. Therefore barely a game due to the comparative lack.
That's very true. Old adventure games had for most of them no failure state at all. You just had to unlock things to go forward.
Hell, are we trying to say that Myst was not a game ? THE Game that made pc games back when everyone thought they were dead for good (a lot like crowdfunding and online platforms did it in 2008 too btw) ?
I think randomly generated stuff was more of a feature in old games - perhaps because it was just too hard to design everything from scratch in them days (?).
I think it was mostly technical issues, like memory issues (hard and graphics). You couldn't put much in terms of assets in your game so it was better to go through procedural generation to still make it big, at the expense of the uniqueness of every bit of levelbuild.
-
If you can't solve a puzzle, you've failed. Implied failure state. I've never played an adventure game without failure states and I've played damn near all of them.
-
I would tend to agree for games like Myst.
However I can't agree for games like Day of the Tentacle. It was basically trying all your inventory over interactable objets or NPCs until it works and you move forward. It is not very different from Gone Home.
-
Trying and failing to figure out how to solve a puzzle is a failure state. Whether or not it's solvable with brute force doesn't change that.
-
Then it works for Gone Home too then. Taken like that, there are failure states. Not very hard mind you, but there are.
-
Like I said, I won't comment on Gone Home as I've never played it. It might very well be a game, I haven't the faintest idea. The only examples I've brought up so far are Dear Esther and Mountain. Other honorable mentions would be things like Proteus and... err... I can't bloody remember the name. There was another but I don't have the time to look it up right now. Doesn't matter anyway.
From what I heard about Gone Home though, it's hardly a puzzle game nor comparable to DotT.
-
I don't know, to me it's the same thing, just less complicated overall. You roam around and push buttons and/or use inventory and see if something happens...
But you are right, it's ten times less complicated in Gone Home. And near to non existing in Dear Esther.
Which bring me to the question : taking Gone Home as an example, is the "puzzle game" really the purpose of the game, or something else ? If so, is this still qualified as a game ? Do the intent and core of the game takes precedence over the few game mechanics that reminds us of a game with failure states ?
Likewise, we could talk about The Longuest Journey (which is an awesome series btw), which is kinda similar to DoT and similar adventure games, but ten times less convoluted and complicated : you spend your time progressing into the game with a few enigmas to solve here and there, just for the form. And a very much more linear inventory puzzle game. In the sequel, Dreamfall, it's not even there, the only failure states are in a extremely limited number of hacks/lockpicks (probably less than 10 in the whole game) and same for combats where you just spam a button and win. I mean, it's so close to Gone Home that...
Is the real issue a matter of the difficulty scale ? A game being something where the failure states are higher (DoT), and a game not being where the failure states are ridiculously low ?
So it's really fuzzy...
-
Not sure I agree. The difficulty of the failure state is fairly irrelevant to me. It might be easy as hell, but if you can fail at it it's a failure state. To again use examples I'm more familiar with, you can't fail at Dear Esther. The only way not to succeed is to stop playing, which I don't count as a failure state in a game but as a failure of the dev to maintain your interest.
I know I keep harping on about failure states, but beyond interaction it's the only characteristic I've seen that applies to all games as a useful term and the non-games all pretty much have in common that they don't have them.
/derail 1
In closing, The Longest Journey in Norwegian is easily the best adventure game experience I have ever had in all my life and nothing will ever surpass it. The voice actors just fucking nailed it so well. It may very well be the only Norwegian voice actor accomplishment of all time, except for Ice Age. All other voice acting up here is so utterly and completely shit.
/derail 0
-
But I think I get what you mean, but still, the only way to fail at DoT or Myst is to quit playing because you can't sovle an enigma. It's not the game telling you it's over, it's on your own volition...
Edit : also, TLJ is the best adventure game ever, no qualms about that :)
-
On things like FF7 and how our perception has changed, I totally agree, though would you also see it that way if it was your first time playing it but right now ? Probably not. There would be the novelty factor. Don't forget that replaying something again and again makes that go away and the magic vanishes a little too. When the game is awesome it gets replaced by good old nostalgia.
But if you played it right now for the first time... You would see it differently. And differently from the first time you played it in the past too !
Not sure if i'm really clear in what i'm trying to say...
Well, it's unknowable :) But I find the psychology of it genuinely fascinating.
There was a novelty factor at the time, because most jrpgs were presented in a certain way, about certain things, and this was bigger, grander, darker. I kind of felt, as a wee young lass, finally, they are taking me seriously. Instead of princesses in castles, you had reactors, gone-wrong-science-experiments, corporations and environmentalism. So that was a huge novelty factor at the time, yes. Which wouldn't necessarily be so for a first play through now?
But while I'm aware I'm a different person (hopefully) to the one I was in my early teens, the game itself hasn't changed. So I was quite surprised how irritating and frustrating I found certain things, how impatient and grumpy I got at minor obstacles. It's uncomfortably jarring. It was also a nasty hit to personal pride that I had to look at a youtube video to get out of a room >.>
I'm not sure how I'd feel playing it for the first time now, really. Different, certainly, bestowed with the expectations of games I now have (as well as a different subject position in general). I can categorically say I would still have liked it, mind ;)
Oh - which reminded me of something else. One of the things I'm getting out of it now, which I did not get on my first playthrough, is a bigger emotional response (Not Aeris. Never liked her). I think some of that is nostalgia fuelled. It was a nostalgia binge that prompted my current playthrough (as well as these letters http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2011/03/the-final-fantasy-vii-letters-part-1-welcome-to-mi.html (http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2011/03/the-final-fantasy-vii-letters-part-1-welcome-to-mi.html)) as I was playing remixed songs from the soundtrack to my entirely unwilling and disinterested partner :D (in a long car journey when he was driving and couldn't get out).
A particular song came on that reminded me of a certain scene, and excitedly I started to retell it from memory and then realised :oops: to my distress and embarrassment, I was actually getting choked up and had all the sads. Which is both the power of music (done well) and, well, I don't like sad stories about dogs basically, even if they are anthropomorphic >.> (eyeball torture and sad dog stories are my kryptonite, it's probably not advisable to publicly declare your weakness on the interwebs, but oh well).
But that's a combination of music, sad dog story and nostalgia.
On the recent playthrough, though, there was only a small scene - a flashback with an npc character waiting for her husband to come back from the war. and it shows you her going each time hopefully to the train station, and each time being disappointed. eventually a severely injured woman with a young child comes out, the mother dies and the woman takes in the young child. The young child is a bit odd though, sweet but says weird uncharacteristic things. Talks about communing with the planet. Has moments of profundity. She basically asks the woman not to be sad, but that someone close to her has returned to the planet. The woman dismisses it, but not long after is officially informed that her husband died in battle.
Le gulp. Even writing that is making me a bit sad. Which is obviously very silly. It's just, well, heartbreaking. All that hope, each time, waiting for someone who is never coming back. It was done well, quietly, with little fanfare. Just some speech bubbles hanging in the air over the images while music played.
Probably subtle enough for me to miss entirely the first time. It can't have made much of impression first time around as I wasn't prepared for it. I had a vague recollection it happened story wise, but I doubt I cared, tbh. It wasn't a big fancy FMV or a particularly prominent plot point. My desensitized macho little self would've been tapping her fingers going, ok, yeah, that's where Aeris came from, blah blah, dead-husband-NPC-that-I-never-met, do I get to kill stuff now?
I think that combination though - of music and speech bubbles, can be really effective and powerful if done right. Kind of like silent movies, the music has to take on more of a character to convey a lot of tone - though there's a lot of exaggerated facial expressions (which FF7 can't really do, and in fairness, even with all the realistic graphics we have now, attempting to recreate realistic facial expressions is still largely uncanny valley).
A decent voice actor can convey tone very well, of course. But I wonder, now there's more of a move (and I'm not saying there shouldn't be!) to everything being voice acted, if the music plays less of a role now than maybe it did and sometimes the text music combination is more effective than voice acting in certain respects.
I think it was mostly technical issues, like memory issues (hard and graphics). You couldn't put much in terms of assets in your game so it was better to go through procedural generation to still make it big, at the expense of the uniqueness of every bit of levelbuild.
Mm.
The thing is though, I think because we did procedural generation due to technical issues which made things big at the expense of uniqueness, and we now have the technical ability to produce uniqueness, there's the idea we should. But maybe that's an assumption on my part?
I'm not saying all games should be procedurally generated or anything like that (!) I'm just saying there are advantages to doing so in some cases that are perhaps overlooked because it's no longer the done thing.
Because we (sometimes) gain the uniqueness at the expense of other things. Case by case, ofc, depends on the game and the intention and what you are trying to evoke.
I think perhaps there's an idea (?) that we develop things along a linear line and, as the technology improves, we do things in a different way that is inherently and objectively better. I don't think that's true at all, though. I think things may have been done due to technological reasons, but things go in and out of fashion. Due to the tech, market, demographic or whatever else.
...Like the idea of MMOs that don't have levels or raids or a hotbar at the bottom for all your combat needs, or that they can have real loss where people can kill you or steal your stuff (or your house, or your boat) when Ultima Online was doing that shit in 1997. I nearly had an apoplexy when I read that the Elder Scrolls Online would not be including the thieves guild or the dark brotherhood because "it's too difficult to implement in an MMO." BITCH, PLEASE. Vast, vast quantities of nerd rage eminating from me at the statement :evil: an MMO is fucking tailor made for the killing and the thieving of other players, it would've been awesome in a nice tasty marinade of AWESOME SAUCE. :evil: :evil: :evil:
From what I heard about Gone Home though, it's hardly a puzzle game nor comparable to DotT.
It's not a puzzle game :)
(Though I would compare it to DotT, in that you just walk around and interact with objects).
Though an implied win state could be to find certain things out, and an implied fail state would be not doing so. Not overtly stated or overtly punished, but definitely an implied objective the game suggests to you.
Your narrative progress could also be halted by not finding certain things (like a secret door, etc). You'd have to be fairly unobservant not to, as Lyn says, it's not difficult, but it would be possible.
Oh, also, Miz - I intended this to be fairly broad in considering what makes up the concept of a game. I don't consider the best adventure game experience you ever had, and your reasoning why it was so, to necessarily be a derail. If anything it helps show what's important to us about them. I think that's useful to explore, especially if what's important about them has changed over time.
There are some tangentially related questions - is there a disparity between what games are and what they could be? How have they changed - how have our expectations changed? (we'll stay away from the 'who are they for' question if poss, as that ends up being controversial)
^ fits into that somewhere I think.
-
@Lyn
There's a rather important distinction between the two though. If you can't solve a puzzle, it's a failure state. If you just stop playing it's not. There's a whole 'nother discussion to be had about shitty game design when it comes to puzzles (completely illogical stuff that only lets you pass when you brute force some completely ridiculous combinations of items and so on) and these non-games (boring someone so badly they can't even be bothered keeping W down for a bit more), but I think that's a separate discussion to defining games.
@Kala
As I said, haven't played Gone Home (not going to, looks incredibly boring) so can't say much about it. From what little I can tell it's damn sure toeing the line between game and non-game, if not tumbling flat out over into non-game territory.
-
Though obviously
and these non-games (boring someone so badly they can't even be bothered keeping W down for a bit more)
is entirely subjective :P
We've got a definition of what a game is in a formal or technical sense of implied win/fail states. (the flaw there, it seems to me, as a clear-cut definition, is overt win/fail states excludes too much, whereas implied covers almost everything. But I would submit it's not a clear-cut thing. Which is why it's interesting to talk about! :D)
And other people have suggested definitions that are more around what the player does with the game than the game itself. (I.e a game is a game because we use it to play).
I think there are distinctions between seeing games as a narrative form - a unique way of telling a story, seeing games as a creative tool - a way of creating something, or seeing games as an electronic version of sports maybe? with the competitive and scoring elements. And there's overlaps between all those things games are and can do in various games, ofc.
But if someone views games as a narrative form, and is interested primarily in the story elements, they aren't going to be bored if there's little to no action, provided that story is good enough to engage them and hold their attention. (In kind of the same way that 140 hours of glorious FMV cinematics! was once a marketable aspect).
As I said, haven't played Gone Home (not going to, looks incredibly boring) so can't say much about it. From what little I can tell it's damn sure toeing the line between game and non-game, if not tumbling flat out over into non-game territory.
From where you're drawing the lines, probably so, yes.
I think they are very fuzzy lines, mind, which is no bad thing.
-
Yes that more or less. Will write a bit more about how things have changed and evolved for me later.
-
Well now, remember games 20-30 years back ? The idea behind how you played them and what you would find enjoyable in them was drastically different. It was all about challenge, and 'beating the game'. There you sure had that failure state being at the center of most games.
I remember playing extremely hardcore games compared to today's games, even if it was probably magnified significantly by the fact that I was still a kid. I mean, the first game ever I got was when my father bought our first computer and it was Prince of Persia, the first one. With pacman, but whatever. Prince of fucking Persia ! My mother was all "omagad" seeing all this blood, and me and my brother were all "omagad it's gross and it's awesome !". And we kept playing it again and again, even if we spent our time dying in the first levels. And you know, you had very few lives, so it was over pretty soon. And no save state. We also got just after the games i've probably spent the most time on besides MMO, but more about them later.
Yeah, no save states for a lot of games, since obviously it was the glorious time of ARCADE games everywhere in the streets. Maybe it was that that bolstered so much that idea that games had to be a challenge - you know, so that the player had to insert another coin again and again to go further. Probably not all of it, but i'm pretty sure it had a strong impact on gaming mentalities where friends used to gather in arcade shops and spend their dime into those games together. Because no internet and all that.
So, consoles and pc games were not that much different in themselves : plug it, launch your game, and try to go as far as you can before GAME OVER. And when you were a bit older than me the kid, and a true arcade gamer, it was not anymore about going a little further before dying, it was doing the same game again but BEATING YOUR OLD SCORE. NEW RECORD, ZING. It was the glorious days of Mario Bross, Sonic and all the likes on consoles. We had that wonderful thing that was a game gear (because fuck the famicom, sega fanboys die hard at 6 year old \m/), and we spent so many hours on most of those games, and now I think of it, I am not sure we even finished half of them. Well, we were young and as bad as youngsters can be compared to us now, but still. It was not easy. And most of the time you had to plug it off halfway with no save state to carry on later. Was pretty frustrating. But I guess my parents were okay with it because guess what, give a portable console to your kids when you are traveling long distances and it's even more miraculous than chloroforming them to keep them quiet. Without all the negative benefits that go with the latter. Whatever.
I couldn't play those like that today. Oh no, just... no. Some of those, I did out of nostalgia in a more recent past, and did in through an emulator, by cheating with save states so that I could freely run through it without the pain of starting again and again. Too old for that shit. :D
So yes, as indoctrinated starwars fans, we got this sucker of a life that was the first x-wing and tie fighter sims. Do you remember how fucking hardcore they were, even compared to their already difficult successors ? Never finished even half of those and still continued to play them for years, every single day, or almost so. We also got Civilization I. Big sucker of a game too. Took many hours of my life away. Probably one of the few soft and accessible games of the time though, now that I think about it. But heh, not the same audience, not arcade-ish, it was meant for people that wanted to THINK more.
So yes, challenge. Lots of challenge. Everything was about challenge and beating the game. I remember having a cousin that was famous in the family of cousins for finishing most console games in a single day. They were not lying.
And then came the PC games renewal after Myst and the likes, and more traditional games in the sense we have them now. Closer, at least. And finally discovered RPGs in secondary school / high school, after so many years on PC RTS and grand strategy games. That's probably when I started to enjoy all the new horizons offered by a story behind. And then MMOs, too, with RP naturally (that's what made me come to MMOs in the first place, and most people waiting for a MMO to be released, in that case SWG, as soon as 2001, were all die hard fans that spent their time RPing on forums anyway).
All in all, we also had no walkthroughs and solutions for games in that time. That's also why it was part of the challenge. We started to get some on the internet eventually, instead of looking for them in your weekly game magazine, but I was not subscribed to any game magazine anyway.
Now, like a lot of people I guess, I don't play for the challenge anymore. I don't want my games to be against a completely passive and unresponsive IA or challenge either in action packed phases, or especially strategy games, but I couldn't stand to play more than 5 minutes to a game of the old times when you basically spend your time dying and game-overing again and again, almost like honing your skills at a game like a bushi in a fucking dojo until reaching the perfect cut or something... Truly laudable, but still. I hear some games reintroduced the modern version of the genre, like Dark Souls, but it scares me now. :(
Sometimes I don't even mind if the IA is stupid. I eventually figured that a lot of the games I played when I was younger (not a child, after), I eventually ended to cheat to get some progress because I either sucked at it, or it was just too damn tedious and hardcore, and that it already started to fade. I was there for the story damnit ! I WANT TO SEE THE NEXT CHAPTER OF THE FUCKING STORY. DON'T YOU DARE GAME-OVER ME @_@
But I cheated after having spent a lot of time trying to beat the game though (yeah, i'm not like that dude... yes really). And when it came to that inevitable end where it was time to use the unthinkable, the superweapon (aka the solution on the internet or the god almighty cheatcode like to finish that fucking Starcraft I campaign grrrblarg), it was always with that little sense of guilt behind, especially when my father mocked me for doing so. Damn him and his sense of righteousness. Righteousness doesn't belong into games that bully you until you die frothing at the mouth.
But yeah, there was definitely the young factor too. Youngsters are incredibly resourceful in games and tech devices and new technology, but they still have their limits.
Now ? Now I have seen games, played games. I mean, I have some experience in the matter, and probably more than in my 6th year of life. I am harder to please, a lot harder. I don't have the patience nor the time to struggle against a game that is apparently decided not to lay down.... Oh well I could I guess, if the game is so damn awesome. But it's harder to find games awesome. When I was a kid they were all awesome, more or less. Same shit with cinema and novels, btw. Probably a very natural thing.
Anyway, now, I work in video games, I know how they are done, I know what's behind the veil (well, at least studio side, I'm too scared to see what's behind the publishing veil, but it seems very gross, do not want). And i'm lazy. So damn lazy. I'm starting to associate a lot of games with tedious work when it's not fun enough to amuse me. And there is youtube.
Youtube with all the walkthroughs. Sometimes I just feel to watch one instead of playing. And it's pretty scary. I have been starting to think recently that maybe my interest in games is fading. The nightmare.
I don't think it is though. It's just that... we get more demanding. And less tolerating of things. And overall I just want to chill and have an entertaining, meaningful, deep, and engaging story. With a good gameplay if possible, but whatever, it's only secondary. Except in the case of grand strategy or RTS of course.
So I would say that now, games are more about entertainment than challenge, most of the time. Which is why I don't really put my trust in failure states nowadays.
Haven't rambled like that for years. And it feels weird. My analytic/synthetic side is not pleased.
-
While I read all of that and found it interesting... what is in a game?
-
Dunno ? It's like asking what's in the blackhole at the center of our galaxy.
I just promised to write about how we evolved in all those years of gaming. Well, that's my personal experience.
-
While I read all of that and found it interesting... what is in a game?
Dunno ? It's like asking what's in the blackhole at the center of our galaxy.
Yes, sorry about that, it was a bit of a broad question wasn't it :D
But no, Lyn did answer the question (or a subset of the question) with that response. If I've understood correctly, from your experience of the games you've played (which is all any of us can really offer) what was in a game, primarily, was skills-based challenge - which has shifted, over time in terms of...importance? to give way to story-based entertainment.
Haven't rambled like that for years. And it feels weird. My analytic/synthetic side is not pleased.
No, no I really enjoyed reading it. It was great!
I think it also mirrors how I've seen games change over the years and how my attitudes towards them have shifted over the years.
I had completely forgotten Prince of Persia. I had it on the master system? mega drive? one of those. Dumped hours into it. The precision timing needed. I would not have the patience now by a long shot. Fuck. That. Shit. And I've never been a particularly patient person. I think it was just bloody minded determination? You will not beat me, you tosspot game? (which was mentioned earlier I think, with the game being an antagonist!)
But yes, now I wouldn't even call that gameplay (well, technically, of course it is, but not in a positive way that I would enjoy). More an exercise in slow torture.
I do think things were so much harder in the games of yesteryear, as well. Not always just...skills based games just, they had less qualms about being genuinely unfair. Like the original UFO, where you start with nothing and the aliens shoot you from nowhere across the screen when you can't even see them. I don't think I'm being elitist in saying that games are both easier and more accessible nowadays - and perhaps having more in common with movies than they once did, I'm not sure? Comparing Mass Effect to Prince of Persia anyways. They are more big flashy multi-media events than pressing buttons in the correct order to make a man avoid spikes.
I was there for the story damnit ! I WANT TO SEE THE NEXT CHAPTER OF THE FUCKING STORY. DON'T YOU DARE GAME-OVER ME @_@
Yes.
That is the main draw for games, for me. Wanting to get to the next part of the story.
I know it isn't for everyone, though. And I don't think it has to be.
When I was a kid they were all awesome, more or less. Same shit with cinema and novels, btw. Probably a very natural thing.
...Is it though?
Is it just that I'm older, less patient, more discerning, more cranky?
Or is it because I've not had to figure things out for myself for so long I don't actually want to bother anymore?
Is it just that I changed, or that games changed with me? Or did games changing change how I played them? @_@
So damn lazy. I'm starting to associate a lot of games with tedious work when it's not fun enough to amuse me. And there is youtube.
Yeah. It actually really bothered me how quick I was to look at youtube and find my way out of that room rather than eventually getting it. Is this what I am now? The attention span of a gnat, demanding instant gratification like any other internet-fed console luddite? :|
Though I am, of course, of two minds. I have this inherent contradiction. On the one hand, conditioned in no small part by nostalgia I think, I value having to discover things for myself, not being spoon fed or hand-held. I resent things that make my life easier, more convenient and 'fun' in games, because they often also detract from the meaning or impact, the adversity. Not challenge in a skills based clever-timing way, but a deeper kind of way? Just that discovering things for myself?
On the other hand, though, realistically, without the conveniences I have come to expect, I will undoubtedly get pissy and frustrated. I will complain it is not intuitive enough; it hasn't anticipated my needs well enough. (Which annoys me, because that's not how I like to see myself, but given my impatience with FF, I think I probably would).
If I'm honest, I'm more nostalgic for the games I've loved and played from the past than I am excited for games and their potential in the future. Which is a bit sad, I think. Because I've always been so excited with games as a way of telling stories, as it's the only thing where we can be present in another world and properly live them. I dunno if they've lived up to my self-imposed hype, though.
edit: granted, in fairness, I thought we'd all have hoverboards by now.
-
But I want hoverboards. The first time I saw that movie, I was too young to appreciate it, but they had freaking HOVERBOARDS. That I came to call it "you know mom, the movie with hoverboards - I want the same at christmas btw kthxbye."
If I've understood correctly, from your experience of the games you've played (which is all any of us can really offer) what was in a game, primarily, was skills-based challenge - which has shifted, over time in terms of...importance? to give way to story-based entertainment.
Nah, just entertainment in general. Story-based entertainment is just personal.
...Is it though?
Is it just that I'm older, less patient, more discerning, more cranky?
Or is it because I've not had to figure things out for myself for so long I don't actually want to bother anymore?
Is it just that I changed, or that games changed with me? Or did games changing change how I played them? @_@
Yeah. It actually really bothered me how quick I was to look at youtube and find my way out of that room rather than eventually getting it. Is this what I am now? The attention span of a gnat, demanding instant gratification like any other internet-fed console luddite? :|
Though I am, of course, of two minds. I have this inherent contradiction. On the one hand, conditioned in no small part by nostalgia I think, I value having to discover things for myself, not being spoon fed or hand-held. I resent things that make my life easier, more convenient and 'fun' in games, because they often also detract from the meaning or impact, the adversity. Not challenge in a skills based clever-timing way, but a deeper kind of way? Just that discovering things for myself?
On the other hand, though, realistically, without the conveniences I have come to expect, I will undoubtedly get pissy and frustrated. I will complain it is not intuitive enough; it hasn't anticipated my needs well enough. (Which annoys me, because that's not how I like to see myself, but given my impatience with FF, I think I probably would).
If I'm honest, I'm more nostalgic for the games I've loved and played from the past than I am excited for games and their potential in the future. Which is a bit sad, I think. Because I've always been so excited with games as a way of telling stories, as it's the only thing where we can be present in another world and properly live them. I dunno if they've lived up to my self-imposed hype, though.
edit: granted, in fairness, I thought we'd all have hoverboards by now.
Not sure i'm there myself, but it still bothers me.
Well I still think that what I watch on youtube are either :
1- Great games that are console exclusive (booo) where there is no emulator option. Like NaughtyDog titles. Curse be on their families and all that.
2 - Alternative endings because like if being an achiever is not enough of a pain, being a story achiever is even more torture in games with dynamic stories and multiple outcomes scenari. And no matter how I replay a game, I always play exactly the same way because it's what pleases me the most, especially storywise (thus why I usually favor linear and deep stories). So I go to youtube to see alternatives.
3 - Games that i'm interested to watch the story as entertainment, but certainly not fun enough or engaging enough to me to actually buy them and even less, play them. Like, you know, Assassin's Creed and the likes. Or games that feel like too tedious to play due to crappy gamedesign, like Of Orcs and Men, which also had the double negative to have the previous one on Games of Thrones which is an abomination... Well, their stories are damn good though. So I watched it on youtube to spare myself the ache to play through that nightmare. Not even hard, just shitty overall. Too bad, they are not big boys of the industry so I wouldn't mind buying their games, but hell no, my patience has limits.
4 - Watching a game that I have already played. I happened to do it for FF8 and 10, because honestly, when you have played through them 4 or 5 times with most achievements, why bother to do it again lol. Just watch the story if you are nostalgic and all that...
So while I like to tell myself that I use youtube most of the time for those... legitimate things I would dare say, I still happened to use it for Gone Home, because I really didn't know what to expect and it didn't seem like something I would buy.
WRONG.
Now I regret it.
At least I bought Dear Esther 2 years ago.
-
But I want hoverboards. The first time I saw that movie, I was too young to appreciate it, but they had freaking HOVERBOARDS. That I came to call it "you know mom, the movie with hoverboards - I want the same at christmas btw kthxbye."
Well, I don't really know clearly what I was expecting or hoping to have by now so it's difficult to articulate. I haven't put my finger on it entirely. Just that we don't have it yet. MMOs was probably the worst disappointment for me in that area, as it seemed like such a...theoretically exciting thing to explore. You create a world and the parameters but then real people interact within that virtual space with whatever you've created.
UO and EVE made me think, wow, this is a thing where in a virtual space you can do things which will have real impact on the game experience of others, and they can have real impact on yours (to use the lucid dreaming comparison, you are aware you're dreaming, but other people are also in your dream, aware they're dreaming also. but to them, you're in their dream. etc) Actually, it's probably ATITD, a small experimental game, that made me think there was the potential to really explore some stuff here.*
And all that...enthusiasm for the potential of what we could do, of course, rubs up a bit harshly against what we've ultimately got...which is largely mouthy shit-talking teenagers in a virtual themepark where they play on the rides and win prizes, comparing them with eachother for status and prestige. -.-;
I dunno. Perhaps that's just more just... people (and my harsh and unfair perceptions of them!). But what you make affects who the people are and the way they behave, right?
(though I know I'm straying into 'who are the games for' territory here, and I should not do this) But I think for an MMO, people and their behaviours are part of the game.
*Though I think expectation played into that, as well.
To give an example, a social situation was provided for the players to solve. A dynamic rp type kind of thing, but with a political bent (which was admittedly controversial). Basically, it deliberately benefited a player with one type of avatar and not another. It was deliberately unfair to see what the players would do to counteract or address it. I'll admit the games resources were limited in the actions you could take, but at the same time, you could enact laws. You could all refuse to have that benefit. You could trade or give the beneficial things to avatars denied it. So there's a fair amount of social power given to the players there, and a...very strong implied suggestion about taking matters into your own hands.
What did the players do?
...They whined on the forums that it was unfair :|
Because that's what you do in online games when something unfair happens. It's the done thing. We're used to doing that, rather than having any real power to change things ourselves from within it.
But not when the game provides you the tools to actually do something about it and is deliberately doing a social experiment to see how people would behave in a virtual world! :bash:
(though, I might be putting an unfair slant on that)
It's not just MMOs, though... Games uniquely place the player (unlike the reader or viewer) into the world to interact and discover. Therefore it seems to me those experiences should be more challenging and meaningful because you're getting those visceral responses, you have agency and immediacy. But they're mostly not, because mostly our stories are a bit shit (to be blunt).
Though if I'm entirely honest, that depends on what day and mood you catch me on, whether it's "games are amazing! they have all these amazing properties and unique things you can do!" to "games are a bit shit. everything's got shinier, but nothing's better in a real sense. if anything it's more dumbed down."
Nah, just entertainment in general. Story-based entertainment is just personal.
Yes, you're right of course. I was projecting my own stuff onto that. I think I had more in my head going from Prince of Persia (which has no real story apart from to provide loose motivation for the mechanics. the princess! the egg-timer!) to Mass Effect as some kind of example and extrapolated.
Well I still think that what I watch on youtube are either
Heh. Well, yes, I'd watched many clips of things for nostalgia, rather than playing them through all over again.
I think that's one of the (many) reasons I was surprised I was having such different reactions in my FF playthough - given that had been kept alive by watching things like clips. But the actual experience of playing it was different than what I remembered.
Though in all honesty, it would have to have a very good story for me to want to watch a playthrough on a youtube video :| I think I'd probably just go and watch a film. Unless it was something I was already heavily invested in, I've rarely found watching games to be in any way engaging. (some exceptions, but for the most part, and some more than others).
That said, I'd happily watch an ending or a cut scene in a game I had no intention of playing because the mechanics don't appeal.
Re: Gone Home - Aw :P Well, it does depend. But the thing with Gone Home I guess is putting you in that virtual space? Evoking a kind of mood, providing a specific experience? And you feel a certain way being that person and rummaging through the personal items of your family, and as a player, making those discoveries about them.
(Which are actually pretty subtle, I needed a bit of time to put everything together re: the dad's uncle... >.>)
I find it really interesting that many people found it so intrusive that they were putting many of the items back where they found them. I, of course, left shit all over the floor as I'm naturally a very messy, but I felt a bit guilty about it. (I also loved the admonishment about leaving lights on in the house when you aren't in the rooms - really cleverly anticipating there!)
I don't think you can get that experience from just watching it being played. As much as people will argue you may as well do, because it's just an interactive movie. The interactive is the point, though.
-
As an aside, also reminded of this bit from Penny Arcade, with games changing the person or games changing with the person vs the person's perspective of the game changing where Gabe talks about Shadow of Mordor http://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2014/10/01/kiss-the-girl (http://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2014/10/01/kiss-the-girl) -
As a husband and a father this stuff really resonated with me. My guess is that if you’re not married and you don’t have kids, this scene probably doesn’t carry the same emotional payload. I can tell you that as a young man this stuff would have gone right over my head. Once you’re a parent though you end up gaining access to this hidden band of information that was there all along but you were never tuned into it. What I love is that I’m seeing that parent’s perspective pop up more and more in video games. The first time I can really remember being hit with it was in Heavy Rain. The scene in the mall when you lose your son had me crying. I lost my youngest son at Disneyland for about 30 minutes, and I can tell you that it is a terror unlike anything I have ever experienced. The last of Us is another great example of a game that punched me right in the Dad gut. I’m sure it’s a great game no matter who you are but my God, as a father that game is just a masterpiece.
I wonder if there is, or will be, more dad centric or 'parents perspective' stuff in games as players have grown up with (or sometimes, grown out of) them?
-
On MMO and players : welcome into humanity I guess. Players are players, and player gonna be stupid. Nothing ever convinced me of the contrary to that day. MMOs made me even more misanthropic than I originally was.
More seriously though, regarding your example of players whining instead of doing, it's pretty illustrative to how I see people in general, grossly :
- You have leaders, very few of them. Charismatic or whatever make them people follow them. They do not need to be necessarily full of insight, quite the contrary : they just need to be populists.
- The rest composed of sheep that can't do anything on their own. It's basically a fundamental trait in humans in general.
- A minority of outsiders that do things differently. Oddballs.
All of that through my coloured glasses of course. xD
______________________________
I like sometimes watching people play, but for example in RPGs I get highly frustrated because they don't make their characters the way I want, and don't make the choices I want. Sometimes yes but it's hard to find. And it can change at any moment through the playthrough...
______________________________
On Gone Home I was lucky enough to feel most of what you described because the player was actually making sure that he was putting stuff back in place, shutting down lights, etc. It was well played in the regard that he felt how to transmit the right emotions to the guys watching.
______________________________
There probably will be more parent centric stuff since most gamedesigners also grow up with time. And new ones are not always neckbeards in a cave.
Well, in the case of children and parents in stories in general, it's most of the time cheesy or full of nonsensical feelings imo. The Last of Us did it right, but most of the time I just facepalm when I see that kind of scenes. Well, for Shadow of Mordor, I can't say since I havent played it. Probably one of the games I might watch on youtube btw. Not really my thing, I hate that kind of open world gameplay (the same reason I don't play Elder Scroll games).
-
While it was still a game, I think Heavy Rain was the most 'blurred the lines between game and film" that I enjoyed.
-
I loved it and had to watch it on youtube :/
-
I loved it and had to watch it on youtube :/
If you can, it would still be worth going back and playing it, in my opinion.
-
Tried it. Took me about an hour to come to the conclusion that it was a long series of quicktime events and put it away forever.
-
To each their own, I suppose. I enjoyed it very much.
-
On MMO and players : welcome into humanity I guess. Players are players, and player gonna be stupid. Nothing ever convinced me of the contrary to that day. MMOs made me even more misanthropic than I originally was.
More seriously though, regarding your example of players whining instead of doing, it's pretty illustrative to how I see people in general, grossly :
- You have leaders, very few of them. Charismatic or whatever make them people follow them. They do not need to be necessarily full of insight, quite the contrary : they just need to be populists.
- The rest composed of sheep that can't do anything on their own. It's basically a fundamental trait in humans in general.
- A minority of outsiders that do things differently. Oddballs.
All of that through my coloured glasses of course. xD
Heh. Well, maybe. I certainly have my own misanthorpic 'people, ugh' and 'people on the internet, ugh' reactions (on a regular basis). But, y'know, I am a person on the internet. And no one ever sees themselves as a sheep, only others.
I was thinking more along the line of schemas. There's been psychological experiments where they've put people in a specific environment - e.g an office. And they have all this stuff in the office that you might expect to see - e.g desks, printers, stationary, computers, pot plants - whatever. Then they'd put in a few prominent out of place objects, like a random brick or something. Put people in a room, have them look around, then they come out and record the items they remembered seeing.
You'd probably imagine they'd write down the odd objects, as they'd stand out. But that was a bit of a blind spot - they saw and recorded what they expected to see in that environment.
So I think expectation and convention can have a massive role.
Which is a bit...self-defeating, I suppose? As it suggests you can put things in games for people to do - give them ways of doing things they would not normally have at their disposal but...if they're used to that type of game being something else and used to a certain way of responding to things, they might not even see or consider it.
Because they've become used to doing things a certain way. (Which, I think as well as getting older & more impatient, has influenced how I play games, and my reactions to them as well - sadly).
So just read this about procedural generation:
Both Riad and Kristmann love complex systems and procedural generation, and working with character behavior against those frameworks [..] "Obviously procedural generation comes with costs, probably most importantly the fact that you, as a creator, are giving away a lot control," Kristmann suggests. "But letting go and allowing the player to drive the experience fosters the creation of personal and intimate stories. Usually this approach does not provide epic story arcs or mind blowing reveals, but the bond it creates between the player and the game is something I care a lot about as a designer."
Probably dovetails a bit with where my thoughts have gone with it, re: pros and cons. That and you get a unique experience each time, so re-playability. I love that some concepts and ideas we've had in gaming but might've gone out of fashion (e.g point and click adventures, or procedurally generated stuff) are being explored again in indy games.
I wonder if that's nostalgia on their part (like mine) for the games of yesteryear; or having the freedom to explore stuff out of the (now) traditional paradigm?
-
A friend of mine has a young son (about 11), I had a very interesting conversation with him and his friend a few weeks ago about video games.
It came up that he had gotten a hold of some very old NES games online (the kind I was playing at his age). I asked him if he thought those old games were more difficult than the ones he plays now, and the resounding answer from both of them was that they were extremely difficult and unforgiving.
I think when you only had enough memory for 9 or 10 levels with most of the same sprites you had no choice but to make it incredibly difficult, or you'd finish the game in 20 minutes. So you get genre standards like 3 lives, 3 continues and then forced restart. The japanese games tended to abuse this more than the US ones, and punishing the player and making them run through a grueling amount of grinding gameplay design aesthetic would continue for years with Japanese games. Think of all the old Resident Evil or very early Final Fantasy games. Of course ones sense of accomplishment was fantastic when you actually made it through them, like you really achieved something impossible.
That being said it has been super interesting seeing the other side of game design philosophy that more of the USA designers pushed. Look at the old LucasArts games, where it was literally impossible to die, and there were no 'lose' conditions - you just got to solve puzzles and have a fun adventure with no fear of walking off a cliff (looking at you, Space Quest).
Anyway I guess it's a mixed bag today, but I do like a lot of the variety. $40 million production games that take 3 or 4 hours to finish and are basically just a series of cut scenes and scripted action (Call of Duty and clones), and then you get grueling punishment like Dark Souls.
On the whole I think most mainstream games are stupidly easy and take little effort and hold your hands the entire way though, though.
-
Indy games explore many things that have disappeared at some point, since they are indy games. Or, more precisely, since they can do whatever they want as long as they get kickstarted by people and not their publisher.
Anyway it's fun reading about what add replayability to people. I usually want to play my games again and again when the story/atmosphere/universe was awesome. So most of those games are completely linear, or close to. Be it mass market stuff like Mass Effect or more hipster stuff like The Longuest Journey.
I usually seriously dislike procedural games and open sandboxes for solo play. I just find them extremely boring and not appealing most of the time. I mean, past 5 min i'm already losing grip on those games...
But to the contrary, I love that for multiplayer ! MMOs, especially, when you are not there for the story but for the story you create with other people, and the sandbox you play in with other people. Without those, I just find it boring...
-
Since we've moved on to other game features than the actual definition, let me get something off my chest: Dark Souls etc are crap for me. I really don't like them. I'm too old for this shit. If I want to ram my head at something repeatedly, I'll go take out a supporting wall or something in real life, because at least that'll serve some sort of purpose.
I'm perfectly fine with facing a challenge (One Finger Death Punch, high end Quake III Arena, the fucking Librarians in Metro 2033 etc) but then there's just intentionally frustrating stuff like Dark Souls. It's not a good game as far as I'm concerned. When beating something becomes a question of trial and error until you discern whatever pattern the game aims for, it's gone from challenge to just... urgh.
On that subject, just add bloody difficulty levels. Give people the option. Sure, if I want a challenge I'll hit the higher difficulty levels but sometimes I don't want to. Sometimes I just want to have a little mayhem/story action going without the frustration. Hell, the Saint's Row games? I turn the difficulty way down in those games. Why? Because I don't play them for the challenge. I want to be the Boss. The utterly batfuck insane leader of the Saint's that cause carnage and mayhem with impunity and great humor. I don't want to be the Boss that struggles to get past every few encounters.
Options are always good, period. I certainly recognize that some people want to play the hardest difficulties to add challenge and such to their experience, but some people do not. I shift between the two constantly, depending on the game I play and what I want out of it. Hearing the internet catch fire then get doused immediately in tearful whines when someone suggested difficulty levels in Dark Souls blew my mind, as apparently this would somehow change the gameplay experience of those who prefer the high difficulty. WHY?! Fuck you! You can still play the game exactly how you want to! Having the option changes nothing except adding a wider range of players to the game.
Intentionally frustrating games are not for me. I have grown way too old and spent way too much time playing games to waste my time on such things anymore. Give me a challenge, fine. Just let me decide whether I want the actual challenge or if I want the progression of the story and so on and let others decide if they prefer the frustration.
-
I'll agree that I'm not interested in 'trial and error' punishing difficulty either, unless it might be a sort of memorization-puzzle in an adventure game or something.
Dark Souls was ridiculous just for the sake of being ridiculous, super not interested.
It's hard for developers though as there is such a huge margin of skill sets.
Like you ever watch somebody play IKARUGA online and not even have to shoot anyone and finish the whole game? That's not me, but for that person the game is probably just fine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mt6fZBjqE9w
-
A friend of mine has a young son (about 11), I had a very interesting conversation with him and his friend a few weeks ago about video games.
It came up that he had gotten a hold of some very old NES games online (the kind I was playing at his age). I asked him if he thought those old games were more difficult than the ones he plays now, and the resounding answer from both of them was that they were extremely difficult and unforgiving.
I think when you only had enough memory for 9 or 10 levels with most of the same sprites you had no choice but to make it incredibly difficult, or you'd finish the game in 20 minutes. So you get genre standards like 3 lives, 3 continues and then forced restart. The japanese games tended to abuse this more than the US ones, and punishing the player and making them run through a grueling amount of grinding gameplay design aesthetic would continue for years with Japanese games. Think of all the old Resident Evil or very early Final Fantasy games. Of course ones sense of accomplishment was fantastic when you actually made it through them, like you really achieved something impossible.
That being said it has been super interesting seeing the other side of game design philosophy that more of the USA designers pushed. Look at the old LucasArts games, where it was literally impossible to die, and there were no 'lose' conditions - you just got to solve puzzles and have a fun adventure with no fear of walking off a cliff (looking at you, Space Quest).
Anyway I guess it's a mixed bag today, but I do like a lot of the variety. $40 million production games that take 3 or 4 hours to finish and are basically just a series of cut scenes and scripted action (Call of Duty and clones), and then you get grueling punishment like Dark Souls.
On the whole I think most mainstream games are stupidly easy and take little effort and hold your hands the entire way though, though.
I disagree with FF games, except maybe if you speak about the 3 first ones I haven't played... But FF has always been known for its very casual, laid back difficulty. I mean, look at FF4 for instance. It's almost on rails.
I also beg you to try playing Lucasart space sims again, especially the first iterations, and we will talk again how it was "impossible" to die. Impossible to finish you mean :D
For some of their other games, probably yes, of course, though.
-
A friend of mine has a young son (about 11), I had a very interesting conversation with him and his friend a few weeks ago about video games.
It came up that he had gotten a hold of some very old NES games online (the kind I was playing at his age). I asked him if he thought those old games were more difficult than the ones he plays now, and the resounding answer from both of them was that they were extremely difficult and unforgiving.
I think when you only had enough memory for 9 or 10 levels with most of the same sprites you had no choice but to make it incredibly difficult, or you'd finish the game in 20 minutes. So you get genre standards like 3 lives, 3 continues and then forced restart. The japanese games tended to abuse this more than the US ones, and punishing the player and making them run through a grueling amount of grinding gameplay design aesthetic would continue for years with Japanese games. Think of all the old Resident Evil or very early Final Fantasy games. Of course ones sense of accomplishment was fantastic when you actually made it through them, like you really achieved something impossible.
That being said it has been super interesting seeing the other side of game design philosophy that more of the USA designers pushed. Look at the old LucasArts games, where it was literally impossible to die, and there were no 'lose' conditions - you just got to solve puzzles and have a fun adventure with no fear of walking off a cliff (looking at you, Space Quest).
Anyway I guess it's a mixed bag today, but I do like a lot of the variety. $40 million production games that take 3 or 4 hours to finish and are basically just a series of cut scenes and scripted action (Call of Duty and clones), and then you get grueling punishment like Dark Souls.
On the whole I think most mainstream games are stupidly easy and take little effort and hold your hands the entire way though, though.
I disagree with FF games, except maybe if you speak about the 3 first ones I haven't played... But FF has always been known for its very casual, laid back difficulty. I mean, look at FF4 for instance. It's almost on rails.
I also beg you to try playing Lucasart space sims again, especially the first iterations, and we will talk again how it was "impossible" to die. Impossible to finish you mean :D
For some of their other games, probably yes, of course, though.
Sorry, I meant specifically the LucasArts 'adventure' games like Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion, they had an expressed 'no dying' rule. X-Wing, Tie Figher yes dying everywhere.
Funny you should mention that I was exactly talking about the first three FF games.
The first one: No mana, you get extremely limited charges for spells. If you tell someone to attack a monster and it dies before their turn, wasted attack. You have to buy all your magic. Extremely difficult monsters who will kill you with impunity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QacOrCLlZg
Basically I think it was the 'dark souls' of 1990. At least until BattleToads came out.
-
Ah I see !
-
Think of all the old Resident Evil or very early Final Fantasy games.
Or go back even earlier, Dizzy on the Spectrum. Aside from having to find out what item does what through a series of basically riddles (or sometimes just knowing enough folk tales) there's a bunch of timing/skills based challenges that will kill you. I remember magic land had this GOD AWFUL bit near the beginning, where there is a shark fin continually moving on the water. you need to jump on the shark fin. but you can't stay on it, you roll off (you are an egg) and drown. so you need to jump and land on it as it's moving again, until you get to the other side.
and it wouldn't be so bad, if once you'd done it, that was it. but you may need to pick up an item from several screens in one direction, and then go BACK AND FORTH with them, so you might end up jumping that fucking shark several times. Or lily pads with a similar premise (stay on them too long, they go under the water, you drown). god dammit. even thinking about that is making me angry (though I loved the game).
and it's really fucking *long* content wise - with no saves. NO SAVES.
I guess because the arcade ethos originally was much like those seaside machines, where you put money in to control a claw getting a toy bear, or one of the shelves where the money might push some money off. the point is to rob you of your money :P so you fail and keep putting money in each time.
Maybe that idea was still in there somewhere in the shift between arcade machines and home gaming.
And isn't now :)
On the whole I think most mainstream games are stupidly easy and take little effort and hold your hands the entire way though, though.
Agreed, and I'm not sure how I feel about it.
I suppose I want a specific kind of difficulty.
I don't neccesarily want stupid pointless obstacles, or something that's going to frustrate me, that I have to practice over and over again to get past.
but I do want a sense of accomplishment or discovery or risk or whatever. I want to know the game could KERB STAMP ME and I need to be prepared for that eventuality and be on that edge-of-seat knife-edge.
That's why I love a sense of randomness so much, I guess. Because it's not putting in things that will frustrate me, but I know the game could throw me a curve ball for a real sense of risk... Such as a daedra lord at lvl 2 or a very large UFO landing near the beginning of the game...
Knowing the game is going to play fair (or adhere to my expectations) undermines that slightly, somehow.
I usually seriously dislike procedural games and open sandboxes for solo play. I just find them extremely boring and not appealing most of the time. I mean, past 5 min i'm already losing grip on those games...
But to the contrary, I love that for multiplayer ! MMOs, especially, when you are not there for the story but for the story you create with other people, and the sandbox you play in with other people. Without those, I just find it boring...
You've talked before about that (at least, I think it was you) and I think you were saying it was due to your inclination to have to try and find everything that was hidden, all the secrets etc, so you couldn't actually enjoy it? I can't remember if you said that the world felt empty as well without others, but that's a common complaint too.
I, on the other hand, love them :p well, depending. and I love linear games too, again, depending. for different reasons. :)
(though MMOs I feel particularly and especially jaded about as my expectations were so high for the reasons you state :( and the early promise of games like UO and EVE )
Options are always good, period. I certainly recognize that some people want to play the hardest difficulties to add challenge and such to their experience, but some people do not. I shift between the two constantly, depending on the game I play and what I want out of it. Hearing the internet catch fire then get doused immediately in tearful whines when someone suggested difficulty levels in Dark Souls blew my mind, as apparently this would somehow change the gameplay experience of those who prefer the high difficulty. WHY?! Fuck you! You can still play the game exactly how you want to! Having the option changes nothing except adding a wider range of players to the game.
Intentionally frustrating games are not for me. I have grown way too old and spent way too much time playing games to waste my time on such things anymore. Give me a challenge, fine. Just let me decide whether I want the actual challenge or if I want the progression of the story and so on and let others decide if they prefer the frustration.
Interesting! (...I know I'm using that word too much, I'm becoming a parody of myself :oops:)
I guess if you were able to define enough of your own parameters, you'd be creating your own experience, in a sense.
Actually, IIRC, that's sort of what Jennifer Hepler once suggested. That if people were just interested in the story they could have the option to skip through the combat if they found a boss fight too difficult or just found it boring or w/e. I think that suggestion was met with outrage :P
As for me, I don't actually know if I'd want that entirely. I like being able to define certain parameters - e.g in Civ or something...
But even if games where you can change the difficulty setting mid-game, I tend to just leave it at whatever default setting. It feels a bit like cheating, somehow.
But I'd worry if I was given the option to adjust too much, I'd take it, but not enjoy it - it would somehow cheapen the experience (a bit like things like quick travel; I could always choose not to do it, but I don't because it's convenient, yet it feels cheap).
I guess because sometimes what I think I want and what I actually want aren't the same.
I disagree with FF games, except maybe if you speak about the 3 first ones I haven't played... But FF has always been known for its very casual, laid back difficulty. I mean, look at FF4 for instance. It's almost on rails.
Funny you should mention that I was exactly talking about the first three FF games.
Like Lyn, I think I've only really played the later ones (I started at 7, and then backtracked with some earlier retro ones rereleased on the DS) so I'm only qualified to talk about those.
And yeah, they're easy and on rails (though often give you the illusionyou aren't by allowing you to travel a world map freely, until you get to X).
I got Wan to play an FF game because, well, I like them :P He wrote six blog posts detailing how much he hated it -.-;
To him (the later) FF games are the antithesis of everything he likes about gaming, or what he thinks gaming should be. Unskippable cutscenes where you don't do anything. Dialogue-heavy. Combat that you can get through just by holding a button down. Pretty much an interactive movie.
And put like that, in theory, I can see his points.
But I came from a different position, in that I used to play a lot of jrpgs on my master system, megadrive and PS1. And with many of them, you could probably complete all the actual story content in very little time at all, so they've stuffed in a load of puzzles to stymie your progression and draw it out. Something like Alundra, for example. But omfg I hate puzzles SO MUCH. Anything with pillars, moving platforms, levers etc needs to just DIAF. (and X is a bit guilty of this too with those FUCKING TEMPLES, but nowadays you can just consult a handy walkthrough ¬.¬ and they aren't every 5 seconds)
So when FF7 came out and had THREE DISKS THAT WAS BASICALLY ALL STORY CONTENT TO PLAY THROUGH and either no or very few STUPID PUZZLES TO HALT YOUR PROGRESS THROUGH SAID STORY and bosses that if you were really stuck, you could just GRIND A BIT UNTIL YOU BEAT THEM... well. I felt disproportionately grateful. Because to make the game last as long as it should, they stripped out the irritating puzzles and replaced it with more story. Like I wanted.
-
On difficulty progression curve :
(http://www.gamasutra.com/db_area/images/blog/6045/1.png)
I don't remember who wrote about that theory and graph first (i'm such a bad student forgetting all about his classes), though the idea is there : you give the player a few first and basic tools to make him adapt and understand the game, to start and feel he is actually getting somewhere, and when he starts eventually to believe it's too easy, you increase the difficulty in the next levels, with more tools, more complexity, and challenging enemies that he was not prepared to fight and that might actually ask him to find a way to deal with. The feeling of accomplishment after that is supposed to be multiplied.
It doesn't mean that it works for every game concept in the world, but it's a good general rule that many fail to follow properly. A few of those who do it right are blizzard (in their RTS) for example.
You've talked before about that (at least, I think it was you) and I think you were saying it was due to your inclination to have to try and find everything that was hidden, all the secrets etc, so you couldn't actually enjoy it? I can't remember if you said that the world felt empty as well without others, but that's a common complaint too.
Mh yes, I might have said that several times somewhere. :)
But I'd worry if I was given the option to adjust too much, I'd take it, but not enjoy it - it would somehow cheapen the experience (a bit like things like quick travel; I could always choose not to do it, but I don't because it's convenient, yet it feels cheap).
To me it's even more than that. It creates a feeling of discontinuity, but also makes me feel that I actually failed at it somewhere to eventually fall back to that option. It's quite the opposite feeling to accomplishment.
Dialogue-heavy
Lol, that's the roots of RPGs. Dialogues.
I mean, look at the first RPGs of old, the ones neckbeards of RPGCodex put on altars and venerate all day long. Baldur's Gate, Planescape, etc. Not saying that they all had that syndrome, but it was basically walls of text. Lots and lots of dialogues and NPC interaction. And it was not voiced or cutscened, which means that it was ten times less seamless and implied a lot of reading and time spent doing so. Or TLG again, where every important character was a potential gold mine of dialogues... And by gold mine I mean El Dorado : just one of those could give you half an hour of voiced dialogues that were not even boring or tedious to listen to. It was actually rather soothing.
FF games were more or less similar in that regard, except the story was scripted and kept separate to starting dialogues with random NPCs in the streets.
But I came from a different position, in that I used to play a lot of jrpgs on my master system, megadrive and PS1. And with many of them, you could probably complete all the actual story content in very little time at all, so they've stuffed in a load of puzzles to stymie your progression and draw it out. Something like Alundra, for example. But omfg I hate puzzles SO MUCH. Anything with pillars, moving platforms, levers etc needs to just DIAF. (and X is a bit guilty of this too with those FUCKING TEMPLES, but nowadays you can just consult a handy walkthrough ¬.¬ and they aren't every 5 seconds)
So when FF7 came out and had THREE DISKS THAT WAS BASICALLY ALL STORY CONTENT TO PLAY THROUGH and either no or very few STUPID PUZZLES TO HALT YOUR PROGRESS THROUGH SAID STORY and bosses that if you were really stuck, you could just GRIND A BIT UNTIL YOU BEAT THEM... well. I felt disproportionately grateful. Because to make the game last as long as it should, they stripped out the irritating puzzles and replaced it with more story. Like I wanted.
I like small puzzles here and there. Not something too difficult actually. Of course I won't expect them in every kind of game. But I like them in adventure games, for example, be it an old point and click or just a Tomb Raider / Uncharted / whatever. I mean, the ones in the last Tomb Raider were nice, though maybe too easy for once. It didn't take a genius to do those.
That's also why I consider The Longuest Journey to be one of the few games I would dare call 'perfect', especially in that regards. It was making you think a bit without making you stuck for days because its main purpose was to tell a story and make you enjoy it even more after having solved little puzzles here and there. Which were very accessible, but not too shabby either.
But to the contrary, if I want difficult enigmas that I will spend days to solve, I expect to see those in Myst-like games, and nowhere else. And in the times of old, yeah, they tended to appear in the weirdest places...
And yes, I never was patient enough for true puzzles. I never really liked puzzles, even as a child.