-
I’m annoyed that the author never actually explained what their friend wanted in her idea of a video game, concretely. A bunch of platitudes of “we need games that celebrate life” and “we need games that show how other people live” are all this article seems to offer.
Did the author show their friend Papers, please? Did the author show their friend Gone home? This War of Mine? Myst? Starship Titanic? The Witness?
The fact that their friend was turned off from Journey because of a snake seems more like a suggestion that their friend is looking for a slightly-interactive version of media they already consume–books and movies–than a game. Games have rules, games have opposition, and perhaps most importantly, games have failure conditions. Seeking to eliminate those or avoiding those as a consumer means that one doesn’t actually want a game.
And that’s fine, but it’s not a problem with the industry.
-
I’m annoyed that the author never actually explained what their friend wanted in her idea of a video game, concretely.
It’s fine to be annoyed, but for someone new to a genre/medium, a common way of filtering based on one’s initial opinion is on what they don’t like.
If I have never read books before, and you show me Animal Farm and I don’t like it, there isn’t a whole lot I can offer in terms of formulating what I do want in a book. Since I don’t know about the complete sphere of what’s available, I can only offer some seemingly superficial annoyances, like “I didn’t like the pigs.”
Is the <thing> I don’t like about the book because I don’t like <thing>, or I don’t like how <thing> was presented in this book? Would I like <thing> if it’s presented in a different scenario? Maybe I would like pigs if they weren’t the anthropomorphized kind, but the cute cuddly pet kind. I don’t know, because I haven’t seen the pig in any other context in a book yet!
perhaps most importantly, games have failure conditions. Seeking to eliminate those or avoiding those as a consumer means that one doesn’t actually want a game.
This is obviously not true from first principles. The fact there is such a thing as “failure mode” in most games isn’t a fundamental fact of video games themselves.
A game I’m sure we’ve all played without a failure mode would be Sim City. Or if we’re looking for a more modern video game that likely checks all of the author’s friend’s box: Beyond Two Souls. There is literally no “game over” state. It’s a multi-pathed mono-directional experience. Actually, you even mentioned a game without a failure mode: Myst. Getting “stuck” and being unable to progress is not a failure mode within the world of the game, the same way a reader does not “fail a book” if they decide a book is too dense and decide to stop reading.
-
Games have failure conditions.
Interactive fiction is my favorite game genre, and this is not true for the genre. There are many possible choices here, and interactive fiction genre actually has detailed terminology for choices, called cruelty scale.
-
-
It’s due to the nature of this fuzziness that we have the classifications of orthogame and ideogame (thanks Richard Garfield!). Wherein, albeit loosely explained, the former is a competition between two or more players using an agreed-upon set of rules and a method of ranking and the latter is a game presenting a series of interesting player decisions that produce a personal outcome. Along with pseudogames, where user input is not reflected in the game, and roleplaying games wherein conflict is resolved with collaborative storytelling, we arrive at a group of classifications granular enough to describe most games adequately.
-
-
-
-
-
-
Fun little read, I always love finding out how people unintentionally get into FreeBSD :)
-
Excellent article, and a great little dive back into the rabbit hole of electrodynamics. Thanks for the article!
-
This is great! I enjoyed reading it far too much, I almost want to dive into their papers! Thanks for the post!
I’m all for debunking myths and flavor-of-the-month psych BS, but the links included do little to provide any evidence of the claims. I’m not saying the ideas of the writer are not well-founded, but there is little scientific evidence cited or linked to by a majority of the thought pieces included to reinforce their claims.
I’m still in the process of distilling all information he gives there but I do see enough cited scientific evidence, e.g. more than 10 articles in the post about learning styles. Maybe I should have submitted only that post instead of the index/collection of all fads.