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[Criptfeind]

I agree with most of your post other then

"Games only exist to entertain" are hideously hypersimplistic and naive notions of the medium.

What is wrong with that in of itself? It is true, or at least mostly true, and it says nothing on how they should entertain.

[G-Flex]

Even games that entertain can also serve other purposes. Some games are educational, and some games are intellectually or emotionally stimulating. It's like movies or books or anything else. You might say those purposes fall under "entertainment" as well, but at that point, the word is being used so vaguely that it loses any meaning.

You cannot prescribe a purpose to a medium. Period.

[Soadreqm]

I'm with the school of thought that realism sucks. In the real world, you can't become a master surgeon by shooting people. You also don't really become a master marksman by shooting people. You become a master marksman by clocking something like a thousand hours at the firing range. Clocking a thousand hours at a gunfight would work too, but the problem is that you will die, especially if you try it without becoming a master marksman first. To become good at medicine you go to med school for something like ten years. It is insanely grindy, boring and unbalanced.

While you certainly can go for a less extreme version of this, and even succeed, there's really no reason you automatically should. "More realistic" does not imply "better". If you're getting rid of gaming abstractions, you should be doing it to actually make your game a better game, not to meet some abstract ideal of realism.

That said, making a game as hyper-realistic as possible in the medium could definitely make for an interesting experience. Big game developers can't really do that, though, since they have taken half a billion dollars of someone else's money and are legally obligated to make a game that actually turns a profit.

[Criptfeind]

You cannot prescribe a purpose to a medium. Period.

A game is not really a medium in that sense.

A computer is a medium.

A TV is a medium.

A xbox is a medium (that plays games only...)

A game is a medium of entertainment.

[nenjin]

I'm having flashbacks to my debates on the Crimelike thing on how skill increases would work.

I'm with the school of thought that realism sucks.

My old nemesis....we meet again!

I'm ok with the whole experience point pool, killing people = pure life experience juices.

If I had to pick my ideal system though, that gives me the most intellectual/immersion/replay bang for my buck, it's the learn by doing system. It's far more prone to problems and creating grinds to achieve a desired goal, but it's a system that makes me feel like it has something left to explore. Systems that don't leave anything to the imagination, the one that you understand perfectly from the tutorial description, always tend to suck the life out of my enjoyment. That's not say I don't enjoy Crawl and its system and all the non-skill learning stuff that's wonderfully deep. I do. But just looking at the system out of context, it leaves something to be desired for my tastes. People need their systems to be holistic both from a programming and a gameplay standing. That leads to good designs. It can also lead to shallow designs, based on the game and what the developer was going for and what the player was looking to get out of it.

Take Fable I for example. You can see exactly what the system is going to ask of you, and all the rewards, right there in front of you. Colored orbs go into pools, pools spent on abilities in trees.The only real mystery to explore is how the abilities change when they're powered up. (Which you get a convenient animation to SHOW you once you've bought it.)

Good, tightly written design, or cop out? If you accept Fable as an arcadey, RPG-lite console experience, it's a tight design. If you want it to be more, it's a cop-out.

The times I get most disappointed is when talented developers, who promise deep experiences, use a "holistic" design as a way to REDUCE potential options, instead of one that opens them up. Because options = work, and they have deadlines to meet. You don't set up a system that implies a whole bunch of stuff you're NOT going to do. So rather than developing a bunch of crap and feature cutting when it's clear they won't make release, leaving gaping holes in the game play, they go for a streamlined design approach. Create something simple and holistic so it's at least somewhat fun, it doesn't swamp your coders and it works. When talented developers with vision end up putting out games like that, it kills my faith that anyone has enough time, or confidence from their financial backers, to really try something more ambitious.

And that's why I love indie games. They don't work in the same way as AAA companies, so they produce games of a totally different scope. Even Blizzard isn't immune. How do they solve the health potion issue of D2? More colored orbs.....I swear the colored orb has become the most heavily relied on video game trope in history. The colored orb sets up SO MANY FREAKING DESIGNS. I'm playing Overlord II right now. Colored orbs there end up defining how many Minions there are (4) and the whole system is built up off that concept.

I want games other than DF to wow me with their design and to make me feel like I _don't_ get everything from the outset. If DF is too uber an example, I'd want more games to be like Dominions 3 in how the rules don't fit into a nice, neat little box. Because those are boring after 20 minutes.

[G-Flex]

"More realistic" does not imply "better". If you're getting rid of gaming abstractions, you should be doing it to actually make your game a better game, not to meet some abstract ideal of realism.

"Less realistic" does not imply "better" either, and sometimes, an ideal of realism (although not complete realism, which is totally absurd) can make a better game, whatever the hell that's supposed to mean.

You cannot prescribe a purpose to a medium. Period.

A game is not really a medium in that sense.

A computer is a medium.

A TV is a medium.

A xbox is a medium (that plays games only...)

A game is a medium of entertainment.

... Huh? "Medium" does not necessarily mean the actual physical device of substance through which art is made. Cinema is the same medium (in the sense of the word I'm using) whether you use film or video, An X-Box, in this sense, is not a "medium". To clarify the definition of "medium" I'm using: Games are a medium in the same way that literature, film, music, or sculpture is a medium, and it's such an incredibly broad one that prescribing any purpose to its use is foolish. Most of the time you can get away with assuming that games are meant to be "fun", but that is still ridiculously broad, and also excludes other purposes they may (and often do) serve.


The fact is that different works within a creative form (be it painting, music, novels, or video games) will strive toward different goals and effects. You cannot say that what works for one will necessarily work for all (or even most) others. Sometimes more realism of a certain form, in a certain way, is better or worse for a game. I don't consider Super Mario World a very realistic game in any sense of the word, and that works perfectly fine. Some games (simulation games, even DF to a degree and in some ways), on the other hand, strive for manners of detail and realism that I feel serve them well.

[JoshuaFH]

Even games that entertain can also serve other purposes. Some games are educational, and some games are intellectually or emotionally stimulating. It's like movies or books or anything else. You might say those purposes fall under "entertainment" as well, but at that point, the word is being used so vaguely that it loses any meaning.

You cannot prescribe a purpose to a medium. Period.

Perhaps I was being too vague with my usage of the word. What I was alluding to was that people prioritize entertainment as things they want in their lives, and so people play games to fill their lives with entertainment. That's an odd usage of words, but it's what I mean. If a game fails to entertain you, that you basically spent your time and money on nothing whatsoever.

Even educational games need to prioritize entertainment over anything else, because if it isn't entertaining, then it's just an odd quizzing and testing program. It's the fact that games need to place entertainment over any other goal that defines them as games, the interactive digital medium can be many things other than games, is what I'm trying to say.

[G-Flex]

Perhaps I was being too vague with my usage of the word. What I was alluding to was that people prioritize entertainment as things they want in their lives, and so people play games to fill their lives with entertainment. That's an odd usage of words, but it's what I mean. If a game fails to entertain you, that you basically spent your time and money on nothing whatsoever.

Even educational games need to prioritize entertainment over anything else, because if it isn't entertaining, then it's just an odd quizzing and testing program. It's the fact that games need to place entertainment over any other goal that defines them as games, the interactive digital medium can be many things other than games, is what I'm trying to say.

However, entertainment is not necessarily the only goal of the game, and how to achieve that entertainment, and what entertainment even means in any particular case, is in fact open to question and highly variable. I don't think you'd disagree with that, though.

I think part of the problem here is that there is no good word for the "interactive digital medium". Everything is shoehorned into being a "game" somehow, and nobody can even understand the concept of the interactive medium aside from that box unless it's, as you say, something like a "quizzing or testing program". A documentary's primary goal isn't to entertain, but it's still a film, and if both "Eraserhead" and "Everybody Loves Raymond" are both trying to "entertain" me, then I have no idea what the word even means anymore... yet the same diversity could easily be used in the "games" industry. It just isn't yet, or at least not effectively, because nobody knows how. The industry still largely exists in the same pigeonhole it was crammed into decades ago, and that's why when you see games on TV shows and the like, they still have bleep-bloop noises and "high scores" and "levels" 97% of the time. The mold hasn't been very effectively broken and boundaries haven't been pushed enough, at least not in a widespread enough manner.

Basically, I question that games have to be pigeonholed any more than literature or film or anything else, although it's very obvious that they are. I've played strange artsy-type games that are designed such that I couldn't even say they were meant to "entertain" as a primary goal whatsoever, but they were unmistakably games.

[Criptfeind]

I think part of the problem here is that there is no good word for the "interactive digital medium".

What about program?

Also, semantic arguments. Bleh.

[G-Flex]

"Program"? That would include literally all computer software, interactive or not, "game"-flavored or not.

Semantic arguments are annoying, but semantics does still impact the way people talk and think about things, otherwise politicians wouldn't care so much about how concepts are framed using words.

[Criptfeind]

Okay.

Semantic:

1: You are right. Games are defined as a competition of skill. Nothing about fun in there.
2: You are wrong. Games are things made to be fun.
3: You are right. Games are so broadly defined as to be a worthless term.

[G-Flex]

Okay.

Semantic:

1: You are right. Games are defined as a competition of skill. Nothing about fun in there.
2: You are wrong. Games are things made to be fun.
3: You are right. Games are so broadly defined as to be a worthless term.

This is... very silly. By that logic, single-player games aren't games, because they aren't competition. Please don't use the first generic dictionary definition of the word "game" to make any sort of argument when we're obviously talking about a particular medium that uses the appellation. That isn't productive or useful.

[Criptfeind]

Edit: You know what? No. I am not getting into a semantic argument about semantics.

[G-Flex]

At any rate, the point I'm trying to make is pretty simple: You can't really assume that anything in any medium exists for any purpose you externally impose on it. Different works within the same medium can strive to do vastly different things, and I've seen that in gaming. So any talk of what games "should" do or are "supposed to" do are flawed right out of the gate, because what they attempt to accomplish can't be assumed with broad strokes (nor is there any reason to), and what different games do have in common in terms of goals are often attempted using very different means anyway. It's far, far more productive to judge any work in terms of what it attempts to do, what it actually does, and where it fails/succeeds at either.

[kaijyuu]

I'll chime in on video games needing to be "fun."


No, they don't need to be fun. They DO have not NOT be boring. There's a difference.

Video games are really just another form of storytelling, which is what was being referred to as a "medium" earlier. Any story told with a book or a movie can be told with a video game, There are different considerations to be had, of course, but the player's role doesn't have to be a gleeful one or any of the other emotions associated with "fun." The player simply must be immersed; the have to care. Video games gravitate to "fun" to do that is all, for various reasons. Mostly because it's the easiest way to get the player to care.