tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-886868484666652260.post5927295620428734251..comments2024-03-09T03:49:50.699-05:00Comments on Your Critic is in Another Castle: Win, Lose, or FailK. Coxhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06554183349391372039noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-886868484666652260.post-27317092020601048592011-09-27T12:47:13.240-04:002011-09-27T12:47:13.240-04:00I would argue your biggest problem here is the wor...I would argue your biggest problem here is the word "game". Just because I'm entertaining myself with an interactive program doesn't make it a game. <br /><br />If the kids and I pull out the legos and build random stuff, we may be playing, but few people would call it a game. In the same vein, if I pop open Minecraft and build random stuff, I'm playing, but it's not really a game.<br /><br />Goals as well do not automatically make something a game. I can set a goal to do the laundry, but when I accomplish this goal, even if I find an entertaining way to do it, it's not a game unless I make into a game. If the wife and I decide to race to see who can fold the most clothing, at that point it becomes a game.<br />In my opinion, putting "video" before "game" doesn't change the meaning of the word. If you wouldn't call it a game in a "real world" format, it wouldn't be a game in a digital format either.Matthew Robbnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-886868484666652260.post-40427383542281747142011-09-27T10:31:18.302-04:002011-09-27T10:31:18.302-04:00I think that gaming definitely does require at lea...I think that gaming definitely does require at least some focus on gameplay. If player input is what defines the game world, then mechanics can make or break it, or at the very least define replay value.<br /><br />However, I do agree that our lexicon needs to be reevaluated. Still, I'm fairly sure there will never be a "unified theory" of gaming, a virtual catch-all that describes or sets a rubric for a good game. Games are an extremely personal experience in nature, and what is a good game for one person may be terrible for another. I personally am usually drawn in by games with some sort of engrossing storyline, whether it's an incredibly strong story (as in the Uncharted series), or a story that requires almost entirely player input for it's outcome (such as Dragon Age). I enjoy games without stories, like Minecraft, but generally speaking if I'm not being told a story, I get tired of the game after a while and feel as if I am spinning my wheels. This is the reason I don't play MMO's all that often. <br /><br />This is not to say that those games are bad - there are fantastic games with absolutely no storyline. However, because games are such a subjective experience, I wonder if game reviewing can ever be objective at all? There are some objective standards upon which a game can be judged, and mechanics are some of the most concrete things we can point to as being "good" or "bad." <br /><br />/RAMBLINGAllen M Jenkinshttp://allenmjenkins.wordpress.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-886868484666652260.post-78629195479734029232011-09-22T18:26:12.197-04:002011-09-22T18:26:12.197-04:00My reaction? Games aren't clocks, they are do...My reaction? Games aren't clocks, they are <a href="http://toldaintalks.blogspot.com/2011/09/elfs-best-friend.html" rel="nofollow">dogs</a>DoctorJaynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-886868484666652260.post-89537464039050044012011-09-21T12:13:35.446-04:002011-09-21T12:13:35.446-04:00Agreed on both counts. What I see as the great fai...Agreed on both counts. What I see as the great failure of motion-based controllers is that they are anything but seamless. I haven't used Move yet, but I have a Wii and have played Kinect games, as well as previous-gen attempts at similar things (I still have a U-Force), and I've yet to play a game that had seamless motion control. "Mostly seamless" doesn't work for exactly the reasons you mention. (If I want frustration in sports, I'll play for real. I don't need to swing my arm forward and have the Wiimote decide "sorry, you actually let go of the ball already, you got a 3.")<br /><br />Yes; with few exceptions, arcade games have failure states whether or not they have victory conditions, and I think that drove a lot of console game development up through the NES era, when we finally started to get some depth. <br /><br />Actually, thinking about it, I don't think that's quite right. '80s and '90s games had failure <strong>conditions</strong>; I think you may have used these interchangeably, and maybe this is just the programmer in me (or the English minor; grammar Nazi ftw), but I think there are differences, and I think those differences touch more closely on what you expanded.<br /><br />Those "classic" games (Asteroids, Pac-Man, and so on) had end-of-game conditions: run out of lives or time or whatever and that was it. There were rarely victory conditions (I never did like Dragon's Lair - I'm not one for memorization, although ironically I do have a good memory), but there were also no intermediate states in the sense that games have them now. Sure, you could beat the cherry stage at Pac-Man and move to strawberry, but that's not quite the same ... I don't think milestones really count as success states. Most games didn't have failure states, either: you couldn't fail and continue. (There were exceptions, like the bonus stages in Galaga, but that was still a purely linear path.) <br /><br />Now, many games have success and failure states, but not necessarily win-the-game or lose-the-game conditions. Those states are a large part of gaming, in no small part to Microsoft's achievements/gamerscore idea: give us little things to do within a game, and suddenly there is that much more of a reason to go back and play it again, or to play off the beaten path, so to speak. So The Sims is definitely a video game because it has these states: burn down the house, have three kids, learn to play a musical instrument, what have you. Fallout 3 and Fable II have win-the-game conditions as well as success and failure states. Most sports games have modes that don't even have end-game conditions ... everything is a state.<br /><br />I think that, really, is what is driving the current generation of games, the idea that you can play a game for a while, put it down, and come back later to pick up where you left off ... and then do so as many times as you want. There are still hugely popular games with victory or failure conditions (Bejeweled, for example), but even those have things to play for in addition to the end-game conditions. (In a sense, they become meta-games: within the larger game, each individual game is a goal, or contributes to a goal. Play 100 times, match 10,000 games, score 500,000 points ... the idea is to get you to think of Bejeweled as a series of games rather than a single game.) <br /><br />And in all those cases, those really are player-determined goals. Which achievements do I want to get? What kinds of achievements do I want to try for: extremely rare? Grinding? Online? Local multiplayer? Can I create my own in-game goals, even if I track them out-of-game? (I'm sure I'm not the only person who built an Excel pivot table with races, classes, and high scores from playing Dungeon Crawl.) The modern game-playing experience is much more user-controlled than it was before (in more than the literal sense), and that's a very good thing.zlionsfannoreply@blogger.com