Tribble wrote:Old_ones wrote:If you've got some time to kill Sargon of Akkad has a lengthy commentary on some of the "gaming is dead" articles in the gaming press.
[youtube]N_K13iEWQfY[/youtube]
Which was good for me because the last thing I want to do is give these Y. pestis carrying assfleas a hit for writing this drivel. My "favorite" passage comes up at around 45min. Sargon is reading and discussing a reviewer's list of rules for making better games and entry number 11 is "We stop upholding 'fun' as the universal, ultimate criterion of a game's relevance". The reviewer goes on to dismiss fun as "a neurological trick".
I wonder what the actual game developers are thinking about all of this shit.
Well, that was awesome.
(haven't seen the video, but ablut fun...)
Old school game designer Raph Koster wrote
“A Theory of Fun†which asserts that fun is the feeling when the brain understands something, i.e. when a model/system makes sense and you “get itâ€.
While there is no agreed definition of what exactly is a game, there is generally a distinction between
play and
game. Play is meant as “playing around†within a system (which can be the “big sandbox†— the physical reality itself), whereas “a game†requires a goal/winning condition that must be achieved using the rules of the system. The condition is an achieveable state of the system.
Games require a deeper understanding of the system because the manipulator/player must be able to manipulate the system in such a way that a defined desired state (winning condition) is achieved. Subgoals (states between starting and winning condition) are added as discrete steps, where the manipulator/player feels extra rewarded for “getting it†but the fun is ideally poured out all the time. Fun is also different, but related to
“flowâ€. I guess the so-called flow tunnel is like a conductor that makes fun possible, i.e. when player's understanding of the system and the system align (the players mental representation of the system is accurate, or congruent to the game system), yet achieving the goal is neither too simple (boredom) nor too difficult (anxiety).
As you can see, play and game are not a dichotomy. Someone who is playing can make up their own goals any time (assume possible states of the system, then setting them as goals) and try to achieve them.
It's possible to e.g. make a game that is not fun (i.e. learning and understanding the system is not fun, dreary, repetitive etc.) but the content is — like the story it tells. One of these systems has a very long history and it's called a “bookâ€. In this game, the narrative is divided into what's called “pagesâ€. Understanding how they work is fairly trivial, and it gets boring quickly to flip pages, using fairly primitive mechanics and e.g. one's thumb or index finger. But the content can be entertaining and immerive in many different ways.
There is another popular game there is a controllable little circle that sits on a red track. The circle starts on the left side and progresses toward the right, but you can manually move it to any position. You can
play around with it as you want. The goal state is the most right position. It's also boring to manipulate this system, for reasons that are obvious. The rules of the game are again too trivial. However it has utility as the circle indicates a position within a video, which is interesting. Ideally, you don't want to “scrub†at all (this is a special move in this game).
As you see, “games†are understood to be
specific systems, otherwise virtually anything can be seen as a game. I'm all for exploring and doing interesting things (e.g. Rohrer's Passage) however there is the danger of obscuring vocabulary and, I suspect, exploit a popularity of some label or defend what a buddy-with-benefits is doing. Gaming “journalists†(these are scare quotes this time) ought to have a better grip on their medium.
