Posts on Current Forum | Archived Posts
|
|
|
||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
| Frequently Asked Forum Questions | |
|||
|
||||
|
|
|||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| Search Older Posts on This Forum: Posts on Current Forum | Archived Posts | ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| Re: Here's an odder notion | |
| Posted By: Cody Miller | Date: 12/14/10 2:01 p.m. |
In Response To: Here's an odder notion (ThorsHammer) : What if we just made the gameplay mechanics as fun as we could, instead of : burning time, money, and manpower on formalized "player investment : systems"? : I've suggested this before . : -Nate (hasn't touched Reach in a month, busted Halo 1 out at Thanksgiving,
The problem is that making mechanics as fun as possible is not something players seem to want. You are correct in that this is really the best and only way you should compel your players to play, but as ZackDark has hinted, mere fun doesn't seem to be enough. He is I believe correct, in that there is a shift in the attitudes of the people who are primarily playing games now - the children of the baby boomers, and so game design is going to obviously appeal to their sensibilities since they are not only the primary audience, but they are the ones now making the games too. RC Master's post is particularly illuminating, since he argues that many people do not have the ability to "self-generate goals". As I argued, the ability to self generate goals is precisely what makes leisure activity (and indeed life) so valuable. Leisure activity is something by definition that you yourself do because it interests YOU. If you are interested in outer space you study it. If you like basketball and want to get better you practice. If you cannot generate goals for yourself with respect to whatever activity you've chosen, then that seems to be evidence that you no longer have an interest in it. Which is fine; you move on. Children need incentives to do things like their homework or to eat their vegetables or to take piano lessons, because they don't yet know that these things are valuable, because they are children and don't have enough life experience. Being an adult means being able to make decisions for yourself! And so how sad it it when someone is unable to make a simple decision or form goals around how they are to have fun! This has got to be the simplest thing in the world. Even children can make decisions about how to have fun and what to pursue on their own time. The only reason to partake in a leisure activity is because you want to. The trouble then would seem to stem from the values that my generation holds, because it seems more and more things we do not do for ourselves! ZackDark's comment about vanity is close to what's happening. With everything connected all the time, be it via cell phones, facebook or what have you, you've got the ability to broadcast yourself to anybody anytime. Curiously though this seems to end up causing one to devalue the experience itself, and to place the value on sharing it with others. At a party in college I witnessed a girl snap a picture of herself mid kiss and upload it to facebook. Can you imagine? Kissing someone, and at the time not being concerned with the kiss or the moment, but with getting a picture to show everyone you're kissing this hot guy? The picture, the record of the event, is more valuable that the experience. The virtual is more valuable than the real. The digital projection of ourselves is valued more than who we really are. This invades our leisure time as well, and so our decisions about what to partake in and what to strive for now must be considered not only in the context of 'what do I want to do', but also in the context of 'what do I want to show other people that I'm doing'. You can now see why some people might have problems setting their own goals; without the consensus of everybody else, how will I know which goals are considered valuable? Without the developer telling me what challenges to partake in, how will I know what to play for? Do you not see how this is a travesty? Leisure time, the one thing that is supposed to be for you is now being dominated by the thoughts or concerns of other people. This is not a case of the developer simply saying 'Hey, did you know that you can try to beat the level as fast as possible?", this is about the developers putting a value on an action, thereby implicitly telling you what is valuable and what is not, re-enforcing the notion that your choice of activities must contain considerations about what other people will think. Because of the vanity that our culture has bred, players will thus tend to actually prefer these types of systems! I would love to see a game developer have the balls to make just one achievement in their game - 1000G press start on the main menu. I would bet anything that the resulting shitstorm by angry players would be huge, even if it's the best game ever made.
| |
|
| Replies: |
The HBO Forum Archive is maintained with WebBBS 4.33. |