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Well, games with high graphics and realism have cars that you cannot use and other things to give the sense of immersion. If your playing let's say GTA and the

Well, games with high graphics and realism have cars that you cannot use and other things to give the sense of immersion. If your playing let's say GTA and the buildings where you cannot enter were simply gone it would be very weird. What i think take from the article is that game development moved away from it's roots. Every game is for the eye candy instead of being fun, the only company that comes to my mind at the moment is nintendo. Yeah, things don't look too good for them at the moment, but one of the most popular games of all time has simple graphics and simple gameplay and it's fun. It's called Super Mario Bros.

qrendel 10y ago
I think it's more that the intent of games has been diverging for a long time, to the point where they are really several different art forms all getting lumped together under the category "games." The most obvious that come to mind: - interactive fiction, both movies (Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls) and novels (To The Moon, MUDs) - simulators of various kinds (most FPSes are basically war simulators, or at least laser tag simulators, but also stuff like racing and flight sims) - pure gameplay (platformers, 4X games) - puzzles (Tetris, Bejeweled, The Witness) - others... Then those get combined in every imaginable way by the developers, yielding a huge spectrum of games so that it's very difficult to put most of them into a single category. At the edges they're still fundamentally different things. They're never going to evolve into a single Platonic ideal that can be called "games" (that was closest to being true back in the Atari days, where everything was fairly similar to Pitfall or Donkey Kong) - just keep diverging into different experiences (especially with VR coming around now), while still maintaining a continuous spectrum of different types that borrow from the best (and worst) parts of the purest genre forms. The extreme focus on high-end graphics and realism is mostly due to the influence of a few of those genres - simulators and interactive fiction. That's a huge portion of the market, so it seems like all games are just about graphics now, when that really isn't true.
Kristine1975 10y ago
> If your playing let's say GTA and the buildings where you cannot enter were simply gone it would be very weird. I think that's one point of the article: Instead of creating a game not set in the real world where for some arbitrary, unexplained reason there are huge blocks everywhere, developers create games ostensibly set in reality where those same blocks look like buildings. Except that you expect to be able to enter these buildings (like in reality), so when you can't that breaks your immersion. So keep the blocks, but don't make them look like something that exists in reality, because then players will expect them to behave like the real thing.

qrendel 10y ago

I think it's more that the intent of games has been diverging for a long time, to the point where they are really several different art forms all getting lumped together under the category "games." The most obvious that come to mind: - interactive fiction, both movies (Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls) and novels (To The Moon, MUDs) - simulators of various kinds (most FPSes are basically war simulators, or at least laser tag simulators, but also stuff like racing and flight sims) - pure gameplay (platformers, 4X games) - puzzles (Tetris, Bejeweled, The Witness) - others... Then those get combined in every imaginable way by the developers, yielding a huge spectrum of games so that it's very difficult to put most of them into a single category. At the edges they're still fundamentally different things. They're never going to evolve into a single Platonic ideal that can be called "games" (that was closest to being true back in the Atari days, where everything was fairly similar to Pitfall or Donkey Kong) - just keep diverging into different experiences (especially with VR coming around now), while still maintaining a continuous spectrum of different types that borrow from the best (and worst) parts of the purest genre forms. The extreme focus on high-end graphics and realism is mostly due to the influence of a few of those genres - simulators and interactive fiction. That's a huge portion of the market, so it seems like all games are just about graphics now, when that really isn't true.

Kristine1975 10y ago

> If your playing let's say GTA and the buildings where you cannot enter were simply gone it would be very weird. I think that's one point of the article: Instead of creating a game not set in the real world where for some arbitrary, unexplained reason there are huge blocks everywhere, developers create games ostensibly set in reality where those same blocks look like buildings. Except that you expect to be able to enter these buildings (like in reality), so when you can't that breaks your immersion. So keep the blocks, but don't make them look like something that exists in reality, because then players will expect them to behave like the real thing.