SatelliteOfLove

It happens early, but late enough that players have spent hours and hours with the game. In a moment, it’s all gone. There’s no checkpoint. Most games are designed to ensure the player, if found to be putting in a reasonable effort, will be victorious. Games are, largely, not about failure anymore. There is no winner in EVE Online, at least not a permanent one, and many players are happy to squash you under a virtual boot--the whole reason Something Awful’s GoonSwarm alliance exists is to ruin everyone's time. It’s an experience that asks you to totally forget the concept of a backlog and submit.

There was a point around 2007/8 where the game design environs, especially in the MMO genre where the noble goal of ensuring no one is completely screwed and can be guarenteed to acquire a Success State deevolved into a guarentee of not seeing a Failure State.

From that point on, it has led to various things once reguarded as basic expectations: the risk of setback, the coming up short on a goal of doing/acquiring something while it's still fresh, or the upgrading of one's experience and prowess in-game, are now seen as anaethemas, horrible slights to the sanctity of the player.

No longer is it about "Equality of Opportunity" but "Equality of Outcome". In this viewpoint (both from developer and players who follow this creed) all gameplay and socialization leading to that Outcome is seen as a grind, boring and tedious, but inherently better than the Opportunity, as that carries a risk of Failure State. And since that gameplay and socializtion is a grind, when its lessoned and/or marginalized, it is inherently a Good Thing.

People complain about apathy, ennui, and boredom in MMOs, but few realize this is the main source of that emotional entropy, and fewer still that do realize are ready to take back the mantle of player agency, player responsibility, and player restriction necessary to curtail it. The genie is out of the bottle.

Thank god CCP makes an MMO that flips off this wasting disease of the genre, even if I don't find the gameplay or aesthetics to my liking. Keep up the good fight.

As what it means to be a "game" splinters, are we forming regrettable cliques?

This has been the case as long as there have been genres and multiple systems (Dah 70s), but what the tree he dives for in that forest is one of an aging understanding of that clique effect, using the concept of cliques itself to make advantages and attention instead of making use of them.

Nice article with a good point. They could be cautious or waiting for failure to occur, we'll have to see.

And if there's one thing I've learned about N, is that they're either way ahead or way behind the curve. We'll just have to see how it shakes out.

/salute

Don't be a stranger. Your dulcet tone, erudite gaming tastes, and perfectly chosen non-sequitors were a huge boon to the site, month in, month out.

2) I'm not going to pretend I have inside information on how one company or another does business, because I most certainly do not. I do know that when a multinational corporation is having tough times, it's often easier for those at home to blame those who aren't there, versus those that are sitting right in front of them. Maybe the blame is being assigned properly, and maybe it's just some epic-level buck-passing. Again, I really don't know, but I have my own theories.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the secret company described here is indeed Squeenix! The entirety of Eidos is one giant Sakaguchi/Matsuno!

And what's on the horizon? Killzone? Tearaway?

Looking outside of Japan is mistake. It's been proven time and time again that handheld development is strongest in Japan! Now then, for the Vita we look overseas to...and...oh.

When I post that argument, evidence serendipidously lands in my lap to back me up every time. I am blessed in some ways, I guess.

Asking someone to sacrifice ten hours of their life with a frustrating learning curve that might not pay off, especially if their job doesn’t involve playing games for a living, is much to ask.

The battle Demon's Souls won for the right to be a game about the journey as much as the destination was not a battle fought for its own sake alone.

@jeff : The thing I've learned about machinima is it obeys Sturgeon's Law x10. For every Mage in a Blue Dress, there's 99 shitty WoW machinima videos for example. Same for webcomics.

Stream Monsters have never been a source of Wylde-level wit. Get past their dullard spew and you have Good Stupid for days out of the matches and faux kayfabe (there's a rabbithole of meta) themselves.

Ooooh, I like this Helen Lewis woman. That's the kind of outside wisdom we need now.