MechaMarshmallow

@johnymyko: I do not think that anyone here was even saying that if someone made a game like that they would demand it to be how they wanted or force their personal views on it. @frostyryan might have phrased it a bit strongly, but it sounds like both of you would potentially be turned away from an otherwise fun game if the subject matter was pushing themes that you find objectionable.

I agree that it's important that artists are allowed to create what they want without censorship, expressing freely in video games as well as writing and other forms. But I think it's also important that we don't allow that freedom of expression to shield hateful or otherwise objectionable messages from criticism. I would also support the right of the theoretical KKK game developer to create their game, but I sure as heck will be praising the critics who savage it for trying to push a racist agenda.

Generally speaking I'm not a very easy person to offend, but I think video games are at their best when they have strong and interesting storytelling without relying on outdated stereotypes or questionable aesops - or at least when the story is decent enough that not get in the way of the gameplay.

People tend to pay a lot more attention to the nuances of storytelling and characterization in games than I think the creators often intend, but I am of the opinion that if you are going to try and tell a story with your game and many players find that story to make the game less enjoyable, then that is a failing on the part of the creator. Just like bugs, unbalanced game play or shoddy DLC practices, the story is a part of the finished product and should not be disregarded just because it's easier to skip bad cutscenes. The lack of care for the product is still there.

I don't know that this has ever pushed me away from a game alone, but it certainly can work in tandem with a game I already dislike for some other reason to make me put it down. On the other hand, I love examining things I disagree with so if it's fun but also obnoxious, that'll probably push me to dig deeper into what it's trying to do so that I can articulate why I disagree with it.

My go-to answer has always been that to be a 'game', it must be a system of rules and restrictions that includes three things: Some form of player interaction with the system that is reflected within the system, an implicit or explicit goal within the system, and the typical primary motivation for the use of the system to be some form of personal satisfaction.

A system lacking interaction is the most obviously not-a-game system. Then it becomes a movie or a story or something else like that. Like I am sure everyone in the world has said, all art is interactive, but I can't think of anything that would qualify as a game that would lack player interaction that does not affect the system in some sort of direct manner.

The goal is a big one for me, because it is what draws the line between a lot of things that are argued about. A system that resembles a game but has no explicit or implicit goal is a toy. The easiest examples are that Minecraft is a game, but Minecraft's creative mode is a toy. Toys can be turned into games; If you challenge someone to make the best house in creative mode in a half hour, it becomes a game.

The primary motivation part could probably be worded better, but if a system's primary purpose to the player is typically something other than personal satisfaction it's not a game. It's something else. You can certainly gamify systems in workplaces or health regimes to make them more compelling prospects for users, but those users would ostensibly be interacting with those systems anyway even without the game there. Conversely, a Minecraft streamer may hate playing Minecraft online 8 hours a day, but the typical purpose of the game is player enjoyment, even if that player in particular considers it more of a job.

That last point is particularly relevant to the realm of sports. Look at fencing for example. Originally sword fighting was typically a job or a necessary survival skill, not a game in the slightest. As time progressed and we began to advance beyond that, we created a system of rules around sword fighting and partook in it for personal satisfaction, and it became a game.

All this is to say that there's for sure some dark, dystopian future where the gamification of office jobs become so compelling that we begin joining them for the fun of playing the game rather than the objective of employment, and 'office job' becomes a game. Meanwhile, Minecraft is no longer played by anyone except for streamers. They hate it, but it's still the most popular game on twitch. Yet, as no one plays it any more for fun and just wants to watch it, it has become a job.

I hated this in Enemy Unknown and I hate it in XCOM 2. While I understand they had design reasons to do things this way, I'm definitely going to have to work out how to mod all of these hidden bonuses out before I play XCOM 2 again. Knowing that this is going on behind the scenes will kill my enjoyment in this game otherwise.

I played through and beat Breath of Fire 4 without ever realising that you could hit right on the d-pad to bring up a whole other list of spells in battle.

:(

I'm not a player who is receptive to emotional stimuli, but even from that perspective I think the intro was great. I feel like it did a truly amazing job of conveying to the player who Henry is as a person, not just in what happened to him but also the limitations on choices you can make. Sure, there's some wriggle room in how you can have him act, but just as much is conveyed by the answers you can't give. You absolutely can't have him move across the country for Julia's job. I felt like I had a stark impression of just who he was and where he was coming from by the end, and going into the meat of the game I had some firm opinions about him just from that stuff alone.

Reading this thread makes me realise that I may be in a very strange minority where my main complaint about the game was 'needs more difficult bosses'

My enjoyment of the game can pretty much be plotted as a straight line increasing steadily from 'meh these puzzles are bad' to 'GOTY 2015'. Then a vertical line to negative numbers when I started trying to interact with the community, but I should really have known better.

@iodine: You need to send them back to leader training to level them up more. It works the same way as psionics.

I knew it from the start. I say 'knew', that's not quite right. I was damn sure that they would exist from the start. It was just a matter of me clicking on everything vaguely line-shaped in the environment until I found the one in the sand temple.