oraknabo

While I think definitions can be important, I tend to defer to Wittgenstein on discussions about things like games and art.He believed the "central problems of philosophy" that had been argued for centuries were simply just disagreements over weakly defined terms not deep discussions about reality itself. basically, it's really easy to exceed the bounds of language and most "problems" of definition and categorization come more from the limits of language than the complexity of the world and the essence of a thing can't usually be fully encapsulated by a single label, especially when most words have multiple (even conflicting) definitions.

Categorization can be a really useful tool, especially in scientific and academic environments, but they only really work when you can point at specific places where you can draw boundaries between things. How do we tell a plant from an animal? We can look at criteria like what they breathe or how much independent mobility or intelligence they have, but each has cases where these criteria get confusing. It wasn't until we looked at cells that we got the best way to draw the line: cell walls. Plants have them, animals don't. Fungi are an edge case so we don't consider them either.

All we really know that differentiates a game from other media is interactivity, but things like cooking and woodworking are interactive, so why aren't they games? Both can have goals and rules of some kind as well, but I think games have stricter rulesets in most cases. I think most people will agree that rules are essential to games. There's not a lot of crossover between Chess, Baseball, D&D, Pong, Sim City, Tetris, Monkey Island & Minecraft but they all have interactivity and rules. Games like Minecraft have been controversial for relaxing the rules and making video games that are more like cooking and woodworking than previous games, do they have elements that still differentiate them as exclusively games? What could set many games apart from other passtimes is competition but this also gets muddy. For D&D, puzzle games and many single-player games you have to define competition as competing against the Dungeon Master or Game designer. In a simulation, it's more like you're competing against the systems themselves. I think without competition, you have a pure simulator that may not qualify as a game. In the driving part of EuroTruck Simulator 2, there is very little competition but maybe in the business side of the game there is a little. Randomness also seems like an important element I think many people overlook but the more story-driven a game is, the less randomness it will usually have and there are some adventure games that you could argue have none.

So, to some degree or another, I think you have to have interactivity, rules and some form of competition, but those terms can be argued almost as much as the word game itself, so it seems like they only get you incrementally closer to a decent definition.

I actually keep my Steam library pretty small. I tend to avoid impulse buys there by keeping games on my wishlist and only really buying those when sales come up. I have played at least 90% of the games on my list (though not all to completion). I actually own way more games on GOG and have played just about ever one of those as well.

While I'm optimistic that UA will turn out to be a good spiritual sequel to UU and Arx Fatalis and mostly live up to my expectations, I agree with the discussion on the last Bombcast regarding SS3 that the game needs to be as groundbreaking as the first was in its time to really be worth making. Maybe it could be a VR game that introduces us to VR in a similar way to how the original UU and SS introduced us to 3D RPGs but I feel like it's already a little late for that. (what's interesting about the VR angle is that if you go back to interviews with LGS people about their 90s work you hear them talk a lot about their games being inspired by the promise of VR at the time)

It's also going to be incredibly difficult for them to deliver a game with the atmosphere and roleplaying system depth of SS2 while still having to compete with the Bioshock games on a certain level (at least on quality). I'd like to see them delve deeper into the the tabletop systems that inspired the first (like Traveller) and go more in that direction than anywhere near Bioshock's direction. With or without Spector's involvement, they really have to avoid making the Invisible War of the System Shock series. Whatever they end up with needs to be bigger and more ambitious than the first two on every level.

It's too bad Doug Church is buried deep in Valve (working on Left4Dead 3 maybe?) because I think he'd be a great asset to both of these projects.

Adventure Game is probably the best umbrella term for your examples. TWD is a pretty standard one (with a few action elements) and visual Novels and Walking sims are both variations on the Adventure formula with one focusing more on dialogue systems and the other on environmental exploration.

It's been 24 hours since I signed up and I never got my codes.

Anyone know what's in the third package?

@alavapenguin: @jasonr86: Are there any philosophers you like that you don't consider to be navel gazing? Just curious.

OR

I suppose I'm trying to pinpoint which of the two is the bigger problem. Would comedy routines at least solve the second?

I'd at least propose that they do add to the atmosphere of the game (and they clearly add to the story if you find the right ones) but it just happens to be an addition to the atmosphere that, for whatever reason, a lot people seem to find disagreeable.

I'd like to ask people who are so put off by the audio logs in the game if each one contained an old standup comedy routine would it still bother them as much? --If you got Who's On First on one at the quarry, George Carlin talking about swear words in the keep and maybe a Marx Brothers scene in the video room?

I understand the complaint that the logs don't seem to add anything to the game, (that's debatable given the content of some of the later ones) but in some ways I don't see them as doing anything different than the sea shanties in AC: Black Flag and people loved those.

@thatpinguino: No problem. I'm happy to direct the discussion back toward the game itself.