I was asked by Adrian to post this here, so there we go. Everything below is from him:
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Hi guys, Adrian Chmielarz here.
I’m having trouble with the verification email after updating the email in my NeoGAF profile, and thus I cannot post directly from my Saphathoreal account atm - so big fat thanks to the friend who posts this here for me.
I’ll be writing a follow up blog post soon, but I thought that maybe it’d make sense to clarify some things right away.
I
do not want to make interactive movies or books or whatever. Games do borrow elements from other media (e.g. music) but they also offer things that
no other art from can, like interactivity and sense of presence.
Not embracing that would be silly.
But a lot of you here believe that there’s one more crucial element that defines what video games are, and that element is
challenge that can result in player’s failure (don’t die, solve a puzzle, be faster than an enemy car, etc.).
Why?
We all respect Sid Meier, right? His definition of a game is that it’s “a series of interesting decisions” (or “a series of interesting choices”
.
No part of this definition says that a “challenge” is
sine qua non of video games.
Let me use Skyrim to explain my point of view. I have played it for well over a hundred hours. I have finished the main story, most of the sub-quests, explored most of the world, destroyed the Dark Brotherhood, etc. It was a fantastic experience.
But: I did it all on god mode. From start to finish. I’d like to pretend that I was role playing a necromancer cursed by gods with immortality, but the truth is I couldn’t be bothered with trial and error combat and the inventory/speed limits.
Now tell me this: was I, or was I not
playing a video game?
In my opinion, I was. It was an
interactive, immersive experience full of interesting decisions.
So this is where I come from.
That does not mean that I think my post was flawless. It was not.
For example, my definition of a “gameplay” was that it’s something featuring “challenge”. I called the “challenge”-less gameplay as “interactivity”. So it was “gameplay” versus “interactivity”. Wrong. That’s definition clusterfuck. Gameplay is gameplay, and whether it features challenge or not is a whole different story.
Other example: my post was supposed to be thought-provoking, but it simply went too far. If I believe that games can evolve or grow a new branch, then it was narrow minded of me to state that there’s just one way to do it.
As I said, I’ll be writing a follow up, and I’ll try to be better. Blogging is new to me, and English is not my first language – but still some mistakes that I’ve done… Well, I should not have done them. I still stand by the general idea that removing challenge can result in a more engaging, deeper, more memorable experience that we still should call a video game, but there’s more to the story than this.
Thanks for listening.