RedlineRonin
Member
Article
A lot more article at the link. A decent chunk references Edith Finch, a game I haven't yet played.
I'd strongly encourage reading the article before posting. I disagree with a lot of points, but that last quote I believe is directionally correct.
What really sets games apart are their ability to create unique stories for everyone who plays them. Emergent gameplay, as a term, is kind of beaten to death, but it's probably the easiest one to use to identify what makes games special.
Thoughts?
Did a quick search and didn't see this posted. Lock if old.
The approach raises many questions. Are the resulting interactive stories really interactive, when all the player does is assemble something from parts? Are they really stories, when they are really environments? And most of all, are they better stories than the more popular and proven ones in the cinema, on television, and in books?
Left less explored were the other aspects of realistic, physical environments. The inner thoughts and outward behavior of simulated people, for example, beyond the fact of their collision with other objects. The problem becomes increasingly intractable over time. Incremental improvements in visual fidelity make 3-D worlds seem more and more real. But those worlds feel even more incongruous when the people that inhabit them behave like animatronics and the environments work like Potemkin villages.
To dream of the Holodeck is just to dream a complicated dream of the novel. If there is a future of games, let alone a future in which they discover their potential as a defining medium of an era, it will be one in which games abandon the dream of becoming narrative media and pursue the one they are already so good at: taking the tidy, ordinary world apart and putting it back together again in surprising, ghastly new ways.
A lot more article at the link. A decent chunk references Edith Finch, a game I haven't yet played.
I'd strongly encourage reading the article before posting. I disagree with a lot of points, but that last quote I believe is directionally correct.
What really sets games apart are their ability to create unique stories for everyone who plays them. Emergent gameplay, as a term, is kind of beaten to death, but it's probably the easiest one to use to identify what makes games special.
Thoughts?
Did a quick search and didn't see this posted. Lock if old.