Amir0x said:
I went into Journey really excited about the concept. It's not that I'm failing to engage the game, it's that the game is failing to engage me. It's almost never a gamers fault for not liking a game for being what it is. That's a developers responsibility.
As a (former) developer I completely disagree. There's no way to guarantee compliance on the part of your audience. There's always a need for them to "buy-in", or you're fucked.
Look at it this way:
You wrote at some length about mechanics; but where's the "fun" in any given mechanic? Define the appeal.
To do that you need context, it needs to have some "meaning" in both a larger sense and intrinsic value as an action.
In most cases this springs from a combination of presentation (the graphics and sound are more critical than people like to admit), and the placement of the mechanic within an overarching supergoal - fundamental stuff like staying alive, building a score, etc.
If you take away the supergoal, because you wnat to avoid dealing with a hard "fail"-case, it's all on the presentation. Specifically what that presentation means in an ambient sense, and a huge part of that is the perception of the individual player.
The way you describe the way the avatars in Journey communicate as "barking" suggests to me that you find it unattractive. Me, I'd characterize it more like hooting, which I think suggests how poignant I find it.
That's because I'm me, and you are you.
Minimalism can be powerful because it allows space for the viewer to project aspects of their "self" more into the work. That's the fundamental principle of TGC's stuff; abstraction to allow empathy.
The thing is, its not going to work for everyone equally, because, simply put you need to buy into the idea for it to work. They can try and seduce you, shape your perceptions through sympathetic visuals, and emotive sounds and music, but until that spark jumps the gap and you actually invest in the thing... nada.
In the reveal trailer the camera pulls back from the close-up on the avatar as the cello swellled in the soundtrack I was sold, instantly, because it made me
feel something. The juxtaposition of this oddly empathic humanoid figure within this vast pastelly desert evoked a real feeling of scale and isolation and loneliness.
And that, to me, has more value than transitory pleasure of Mario's jump or the amusing squawk as you launch an angry bird. Even though, essentially, if you strip away the hit/death mechanic from Mario, or the score imperative from Angry Birds, they are basically the same thing.
