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Originally posted by: IceCold
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Perhaps more people feel the same? There must be some scholarship or documentation on the perception of environments in games - to me it is more important than any "fun" I have while playing.
I'll have to stop you right there.. It's a game.. Analysing these things is great and all, but at the end of the day, to me at least, they are not what make games great. They add to the style, the presentation, the artistic side of things. They enhance the experience, sometimes to a great extent, and are definitely noteworthy. But the gameplay is always paramount. ... having fun is the reason I play games, and I don't want that to change. And I believe that if you don't play games for fun, then they are not for you.
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Originally posted by: Hostile Creation
But if you apply the qualities of another medium to gaming, you're only holding back its potential.
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Gaming is a visual, moving medium, but it's very different from film (or any other medium for that matter). Other mediums can compliment it in some way, but if you try to put the limitations of one medium into gaming, you're only going to limit it.
But what is fun?Here's the American Heritage Dictionary's take:
fun n.
1. A source of enjoyment, amusement, or pleasure.
2. Enjoyment; amusement: have fun at the beach.
3. Playful, often noisy, activity.
Here's another quote from IceCold:
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If you value the "perception of environments" more than the joy you get by playing the game, you may be exploring a desert with few oases. It does make it all the more special when a game is rich in these features (like Zelda), but they should not be your primary concern.
Who's to say where I get my "joy" in playing the game? Why did Nintendo use a different graphical style for Wind Waker, and why was everyone up in arms about it? These things matter and they affect the "fun," if we are going to separate "fun" from every aspect of the game except the running and jumping.
Fun's an awful word. I can have fun doing something, but can I really isolate which part of it was fun and which was inspiring, tiring, emotional, relational, etc? I believe there is a narrow definition of fun and a broad one, and if we get straight which we're using I think you'll see we agree. The broad definition of fun is American Heritage's first one: "a source of enjoyment, amusement, or pleasure." The narrow meaning is either number 2 or 3. In my post, when I made the critical comment that a consistent game-world meant more to me than "fun," I was referring to the narrow definition. When playing a game, I see the gameplay "fun" as the basic physicality of Pong, Tetris, or Mario. In Banjo-Kazooie, this is flying or racing or running and jumping. This is only a fraction of the modern video game. The enjoyment of Banjo-Kazooie comes from a variety of things: collection and progression, graphical beauty, storyline, and humor. Each of these individual parts is not fun - the only one that comes close is collecting things and progressing through the game, which can be fun but it can also be tiresome; in Banjo-Tooie and DK64 it's exhausting and tedious, but these games still have value.
I refer to the actual "value" of a game as how much I "enjoyed" it, and this is I believe the broad definition of "fun." This means that if a game was tiresome in some way I can still consider it a good experience and walk away with a positive view of it. (Case in Point: Killer 7, a very un-fun game.) Some posters have commented that they view the dungeons of Zelda to be frightening, difficult, and perhaps even painful - how interesting that all who have said this considered it a positive quality! They had a reason to go into that dungeon, and I don't think it was "fun" in the narrow sense, but rather their enjoyment of the game-world, story, progression, etc. This amounts to pleasure in my mind, not fun. American Heritage doesn't see it the way I do, but I have always thought that fun was a specific type of pleasure, not just pleasure in general.
So I believe the game-world gives me my "joy" as much as the running and jumping does. Some people play only RPGs and how much "fun" do you think they're actually having? Final Fantasy VIII had a card game to break up all the random battles, cinematics, heavy-handed story telling, and stat-monitoring - without it, I'd dare say there wasn't an ounce of fun in the whole game, at least in the narrow sense. Personally, I have never played RPGs for their battles, though I know some people do.
Finally, an aside: you're right, I love movies, but I have no idea how they've entered into this discussion at all. My view of the game-world is based entirely on immersion, something a game can do more than a movie when the world is compelling enough. I do view games and movies in a similar way though: I don't separate the individual parts out and say that good "this" plus good "that" plus good "the other" equals good game. To me there must be a unifying whole: good graphics and a good environment without good gameplay can be frivolous, but it can also be enjoyable. In the same way, solid core gameplay with no active narrative or game-world to inhabit is "fun" in the Pong-Tetris sense, and therefore valuable. There's a reason why we don't average out the scores on PGC, and very few other sites do either: even if it were possible to correctly ascertain the actual numerical value of the graphics, control, and gameplay in a game, the mathematical average of them all would never be a correct assessment of the game's quality. A game must be more than the sum of its parts, otherwise we wouldn't value Metal Gear Solid, Doshin the Giant, or Chibi Robo.
P.S. Hostile, where are you getting your BA?