The tools just aren't there still to generate a constantly progressing experience with endless variety but enough curated content to remind you there's some heart in it all, definitely getting there though, i'd definitely agree that games are repetitive, even with the finest minds on the planet at the wheel and i know there are leads who would have the energy to produce these ideas, but in most games as people see them, the cost of developing that kind of variety is ridiculous

You can knock army men games and wotnot but i think COD4 marked a seachange in the minds of developers, and games suddenly became more like films, like repetition started reducing rapidly, money got poured in recreating what cod4 did so well but it's gone kind of wank, missed the point, and now i reckon that endless surprise and variety will come via oculus surfing walk-em-ups. I say it loads but I stand by it, Dear Esther's pure variety in there, when on a monitor its yawnsome. CoD games are unbearable trash in VR.

This game started life with the zbrush age so i've no doubt they've been knocking out a huge amount of content over the years that should retain its relevance even through a generation, so maybe it's this that keeps it in development, and when it surfaces it'll be part of the oncoming inventiveness afforded by tools and specs

Games are fundamentally repetitive. The cost of getting a game running compared to the cost of making another section of doing roughly the same shit will always be a barrier.

Dead Souls was lacking in lady/man/pug ritual sacrifice. Always worth it.

What?

I believe he was expressing disbelief.

Ha. You fanbois.

SotC transcends the medium.

I think it means it was born in the body of a man but it's more comfortable as a woman.

In all seriousness you could argue that any game that stops feeling like a bullshit videogame despite not actually jettisoning the core experience - rules, mechanics, goals, patterns - has gone a long way off piste. I crave these titles.

Ftr I don't really think Colossus qualifies.

Very little indeed. The ones that get closest have tended to tailor their scenarios very carefully to fit, and don't require a great deal of 'suspension of disbelief'. Something like Portal is a game about solving spatial puzzles in a context which is very much about being a lab-rat. Could be tighter, but it's on the right track.

http://2paragraphs.com/2014/08/sony-saying-sayonara-to-the-last-guardian/

Totally not worth reading.

I still find the basic constituents of 'game' the most compelling reason to deal with interactive fiction, insofar as almost everything we do that is interactive comes with the notion of 'a task performed, an outcome achieved' as a vital element of the experience.

Plenty of people drive cars for the sheer pleasure of driving but they still get you from A to B, and that core function seems to be what all else hangs off. My suspicion, and indeed experience, is that when you unhook interactivity from the convenient structure of tool-for-a-jobhood and all the design therefore necessary to escalate challenge and encourage development of mastery, you mute the medium of interactive fiction significantly. Any insights into its topic can feel lacking in potency, underearned or even shallow. Certainly, the 'lighter' a product's taskmastering and feedback, the more searingly profound and novel those insights seem to need to be to make up for it.

Should state, this isn't an argument for making everything well hard. I think a better model is to make everything 'non-trivial' - choices made should reward richly with further options, and be aesthetically satisfying in themselves. It's the complication of friction rather than the imposition of grotesque impediment for its own sake. And absolutely, do not write a game 'about' hardship without presenting that mechanically too, otherwise your product doesn't actually make sense.

Interestingly i think i get you about the mechanics of gameplay being what drives the experience, but i'd like to investigate ways in which to submerge identifying mechanics within a coherent space, and the mechanical  manifestions introduce themselves in the nature of the space (Space is a rough word here, could mean the entire physicality of the experience) as it starts rolling towards the whim you have abraded it towards

Thats all very loose talk and all of my ideas now are VR focussed which means you guys better get on that so you know what im about more! But essentially making 'walking simulators' that compel via perversity and aesthetic richness and write a story that is more a kind of under-hum of potential, that breaks into kineticism expressed in all forms, be it violence, quick reactions to an emotive npc outburt or just a burst of beauty breaking through the walls. I kinda loved ico for the very muted sense of power possibly bukding within the castle, which reaches a crescendo eventually but the most of the game is a good hearted boy helping someone he doesnt understand the best he can. Players can always be like that, SOTC in fact is another example, the hum of bad things teasing into the mood of the  game while you, the player, and your avatar and his horse face the hard work of doing your task, perhaps doubting what you were doing, and in a perfect world this mechanic could work beautifully with a well organised system and simulation of 'potential change'  in both living and more mathematicaly based game driving variables

There was a good link ace linked in games we wrote i think, in it it had an article about using the boids algorithm to model social direction, it could be extremely useful to run a simulation like this for exactly that.

Id like the modern game to be a game but you not know it's a game as such, you're investigating ideally wonderfully presented areas, maybe having fun with time and space and all that, and the mechanics of the game swoop into you over time, the player makes their own connections, each interaction, as you say, is rich with information and oportunity

You essentially learn to live in the game world, live buy whatever the dev designs as constants, hard and fast rules, and a world, doesnt have to be human, it can be emtirely inexplicable, but its reacting to whart you're doing, what others in the gameworld are doing, your interaction start getting very rich, animation now makes switch a button or ay kind of interaction easy now, in a VR headset playing a well designed game you are enrapt. Youre more than happy to investigate everything, youre in someone elses private universe, you want to see what maskes it tick, and then i guess i want this to be the driving force for it all

In reference to making games about hardship, one of my most cast in iron pledges is to help people understand psychosis, and yes believe me it will be mechanics up the wazoo, fantastic technology is becoming available to help this (significantly atm, binaural stereo) and with any luck i can sink the lumpen boy feel attached to the word game and games instead be part of a task filled progression to, well, where you should end, but none of that be overtly expressed on you. Systems being in work you'l never know the mathematics of, altering the game world (My environment ideas are a tad ambitious) in a way you can only vaguely impact

And of course the mechanics of psychotic onslaught... that can only be done on your own. If i do my job right, id like to think things changed for the better

It might take a bit of a paradigm shift for people to accept that they aret the hero, never will be, they will be part of a machine they cant broach, but they know its there and they can try to broach it. Systems like this neednt be complex, algorithms to control the sway of system and its effects on the player can be very simple (boids is a good example), end points of these systems are npcs, of which there can be few, but maintaining a believable dynamic between them with a system evoked bias automatically makes for much more compelling interaction involving an exchange with an entity capable of maintaining a compelling exchange. This is mechanism, but it's not 'gamey', well, it IS gamey but it's a little further along than galaga, and i want to think of immersive experiences as capitalising on the fact that in a VR hud, you are completely happy in your own space and time, you an just dawdle around and look at things, its a thing of great pleasure. Mechanisms can manifest with subterfuge, they can follow simple principles, in fact fairly self explanatory rule based reactions with ancilliary systems (state machine, behaviour tree, pathfinding) making agents in the space react accordingly short term and this be modelled into the overarching computation of the overarching system. It's almost a weird animal crossing-esque contentment with just existing, somewhere that couldnt possibly exist, which brings me onto:

Dear Esther - i never for a single second thought it would replace a walk in the moors, it couldnt possibly, but ive never been on an island like that.. thats irrelevant however, as the first two areas are quite simple walking around grassy hills and taking in the view and trying to ignore the narration, this is on VR i might add, i played the gane through once on a monitor and went 'pretty but eh', vr proves transformative, but its only when you get to the caves level that i realised the potential of VR things completely replacing the mentality behind faster bigger more explodingser - instead you do a weird 'wtf' breathing noise and try and take in the scale of what you are experiencing, that 3rd segment of the game is absolutely spellbinding in VR and very much formed some central thoughts about what people actually want from gaming, and wether what people want from gaming at the moment is mainly described via the device through which they experience it

Anyways, i digress, kind of, the Ueda games to my mind have caught the sense of just enjoying being in a place you can hang around in, look around in, take things in, enjoy in awe the scale of everything. There's clinically little to distract in these worlds (half life 2 goes by the same principle btw, and benefits deeply from it in comparison with just about any other shooter going), the aesthetic is tight and focussed and mood perfectly set. This is in monitor game form examples of stuff on VR you'd just rather do than run around trying to shoot things and getting increasingly fucked off when BEING INSIDE the world makes you incredibly aware of your limitations, and everything tunnel and overt is frustrating and disappointing

I really do hope the adoption of vr increasingly exposes the recent (well, its been quite a while) trash being output to make sparkles in the eyes of the pent up, as the trash it is, a game that invites you to be a member of something real that you only play your part in, to me, is far more effective than being a passenger on an exploding train that looks like a cock plundering onwards into USA FUCK YEAH boogeyman arsehole

LazyGunn wrote:

It might take a bit of a paradigm shift for people to accept that they aret the hero, never will be, they will be part of a machine they cant broach, but they know its there and they can try to broach it.

What if all games are a personalised Total Perspective Vortex?