It's the feedback loop that gives the pleasure. Has to be real time so fucking about in 3D environments for half an hour before getting an occasional payoff doesn't do it for me. I'm shallow. It's why original Doom remains the only FPS I've ever enjoyed.

One of the reasons that I have no problem with the whole 'experience' thing is that games are one of, if not the only medium where you can wander around an artificially constructed space. The other I guess are galleries and interactive theatre, but none of them really match what you can achieve in games, whether that be something like Gone Home, The Stanley Parable, Firewatch, Naissence, or the Beginner's Guide. If the gameplay in those games was more than "wander around and take it in" maybe they'd be "better" "games" but they'd also not be what they were intended to be. 

The analogue to film in the 70s feels appropriate now - during the Hollywood Renaissance, all yer big upstart film school directors repackaged French New Wave, Italian Neo-Realism, and other world cinema, in a way that was halfway between homage and influence, increasing the texture of their films. That's what gets us the Nepal section of Uncharted 2, the solitude and wandering between combat in the Last Of Us, the aimless car rides of Final Fantasy XV, the blissed out space-faring of No Man's Sky. Without these spaces to breath games would be a bit stifling, and I think the experience side of the coin has added a lot to games in recent years.

I think you can almost see a turning point around the late PS1/early PS2 (alongside the bountiful PC era) where people realised that games could be a medium for story as opposed to a series of mechanical tricks that get you hooked into a gameplay loop. People who grew up on Coin-Ops and so on are far more predisposed to the arcade game loop, and find the stories boring, which is fine - both sides of the coin are catered for.

davyK wrote:

It's the feedback loop that gives the pleasure. Has to be real time so fucking about in 3D environments for half an hour before getting an occasional payoff doesn't do it for me. I'm shallow. It's why original Doom remains the only FPS I've ever enjoyed.

Aye see that's the difference, if the 3D space is enjoyable to me, then I don't need an objective. I like to wander and instigate, but conversely I hate unfocused and meandering open world design. Both ends of the gameplay/experience spectrum are really enjoyable to me, but it's often the middling and sprawling blur that constitutes a lot of games that puts me off. I'd rather have an exciting world to explore with no combat mechanics (hi Grow Home) than bog standard combat mechanics and no direction to go in (Hello, Ubisoft Open Worlds)

Of course I also think if you want the best of mechanical workings, you should play one of the many hundreds of finely tuned rogue-likes out there like the Binding of Isaac, Nuclear Throne, Invisible, Inc. Crypt of the Necrodancer, or Telegltich, as they live or die on the strength of their core mechanics, and here they are, living.

There's still hundreds of games that are pure gameplay out there though, I think you just have to roll a bit harder on the smaller titles like Assault Android Cactus than expect the homogeneous AAA market to serve you up anything other than big messes that are trying to appeal to everyone.

I think the latest Tomb Radier is a fair example of the problem of stretching yourself too thin. I played it for about 10 hours and gave up because it was like a MOR drone, but I imagine my takeway of enjoyment: ambling around the hub, finding tombs, hunting deer, solving tombs, would have been different from what you might have enjoyed: the tight gunplay, the scoring system, the aggressive AI that forces qucik reactions.

Either part of those would have made a good game, but mashing them together meant I was always hesitant of progression because it might mean leaving behind the bits I like for the bits I don't like, and also the friction between the two halves undoes the world. How are wolves still a threat when I can slaughter 20 people incredibly violently? I love the frenetic scrambling combat, but it's too unfocused as a whole.

A recent interesting example is House of the Dying Sun, a Freespace/Wing Commander style space combat game with an amazing aesthetic and controls... and it's about 2 hours long, because the story is about 10 sentences long and all the narrative is scooped out and replaced with the missions which have zero preamble and zero context beyond the original story statement. It's a space combat game for people who want space combat, want a sense of a grand narrative, but don't want 100 hours of ELITE style preamble, nor do they want the flow of the game interrupted by long winded story.

... I still want a new Wing Commander though.

I'm very glad that things like Rapture and Gone Home exist and people get stuff from them. Just wish they didn't take up the slots on PS+.

As a counter to that, and the the idea that 'experience' games are like films, I think AAA games are closer to trying to be films most of the time. Compared to most big AAA romps like Tomb Raider and Uncharted, Gone Home is an experience game that is nothing like a film (although as a comparison something like Virginia is closer to a film thanks to its editing trappings, price, length, presentation, etc, and that' why it fails). 

Dark Souls and Gone Home are far closer to each in how they create a world, build their history through visual and written cues, and how they make you feel a specific way through non-gameplay elements, than Dark Souls and Call of Duty are close to each other through their gameplay loops. The stuff that's great about Dark Souls and Bloodborne especially could probably make an interesting stand-alone non-combat game, but their trick is to twist both components together so they complement and reinforce. 

If there's one thing that most experience games do, it's to try and tell their story through methods that are slightly different to traditional film techniques. They create a believable environment or scenario, they fill it with the kinds of detail that would be tough to notice in films, they allow for in-character interrogation of objects and systems. Sure they have dialogues and characters and often operate on three act structures, but wandering around in Firewach was for me far more a/effective than watching Leo grunt his way through The Revenant, and i'm not sure the story will hold up as well on the silver screen.

The games that err to close to machinma, like Dear Esther, are the ones that don't stand up. Games use the language of cinema as a crutch already, but I think bigger games are often more to blame than smaller games.

Anything modern is a bit of a broad stretch, I've already mentioned Binding of Isaac, Nuclear Throne, Invisible, Inc., Crypt of the Necrodancer, Telegltich, House of the Dying Sun, and Assault Android Cactus off the cuff, all of which have barely any exposition*.

Something like The Binding of Isaac is basically like a near infinite arcade experience that remixes itself as it goes on, people play it for around 500 hours because at it's core its a simple gameplay loop that and be exponentially iterated on with items and abilities that synergise in a near limitless way.

*HOTD has a few sentences at the start, Teleglitch has terminals with text on that you can ignore, AAC has an opening custcene and maybe 2 or 3 micro scenes sprinkled in between its Robotron through a kaleidoscope style levels.

There are definitely stories in games that are effective because they're games. Something like Brothers, for example. A very simple story given more impact by the way you interact with the main characters.

davyK wrote:

Will check those out. Cheers.

Not meaning to be a dick, I just think a large part of the perception issue is that big console games are all there is, when there are in fact 100s of games released every year, many of them as good as if not better than a lot of bigger games, but they're shied away from because they're only £10, and therefore they can't be as good as something that costs you £60. We've just seen a return to the idea of the bedroom coder that popularised the whole medium in the UK during the 80s, except now they have bigger budgets and better software suites - they still have the same wild ideas.

Isaac also has the presentation issue. Some people will never be able to see past its poo and blood trappings, but when you get far enough along playing it, you stop seeing it, just like with old arcade games. They're all shapes that have different properties.

Tempy wrote:

davyK wrote:

Will check those out. Cheers.

Not meaning to be a dick, .

I know you're not. I'm pretty stuck in my ways and haven't seen a lot of newer stuff that interests me. It's great when someone takes the time to list a few things that might challenge my perception of how things are , and better still, I might enjoy.

I do prefer the form factor of a console but have no issue trying something out on PC.

I finally watched 10p's oxenvid and it has some shizzle re this Fred so go watch it too

Sorry that was a bit cryptic. A few minor plot refs/spoilers (as flagged with) but

Tempy wrote:

on

I think it is definitely fair to say you can have one, the other or both. Experience can be there very deliberately by design but also appear as a by-product of the tools setup for the main part of the game.
GtaV is an excellent example of a game where I have had some great experiences that are outside of missions or in the pursuit of any form of progress.

Of course the risk a developer runs when opting for either experience or gameplay solely is that there is nothing to fall back on if they miss the mark. Further to that, while gamers are well versed in what constitutes good and bad gameplay an experience can be much more subjective. In that way I think experience based games are like other media such as books or films.

Yeah I would go along with that.
"Play" is certainly an aspect of games I particularly enjoy, especially as I'm not competitive in the slightest.

Halo 3 MP was good for it in casuals. Despite being in a match myself and Uni mates would often just muck around, then get told off. (always in Casuals btw).

THPS was another. I would quite often go on Free Skate then just skate about while chatting with mates.

Crackdown was ace for just 'playing' as well.