I believe the plot of most games -can- be summed up in a high-concept sentence.
eg. Bioshock:
"An extreme Objectivist community, located under the sea, falls apart, and you must deal with the aftermath." Of course, that assumes knowledge of what Objectivism is, but I believe it's a reasonable high-concept take on Bioshock's plot.
The issue with games, of course, is that plot, unlike in film (a more passive form of entertainment), is often secondary to enjoyment of the experience, rather than central to it. Giving you the plot of a game doesn't tell you the mechanics, the game genre, what makes it fun, etc.
So, you try and simplify the mechanics so these more nebulous concepts can be explained in a high-concept. While this leads to some great games like the PopCap games, I think trying to make high-concept games to draw in non-gamers leads mostly to trash like the shovelware that comes out in a steady stream on the Wii. This won't draw in any new gamers for the long-term, when they play the crappy game and realise they wasted their money, and question the value of gaming in general.
Besides, I'm not really interested in making gaming more accessible. I believe you (using the general you) take things on their own terms rather than expecting them to change for you. If I went to the movie theatre, saw a title like, say, 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind', and said 'that sounds dumb', choosing to watch something else instead and missing out on a great movie, I believe that's my fault for not doing a little reading first, not the filmmaker's fault.
I don't care how many people enjoy a game I liked, only that I enjoyed it. It doesn't drive me crazy that 'Alice in Wonderland' will have more people see it than play my favourite game, because if they don't play the game, that's their loss, not mine.
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Uh Oh, the fanboys are out...
I also own both a PS3 and a 360, and I definitely love some PS3 exclusives (LittleBigPlanet, Valkyria Chronicles, Demon's Souls, the Uncharted Series, God of War 3), and like some others (Ratchet and Clank, Infamous, MGS4). I think there's lots of good exclusives on the 360, too. To a voracious gamer like myself, there's plenty of reason to own both.
Putting aside the Halo series, which I've always disliked (above and beyond a general dislike of FPS on console), there's games like:
Beautiful Katamari
Crackdown
Dead Rising
Fable 2
Forza 3
Gears of War/2
Viva Pinata
Chromehounds was great before they introduced party chat, which ruined the 'beyond radio range' tension. Although I'm yet to play it, Alan Wake is also getting some good reviews.
Then there's the 'PC/360 exclusives.' If you play FPS on console, the Left 4 Dead series. If you don't play games on PC at all, the Mass Effect series.
I do think the exclusives on XBox Live are better than the PSN exclusives, particularly if you played through the extensive PSN PS1 collection the first time around, but that's neither here nor there.
Basically, if you can afford it, get both.
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Yay for a new EGM, can't wait for it to filter to us out here in the antipodes (probably in 2 months :/)
Although I'm definitely interested in how long games are, because I have limited hours in the day and a lot of options as to which game to play, I'm otherwise so with you - tell me how much -fun- the game is, and what you like about it. Games writing shouldn't be journalism - I don't need a nut graf and a descending pyramid of information - and when it tries to be, it's both boring and pointless - it tells you everything about a game without telling you anything about the game, if you know what I mean.
I also appreciate the aesthetics of print, the way a magazine smells, the eye-friendly nature of reading paper as opposed to a backlit screen, and so on. There's something to be said for the virtues of print beyond content alone.
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Andrew - You sound like exactly the type of person my post is aimed at. We're probably never going to agree, but here's some of my responses.
"Your point is incredibly muddled... because of such."
This point came to me originally from a thread on my guild's forums - people (and there were quite a few) complaining that there was no point doing 25 mans anymore if the loot was the same. If that doesn't say they're in it for the loot, what does it say?
Speaking only for my guild, the only reason I find 25 mans harder is because of logistics - waiting for people to log on to fill the raid, dealing with a few sub-par players (even still) that can be filtered out in 10 mans. A 10 man is usually a tighter group, and smaller raids generally require each individual to do more (at least in variety of actions). I certainly find that I do less individually in a 25 man.
"Anyone who doesn't agree that WoW is becoming overly simplified has either not played the game much...talked about gear."
Disagree, and I've played the game plenty. This may be horrid to you, but it's fine for me. I read EJ, I theorycraft, and while I don't think having to know some things, like the hit cap, is so bad, I still think it's ridiculous that I have to know about 'above this number, ArPen works better', 'haste is less useful above this number', not to mention all the not-very transparent mechanics that combine to make the crit cap, etc, etc. IMO, a game like WoW shouldn't require a spreadsheet. I'd like to spend my time playing the game, not doing maths.
"@Mike the game has been incredibly casualized...
@Guillaume "Much easier" is such an over statement. Bosses being hard or easy isn't the only thing that factors in making a game casual..."
You might be nostalgic for hours of farming just to have all the necessary buffs for a raid, I'm not. I've raided from Molten Core on, and if I never have to farm a piece of resistance gear again, I'll be quite content.
I don't think making the game more accessible is a problem. Being able to get badges doesn't invalidate the efforts of the people who got that gear before it was available for badges - they'll be onto the next tier of gear, anyway. It sure makes it far less painful to gear alts or new recruits, rather than having to run old content again and again to get them up to par.
As much as it seems you would like it to be, the game is not built for the tip of the iceberg, it is built for the large section floating underneath. There's always going to be a group who race through content and complain that they're stuck waiting for people to catch up.
Top Tier guilds may make up a disproportionate amount of the forum posts related to raiding, but that doesn't mean they're where the money is, and there is an incredible amount of arrogance in some of the petulance that these guilds display when they don't get their way.
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As someone who has also lost a lot of weight in the past year, I'll just add my 2c. I understand this isn't supposed to be a massive guide to weight loss, but there's a few more basic things that it helps to understand to keep weight off.
Food is absolutely the key to weight loss, and although I could go on about macro nutrients, the essential formula is calories out has to be more than calories in. Exercise helps, but food is more important. If I could give one food tip above all others, it's avoid white carbs (ie. sugar, white bread, short-grain rice, cookies, cakes, all the good stuff, unfortunately). Carbs in general are not great for weight loss, but wholegrain carbs at least keep you full longer and have more nutrients.
Drinking calories is absolutely the worst way of taking them in because it's so easy to do, and in soda there is absolutely nothing of nutritional value. Juice has nutritional value but still has a lot of calories, and unlike eating fruit, has no fibre to indicate to your body that it's getting full, so you can easily drink a lot. Alcohol has a lot of calories, too, although I don't begrudge anyone a few drinks a couple times a week. Drinking a lot (3+ litres) of water a day is great - flushes your system of toxins, keeps you from getting dehydration headaches, quells hunger, and actually helps you lose weight, because your body stops retaining water when you drink a lot of it.
Lastly, exercise is definitely useful, but make sure you do resistance training (ie. weights or bodyweight exercises like push ups and chin ups) as well as cardio to maintain muscle mass, as muscle burns a lot more calories than fat, making it harder to gain weight, and easier to lose it if you do put any back on.
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To me, it's definitely a tired debate, one that I covered at my own blog a while back (under that closely related topic 'Where's Gaming's 'Citizen Kane'?) It seems to come around every few months, and I agree with you, does it really matter? Did you enjoy the game? Then that's enough. Art is really in the eye of the beholder, anyway.
There's also a big issue, to me, in looking for legitimacy from people who are in no position to give it. As you say, gamers tend to be passionate, and they (we) put too much stock in the opinion of outsiders. When a game designer says 'games could be better', I listen. When a journalist or critic who didn't grow up with games, and doesn't play games makes a snide or ill-considered comment, I don't ask them to change their mind, I just think 'so what?'
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Hey BJ, it's good to see I'm not the only one who feels this way about rating system used in games writing. I try to avoid pimping my blog and drawing the attention away from bitmob, but you may find my blog post on a similar topic interesting: http://www.oldschoolhard.com/2010/02/gaming-writing-inhale-the-fail/
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-Eddie Ba"
If you want to talk about 'realistic' graphics, there's still a long way to go. Skin tone looks weird, movement animation is still not quite right, facial animation is not quite right, even with anti-aliasing there's still plenty of jaggies. Environments where every object has realistic physics (including those of destruction) don't exist yet.
Also, current generation consoles are less powerful than their manufacturers make out they are. '1080p' output is often an actual resolution of 600-700p, internally upscaled.
-Eddie Bax (hoping I don't an 'a guest' attribution again"
How will I play a fast-paced multi-player game with the multiple hops from the streaming server and back again introducing a lot of latency?
What if I'm in an internet backwater like Australia (which I am) where unlimited internet is not the norm and I have a low download cap? Or in a rural area where broadband is patchy or slow?
Only something like half of all XBox 360 buyers actually connect to Live, and that's probably the most 'hardcore' of all current systems. Is there enough money in this 'hardcore' niche of a niche to make a streaming service viable? I can't see the Wii-buying general public really being interested.
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Podcasts certainly indirectly affect my gaming, though, largely through alerting me about new games I never would have played otherwise. Zeno Clash, Mount and Blade, Plants vs. Zombies, Trine - it's these sort of indie games that I've picked up and loved only after finding out about them on podcasts"
To use the movie comparison again - total US video games sales, 2009 (admittedly, including hardware as well as software): $19.66 billion USD (http://www.npd.com/press/releases/press_100114.html)
Total US box office + DVD sales, 2009: $18.6 billion (http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5BU0HS20100105)
Percentage of children who play video games: 97 per cent (http://www.dailytech.com/Study+Shows+97+Percent+of+Kids+Play+Video+Games/article12985.htm)
Essentially, the video game market is bigger than the movie market by dollars, if not by eyeballs, and growth in the market will come as more and more kids grow old enough to play games. Growth may never come from older people who don't currently play, but it's not really a problem - the kids are digital natives and they grow up with games.
Or, as Douglas Adams would put it: Don't Panic!
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