You are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

3
2

[–] HotRod32 3 points 2 points (+5|-3) ago 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serious_game

A game can be defined as anything with a failure state, or anything with its own rules where the outcome depends on your choices. Whether you think it's "fun" has nothing to do with it. "Choose your own story" games are still games, even if they're not fun, or if they're made by attention whores who make a living by feasting upon the internet's hate against itself.

0
4

[–] Gigan 0 points 4 points (+4|-0) ago 

Literally the first sentence:

A serious game or applied game is a game designed for a primary purpose other than pure entertainment.

Video games are meant to be fun and entertaining. I think you used the wrong BS Wikipedia article.

0
0

[–] Majatek ago  (edited ago)

Wikepedia in general is always subject to change - it being the amorphous blob of a perpetually incomplete information repository that it is.

That being said - fundamentally, a game is a piece of interactive media that provides players some degree of control - this can be as broad and all-encompassing as a Minecraft game (where the player is allowed to terraform entire worlds) to being merely a camera placed within a narrative presentation (often called "walking simulators").

The biggest problem is when people try to define games as "fun" when really they mean to say engaging. Horror games aren't intentionally fun (depending on exactly what type of horror it's aiming to be, anyway) - but they do attempt to pull you into their horror themed worlds and narratives. There's no denying games can be fun - but we really need to respect this art form as more than just a single form of entertainment (as movies - for example - can both facilitate comedy as well as horror).

It also simultaneously bothers me seeing god-awful media (Polygon, Kotaku, RPS - and generally anyone who aligns themselves as "anti-GG" in journalism) complain about games as a whole not being mature enough of a media to be respected like film or literature - when we've got such pish as Fifty Shades of Grey (which literally started as Twilight fan fiction). Critics of games focus on an extremely limited spectrum of titles that fit their agenda - and then whine to high-heaven when a game about cheap shlocky thrills (eg: Call of Duty) is released. Call of Duty doesn't represent the entirety of gaming. It's time hack journalists pull their heads out of their rears and realise that gaming and the games industry has already matured to the point where they're no longer needed. Almost anyone can create a game today and enrich whatever genre they choose to make their independently-developed title in, or be defacto journalists themselves.

Sorry for going on for a bit. Just wanted to get that out of my system finally. It's been annoying me for a long while now.