Related:
http://www.theastronauts.com/2012/11/the-truth-about-challenge-in-games/

You don’t care that a team of two hundred people worked hard to make sure you get the final prize. The victory feels yours, and yours only.
Challenge in video games. It’s the comfort food.

(Another good post by the astronaut crew!)

Good stuff! Nice to see there is actual research supporting this.

Basically what we have is: Whenever the focus is on the actual controls (such as a someone trying a first-person game for the first time) or on the task at hand (puzzle solving or attention requiring task) any emotional undertones that is in the same scene is lost.

Another thing that makes sense in this sort of thinking is that cutscenes are just a sort of bad left over design choice in  modern games. They are required in order to get any sort of emotional content across. Games like Uncharted are otherwise so focused on constantly entertaining people that even if it was possible to tell the story while the game plays, it would just not work. Thus if you have a combat focused game, your only chance for other feelings is through cutscenes. This does not make me like cut scenes or anything, just thought it was a bit interesting

I misread : Games do not need save(points)... like no saving of progression.

I read it like that too first


I wonder what this article was really trying to say though. I mean he says that some age group are underserved, but yet makes no effort to say how you could serve them. Then he also sort of hints that this is just a phase, and when you get through it you really understand the beauty of games again. He might unconsciously making the argument that Michael made too

Hey, Painkiller is a pretty classic FPS. Story almost nonexistent (good!), because if I have to choose between a mediocre/rubbish story and no story, I prefer not to have a story... It was a pretty entertaining game. Strange and weird.

Did not mean it like that. I really like Painkiller. It was just an unexpected direction.

Lots of good stuff in such a sort post, such as:

If you read discussions like Most Jaw-dropping Scenery or Sequence in a Game you can see that the things that people remember from their favorite games are:
- Beautiful places
- One off events like a helicopter boss fight or escaping a house on fire
- Gameplay-less experiences like exploration or short interactive dramas

Saw this in the notgames tumbler. I first thought it was some random blogger. Then I saw that it was a dev, which felt extra coolt. But a dev that made Painkiller

Congratulations!

Thanks!

I don't think there's an interface for that (yet). But if enough of us can agree on a time and date (4 players is the minimum), maybe we can email the developers and ask to accommodate us.

Could be interesting. I just know that I suck I planning my spare-time, so would not want anybody to rely on me

Sounds very interesting! I would like to give it try, but with a small child at home it is very hard to do stuff at specific times.

Is it possible to do something a time of your own choosing? I could possibly try at 20.00 (GMT)

Also worth considering the more interactivity you have (or at least degrees of freedom) the more difficult it comes to construct a consistent world and vision. Just try a game like Dishonored which try to give a great sense of freedom. It very soon just crumbles down to a chaotic mess unless the player is careful to obey certain rules. There is some fun and beauty into this sort of chaos, but it can also be very damaging. For instance, if you have characters that you want to give the illusion of being in a certain way, then any extra way the player can interact adds an extra uncertainty to if you will be able to achieve this. This is so important because I think for certain type of objects (especially characters) the only way to make them possible is to use make-belief. We cannot simulate an interactive human being, but we can do something that will give the player the illusion of being a real human. Interaction really stands in the way of having life-like humans and the like in game. Just compare how much alife the characters in Heavy Rain are in the cutscenes compared to how stupid they can be when you have full control (walking into walks, dead stare, etc). The trick is to have just enough interaction to realize your goals, but not any more. Something like Einstein's "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler."

Wrote an essay on this:
http://unbirthgame.com/TheSelfPresenceStorytelling.pdf

Basically the main concept is that interaction is used to create a sense of immersion. I think that this is pretty much how a game like Dear Esther works. The difference between simply watching a playthrough of Dear Esther and actually playing, is not so much making actual choices. (You can consider a version of Dear Esther where you simply take path choices along the ride.) What makes Dear Esther is instead the finer and continious input that creates this sense of "being there".

Not sure that is what you had in mind. I mean this theory is still based upon a very tight framework of input and output, but at a more subtle level. Also the big distinction is that the motivation for the designer is not make the player learn anything (as in better aiming, spatial traversal, puzzles, etc), but to transport the audience into another world.

I liked the atmosphere in this one. Very simplistic but very effective.

Problem is that it suffers from tons of adventure game tropes. Obscure puzzles, pixel-hunting, poor sense of space, etc, and all of those really killed it for me. I had to check the walkthrough way too often and that took away much of the immersion. However, I think you need these sort of interaction to have a nice experience, and a big design challenge is what to replace it with. Given how easy it is to make this type of game, I am not sure why more people do not give that a go.

I liked this one. It is not a complete picture (and do think it is intended to) but I think it is an interesting way to think about it.

Give us more peace games dammit! Would be interesting to just force peace games into any give genre. Like peace-rts, peace-rpg, etc. That would have been a nice challenge really.

Agree with shredingskin here. Tadgh Kelly has some points, like puzzles can get in the way. But like shredingskin says, removing them is not the way to go, because you are missing out a lot on the pacing and feeling of agency. Just choosing dialog options would not make the walking dead games what they are. What I think can be discussed is how to improve the puzzles as is, for instance by adding more solutions and give a more sense of free exploration.

Also have to mention that Tadgh has a very strong agenda here. Basically he think games are good as they are (well at least a subset of what we would call video games anyway), and that the way to move forward is to take these games apart and build up a design theory on how to best make these sort of games. He is the only one I know that thought the physical movement in Amnesia made the game worse and think that Dear Esther should be called "virtual promenade". He also thinks that stories are just plots with a very specific classical arch, and of course use this as an argument that games cannot tell storiews.

Tadgh is not an idiot though, he has some very smart things to say, and I find most of his stuff worth reading if I can just look aside his bias.

It even offers a solution to the Death Problem that shows in horror games; the moment the monster has almost mauled you, one could jump cut to an unrelated (but complimenting) scene and later jump back, contriving that the monster has not actually caught you.

Oh did not consider that. Very neat idea indeed!

As Michael says, I do not cutting can be used everywhere, and just moving through non-relevant areas can add huge sense of presence. I am really interested in games that flow on in a single stream as much as possible. That said, designing only this way is a huge problem, because it is hard to find enough interesting locations/interaction over a certain "story-line" (very vaguely meant here), and simply cutting would work. I have only tried it during loading scenes before, where I think it works nicely. But as shown here it seems to work very well inside actual gameplay.
When escaping the airport the cut not only help pacing, it also also opens up the space of interaction / exploration, because it does not really matter where the player choose to go, he just have certain zones that cut to another scene and the player needs to fill out the blanks.

Did you view the commentary Jeroen? If not, do not forget about that

The story is open for interpretation There where lots of stuff I did not get either, but I still liked the experience.

I would not call it a linear sequence though, it is more of a random order of scenes.

Also, do a second playthrough with developer commentary on, I found that to be fun.