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Entertaining vs. Interactive


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Let us define an interactive video game. If a video game is entertaining, it's enjoyment stems from it's story and artistic value. An interactive video game is one whos enjoyment comes from actually playing the game itself. Final Fantasy 7, a role-playing game(or RPG) would be conciderd entertaining. Super Mario 64, an adventure game, is an interactive game. The story element is still perserved, but a sence of envolvement overshadows it. Or again: Super Metroid. This is an interactive video game with a plot in it, capable of high development. It suspends the time-sequence, it moves as far away from an "entertaining" game as possible. Consider the progression of a game. If it is in an entertaing game, we say "wow, look at the story, its great " and wait for the next bit of story to continue the enjoyment. If it is in an interactive game, we say "wow, this is fun." That is the fundamental difference between these two aspects of a video game. An interactive video game cannot be enjoyed by a gaping audicence of gamers who follow Sony Playstation and Squairsoft religously or to a 5 year old or to players who only play the newest and best looking video games. They can only be kept awake by a story and good graphics. They can only observe. But an interactive game requires thinking and inclusion.

Observation is one of the simplest of the human faculties. You will have noticed in daily life that when people only observe, they almost never have an opinion and are boring at bottom. The man who sits back and watches TV dosent think, and if you meet him in a year's time he will probably still be watching that same TV show, his eyes still bulging from his head. It is difficult for an interactive person to be friends with such a man, and for two observationalists to be friends must be impossible. Observation by itself takes us a very little way, not does it take us far into video games- only as far as the story. If we would grasp interactive video games we must add thinking and a sence of incusion.

Thinking first. The intelligent gamer, unlike the observational one who just plays the game, mentally picks up on important elements. He sees it from two points of view: isolated, and how relates it to previous parts of the game. Probably he does not know how to slove a particular problem, but he does not expect to do so yet awhile. The puzzles in a highly organized game (like The Legend of Zelda: Orcania of Time) are often intertwined and the ideal spectator cannot expect to solve them all until he is towards the end. This element of intellegence and thinking-the fun element as it is sometimes called- is of great importance to the interactivity in a game. It occurs through a break in the story, where the player must solve a problem through thinking and more subtly in not being babied along though the game, and being challenged. This challenge is essential to an interactive game, and cannot be appreciated without intellegence. To the observational gamer it is just an annoying break in the story. To appreciate a challenge, the whole mind must play the game, not just the eyes.

That brings on a second qualification: Inclusion

Thinking and being in the game are closely connected, for unless we think, we are never truly IN the game. If by the time we are at the end of the game and we have forgotten the skills we have learned early on, we shall never finish the game. The game designer, if good, expects us to be in the game, not just play it. Every action must be experinced, not observed; it ought to be open-ended and and not sparse on setting; even when complicated it should be organic yet still be free to roam around. It may be difficult of easy, it may and should contain mysteries, but it ought not mislead. And in it, as it unfolds, will be the gamer, involved in the game itsself and will constantly challenge and reconcider the setting, searching for new clues, now chains of cause and effect, and the final sense(if the game has be interactive) will not be that of finishing a book or movie, but something which might have been shown by the game designer straight away, only if he had shown it straight away it would never have become fun. We come up against fun here: fun at which a game designer should never aim, though he fails if he does not achive it. I will conduct fun to her proper place later on. Meanwhile, please accept her as part of an interactive game. She looks a little surprised at being there, but fun ought to look a little surprised: it is the emotion that best suits her face, as Miyamoto knew when he designed her in the arcades, between the simulators and the soda machine. The fun who does not look surprised, who accepts her position as her due-she reminds us too much of a prima donna.


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