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Penny Arcade - Comic - Minimalism
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Minimalism
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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More to the point, I fail to see how not receiving visual feedback from a game / not giving focus exclusively to the game == "not a game". You're still interacting with it, and you are receiving tactile feedback from it. By that criteria, absently solving a Rubik's cube without looking at it is also "not a game".
Not to mention that the Go button isn't remotely a "press X to win" device.
PS: Tycho's face in the last panel just screams, "Gabe, hyoo eeediot!"
Hell, I'd buy two.
I agree that Rubik's cube is not a game. Its a puzzle.
Pokemon Go is, however, a bad game.
I find that conversation interesting. I will never ever engage in it on the internet where the discussion is inevitably about something else entirely.
Being that it's 4 in the morning, I woke up and read yesterday's (this) comic again, then I read Jerry's write up. The idea of a 2d puzzle platformer where you die to progress lit me up. Then, err, this happened:
The Avatar ran forward, out of breath but not for exhaustion. Ahead of him lie The Door. Its painted mushroom striations just *barely* containing the sacrosanct secret behind its portal.
Atop its arch, a beaten gold plaque hung with the words "Wisdom Lies Within". True, the door itself was the most threadbare formality of a guard, but this... Place, wherever it was, was not welcoming to visitors. It was not welcoming to HIM.
Innumerable traps and false leads had the Avatar followed. The way forward was quite literally strewn with his blood and sweat, and more, because This Place required you to die for its Wisdom. Many puzzling rooms had the Avatar passed, the price of passage always the same: Death.
Bridges of his own body splayed across pits of spikes, murder holes filled with *him*. In This Place, Death was a mere formality. The Avatar walked through the tunnel toward the light only to return through the same door he entered by. Everything the same except for his newly arranged corpse.
The Avatar had made it, passed every challenge. The Door which had taunted him for so long was opening! Wisdom Lies Within! The Door raised within its frame, the seam down its centre just another diversion. The "Door" drew up; the Avatar waited for the gate to fully raise before entering. He had waited long, he would savor this.
The room was spherical, the dark stone seamless. In its very center, The Orb. The Avatar licked his lips. Across the center of the room, a bright blue line of light shot out, then another. A path formed, The Avatar walked across it to the Orb of Wisdom, growing ever closer. Finally, here it was! The Avatar snatched up the orb and raised it high above his head in triumph!
Or, he tried to, the orb didn't budge. Then, the lightbridge below the Avatar melted back to darkness. The dim light of his torch in the entrance hall was all the Avatar could see by. Midair above a lethal drop, holding onto the Orb of Wisdom, the Avatar didn't feel any wiser.
Because there really aren't many actual game mechanics playing out on your phone.
It's really more of an activity than a game. Here is a ball and some sticks, go do something with it and the neighborhood kids.
I do sometimes worry about the gentrification of gaming though. But I guess it's all relative. The AAA market has long since moved past servicing my taste, because there are too few people like me to spend what makes up the modern AAA budget. The 90's and early 00's were the last time there were enough people like me, and AAA budgets were small enough, for our goals to align. But games still get made to my taste, with production values roughly frozen in time.
Gaming culture as a whole has just lost it's counter cultural edge in its drive to be inclusive. There is nothing sadder than a punk rocker all grown up, with nothing left to rebel against.
Interestingly enough, there actually is a game on Steam that is a 2D platformer where you die to progress (your corpses weigh down buttons, etc.). It's called "Life Goes On: Done To Death". I first heard about it though Jim Sterling's YouTube channel.
After giving it some more thought, I've come to the realization that I have no idea how to define if something is a 'game' or not. The following is my clumsy and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to reason it out:
If there is a set of rules, is it a game?
Must a game have a way of keeping score or tracking progress towards an end-state?
Is an end-state (be it failure and/or victory) required for a game to be considered a game?
Tycho seems to look down on 'grinding blindly' (which I interpret as A) rote repetition while
But, on the other hand, I'm sure that most of us can force a draw in a game of Tic-Tac-Toe (and here, I'm assuming that most people regard it as a 'game', however simple or mundane it is) by following a more-or-less fixed set of moves. Sure, it's not done blindly, but it is pretty close to grinding. So do we have to demote Tic-Tac-Toe from being a game?
Interestingly enough, I first heard about it here:
You dying isn't exactly the point (the point is you spawning clones repeating of your last set of movements), but one or two puzzles certainly require a lot of yourselves falling into a pit.
As evidence, upon reading about this device, and learning that all the mechanics of the game would be replaced by simply pressing a button and getting results my first thought was "Wow that sounds like a marked improvement."
Nah, that's just the clone.
It sounds like a psychological experiment on mice in a box. Except when the mouse pushes the button, he gets cheese.
A very generous Skinner box?