[headdie]

The original doom/doom 2 was built on the Wolfenstine 3D engine and having played both there is not much difference between the two, the graphics were sharpened up a bit but mechanically as far as I am aware it is basically the same game.

Pedantically speaking, I'd call that first statement disingenuous, though it is correct in the sense than ALL technology builds on its predecessors. Though built on similar principles (because only a lunatic would willingly abandon a proven approach), the Doom engine offered massively expanded capabilities over its older cousins. /doomnerd

Technical info:
Wolfenstein 3D Engine
Doom Rendering Engine

ed: I also feel like we're forgetting a huge question that should be asked of games, some would say the ONLY question that really should be asked of games. "Is it fun?"

struggling to work out the differences from those links, but i have to agree with the statement that are they fun should be the main requirement

[Nuke]

Eh, what are you talkign about? Nearly every early game Id did was a technological breakthrough.

Commander Keen introduced parallax scrolling to the PC
Wolfenstein (and or maybe Cavern Crawlers or whatnot had the 3d maze aspect)
Doom 3 added fast paced, 3d combat with non-square rooms and different elevations and such
Quake introduced 3d models and later lighting effects (ie from guns firing)
Doom 3 had great lighting as well

etcetera.

Carmack has been breaking technological barriers his whole career. That's what his interest is.

quake didnt break no graphics barriers. descent had full 3d models and levels a year prior. frontier: elite2 had textured models, curved surfaces, and colored lighting, back in 1993. id's obsession with graphics really didnt start until q3a, by which point 3d accelerators were becoming stock hardware.

i will give quake credit for its networking support though. its the first game i played that had out of the box tcp/ip support. so it could be played on the internet without any 3rd party software. even the way the game handled internal communication through the networking stack was rather revolutionary. in single player it would loopback so it could be its own server.

it also did a lot for modding. at the time it wasnt unusual for a game to have a level editor, lots of games did, but with quake you could mod everything. models, textures, sounds, game logic (anyone remember quake-c?). i dont think any other game at the time came close. mods could also be server side, so you could play a mod on a server without needing to actually download anything.

[Ghostavo]

ed: I also feel like we're forgetting a huge question that should be asked of games, some would say the ONLY question that really should be asked of games. "Is it fun?"

That is kind of a dangerous question if you want to see better games.

[Spoon]

'better' games? You mean different games right?
Also the extra credits crew can be incredibly hipster at times where they just want to see 'artsy' games. This episode is one of those episodes.
It's not a 'dangerous' question, its an excellent question. And the thing extra credits likes to do here is whine about definitions. Wether you call it 'fun' or 'engaging' doesn't matter.


http://youtu.be/amDtAPHH-zE
I know I got this link from HLP at some point, but lets post it again because it fits the topic.

[Ghostavo]

'better' games? You mean different games right?

Better games.

Fun games also get better if we (or they, the developers) avoid asking "is this fun?" all the time during gameplay.

[NGTM-1R]

Fun games also get better if we (or they, the developers) avoid asking "is this fun?" all the time during gameplay.

As the purpose of entertainment is to in fact entertain, the argument that superior gaming can exist outside of fun gaming seems suspect on its face.

[Ghostavo]

Fun games also get better if we (or they, the developers) avoid asking "is this fun?" all the time during gameplay.

As the purpose of entertainment is to in fact entertain, the argument that superior gaming can exist outside of fun gaming seems suspect on its face.

Watch the video I linked, since they handle that question.

[Luis Dias]

It's the old fashioned question about "games". Gamers and developers are somewhat guilty of a real ambiguity here. On one side, they want to be regarded as a new kind of artistic production, just like cinema or photography, painting, etc., so also games can be something "more" than fun, they can be art in themselves (not "contain" art, but "be" art). On the other, whenever someone makes a literary critique of it and starts to point out their shortcomings in the cultural sense, they get all uppity and annoyed and rant **** like "it's just to be FUN and you are RUINING IT with your culture shenanigans".

I think this industry hasn't resolved this question as of yet.

[NGTM-1R]

Watch the video I linked, since they handle that question.

Their answer is neither convincing nor consistent with their argument, as it is rooted in arguments advanced for non-interactive mediums.

As an illustrative example, as a player I respect the work BioWare and EA put into making The Old Republic's Taris a polluted swamp urban decay hellhole where you're constantly worried you're going to turn into a rakghoul or catch rapid-onset Black Death. But it's still a polluted swamp urban decay hellhole where you're constantly worried you're going to turn into a rakghoul or catch rapid-onset Black Death and I am being forced to explore and interact with it in all its polluted swamp urban decay hellhole where you're constantly worried you're going to turn into a rakghoul or catch rapid-onset Black Death glory.

In a non-interactive medium I could detach sufficiently to admire the technical perfection of the work and the degree of effort and skill on display. In an interactive medium allowing me detachment from the work enough to do this while I am actually interacting with the work is a failure and extremely destructive to the work's success.



tl;dr: the Extra Credits crew are bad at this in their belief mediums are directly comparable. Gaming will never have its Schindler's List, because getting much closer than Papers, Please is going to make it unplayable.

[An4ximandros]

The thing is, when some one treats games like "art" (Critiques, examinations, reinterpretations) folks complain that it is simply a game.
It's not the world that needs to accept games, gamers need to accept the world.

On another issue, here is something I came across that puts a good nail on things that piss me off about games right now.

Short: AI that does not challenge the player as an intellectual equal (they don't even bother trying.) Infinite ammo on enemies 'till they die and you need it & weather being naught but fancy special effects.

I frankly hope Carmack tries to push at least one more barrier: AI

And on the subject of TOR: Hoth. Hoth had so much potential. A world where you fight a bare minimum of enemies. Where it is instead the weather that kills you, so you constantly feel a need to run to safe zones in order to not die every (X) minutes. Hell, it could have been a PvP world with shared safe zones. So you got Imp/Rep players duking it out while trying to progress.

PS: I need to get the original X-Com. Never played it. Anyone know where I can find it without overpaying? *Stares at HW2 box*

[Spoon]

Better games.

Fun games also get better if we (or they, the developers) avoid asking "is this fun?" all the time during gameplay.

I wish more developers would ask themselves "is this fun" all the time during gameplay.
It would make for better games.

:words:

I agree with most of this.

Also on the subject of papers, please. I fully appreciate what the game is trying to do/accomplish and its all very 'artsy'. but I haven't really felt a desire to keep on playing it because... well, it might be 'engaging' but it isn't very fun to me. Some times the game even makes me feel like im working.

It's the old fashioned question about "games". Gamers and developers are somewhat guilty of a real ambiguity here. On one side, they want to be regarded as a new kind of artistic production, just like cinema or photography, painting, etc., so also games can be something "more" than fun, they can be art in themselves (not "contain" art, but "be" art). On the other, whenever someone makes a literary critique of it and starts to point out their shortcomings in the cultural sense, they get all uppity and annoyed and rant **** like "it's just to be FUN and you are RUINING IT with your culture shenanigans".

I think this industry hasn't resolved this question as of yet.

You make it seem like the a.) industry is one singular being b.) that this whole singular being is a hypocrite
The side that wants to be regarded as a new kind of artistic production are often not the same people that get all uppity and annoyed and rant **** like "it's just to be FUN and you are RUINING IT with your culture shenanigans".

[NGTM-1R]

Also on the subject of papers, please. I fully appreciate what the game is trying to do/accomplish and its all very 'artsy'. but I haven't really felt a desire to keep on playing it because... well, it might be 'engaging' but it isn't very fun to me. Some times the game even makes me feel like im working.

That's kind of what I was getting at. You make a really bleak world and force someone to work with that really bleak world and it's going to have psychological impact over and above simply watching something bleak. The effort interacting is also going to feel wasted much faster because there's more effort being expended.

A game is also easier to stop than to continue playing. If somebody thinks you're making them work for a Noh Prize, it's literally easier for them to punch out than to push on.

[Luis Dias]

It's the old fashioned question about "games". Gamers and developers are somewhat guilty of a real ambiguity here. On one side, they want to be regarded as a new kind of artistic production, just like cinema or photography, painting, etc., so also games can be something "more" than fun, they can be art in themselves (not "contain" art, but "be" art). On the other, whenever someone makes a literary critique of it and starts to point out their shortcomings in the cultural sense, they get all uppity and annoyed and rant **** like "it's just to be FUN and you are RUINING IT with your culture shenanigans".

I think this industry hasn't resolved this question as of yet.

You make it seem like the a.) industry is one singular being b.) that this whole singular being is a hypocrite
The side that wants to be regarded as a new kind of artistic production are often not the same people that get all uppity and annoyed and rant **** like "it's just to be FUN and you are RUINING IT with your culture shenanigans".

I think I am entitled to portray the industry as a "singular being", at least in the same manner that people think of "cinema", "comics", "sculpture", etc. as enoughy "singular" so we can speak of them as "arts". For instance, while many movies would not be considered by many to be "artistic", everyone agrees nowadays that cinema is an Art by excellence. And it's fine that many movies aren't artistic pieces, I love to be entertained as anyone else, but I will always be free to analyse their artistic achievements (or not) because it is an art.

I bring cinema for a reason. In the beggining of the 20th century, cinema wasn't considered an art and there were a lot of debates around this issue. It was eventually settled positively. I think "games" are still in the purgatory phase of this question. We will, as a society, decide whether if games are an art or not and what that entails. For instance "Papers, please" was cited as an "artsy" game that isn't fun but is "artsy", etc. Well, that is somewhat tangencial and irrelevant. I think that game was more of a case study, more of a small experiment from a developer to developers (or anyone interested in these issues more deeply).

Take both the books and movies of Twillight, winning gazillions of cash and compare them with some random obscure (yet brilliant) artistic book. These gradients exist in every art form. Compare the Avengers or the Transformers with this list http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_considered_the_best and you'll giggle at the comparison. I even think that the very particulars, the techical singularities of games are still very much unexplored in an analytical way, although new words are being invented to convey this (like Kinaesthetics, etc.).

Finally, I post this video in order to end any discussion regarding fun! in games

[IronBeer]

Holy **** did I light a fuse.

[Spoon]

I think that game was more of a case study, more of a small experiment from a developer to developers (or anyone interested in these issues more deeply).

Haha, yeah no.

Reason: What inspired you to make a game out of the process of checking border paperwork?

Pope: I'm an American living in Japan and pass through international airport immigration a couple times per year. After a few times of this, I paid extra attention to what the immigration inspector was doing. The shuffling of papers and documents/computer screen correlating looked interesting and I thought there could be a fun game there. Thinking about it more, I was excited by the idea of approaching this subject from a non-traditional direction. In popular media you've always got the hero spy sneaking through checkpoints but wouldn't it be cool to play the guy on the other side? Instead of letting the super-spy slip through, you can be the one to throw him in prison.

Reason: Your game has gotten a lot of attention. Were you expecting this response? Can you reveal how many copies you've sold so far?

Pope: I wasn't expecting this response at all. Papers, Please was intended as a small experimental project that I'd finish off before working on something more marketable. I'm extremely happy with the overwhelming response it's gotten. I'll be posting a devlog update with actual sales numbers soon but for now I'll say it's sold wildly beyond my expectations.

Notice the bolded part.

Edit:
Listened to that video you posted. Again, it feels like its just talking about definitions. Is everyone happy if we switch out the word 'fun' with 'engaging'? Does that actually change anything?
He talks about in the last part how befriending people only to kill them a day later in self defense is somehow different from having 'fun'. And then continues to say that the 'fun' part would only be about awesome zombie killing and streamlining the stuff like sharing a can of soda out of the game. Why? Isn't part of the fun of DayZ being able to do all that stuff?
First he talks how 'fun' is a completely broad, vaguely defined and subjective word but then he proceeds to tell us exactly what is 'fun' and what isnt? eh.

[Akalabeth Angel]

People in the future will see Doom in the same way we see things like Beowulf and Gilgamesh today.

That's what makes me kinda sad about computer games, especially early games.

Literature and even movies age rather well, early games, especially 3d games, really do not.

(Exceptions like Infinity Engine isometric RPGs are rare.)

thing is while it is not a thing of sophistication nor a technological breakthrough Doom was the game that broke the way for FPS to become a main stream format

Eh, what are you talkign about? Nearly every early game Id did was a technological breakthrough.

Commander Keen introduced parallax scrolling to the PC
Wolfenstein (and or maybe Cavern Crawlers or whatnot had the 3d maze aspect)
Doom 3 added fast paced, 3d combat with non-square rooms and different elevations and such
Quake introduced 3d models and later lighting effects (ie from guns firing)
Doom 3 had great lighting as well

etcetera.

Carmack has been breaking technological barriers his whole career. That's what his interest is.

I noticed you missed out the original doom which is what I was on about. 
The original doom/doom 2 was built on the Wolfenstine 3D engine and having played both there is not much difference between the two, the graphics were sharpened up a bit but mechanically as far as I am aware it is basically the same game.  So as I say, Doom was not Sophisticated (Its story was run around and shoot things with the occasional story screen) not was it a technological breakthrough for the above reason, (ID had done it all before with Wolfenstine 3D)

I didn't miss out Doom, I just mislabelled the first doom as doom 3.
You say it's the same game but Wolfenstein is full of flat levels with square rooms with zero lighting effects that I'm aware of.

Doom has levels with multiple elevations, free room shapes, variable lighting and event-driven ambushes and such. And so forth.

To call Doom and Wolfenstein the same game is . . . . just wrong.

If Doom and Wolfenstein were essentially the same game, other games of the period like Blake Stone wouldn't have fallen as flat in sales as they did. Doom sold better than these Wolfenstein clones because the game was an huge leap from what came before it.

[Nuke]

tl;dr: the Extra Credits crew are bad at this in their belief mediums are directly comparable. Gaming will never have its Schindler's List, because getting much closer than Papers, Please is going to make it unplayable.

am i the only sick bastard that thinks we need a holocaust simulator?

[Luis Dias]

I think that game was more of a case study, more of a small experiment from a developer to developers (or anyone interested in these issues more deeply).

Haha, yeah no.

[stuff quoted]
Notice the bolded part.

Three things here. First I'm pretty sure many devs and creators will feel that it "would be really fun to put X Y or Z on screen" or on a game or whatever. People talk like that a lot, so I don't read too much in there. Second, even if he really finds it "fun" I am not entitled to judge it. He thinks it's fun who am I to think otherwise about his own subjective experience? Third, the "artsy" characteristic of it is what I think it renders that game as a small case study of a certain game design and what it might express. I really don't need the creator's own justifications to make my mind about these things...

Listened to that video you posted. Again, it feels like its just talking about definitions. Is everyone happy if we switch out the word 'fun' with 'engaging'? Does that actually change anything?

He contradicts himself here and there. The main reason why I found it useful was when he said the obvious: that "FUN" is just too encompassing and vague a thing. I can in fact find "FUN" a game like "Papers please" but in a completely different way that I can find bejeweled. The brain parts that light up are different ones. It really deconstructs this whole notion that games are about FUN FUN FUN therefore no art please.

Except that fun can be risen to a state of art, and art can be real fun. And it's so mindboggingly big a concept that I even think that this bigness and ambiguity made him rant too much and too incoherently at the end. My personal problem with the word is the very first thing he said, that it is a really useless (in the descriptive sense) term. It is so readily observed, but oh so subjective and personal. If you really think about it, these are really strong basis for an art form.


e: As an answer to NGTM and his Schindler's list comparison, one should remember that Schindler's list was quite enjoyable and mass appealling in several ways, the technique, the lighting, the acting, the script, the action, etc.,etc. It should not be compared with "Papers, please". More appropriate to compare PP with some indie 5 minute short movie that wowed movie critics and some interested viewers while the majority of people would just go "that's just too artsy and hipster for me".

[headdie]

Holy **** did I light a fuse.

errrrr..... looks like it lol

[Phantom Hoover]

I'm wondering how much of this back-and-forth can be sidestepped by substituting 'engaging' for 'fun'. Because that's really the issue NGTM's getting at: games as a medium require far more effort on the part of the audience to experience them; so if they don't provide something to justify that effort, people aren't going to stick around to appreciate the rest. This doesn't just affect games: there are plenty of people who can't get past 2001's slow pacing or LotR's plodding, self-indulgent prose, and similarly there are people who find nothing of value in Papers Please's bureaucracy simulator.