Outside of games there's this thing called work.
Work tends to be done in the form of a job and it can often be menial, demanding, dangerous and a hundred other kinds of no fun whatsoever.
It is perhaps a sad reflection on the progress of games towards simulating reality that this drudgery is no longer confined to our working hours.
Here are some of the worst offenders for when games just forget to be fun.
10. Living in the Zone
Though buggy it is hard to deny the quality of both STALKER games, Shadow of Chernobyl and Clear Sky, although both offer a somewhat unique gaming experience; that of eking a living in a miserable and hostile radioactive wasteland.
There is no happiness in the Zone. No joy. Soon you get so used to the misery and squalor that the moment after a kill when you get to rummage through your foe's meagre possessions feels like Christmas morning.
MISERY: Home sweet Zone. Don't worry, if the monsters don't get you the radiation sickness will
9. Social networking
Although GTA 4 brought with it some excellent characters they are a needy bunch if ever there was one. Want to go for a beer? Can you take me to a show? Want to play darts?
It seems ironic that in a game where you can kill practically everybody you encounter the people you can't kill are the ones you most want to.
WHAT NOW? Ah, Cousin Roman, please, be more needy
8. Building a base
The staple of real time strategy games for so long was base building. Thankfully it has fallen somewhat out of favour recently, but the history of the genre is littered with rubbish bases.
Build this rectangular thing so you can create that, upgrade that so you can get this bonus, build a generator of some sort and so on.
This is not a problem in some games where the decision of what to build in what order can determine strategy, but for many, when base building is just an arbitrary process that does nothing but delay a good scrap, it's a chore.
BASE BUILDING: Woo! I've built a base. That was a lot more fun than killing bad guys
7. Level grinding
A great many games have a level based character advancement process without diminishing the fun - usually these games are single player RPGs where the completion of the story is the goal. Online RPGs, particularly MMORPGs, tend to focus on the character as the goal.
A good MMORPG will give you a story, quests, plots and other players to kill and by the time you have exhausted these you find yourself at maximum level, a bad MMORPG will make you stand in a field clubbing monsters while the minutes turn to hours, the hours turn to days and your soul withers and dies like a prune.
THE GRIND: Levelling up was so much fun in Hellgate London they had to shut the game down
6. Harvesting
This is another staple of the MMO genre; running around the countryside gathering things to use for crafting. This is pretty much the sort of thing that so often in the real world gets done by illegal immigrants because most people consider it demeaning. Done for free, in a video game, it's all part of the fun.
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lovlid
October 3rd 2009
3. @ keillrandor.
What is the point of your post? If your not going to tell us your reasons (I'm sure you could at least give us a clue in a fairly short paragraph) Why bother writing this non-statement?
How come your the only one who can "understand the entire problem from top-to-bottom, and therefore manage to explain it properly"? Are you the Great and Fearful Oz? Are you some sort of Uber games journalist, better than all these other minor hacks? Or are you, like your post, gas in the air, a faint whiff of something, good or bad, but in the end, nothing in the breeze.
If you think thats harsh, I apologise. But your the one thats assumed we don't have the attention span to read your theories (walls of text) and ultimately, told us nothing.
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agentcool
October 3rd 2009
2. How about collecting pointless items that have no ultimate purpose in the game? For instance, there are the flags in 'Assassin's Creed' which would probably take around 10-15 hours to collect and the only reward for doing so is about 200 achievement points.
Another big offender in this respect is 'The Simpsons Game' which would have you believe walking around picking up bottle caps is fun. If I wanted to do that, I'd apply for a job as a street cleaner and, even better, I'd actually get paid to do it.
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keillrandor
October 2nd 2009
1. There are a couple of very good reasons why all this is happening - and the main, fundamental reason would probably surprise you - (or maybe not), but it's SO fundamental, it'd be almost funny - if it wasn't actually a problem...
Unfortunately, to explain here would take pages and walls of text, which most people seem to be allergic to, so I'm not going to bother.
However, I've actually been working on all this for a long time - (and every time I thought I had it, another argument would spring up which made me realise the problems ran even deeper, but I very much doubt that's possible now...).
Because of that, I'm working on a paper called Story Writing in Computer-based Role-Playing Games, since that is the one area atm, which has the most symptoms of the underlying problem, and where I started running into them after buying a copy of Diablo 2 in either 2001 or 2002 - (yes it has taken me that long to get everything together, so I can understand the entire problem from top-to-bottom, and therefore manage to explain it properly).
How long it's going to take me to write this paper, I do not know - but I'm working on it, and I know it's important, and for more than just computer games, (and maybe even games in general).
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