89: The Gamer Within

[The Escapist Staff]

"'Well, what if I don't want to kill things? I mean, what else can I do?'
'You're a Hunter. It's kind of your thing.'
'Oh. What if I wanted to start over and be one of the guys who heals? Can I go around healing wolves instead?'
'No, you'd just be healing the guys who are killing the wolves, or yourself, while, well, you know.'
"Eventually she conceded and set herself to the task. One of the wolf corpses that surrounded her dropped a pair of gloves, and I was grateful she simply accepted the fact without wondering what a wolf was doing with clothing."
Sean Sands spends three hours conquering the final frontier: getting his wife to play games.

The Gamer Within

 

[TheBlaze [deprecated]]

I think this article changed my view of MMORPGs more than anything else.

 

[trosaire]

A very good article. I'm on the marketing/advertising side of gaming and not only have I noticed that there are more woman gameplayers out there, many of them are moving from casual games to MMOGs. We just to produce games that interest them.

 

[Bongo Bill]

I think this article really hit on something. When a person says of games, "What's the point?" or "This story is terrible," this is what they mean. The story is just a knowing wink and an excuse to go out and do what everybody knows you're coming there for (in this case, killing boars because a person told you to so you can go kill better boars). If you don't already know that you want to go kill boars, then either the story will bore you because it's a tailor-made excuse to kill boars, or it will betray you because it goes on about all this great stuff that's happening, and then it tells you that your part in the story is to go and kill boars.

Civilization lets you interact with the story in a way I don't think any other kind of game has, which in my opinion is why it was the closest to a success in the little experiment. Lumines doesn't make excuses. Black and White doesn't make excuses. The game is the setting is the story. We can make games like that now, and more than anything else I think that's what we should be pursuing. It makes sense.