Controller Evolution

[qou2600]

First of all, I think "Extra Consideration" is great. I really value all three of your opinions and it's great to see a constructive discussion between you.

Secondly, Your comment's about game tutorials got me thinking, why don't consoles come with various tutorials on them? They all come with internal hard drives, why not include a program where you control a person with a couple of different perspectives such as first person and third person to have the player get used to basic camera control and movement. It could even be something the avatar/mii could be used for, as a way to teach people new to the industry or the console in particular.

About the tutorial being skippable, this is mostly due to people who have played the game previously and don't fell the need to re-learn the control scheme.

Right now, it's both easier and slightly less-expensive to familiarize oneself with comic-book continuity than it is with game-to-game continuity...

That is a very arguable point, because I have tried to familiarize myself with both. It's quite difficult to say which one is more expensive because of the time that some of the comic book characters have been around it's quite expensive to purchase all of their comic books, even as re-prints. Where-as some console game's that aren't re-printed are considered "rare" and then relatively expensive but still available on places like amazon.

Point: Movie Bob.


Seriously why isn't there a voting for who won this discussion!?

Because it is a discussion not a debate or argument.

 

[qou2600]

Also about the Guitar Hero Guitar controller, the game could have been made without the controller or a game similar but the controller played a key role in generating sales and helping it stand out in the public eye as a unique experience. It also adds to the immersion of the player because it give's them the feeling of holding an actual guitar.

 

[Dice Warwick]

I already put my say on "motion controllers vs button controllers" and I stand by it. (that motion controllers need to take a more support role)

The hand-held (DS, PSP) make a good start for new gamers, most games on them are much more simple and forging.

 

[Sovereignty]

Seriously why isn't there a voting for who won this discussion!?

...Because its not a competition, dude.

So?

Let me vote anyway.

 

[Lex Darko]

My only answer to this is... so? Just because we get simplified controllers does not mean that A; we lose the more complex ones, or B; it will result in necessarily worse experiences. There are significant markets for both the simplified and the complex input devices, for a smattering of reasons; and if we pressure game developers to provide a conduit for both of these in their games, what exactly is the downside?

Start a new gamer onto S.T.A.L.K.E.R SOC and just wait a few hours.

Heck, even I get flustered by the number of hotkeys sometimes. Can't remember what's bandages and what's medkits.

In Dragon Age II, you can either take the whole hack-and-slash route (which is more oriented towards console gamers) or the whole finely-tuned micromanaging tactical route (which is suited better for the K&M setup). Then again, it's Bioware we're talking about, who's not known for shitty ports and actually makes proper multiplatform games. But what's to say that other devs will go through the trouble to cater to two entirely different fighting mechanisms?

Take a look at Tiberium Twilight. The game was trying to cater to both PC and console (though everyone was fired before they could finish a port) through radical changes in gameplay. The result of the more console-oriented gameplay was that it destroyed the C&C series for the PC community.

For all you know, the next Ace Combat iteration might just have QTEs for performing kulbits and pugachevs to make it more 'accessible' and to become the next 'CoD-killer'... '-_-

Actually when I was playing the DA2 PS3 demo the first thing I thought when the gameplay started was, "this combat system has been dumbed down for the PCs." I had to pause a moment after I thought that; and asked myself why I thought so.

And then I remembered how a truly good console style hack/slash combat system feels. I thought about the combat in Jade Empire [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJm6VXQYcfk], Demon Stone [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOG6ifU1_FM], and the Kingdom Underfire Series [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzhvu91_A0w].

DA:O's combat (played on the PC, and modded to hell and back) literally put me to sleep. DA2 is better but it's hampered by the vestiges of the old PC point and snore combat system it still has.

As for motion controls:

The only game I've played/seen/heard of that's made really good use motion controls have been on the PS3 using the Sixaxis. Those games being Folklore and Lair (post patch). In Folklore [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ozxFA0r8Dk] (Folksoul in Japan) you use the sixaxis to actually capture the different folks (monsters) in the game after you beat them into submission.

To me the wii/mote is a gimmick validated by those who know not what they do. Like the people who buy overpriced Apple computers because they think their Macbook says something about them other than, "they probably know less than dirt about computers and probably don't play computer games."

To be fair I gave the Wii a fair chance I even bought NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams for the Wii. I had it for Saturn way back when it helped introduce the analog thumbstick. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-27Txc5xc9g] NJoD with the wiimote was a nightmare I spent so much time just trying to get the controls to respond in a predictable way I ended up thinking to myself, "I could playing Demon's Souls right now;" and 5 mins later I was.

I tried on 3 different occasions to play that game with the Wiimote but always end up using the analog stick attachment ignoring the motion control all together. If there was ever a game that could take advantage of the wiimote I would have thought it would be a game like Nights the fact that it doesn't should in itself tell us all something about motion control and games.

 

[RA92]

Actually when I was playing the DA2 PS3 demo the first thing I thought when the gameplay started was, "this combat system has been dumbed down for the PCs." I had to pause a moment after I thought that; and asked myself why I thought so.

And then I remembered how a truly good console style hack/slash combat system feels. I thought about the combat in Jade Empire [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJm6VXQYcfk], Demon Stone [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOG6ifU1_FM], and the Kingdom Underfire Series [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzhvu91_A0w].

DA:O's combat (played on the PC, and modded to hell and back) literally put me to sleep. DA2 is better but it's hampered by the vestiges of the old PC point and snore combat system it still has.

Well yes, I know what you mean. Like I always said, arcade combat was always suited to the controller. And it's not wrong of you to expect some good ole fashioned hack n' slash (which isn't all mindless button-smashing and can include real time tactical aspects, as Kingdom of Heaven shows).

 

[Fanta Grape]

Just posting to say keep this up! It's just as good as any of the video series on this site and I want it to last.

I think getting into gaming can be considered for different types of people. People with iphones or whatnots might want to start playing stuff like mirror's edge or doom to get a feel of what the experience is similar to. Someone who spends a lot of time on the computer should be started off by getting a free steam account and purchasing a copy of Portal or Half-Life 2. Maybe just buy a 16-bit console on eBay for a small price. If I were to recommend gaming to my friends, I'd let them borrow my gameboy or DS. Relatively simple controls and some excellent games. All of these can be very inviting to a new comer so I think the assumption that the people who are outside our current demographic should start off by playing Wii's is poor.

 

[Revolutionary]

Great Stuff! very interesting, this column gets my big rubber stamp of Approval *stamping noise*, I'd like to see more of this. James, especially intrigues me with his ideas.

 

[Razhem]

I would just like to cast my vote in favor of continuing this series. An expert opinion is great, but an expert discussion is greater still.

Though this is a nice change of pace, lets not go overboard. The only real speciallist in here is James, Bob can at most be considered a movie specialist and both Yathzee and him just happen to be game dorks that have gotten the ability to be listened in the videogame media, but both have no bloody idea about the industry or it's inner workings. Hell, Michael Pachter would be more interesting in here simply because James, an idealist and Pachter, a businessman would be a pretty interesting clash of ideas and concepts.

 

[Moffman]

Love this column! Really interesting arguments. I suppose with motion controls it really does depend on what you want from you experience, like Yahtzee I am more inclined to lay back with my video games and use them in this way, if it sucks me in great! But the Wii does offer another (as yet a little flawed) experience that I'm glad exists in the gaming culture.

 

[Venereus]

Hardcores will benefit from developers being less able to re-press the same game as a "sequel" when the last one is sitting right there online.

I'm not so sure about this point. I think hardcores are actually the ones expecting a sequel to be very similar to the previous iteration. A recent example is the unsong Civilization V fiasco, as in, a lot of hardcore fans were really disappointed with the game, but you wouldn't know about it unless you're part of the franchise's online community, since sales have been good (we're guessing the explicit casual appeal worked) and "professional reviews" praised it across the board (Tom Chick being the only mainstream exception).

What basically happened (appart from the buggy release) is that the sequel didn't built upon the previous game's strengths, and instead started from scratch keeping only the core aspects of the franchise, throwing away lots of mechanics and features we liked and were used to having.

Another lesson to be learned, is that we shouldn't underestimate the power of hype. We knew of the many drastic changes being made, but not only we had hoped and trusted the developer (never again), we also bought right into the hype. Even if publishers tried to re-press the same game, if the hype is built well, we'll buy it anyway. The fact that "hardcores" don't fall for mere graphic updates like "casuals" do doesn't make them impervious to other hype tactics.

Now, many disappointed fans did turn back to Civilization IV, but then it was too late. The only thing that comes close to Bob's point, are the players that bought Civ V as their first Civilization ever, and then went for Civ IV, having tasted blood but suspecting there was a sweeter source. But as far as I know there are not many of those.

 

[Ruptuk]

Movie Bob! How you have dissapointed me.

A - Skippable tutorials are functionally more important than you realise. Beyond the argument on whether someone has a cetain level of experience, any game needs to cope with every day life, you know those 'Murphy's Law' situations. What if your PC or PS3 dies and you can't recover the save of the game you are half way through? What if there the tutorial takes an hour to complete, at a QA level of the production cycle that an hour per tester of potentially wasted time! It's not just the player at the end some disicions are made! The cloud may help this but personally I like owning a shiny box of new experiences...

B - Movie Bob - 'That'll be a win-win: Newcomers will have, say, GTA 1 through whatever to take a swing at before they dive into the newest one, and hardcores will benefit from developers being less able to re-press the same game as a "sequel" when the last one is sitting right there online.'

Now, I am not excusing the PUBLISHERS (after all its the people that hold the purse strings that decide these things and not the developer unless they also publish) that decided to cut a few corners in order to get a game development cycle in to a tight time frame for little cash. This is an awful practice and does nothing but harm.

Speaking from experience, a sequel will generally share code with it's previous version and the aim will always be to look at what went wrong and get those fixed. A game may have had massively broken code that public would never see, however those issues would HAVE to be resolved and take a certain amount of time and money to fix before they even start 'making' the new game. The less money left equals less time and resource that can be used to make the new features. It's not such a cut and dry argument when you take this type of issue in to account.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Haha, Yahtzee laying down the law, we bow to no man, woman or child!

 

[Captain Underbeard]

I've been enjoying the discussion, both in the article and on the forum, so much so that it's got to the point where I joined just to join in. So congrats all round To begin with, I think it's necessary to state a point everyone knows but no-one (I think) has really mentioned.

The universal controllers we use are a necessary compromise. In an ideal world, every game would have a controller suited specifically for playing it, and learning how to use these controls would be the best way to play the game. But games would then be very expensive to buy, and to a lesser extent, to manufacture. BTW this doesn't preclude that similar games would have vastly different controllers - after all, if two games are similar then undoubtedly they will have similar control schemes. But yeah, the controllers we use on consoles are an economic compromise - having one controller with multiple different buttons allows for a great diversity of actions to be done by the player without them having to create stacks of very specific controllers. That's why the keyboard and the PS3/360 controllers (the two are essentially the same) are built the way they are.

A lot of people seem to believe that this means they are optimal in some way, however. For those who are used to these schemes - yes, they very well may be optimal as they are suitable. Such people have a wealth of previous experience with these controllers, or previous and slightly less complicated incarnations. Let's think of current generation FPS's. I know that to aim on a PS3 controller is to press R1 then move the right analog stick. This simulates me looking down my sights then looking around through them. Now step out of your gaming bubble. Is this really the optimal way to *aim*? What about the light-gun way - you have a tactile gun controller with its own sights down which you can aim? I know this isn't perfect, as it requires calibration, but surely this a better way to *aim* a gun in an FPS. But you wouldn't use a light-gun in something like CoD, as light-guns have a very limited (and so far shit) capacity for moving the player around. To my mind, an ideal controller for an FPS would be one that would allow you to aim down-sight whilst retaining all the movement capabilities currently available. That would be a far more 'optimal' way to play these games.

What is the point of a controller? It's to allow the player to immerse themselves in the game, to go from cognitive thought to visible action with as little thought about how they are doing this as possible. On a micro level, a controller is 'optimal' if you can do this - hence I'd argue that, for me, a PS3 controller is optimal. On a macro level, a controller is 'optimal' if ANYONE who plays a game can do this - hence the reasoning behind the lightgun/FPS mash-up above.

This brings me to Yahtzee's point - "It's just I've never seen anyone get as lost in Wii Tennis for hours like I do in, say, Silent Hill 2". I'd argue that has little to do with the controller. Silent Hill 2 is a game built to be played over hours and hours and hours (or maybe just hours and hours, or even only hours). SH2 is made to be played immersively over a long period of time - it wouldn't work as a horror game otherwise. As for Wii Tennis - it's designed to be played in smaller, more discrete chunks. It's immersive for as long as a match lasts - events don't tie you from one match to another. You finish a game, then start a new one. No wonder no-one doesn't get lost in it for as many hours as they do in SH2.

So Yahtzee - the controllers have nothing to do with the duration of immersion, it's more the games they're played with. What about another important factor, the intensity of immersion? How 'immersed' in the game are players? Although that's difficult to gauge, I'd argue they are equally immersive experiences for me (hence on a micro, personal level) though on a macro level, I'd say Wii Tennis is, as more people can become immersed in this easier than SH2 precisely because of the controllers - swinging a Wiimote to mimic a tennis swing has more fidelity to the real-life experience than pressing X, an action not requiring you to move your legs, to run - and that's why Wii Tennis is arguably more immersive as far as controllers are concerned (NOTE: I'm not saying it's a more immersive game overall).

Going along these lines, there seems to be an idea that motion controls are rubbish and will always be rubbish. Games made for them tend to be simplistic, or not make great use of their controls, or when they try to be complex they are miserable experiences.

Well, duh. Try playing CoD on a NES controller. See how much fun that is.

Numerous contributors have mentioned that us growing up, and controller's evolving with new consoles, has gone hand-in-hand. That's a very valid point. I'd like to take this argument further though, as I alluded to with the above sentence.

Veteran gamers love to wear rose-tinted glasses. I know, I'm one of them. But think back to the NES, one of the earliest precursors to today's controllers - how many playing buttons did it have? 2. 6 if you count the D-Pad. How many did the Mega Drive have? 6 (10 with D-Pad). And so on. Games for these machines had to be relatively simplistic, as there were only so many combinations of button you could press - there were only so many inputs. Now? The PS3 has 12 buttons (including the D-Pad), and at least 360 degrees of rotation (or button presses) per stick. The amount of commands available to a PS3 controller compared to a MegaDrive controller is probably a billion times more (don't make me do the maths).

Why am I telling you this? Because the Wii controller is comparable to the NES - it's the first generation, the most simplistic, the most basic. Games with it are simplistic. The Move and the Kinect are MegaDrive/SNES equivalents.

I can gaurantee you, the PS3 equivalent will allow for games equally complex and deep and immersive and impressive as PS3/360 games. But you'll have to wait 20 years to see them. But it's short-sighted to write them off because their NES equivalent produces mostly rubbish games (and I'd argue they're rubbish because we've been spoilt by the PS3s/360s/PC games, and not as stand-alone).

Phew. Sorry that took so long. A thumbs-up if you stayed to the end :-D

 

[KEM10]

Oh dear...

Console gamers already see PC games being brought over to their platform being 'dumbed down' because of the constraints of the controllers. If the industry tries to cater to the novice to expand the market, won't they be simplifying the controllers even further if the current ones appear 'daunting' to a rookie?

I think what they were going for was more games that are simplified and just not using the whole controller for the sake of using the whole controller. I think a Prince of Persia game where all it is would be patforming: analog for moving, analog for camera, button to jump, trigger to go back in time. More games that don't feel obligated to use all 10 buttons, dual axis, and d pad. Besides, I doubt the computer gamers that issue that complaint on a regular basis would pick up said game...then again, Super Meatboy sold really well.

 

[irani_che]

On controllers,
I find I can give anyone, be it a Xbox Halo fanatic or a PS3 COD guy my little sister who plays Wii or even my mum who doesnt play computer games but just about knows how to use a computer, a simple FPS like portal or minecraft or COD on a computer and they pick it up really quickly.
A mouse is very intuitive and effective. I would say computer games are the easiest gateway for bringing causal gamers into "mainstream" gaming

 

[WanderingFool]

and God forbid the Tutorial isn't 100% skippable or "hardcore" gamers are garaunteed to pitch a fit about it - as though it's inconcievable that people without their specific prior experience might want to play, too

What? You make it sound like there's something wrong with wanting a skip button, Bob. I have to disagree strongly: a skip button is what makes everyone happy.

If the tutorial is mandatory for everyone each time you start a new game, people who already know what they are doing are going to find it annoying.
If the tutorial doesn't exist, no players are going to get frustrated and turn the game off.
If the tutorial is there, but you can choose to skip it, experienced players can skip the tutorial and just play, while new players can take the extra time to pick up the basics.

With a skip button, everyone is happy. Every game tutorial should be skippable. It's just something that should be in every game these days, like an option for subtitles, and an in-game brightness adjuster so we don't have to change our TV's or monitor's settings if one game decides to be too dark or too bright by default.

I agree with this. As much as I find tutorials useful when new to a game, after playing though it the first time, if I go for a second run, I dont want to go through the learning session again. There should almost always be a skip feature; unless the tutorial is done in such a way that its necessary, but it doesnt feel like you are being literally "taught" things. Something like a first level that has prompts pop up telling you how to perform a certain action, but feeling like it is being said in context, and not rookie training. I would say something like the first level to MW2, in the first part where you are showing the new recruits how it is done. That feels to me like a well done tutorial. Actually, look up the Extra Credit episode about tutorials, they basically say that themselves, if I remember correctly.

 

[KEM10]

Spoiler: snip

I've been enjoying the discussion, both in the article and on the forum, so much so that it's got to the point where I joined just to join in. So congrats all round To begin with, I think it's necessary to state a point everyone knows but no-one (I think) has really mentioned.

The universal controllers we use are a necessary compromise. In an ideal world, every game would have a controller suited specifically for playing it, and learning how to use these controls would be the best way to play the game. But games would then be very expensive to buy, and to a lesser extent, to manufacture. BTW this doesn't preclude that similar games would have vastly different controllers - after all, if two games are similar then undoubtedly they will have similar control schemes. But yeah, the controllers we use on consoles are an economic compromise - having one controller with multiple different buttons allows for a great diversity of actions to be done by the player without them having to create stacks of very specific controllers. That's why the keyboard and the PS3/360 controllers (the two are essentially the same) are built the way they are.

A lot of people seem to believe that this means they are optimal in some way, however. For those who are used to these schemes - yes, they very well may be optimal as they are suitable. Such people have a wealth of previous experience with these controllers, or previous and slightly less complicated incarnations. Let's think of current generation FPS's. I know that to aim on a PS3 controller is to press R1 then move the right analog stick. This simulates me looking down my sights then looking around through them. Now step out of your gaming bubble. Is this really the optimal way to *aim*? What about the light-gun way - you have a tactile gun controller with its own sights down which you can aim? I know this isn't perfect, as it requires calibration, but surely this a better way to *aim* a gun in an FPS. But you wouldn't use a light-gun in something like CoD, as light-guns have a very limited (and so far shit) capacity for moving the player around. To my mind, an ideal controller for an FPS would be one that would allow you to aim down-sight whilst retaining all the movement capabilities currently available. That would be a far more 'optimal' way to play these games.

What is the point of a controller? It's to allow the player to immerse themselves in the game, to go from cognitive thought to visible action with as little thought about how they are doing this as possible. On a micro level, a controller is 'optimal' if you can do this - hence I'd argue that, for me, a PS3 controller is optimal. On a macro level, a controller is 'optimal' if ANYONE who plays a game can do this - hence the reasoning behind the lightgun/FPS mash-up above.

This brings me to Yahtzee's point - "It's just I've never seen anyone get as lost in Wii Tennis for hours like I do in, say, Silent Hill 2". I'd argue that has little to do with the controller. Silent Hill 2 is a game built to be played over hours and hours and hours (or maybe just hours and hours, or even only hours). SH2 is made to be played immersively over a long period of time - it wouldn't work as a horror game otherwise. As for Wii Tennis - it's designed to be played in smaller, more discrete chunks. It's immersive for as long as a match lasts - events don't tie you from one match to another. You finish a game, then start a new one. No wonder no-one doesn't get lost in it for as many hours as they do in SH2.

So Yahtzee - the controllers have nothing to do with the duration of immersion, it's more the games they're played with. What about another important factor, the intensity of immersion? How 'immersed' in the game are players? Although that's difficult to gauge, I'd argue they are equally immersive experiences for me (hence on a micro, personal level) though on a macro level, I'd say Wii Tennis is, as more people can become immersed in this easier than SH2 precisely because of the controllers - swinging a Wiimote to mimic a tennis swing has more fidelity to the real-life experience than pressing X, an action not requiring you to move your legs, to run - and that's why Wii Tennis is arguably more immersive as far as controllers are concerned (NOTE: I'm not saying it's a more immersive game overall).

Going along these lines, there seems to be an idea that motion controls are rubbish and will always be rubbish. Games made for them tend to be simplistic, or not make great use of their controls, or when they try to be complex they are miserable experiences.

Well, duh. Try playing CoD on a NES controller. See how much fun that is.

Numerous contributors have mentioned that us growing up, and controller's evolving with new consoles, has gone hand-in-hand. That's a very valid point. I'd like to take this argument further though, as I alluded to with the above sentence.

Veteran gamers love to wear rose-tinted glasses. I know, I'm one of them. But think back to the NES, one of the earliest precursors to today's controllers - how many playing buttons did it have? 2. 6 if you count the D-Pad. How many did the Mega Drive have? 6 (10 with D-Pad). And so on. Games for these machines had to be relatively simplistic, as there were only so many combinations of button you could press - there were only so many inputs. Now? The PS3 has 12 buttons (including the D-Pad), and at least 360 degrees of rotation (or button presses) per stick. The amount of commands available to a PS3 controller compared to a MegaDrive controller is probably a billion times more (don't make me do the maths).

Why am I telling you this? Because the Wii controller is comparable to the NES - it's the first generation, the most simplistic, the most basic. Games with it are simplistic. The Move and the Kinect are MegaDrive/SNES equivalents.

I can gaurantee you, the PS3 equivalent will allow for games equally complex and deep and immersive and impressive as PS3/360 games. But you'll have to wait 20 years to see them. But it's short-sighted to write them off because their NES equivalent produces mostly rubbish games (and I'd argue they're rubbish because we've been spoilt by the PS3s/360s/PC games, and not as stand-alone).

Phew. Sorry that took so long. A thumbs-up if you stayed to the end :-D

I saved the entire post in spoilers (I think more people should do that instead of just cutting and replacing with a snip).

Two things. First, I think that is the most information anyone has ever put down in a first post. Second, I have to agree with the idea that the current motion controls are first gen and have room to grow, but you can't completely isolate them just because of that. Quick example: everyone goes nuts about the next WoW killer, it is the game to beat when it comes to MMOs. Problem is, when a new game enters the market that is good on its own merits but not quite as good as WoW, it is seen as inferior and left to die even if it could be better than WoW if given an extra year or two of development with a mediocre fanbase. We have to compare this first gen motion controller to the current gen of "regular" consoles because that is what they are against.

Ideally, I hope there is a happy medium between motion and analog controllers where everyone can get along. I would be hard pressed to play a platformer or an epic RPG with motion controls. However, I do think FPS games with a "Wii-mote" and analog for walking are going to be the next big thing (once we work out the kinks).

 

[Deacon Cole]

Allow me to hijack the plane a moment.

...and hardcores will benefit from developers being less able to re-press the same game as a "sequel" when the last one is sitting right there online.

Bob, each time you play a game of, say, Chess, is that a sequel? The rules are the same each time. Why then do many play Chess regularly without complaint that it's just the same game every time? True, you don't have to buy the game each time you play unless the pieces are made of chocolate (there's an idea!) But I am curious what is at work here.

Part of it seems to be how closely video games are emulating movies and sequelists is the bane of the movie industry as well.

Personally, I detest storytelling in video games for this very reason. I had made a post on another forum that I'll spoil here.

Spoiler

So, I've continued to toy with the idea of pre-purchasing Minecraft. I know, I'm indecisive. And also broke. But I have been watching various videos some have made and I've come to the conclusion that Minecraft may be the best RPG ever made despite and probably because it lack two elements common to most RPGs: character stats and story.

There is nothing wrong with character stats per se. They are a tool and tools can be used well or poorly. However, they had long since lost their luster for me even back when I was dealing with paper and dice RPGs. In video games they become a thing unto themselves.

In Runescape I and many others have and continue to spend hours chopping down trees and then burning the wood collected. Why? To raise the woodcutting and fire building skills. Why? To get the skill levels as high as possible. This is not a phenomenon limited to Runescape or even MMO's. Level grinding is so common, it's taken as read by most players and some games are designed with level grinding in mind. I've ramble on about how I like how Bioshock lacked character stats instead having the player acquire plasmids and tonics that for the most part added abilities rather than improving existing ones. Similarly, Legend of Zelda mostly added abilities in the items/tools collected. Minecraft is the same in that the miner crafts tools from raw materials to accomplish tasks. On a side note, Minecraft may be one of the few games where item degradation makes sense.

Minecraft also has just as much grind as any other game, if not more but the rewards and methods are more directly linked. The basic method is exploration either by trudging around the surface or digging a really big hole. In either case you're looking for resources so you can build the things you want which could be and eighty foot nude statue of Sarah Palin or just finding more diamond so you can replace all the diamond tools you had to wear out to find more diamond. You never just stay in one place and slaughter infinitely respawning enemies. No, you must work for a living. Digging through solid rock, encountering and exploring cave systems, hoping that clearing through that next layer of rock will expose the ore you need. So the grind is in actually playing the game rather than stopping to raise your numbers high enough so you can get back to playing the game.

Story in games is a big, big topic and an ongoing debate. But I'm of the mind that what is called storytelling in many games is actually story from another medium that is tacked onto a game. That's what cutscenes are. That's what Bioshock's audio diaries are. An add on but not the actual story of the game you're playing. Not to mention most of them are either cliched or batshit insane like the final fantasy series. I think the dark lord is a fantasy cliche that should be retired forever.

Minecraft has no story or context. Your character merely pops into existence on a beach somewhere and leaves it up to the player's imagination to fill in the blanks if at all and is all the stronger for it. This means the only story going on here is in the actual text of gameplay. A story is an artwork fashioned from the events of live and here you fashion whatever story you get from what you actually do. This means it'll be a story about digging a hole, breaking into a cave system, hearing a giant spider somewhere in the dark, gacking said spider, finding a diamond deposit near a lava flow, mining the diamond and then falling into the lava and losing all your items including the diamond you'd just acquired.

Not much of a story, perhaps. Maybe not worth retelling to others. But from a play experience, it's a much better story than any of the other twaddle on the market. It's a story about what you did. What obstacles you encountered. How you figured out a way to overcome them. And how you either succeeded or failed.

This is what storytelling in games should be. This is why Minecraft is the best RPG ever made.

Condensed version: Minecraft has the potential and probably currently is the best RPG on the market because it lack story and character stats which ties the story, as it what happens not to an abstract spreadsheet of numbers or some writer's pathetic attempt at aping Tolkien for the forty berillionth time, but on what actions the player takes. That is, the environment presents the player with a situation, the player takes and action, the environment reacts, the player takes further action, repeat until the situation is resolved. This is how storytelling actually works. It's not watching cutscenes.

It seems that most developers, especially the triple A sort, are coming up with a gameplay 'engine' that acts as a kind of laws of physics that they can then reskin with a new cast of characters, setting, etc. and expect it to not get stale.

But it does get stale and worse, storytelling in games tend to make the player's actions redundant and unnecessary. Being sent on some quest to save the world or bring in the mail is fairly meaningless when you realize that any other berk could have done it.

This is a big topic and I'm starting to ramble now, so I'll cut this short.

 

[alphaxion]

On controllers,
I find I can give anyone, be it a Xbox Halo fanatic or a PS3 COD guy my little sister who plays Wii or even my mum who doesnt play computer games but just about knows how to use a computer, a simple FPS like portal or minecraft or COD on a computer and they pick it up really quickly.
A mouse is very intuitive and effective. I would say computer games are the easiest gateway for bringing causal gamers into "mainstream" gaming

PC gaming is already the biggest gateway for bringing casual gamers into mainstream (tho the iphone is proving effective too) - just think how many people play games on the websites of Armor Games or PopCap. Then look at how many go on to buy a DS... then a Wii or a 360.

However, there is a massive way of bringing casuals into the wider gaming ecosystem - we gamers. How greater will the pull be if we took the time to invite our less gaming focused work collegues round for a gaming session or ask our parents to join in? You don't have to drop them straight into an FPS deathmatch, start them off with simpler games or even co-op missions.

If there's a human there to take the journey with them instead of just a cold, faceless tutorial then it's likely they'll be open to playing more.