I've noticed a weird distinction in the gaming market. Many big hit games aren't actually very well-designed.
Bioshock, for instance, ultimately falls into the same trap 90% of games do by ambushing the player every five minutes and making it impossible to do any form of planning around the giant list of tactical tools the player has.
Spore at any given level of the game essentially features several different forms of "attack" that all function exactly the same but drain different "health bars;" if you're a carnivore you bite stuff until it does, if you're a herbivore you sing to stuff until it decides to be your friend. It's built such that there isn't any difference in the options you pick, in other words.
Western RPGs are guilty of poor design as well. Mass Effect is designed such that you can completely ignore two thirds of the combat system and hardly need to brush up on Biotics or hacking at all. Aside from that both of those serve the SAME ROLE in the game and are almost universally applicable. Since you regenerate your energy so quickly between fights, in general you can ALWAYS open up a fight by putting enemies at a huge disadvantage. I won't even talk about Fable...
All of these games suffer from what I'd call major design flaws. But they're also--depending on the audience you ask--major hit games that keep people in their seats. They're badly designed as games but they're definitely a really entertaining form of media--either for the sake of immersion and escapism in itself or for the story or because they have multiplayer or because of sheer novelty of being Batman or what have you.
Personally I have very low tolerance of games that have so many flaws. I see the mechanics as part of the whole, something that can be made to serve the way cuts in a film dictate rhythm and camera angles and zooms and focuses can have subtle but powerful effects on peoples' perception of a movie, and seeing that device wasted just gets me mad.
EDIT:
It's become clear I ought to elaborate on this "bad design" matter a little more and that these examples aren't really enough.
In the ideal situation all of a game's elements have a purpose that, although not explicitly defined, is pretty clear. Smash Bros, in spite of a few technical issues like the camera in the most recent game and the unpredictable balance issues prevalent throughout competitive games, provides a fair example. Normal attacks are a means of softening people up, smash attacks are there to either give you some space or finish people off, special attacks provide the iconic spice of each character and unique ways of fighting--IE, projectile attacks, shields, delayed weapons, anything significantly different from the norm--and the items are there to provide support. Characters have weight categories, relative strength and speed to their moves and movement, and all of the usual differences you would expect. The randomness of items' appearance is a way of evening things out and keeping even a weak player from dropping completely out of the game.
A friend of mine and I deconstructed Super Smash Bros. into tabletop role-playing game form once upon a time, and for the time that we tried to follow the Smash Bros. system as closely as possible and supplement it with instruments of problem-solving it worked out well. If you're curious the story played out like a video game-themed Saturday morning cartoon, but I digress. At some point we decided that a spell system was in order to support people who wanted to be more like spellcasters. The problem was that if players could depend on a consistent spellcaster during each session of the game for healing and support the items quickly got ignored; having someone around who can heal or buff at will is like having an unlimited supply of Maxim Tomatoes, Beam Sabers, and Metal Boxes. We were expecting players to use currency to buy items to use during each session, but the items just weren't meaningful because the players had spells. All they ever needed was the green potion necessary to refill their magic and keep moving, and green potion flowed like water as the rewards for completed sessions grew. At the same time the spell system outgrew the items in power because we'd been using a level-based system and spells were dependent on characters' stats...
You can see where this quickly got out of hand and stopped being like Smash Bros. after a while. What it BECAME I can't really say, but the point is this overlapping, unnecessary gameplay element threw off the balance of the game immensely, making players too self-sufficient for GMs to pose a reasonable challenge and putting enough coins in their hands to fill a bank per each player. A lot of digital games also suffer from flaws like this, among them the ones I've listed. Mass Effect in particular seemed like it featured a spell system just because gamers were expecting there to be one, but that's just my take on it and it certainly isn't the worst offender. Fable is one of the worst I've seen, but don't take my word for it. Watch Yahtzee's review of Fable at FullyRamblomatic. He says it all much more concisely than I do.
Maybe Bioshock would make a better example if that one isn't understandable enough. Every element has a purpose. Guns are the workhorse of any FPS, Plasmids are tools for manipulating the enemy AI and environment, hacking is just a nice break--whether it's the break from combat that comes from using it in the midst of a heated battle or the break of having another gun in the room to back you up--and the ingame economy keeps you alive and supplied. Well-designed so far.
Take the invention system, though. It's really just a middleman between me and random loot. There isn't any skill or intuition involved in crafting things in this game, it's just money in a different, more annoying form. "Okay! I killed this teleporting fire bastard! I got... ... ... a bottle of glue and some rubber bands... gee, great." It's completely extraneous. Meanwhile, a bit closer to the gameplay side of things, there's plasmids that seem like they're meant to be used more sneakily than others. Enrage in particular only really works if the enemies aren't already attacking you, but when AREN'T the enemies in Bioshock already attacking you? You're always running headlong into them, completely unable to construct a plan, let alone one involving this plasmid. You never know IF you're going to arrive at a situation where it will be useful, so it's not worth carrying. Security Bulls-Eye is another one that tends to fall by the wayside in favor of more instantly-gratifying ones like incinerate, lightning, and telekinesis, and although they are in general more useful they by no means see their full potential, in part due to the fact that it's impossible to plan around them. I'd hold that in a game with minds like Andrew Ryan and Frank Fontaine that players would want a taste of what it's like to be a magnificent bastard themselves and would really like to outwit enemies instead of overpower them, but maybe that's just me.
What I'd like to know is: where does the entertainment value come from if not from an actually well-designed game? The answer is probably all of the options I've listed, but I'm still curious.
Bioshock, for instance, ultimately falls into the same trap 90% of games do by ambushing the player every five minutes and making it impossible to do any form of planning around the giant list of tactical tools the player has.
Spore at any given level of the game essentially features several different forms of "attack" that all function exactly the same but drain different "health bars;" if you're a carnivore you bite stuff until it does, if you're a herbivore you sing to stuff until it decides to be your friend. It's built such that there isn't any difference in the options you pick, in other words.
Western RPGs are guilty of poor design as well. Mass Effect is designed such that you can completely ignore two thirds of the combat system and hardly need to brush up on Biotics or hacking at all. Aside from that both of those serve the SAME ROLE in the game and are almost universally applicable. Since you regenerate your energy so quickly between fights, in general you can ALWAYS open up a fight by putting enemies at a huge disadvantage. I won't even talk about Fable...
All of these games suffer from what I'd call major design flaws. But they're also--depending on the audience you ask--major hit games that keep people in their seats. They're badly designed as games but they're definitely a really entertaining form of media--either for the sake of immersion and escapism in itself or for the story or because they have multiplayer or because of sheer novelty of being Batman or what have you.
Personally I have very low tolerance of games that have so many flaws. I see the mechanics as part of the whole, something that can be made to serve the way cuts in a film dictate rhythm and camera angles and zooms and focuses can have subtle but powerful effects on peoples' perception of a movie, and seeing that device wasted just gets me mad.
EDIT:
It's become clear I ought to elaborate on this "bad design" matter a little more and that these examples aren't really enough.
In the ideal situation all of a game's elements have a purpose that, although not explicitly defined, is pretty clear. Smash Bros, in spite of a few technical issues like the camera in the most recent game and the unpredictable balance issues prevalent throughout competitive games, provides a fair example. Normal attacks are a means of softening people up, smash attacks are there to either give you some space or finish people off, special attacks provide the iconic spice of each character and unique ways of fighting--IE, projectile attacks, shields, delayed weapons, anything significantly different from the norm--and the items are there to provide support. Characters have weight categories, relative strength and speed to their moves and movement, and all of the usual differences you would expect. The randomness of items' appearance is a way of evening things out and keeping even a weak player from dropping completely out of the game.
A friend of mine and I deconstructed Super Smash Bros. into tabletop role-playing game form once upon a time, and for the time that we tried to follow the Smash Bros. system as closely as possible and supplement it with instruments of problem-solving it worked out well. If you're curious the story played out like a video game-themed Saturday morning cartoon, but I digress. At some point we decided that a spell system was in order to support people who wanted to be more like spellcasters. The problem was that if players could depend on a consistent spellcaster during each session of the game for healing and support the items quickly got ignored; having someone around who can heal or buff at will is like having an unlimited supply of Maxim Tomatoes, Beam Sabers, and Metal Boxes. We were expecting players to use currency to buy items to use during each session, but the items just weren't meaningful because the players had spells. All they ever needed was the green potion necessary to refill their magic and keep moving, and green potion flowed like water as the rewards for completed sessions grew. At the same time the spell system outgrew the items in power because we'd been using a level-based system and spells were dependent on characters' stats...
You can see where this quickly got out of hand and stopped being like Smash Bros. after a while. What it BECAME I can't really say, but the point is this overlapping, unnecessary gameplay element threw off the balance of the game immensely, making players too self-sufficient for GMs to pose a reasonable challenge and putting enough coins in their hands to fill a bank per each player. A lot of digital games also suffer from flaws like this, among them the ones I've listed. Mass Effect in particular seemed like it featured a spell system just because gamers were expecting there to be one, but that's just my take on it and it certainly isn't the worst offender. Fable is one of the worst I've seen, but don't take my word for it. Watch Yahtzee's review of Fable at FullyRamblomatic. He says it all much more concisely than I do.
Maybe Bioshock would make a better example if that one isn't understandable enough. Every element has a purpose. Guns are the workhorse of any FPS, Plasmids are tools for manipulating the enemy AI and environment, hacking is just a nice break--whether it's the break from combat that comes from using it in the midst of a heated battle or the break of having another gun in the room to back you up--and the ingame economy keeps you alive and supplied. Well-designed so far.
Take the invention system, though. It's really just a middleman between me and random loot. There isn't any skill or intuition involved in crafting things in this game, it's just money in a different, more annoying form. "Okay! I killed this teleporting fire bastard! I got... ... ... a bottle of glue and some rubber bands... gee, great." It's completely extraneous. Meanwhile, a bit closer to the gameplay side of things, there's plasmids that seem like they're meant to be used more sneakily than others. Enrage in particular only really works if the enemies aren't already attacking you, but when AREN'T the enemies in Bioshock already attacking you? You're always running headlong into them, completely unable to construct a plan, let alone one involving this plasmid. You never know IF you're going to arrive at a situation where it will be useful, so it's not worth carrying. Security Bulls-Eye is another one that tends to fall by the wayside in favor of more instantly-gratifying ones like incinerate, lightning, and telekinesis, and although they are in general more useful they by no means see their full potential, in part due to the fact that it's impossible to plan around them. I'd hold that in a game with minds like Andrew Ryan and Frank Fontaine that players would want a taste of what it's like to be a magnificent bastard themselves and would really like to outwit enemies instead of overpower them, but maybe that's just me.
What I'd like to know is: where does the entertainment value come from if not from an actually well-designed game? The answer is probably all of the options I've listed, but I'm still curious.
