And they just released a level editor! It's really fun to use.

Here's another random thought about games:

What happens when you remove all the numbers, aside from those that tell you how much of a thing you have. Ten gold, three potions, two pairs of pants, etc. Remove stat points, remove health bars, remove experience bars, remove the damage rating for weapons, the armor rating for armor. Your choices are now based on your intuition and how something looks. Replace the numbers with visual / audio cues.

With swords, for instance, you could tell the player if it feels heavy, if it feels sharp, where it's balanced, etc, and they could judge whether it was better than what they already have based on that. For health, you could have an icon system that would let the player know how badly they're hurt and where, and maybe have a better damage model that would allow for limb wounds to affect combat / movement / perception of the world (permanent deafness / blindness?). Also, in a multiplayer environment, remove the chat and player names and replace with speech balloons or something similar. You can only 'hear' people nearby. Have whipser and shout commands so you can speak softly to nearby players only, or shout that will let people 'hear' your speech bubble coming from farther away.

Would the lack of other numbers shift the focus to getting lots of money as opposed to leveling your character or finding the best gear? Would people still play WoW or Skyrim if they had no idea how much damage / experience / level / health they had? Would that sort of chat and lack of knowledge of other players encourage more actual roleplaying and draw players in, or would it repel them?

Would you play WoW, or The Elder Scrolls Online if it were set up that way?

Sorry, I'm posting in a lot of threads today cause I've been offline for like three days and just got my shit fixed

I don't think a game like this would work, or at the very least if it did draw people in it would not draw the same kind of people. The thing about MMO's (massive multiplayer online) is that they draw in people who like to feel a sense of accomplishment. This is usually done through these number values (level, money, items, etc). Literally the only thing needed to be successful at an MMO is time, sure some people can get to a higher level more efficiently than others, but really the only thing required is time. They are designed this way because its an easy way to get people to play longer. You reward them for doing something that anyone can do (this way no one ever hits a wall as they would in real life), making them feel as if they are working towards something, and in return design a bunch of meaningless tasks that just take a long amount of time to do. It keeps them playing until they realize that they really arent achieving anything because they're stuck in this vicious cycle (farm gold to get good armour to fight better monsters to get better armour to fight even better monsters.

I guess with the kind of game you're suggesting the goal of the game would change from accomplishing something to simply experiencing the world. Sort of like minecraft, but more abstract I guess. The only problem is, experiencing this world by yourself is pretty lonely and depressing. If you aren't going to give them that instant gratification of accomplishing something, you need to give them communication so that they can play with friends. With both of these things missing, I don't think the game would work.

NPR did a good segment on Bioshock Infinite arguing that it's art (note though if you're playing through it and want to be totally unspoiled, I recommend waiting till you finish, it doesn't spoil any details but hints at where it's going in broad strokes): http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconside … ragic-play

They similarly have a really good interview with the game's creator Ken Levine: http://onpoint.wbur.org/2013/04/02/bioshock

Having played through it myself, I certainly think it qualifies and put it on the level of the "smarter" blockbuster a la Inception or the Prestige. Like in those movies there's logical leaps, but the scale and ambition of what it tries to do is so awesome, that I can mostly forgive it. In fact, I'd say its stronger than Inception, because the overarching story of the world and the character's personal journey are well tied together thematically, whereas Inception's overall plot about competing oil company executives is largely pointless.

That's judged against the tougher standards of the film medium though. Judged against other video game narratives, which are almost uniformly terrible (at best they just successfully ripoff an existing movie, see Uncharted = Indiana Jones, at worst they're completely non-existent), it's a fucking masterwork. That they managed to spend 4 years and 100+ million dollars and make a game that feels this personal, detailed, and thematically rich, is crazy.

I did. The guy who played Vaas killed it (in a good way.)

Still don't get the argument against video games as art. Whenever people say that, it strikes me as so dismissive and ignorant.

Edit: this ended up way longer than I intended

I agree that the whole "Game's aren't Art" thing was stupid and misguided from the very start, but I would say a more interesting question for me has been how successful games could be as a narrative medium (not that that should be their intent, I love my sim city or doom as much as the next guy). There were always exceptions that were trying to do things differently and succeeding, a Grim Fandango, or a Portal, but generally video-game stories have been garbage, and I think a lot of the video-game community fails to acknowledge this.
Every time I hear someone try to say Metal Gear Solid (or Final Fantasy), has a better storyline than any hollywood movies, I want to slap them in the face, because that series is nothing but awful, cliche, convoluted, bullshit.

Now more smaller scale art-house games have been experimenting with narrative for years, but I feel like the last few years we're really starting to see a bit of a shift in the medium where larger scale releases start to push the medium in terms of story-telling. I think the Walking Dead game last year was a notable step for me because it was a major release that had better writing than the tv show, and I think Bioshock Infinite is an even bigger leap as well.

Part of what's interesting about this to me is that I think the standards have been so low for games up till this point that there hasn't really been a serious look at this by the community until really just the last few years. The recent discussion about whether Bioshock Infinite really needs to be a shooter, and whether the violence should be scaled back, tells me that the narrative side is starting to get pushed to a sufficient level of polish that people are starting to see the limitations and distracting aspects of game mechanics that we've taken as a given for 20 years.

What I really think and hope might be happening is a new harder split between Video Games and Interactive Narrative, maybe like what happened with comics and graphic novels. Because we're really approaching the point where game mechanics and story-telling are starting to clash and trample each-other a bit. I think a more gameplay oriented action game like Doom suffers if you start forcing the player to sit through story beats to get back to the primary attraction, the action. Likewise, a game like Bioshock Infinite, where the most compelling part of the experience is the narrative and the world-building, starts to feel weird because the gameplay hold-overs of the past don't exactly fit the type of story it's trying to tell. You can imagine a 5-7 hour long version of that game with minimal combat where you just walk around and explore(think something like Dear Esther) that would be much stronger at conveying the story and ideas it's trying to tell.

I enjoy video games for years and often enjoyed some of the 8 bit games because they often built more from the imagination for their story than most do nowadays. I'm serious, read a booklet from an old Intellivision game or Nintendo system. There is a lot more backstory than many games get nowadays.

Shooter games I think have surged in popularity due, in part, to games like Halo, Battlefield and others and giving studios are surefire formula for making money. Much like some movies now, video games are looking for a sure profit with little risk. So, lots of shooter games.

I find the concept work behind video games is very similar to preproduction process of making a movie. The design, artwork and scripting process is interesting to me.