Well, Dr Evil is getting pleasure from story-driven games then.
Stories in games don't have the same significance as in novels and movies (the most important aspect of movies is scene composition). They, along with the rest of presentation (visuals, audio, music), serve to provide a motive to solve game's objectives through those aesthetic means.
And lol @ anyone mentioning Gears as something with a worthwhile story.
By your definition, a person playing catch with a frisbee is having fun because they find pleasure in it; a person being terrified on a rollercoaster is having fun, because they find pleasure in it; a person reading a book is having fun because they find pleasure in it
Yes, why is that surprising to you? Pleasure is important, because life in modern world is filled with boring things like jobs and servitude (although, work can be a source of enjoyment too, if you love what you do).
'Fun' is simple, easy entertainment.
No, it isn't. You are just muddling it up. As I've said in the previous post, fun (enjoyment) is not easily attained when you are involved in whatever medium or activity that interests you. Fun is certainly not cheap when you have good taste.
Other types of entertainment can be a tough challenge with a satisfying reward, while another is emotional affection
Interaction with every object in existance evokes an "emotional impact" of some kind. Purpose or "meanings" and "messages" don't depend on the objects, but on the subject which regard them. That an object has meaning at all means that there is some will dominating it, bending it toward certain interpretation. A belief in absolute anything means to give in to one particular interpretation of a thing, to essentially allow oneself to be dominated by a particular will. This philosophical doctrine is called
perspectivism and has significantly influenced postmodern thought.
You make it sound like "meaning" or "emotion" is something that needs to be explicitly aimed for in order to be achieved instead of something that arises naturally out of any work people make, that they just place it in there and the consumers of his work need to "get it" by going into the bushes in search for it. And what makes games art aren't things unique to them (interactivity) but rather supplemental coats of paint taken from other mediums. And when it comes to emotions, it's almost always talk about sad emotions and with meaning only "moral meaning".
These distinctions are important. A game going for 'fun' (MarioKart) is different to a game going for 'emotional involvement' (Heavy Rain) and the designs and requirements of both are different, with the 'fun' game not needing a story arc and preferably having more options to change the rules and conditions of the activity.
Mario Kart is a good racing game with solid mechanics, which is why it can give pleasure to people playing it. Heavy Rain is a really bad game mechanically (QTE fest) with abysmally written plot and characters, bad VA and facial animation. There are games with crime drama/detective theme which have far better mechanics and stories, and they provide much greater "emotional involment". For example, Blade Runner, The Last Express, Police Quest. And if one wants a story about a loss of a loved one, Silent Hill 2 does it infinitely better, which is not surprising given that the storyline is based on Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment.
Games need to recognise what they are and what they're going for
And what they are? What is a definition of a game? Is there a universally accepted one?.Ludwig Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations says that one cannot see anything in common with various games, but similarities and relationships exist. According to Encarta, games are "activities or contests governed by sets of rules. People engage in games for recreation and to develop mental or physical skills". An activity where a goal is set in advance, which be achieved within a set of predefined rules. The obstacles created by the rules must present a challenge, they cannot be easily overcome. The more complex the rules are, the greater the barrier to entry and the greater the challenge. Chess has greater complexity compared to checkers because each playing piece moves differently in its ruleset, while checkers only provides one type of piece and one type of movement. Thus, the greater the complexity of the ruleset, the greater its depth (the ammount of how much there is to learn the game, to master it; it can be measured as a distance betwence the best and the worst players), which fosters greater skill. A lack of accessibilily can signify depth and a great ammount of accessibility be a source of shallowness. However, we need to differentiate between "meaningful" and "meaningless" complexity. Meaningless complexity would be all the possibilities that don't really affect the game, they don't make it more complex, they only ostensibly do so. For example, useless moves in fighting games or weapons in first person shooters. Or how 3D action games (the likes of DMC, Ninja Gaiden, God Hand, Bayonetta) provide far greater possibility space than 2D action games, however practically all of them are easier and not as good (skill-based) as the best arcade belt scroll games. That's partly due to the economics of arcade game design, which creates a unique environment for operators, developers and players.
Fun games that try to do entertainment like stories will have a much harder job achieving both successfully than focussing on one or the other.
Huh, you are muddling it up again. "Entertainment like stories", what exacty does that mean?
Yes mostly entertained than challenged though, but after the game mechanics have reached a point of good enough, further bettering of them doesn't make as much difference to me as bettering the story and making the game world richer and complex in a meaningful way. Ninja Gaiden imo had better combat mechanics than God of War, but for me God of War was the better experience, because NG had retarded story aspects.
You are far better reading mythology books which can eleborate those themes much more in-depth. Similarly, if you want to know about US foreign policy, you read Noam Chomsky's books not watch political cartoons. Or postmodernism, you read philosophy and literature, not watch The Matrix or Kojima's cutscenes. Though, you can do plenty of things in film you can't do in literature (non-fictional in particular). Cutscenes in MGS are pretty good for setting the mood and flavoring, but mechanics should have the utmost priority in design of any electronic game. Which is why I'd rather play Thief.2 or SC:Chaos Theory than any MGS game.
I would describe people who prefer GoW and in particular HS over DMC and NG as shallow, as in they prefer style over substance games or simply shallow games, the ones with bombastic presentation.but not much substance. Perhaps they will get offended by this but I don't care. Maybe they lack the physiology to play and appreciate more complex games and so they use various excuses to justify games with crappy handhoding mechanics or that they appeal to more people which is argumentum ad populum..Similarly, MW2 is shitty compared to Q3A. And so is Uncharted's third person shooting compared to RE4's/Vanquish's and its brain-dead "puzzles" compared to TR's/Zelda's/Soul Reaver's.
