@opus153: My thoughts exactly. It was super refreshing to not hear about A** Creed for a period of... what, a year or something? Sigh. If they just made the parkour and combat skill-based instead of mindless button-pressing, these games might (might) actually be interesting. As is... they're like city simulations that you can tour. Pretty cool in its own right, but not that cool lol. Haven't played an Assassin's Creed Game since number 3.
@consolehaven: I think that Mike drawing a line between good old-fashioned Mario Cart-fun and that "deep sense of satisfaction." Mario Cart-fun (as I am calling it lol) can lead to that sense of satisfaction, but it's still fundamentally different from the type of satisfaction you might get when playing a game like, say, That Dragon Cancer, or Fez (which is sort of akin to The Witness, and offers something different again from That Dragon Cancer). I think somewhere around this line is the difference between entertainment and art.
Just had this thought, too--it's sort of like the difference between dance and sport. A sport is its own isolated system that we play for the sake of our investment in that arbitrary system. It's satisfying to involve ourselves in this system and then succeed within it (or to watch others do so). Dance (or "art dance," as opposed to "competition dance"), on the other hand, has no "goal." You don't go into a dance performance asking what the rules of the dance are. If the choreographer knows what they're doing, they'll make it in a way that allows you to take something away from it (i.e. develop rules), but the dance is never really about the rules--it's about what you take away.
I'm running with this metaphor way too far and I don't have the stamina to really tease it out lol. But I also don't want to just delete it, cuz there IS a point somewhere in there!! Take away from that what you will haha. Also, I'm a dancer and athlete (AND a gamer, YOWZA!!), so I think about this stuff.
Really don't like what they're doing here. They snuck it into Rogue One twice and it was kinda surprising and new "cool," but it's clear they're trying to set a precedent here. I don't think it should be standard for digital representations of people to just pop up all over... Dunno. Bothers me somehow.
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