What Do You Think Makes A Game Fun?

I like to think that learning lessons that can later be applied to one's main reality are fun rather than playing a game for no really good intentions (such that you eventually become addicted to them). To me, morality always is my judgement for what is fun within a game. The same can be said about art, cinema, and literature. For instance, I like decision-making or multiple paths since they can allow for all kinds of ways of experimenting and can allow you to see your main reality more clearly. Being an evil person, of course, feels guilty and wrong to me, but I will still do it, just so that I can compare the consequences found within a game to those which are found in reality. This means that going around and killing people in GTA IV while free-roaming or going to a strip club is not acceptable by me. Conversations, the relationships you have between others (enemies, friends, etc.) are the points where fun comes into play for me since I feel like I have established a great reason for being in a game's world.

And I don't find expressing one's pride through competing in multiplayer or one's greed through unlockables or trying to obtain as much possessions as possible within a video game as being my perception of fun either.

Everyone has had different experiences in his/her life, so we each have different ideas of what makes something fun. Take your time to share your thoughts about what makes a game fun for you to play.

The gameplay is a big part of it of course, because with bad gameplay the game would just be a chore to play.

But what makes a game memorable for me is if the characters and story can make me feel emotionally. This is why I love RPGs so much, because they seem like the only genre that have consistently achieved this.

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And I don't find expressing one's pride through competing in multiplayer or one's greed through unlockables or trying to obtain as much possessions as possible within a video game as being my perception of fun either.

Everyone has had different experiences in his/her life, so we each have different ideas of what makes something fun. Take your time to share your thoughts about what makes a game fun for you to play.

The gameplay is a big part of it of course, because with bad gameplay the game would just be a chore to play.

But what makes a game memorable for me is if the characters and story can make me feel emotionally. This is why I love RPGs so much, because they seem like the only genre that have consistently achieved this.

Zassimick

Same. Any game like Fallout 3, or Oblivion, where I can really be in it and be immersed, it's great. :D

[QUOTE="Zassimick"]

The gameplay is a big part of it of course, because with bad gameplay the game would just be a chore to play.

But what makes a game memorable for me is if the characters and story can make me feel emotionally. This is why I love RPGs so much, because they seem like the only genre that have consistently achieved this.

TheUberKnight

Same. Any game like Fallout 3, or Oblivion, where I can really be in it and be immersed, it's great. :D

Whether it is the WRPG like Oblivion or the JRPG like Lost Odyssey, each genre tugs at the heartstrings so well or makes you care about what is happening in the world. People may argue about what is better or if JRPGs should really be considered RPGs, but it seems like they both do it the best out of any other.

I like feeling when your characters are humane. For example they can bleed become tired, show emotions, choose their own way.. And so on.

When you can establish relations withs NPC's, when game world shows trust to you. Things like these effects our emotions and makes us feel good :]

Naturally graphics and sounds and mechanics are important too..

[QUOTE="Mawy_Golomb"]

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And I don't find expressing one's pride through competing in multiplayer or one's greed through unlockables or trying to obtain as much possessions as possible within a video game as being my perception of fun either.

Everyone has had different experiences in his/her life, so we each have different ideas of what makes something fun. Take your time to share your thoughts about what makes a game fun for you to play.

LoG-Sacrament

And yes, I do believe that characters and storylines also are ways that can help me become interested in playing a certain game.

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And I don't find expressing one's pride through competing in multiplayer or one's greed through unlockables or trying to obtain as much possessions as possible within a video game as being my perception of fun either.

Everyone has had different experiences in his/her life, so we each have different ideas of what makes something fun. Take your time to share your thoughts about what makes a game fun for you to play.

And yes, I do believe that characters and storylines also are ways that can help me become interested in playing a certain game.

[QUOTE="Mawy_Golomb"][QUOTE="LoG-Sacrament"] so you arent very good at gaming then? :P joking aside, there are lots of things in gaming that i find fun. they include a compelling story, great music, customization, exploration, depth, and numerous other things. its not really a question of how many of these things a game does, but how well it does a certain few of these things. LoG-Sacrament

And yes, I do believe that characters and storylines also are ways that can help me become interested in playing a certain game.

The last comment which I will make about multiplayer is that I've been solely associated with video games, so co-op and multiplayer are less likely for me to focus on. MMOGs are way too addictive in most cases. I've played Runescape before and the experience has become repetitive for me. Co-op actually seems quite intriguing to me since you are playing for the purpose of going through a storyline as well as to work with another player or set of players. In fact, I must say that I have a unique concept in mind for co-op and multiplayer that I will desperately try to introduce once I am in the video game industry. And rest assured, when people do see it, they'll think to themselves, "why didn't anyone come up with such a brilliant idea?"

And yes, I do believe that characters and storylines also are ways that can help me become interested in playing a certain game.

The last comment which I will make about multiplayer is that I've been solely associated with video games, so co-op and multiplayer are less likely for me to focus on. MMOGs are way too addictive in most cases. I've played Runescape before and the experience has become repetitive for me. Co-op actually seems quite intriguing to me since you are playing for the purpose of going through a storyline as well as to work with another player or set of players. In fact, I must say that I have a unique concept in mind for co-op and multiplayer that I will desperately try to introduce once I am in the video game industry. And rest assured, when people do see it, they'll think to themselves, "why didn't anyone come up with such a brilliant idea?"

I have played some other MMOs as well. But most of them have been free ones. Others that I've played include BOTS (made by Acclaim), Gaia Online, and this other one whose title I can't remember (much like Perfect World). As for telling you my idea, I simply cannot say anymore than that because than many others might see my idea and steal it. Not only might my idea be pretty profitable, but it certainly will be an original one, too. It's likely that nobody will figure it out until a game with such a concept is finally released.Mawy_Golomb

when people do see it, they'll think to themselves, "why didn't anyone come up with such a brilliant idea?"

Mawy_Golomb

Err that probably wasn't the best quote but anyways...

From what I've read of you, I don't think you've experienced a vast variety of games yet. I say this because you play games like COD4 more than 2 times. Now I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that but I spend roughly 70% of my days playing games and I still have an endless list of games to play not to mention a lack of time to revisit games that had some kind of replay value. It's been almost 5 years now and the list of games I plan to play grows faster than the list of games that I've played. So my point is that I still get surprised at how innovative some games are and I'm sure I've played at least 5 times more titles than you. (I don't know the exact number but I'd estimate that I've played 300 different games and beat 250 of them) Your very lack of knowledge in the field of co-op gaming already closed off a giant portion of excellent gaming experience.

Err... sorry I probably shouldn't have started cause now I'm too lazy to finish formulating my opinion lol.

Anyways, one very valuable thing in gaming is the ability to compare with other people who are playing the same game either co-opertively, competetively(directly through skills or through collection of items), or just conversationally. To experience what I'm trying to say here, play a Nippon-Ichi game on the playstation 2, Disgaea 2 is a good one. These games have a lot of depth and you can grind and collect items for thousands of hours (for instance a level cap of 9999). When I first come to the realization on how much time I can spend in this game, I got extremely excited. However, Once I finished the story and all the bonus stages, I no longer feel the motivation to keep training my characters. This goes back to the challenge vs reward mentioned earlier by someone else.

Yeah my opinions are quite inconclusive but I currently do no feel to formally formulating a well written response. I may return to finish what I've started here on some later occasion but who knows where life takes me lol.

Stay away from MMOs, for your own sake.

It amazes me that people get addicted to these games... Don't understand it... They are so boring and nothing happens... They certainly arn't skill dependent... more like time dependent...

For me it's the easy-ness of the game. I don't find challenges and hard games fun.

IMO...the easier the game, the more fun it is.

It's just like ASK_Story said there is no answer, at least for the majority of people.

People are just too complex to nail it down to just one or two things, even to say it takes a combination of every aspect like gameplay, story, sound, graphics all added together I don't think would be true, otherwise how would you explain older games like tetris nad pac-man which were really fun and addictive and I could still happily play for hours today.

Plus the fact that people are moody creatures, certain games become more appealing depending on your mood, also people change over time what you consider fun now may seem baffling to you when you look back in 10 years time, although saying that the opposite can also happen you see it happening a lot with music, how sometimes older people still listening to the same stuff they did when they were younger and automatically dismissing everything new as rubbish without taking the time to form a proper opinion.

People are just too complex to nail it down to just one or two things, even to say it takes a combination of every aspect like gameplay, story, sound, graphics all added together I don't think would be true, otherwise how would you explain older games like tetris nad pac-man which were really fun and addictive and I could still happily play for hours today.

[QUOTE="kapow85"]

People are just too complex to nail it down to just one or two things, even to say it takes a combination of every aspect like gameplay, story, sound, graphics all added together I don't think would be true, otherwise how would you explain older games like tetris nad pac-man which were really fun and addictive and I could still happily play for hours today.

LoG-Sacrament

So does that mean that a more simple game will suddenly stop being fun to play as soon as something more complex turns up? No, it's still fun but just for different reasons.

People are just too complex to nail it down to just one or two things, even to say it takes a combination of every aspect like gameplay, story, sound, graphics all added together I don't think would be true, otherwise how would you explain older games like tetris nad pac-man which were really fun and addictive and I could still happily play for hours today.

So does that mean that a more simple game will suddenly stop being fun to play as soon as something more complex turns up? No, it's still fun but just for different reasons.

games nowadays simply have a greater chance to be more fun. maybe older games that made their gameplay elements extremely well could still be fun, but they dont have the same opportunities. enjoying hd graphics is fun. listening to fully orchestrated scores is fun. exploring 3d worlds is fun. caring about expressive and voice acted characters is fun. taking on the mountains of enemies now possible to put on screen is fun. its not that these games stop being fun. its that these games have much harder competition nowadays. LoG-Sacrament

I recently replayed all my monkey island games, comparing the first game in the series to the last, obviously the first game had much worse graphics all thew music was in midi format and there was no voice acting yet mokey island 1 was so much better than the fifth game. Graphics, music and voice acting mean nothing if the story and gameplay aren't up to scratch.

Also looking at it another way because the game had worse graphics and no voice acting, you used you imagination a lot more to fill in the blanks, I remember when I played curse of monkey island and I heard guybrush speak it kind of ruined it a bit for me cos it wasn't how I'd imagined it. It's liek the difference between books and films, films show you how someone else imagined it, books let you do it for yourself. Not that I'm saying we should all go back to playing text based adventures or anything lol

I hope this isn't coming across that I just like older games and I think newer games aren't fun to play. Like I'm currently playing fallout 3 but sometimes I'm not in the mood to play it and I'll have more fun if I just go online and play something like bejewelled or one of those flash crazy golf games or something lol

[QUOTE="LoG-Sacrament"]

games nowadays simply have a greater chance to be more fun. maybe older games that made their gameplay elements extremely well could still be fun, but they dont have the same opportunities. enjoying hd graphics is fun. listening to fully orchestrated scores is fun. exploring 3d worlds is fun. caring about expressive and voice acted characters is fun. taking on the mountains of enemies now possible to put on screen is fun. its not that these games stop being fun. its that these games have much harder competition nowadays.

I recently replayed all my monkey island games, comparing the first game in the series to the last, obviously the first game had much worse graphics all thew music was in midi format and there was no voice acting yet mokey island 1 was so much better than the fifth game. Graphics, music and voice acting mean nothing if the story and gameplay aren't up to scratch.

Also looking at it another way because the game had worse graphics and no voice acting, you used you imagination a lot more to fill in the blanks, I remember when I played curse of monkey island and I heard guybrush speak it kind of ruined it a bit for me cos it wasn't how I'd imagined it. It's liek the difference between books and films, films show you how someone else imagined it, books let you do it for yourself. Not that I'm saying we should all go back to playing text based adventures or anything lol

I hope this isn't coming across that I just like older games and I think newer games aren't fun to play. Like I'm currently playing fallout 3 but sometimes I'm not in the mood to play it and I'll have more fun if I just go online and play something like bejewelled or one of those flash crazy golf games or something lol

[QUOTE="kapow85"]

[QUOTE="LoG-Sacrament"]

games nowadays simply have a greater chance to be more fun. maybe older games that made their gameplay elements extremely well could still be fun, but they dont have the same opportunities. enjoying hd graphics is fun. listening to fully orchestrated scores is fun. exploring 3d worlds is fun. caring about expressive and voice acted characters is fun. taking on the mountains of enemies now possible to put on screen is fun. its not that these games stop being fun. its that these games have much harder competition nowadays. LoG-Sacrament

I recently replayed all my monkey island games, comparing the first game in the series to the last, obviously the first game had much worse graphics all thew music was in midi format and there was no voice acting yet mokey island 1 was so much better than the fifth game. Graphics, music and voice acting mean nothing if the story and gameplay aren't up to scratch.

Also looking at it another way because the game had worse graphics and no voice acting, you used you imagination a lot more to fill in the blanks, I remember when I played curse of monkey island and I heard guybrush speak it kind of ruined it a bit for me cos it wasn't how I'd imagined it. It's liek the difference between books and films, films show you how someone else imagined it, books let you do it for yourself. Not that I'm saying we should all go back to playing text based adventures or anything lol

I hope this isn't coming across that I just like older games and I think newer games aren't fun to play. Like I'm currently playing fallout 3 but sometimes I'm not in the mood to play it and I'll have more fun if I just go online and play something like bejewelled or one of those flash crazy golf games or something lol

I understand your saying that because of technology improvements newer games are more likely to be fun than older games, because as well as having good gameplay they also have good sound, voice acting, graphics as well as the gameplay. I just want to point out that I never said that older games were more likely to be fun than newer games, in my original post I just said that a game could still be fun even if it lacked good graphics, sound and story and used older games such as tetris and pacman as an example.

As for the text based adventures I said

"Not that I'm saying we should all go back to playing text based adventures or anything lol"

by that I meant that we shouldn't play text based adventures because they aren't like books, I only played a few and I never liked any of them.

[QUOTE="Mawy_Golomb"] id say that the mmorpg for you is ffxi. its a great team-based mmo that sadly got overshadowed by more approachable mmo's like WoW and its clones. get with some good players and youll find theres much more to it than the click-and-wait system of runescape and most free mmo's.tedisthebest

when people do see it, they'll think to themselves, "why didn't anyone come up with such a brilliant idea?"

Err that probably wasn't the best quote but anyways...

From what I've read of you, I don't think you've experienced a vast variety of games yet. I say this because you play games like COD4 more than 2 times. Now I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that but I spend roughly 70% of my days playing games and I still have an endless list of games to play not to mention a lack of time to revisit games that had some kind of replay value. It's been almost 5 years now and the list of games I plan to play grows faster than the list of games that I've played. So my point is that I still get surprised at how innovative some games are and I'm sure I've played at least 5 times more titles than you. (I don't know the exact number but I'd estimate that I've played 300 different games and beat 250 of them) Your very lack of knowledge in the field of co-op gaming already closed off a giant portion of excellent gaming experience.

Err... sorry I probably shouldn't have started cause now I'm too lazy to finish formulating my opinion lol.

Anyways, one very valuable thing in gaming is the ability to compare with other people who are playing the same game either co-opertively, competetively(directly through skills or through collection of items), or just conversationally. To experience what I'm trying to say here, play a Nippon-Ichi game on the playstation 2, Disgaea 2 is a good one. These games have a lot of depth and you can grind and collect items for thousands of hours (for instance a level cap of 9999). When I first come to the realization on how much time I can spend in this game, I got extremely excited. However, Once I finished the story and all the bonus stages, I no longer feel the motivation to keep training my characters. This goes back to the challenge vs reward mentioned earlier by someone else.

Yeah my opinions are quite inconclusive but I currently do no feel to formally formulating a well written response. I may return to finish what I've started here on some later occasion but who knows where life takes me lol.

Not to be too detailed, But my frist thought for this question was Freedom and simplicity. You never want to feel trapped within a game and you never want it to be over-complicated to the point it becomes a chore.

There are many more, but i would say those are my two main ones.

The killing :evil:

That is all

[QUOTE="Mawy_Golomb"][QUOTE="LoG-Sacrament"] lol i see you enjoyed my joke. it was never really a question of respect, but we might as well continue now that we are here. id never question what somebody finds fun in something so trivial as a videogame, but id say that you seem to be stereotyping large groups of video games. video game multiplayer about more than just seeing who is best. computer players simply cant hold a candle to real people. its much more fun to play against a person who can adapt stragetically than a cold and mechanical computer player. if you dont believe me, then go play counter strike with bots and with people (the experience is extremely different). and id have to imagine that your mp stigma is with competitive games, because there is a whole other world of coop gaming as well. you could even make the next step in the mp staircase and go to mmo's. LoG-Sacrament

The last comment which I will make about multiplayer is that I've been solely associated with video games, so co-op and multiplayer are less likely for me to focus on. MMOGs are way too addictive in most cases. I've played Runescape before and the experience has become repetitive for me. Co-op actually seems quite intriguing to me since you are playing for the purpose of going through a storyline as well as to work with another player or set of players. In fact, I must say that I have a unique concept in mind for co-op and multiplayer that I will desperately try to introduce once I am in the video game industry. And rest assured, when people do see it, they'll think to themselves, "why didn't anyone come up with such a brilliant idea?"

Ahhh!!! There has already been a game in development for one year before my idea came into existence. I had might as well tell you my idea since it has already been thought up by someone else. The idea was to make a game/mod (I'm going to still try to make a low-budget mod of this concept) which allows the combination of co-op gameplay (playing w/others in a storyline) and multiplayer, such where the NPCs are actually all players, so there are no NPCs in a game at all. This idea of mine was started sometime in 2008 (maybe around the summer time) and not until today, when I was looking at 15 games that most people forgot (Driver 5, L.A. Noire, etc.) did I see that there was actually an idea like mine in mind for a game. And that game is known as The Crossing. It combines single-player (the story) with multiplayer, which gets you a new mode called "crossplayer." There are no NPCs in the single-player portion of the game. Instead, as you would've guessed, everyone within the world is a player. It's so unbelievably shocking to know how many people in the world can actually share similar ideas.

Before GTA:SA came out, I actually was interested in modding games. I brainstormed a lot of ideas and one of them was to have a parachute in the game. Out of nowhere, I found that GTA:SA made that possible. I couldn't believe my own eyes. Well, there you have it. Even if I kept my big mouth shut, it wouldn't make a difference because The Crossing already has such an extremely similar concept to that of mine, so it is impossible for me to get out such an idea before this game (unless it gets delayed for several years, which I doubt will happen).

In case you are interested in The Crossing, you can read about it on Wikipedia, or on this website:

http://www.gamesradar.com/pc/the-crossing/g-20070109103328574003

There is even an official website for the game, which can be found here: http://www.arkane-studios.com/en/the-crossing.php

Feeling of Freedom

Working Controls

Variation of Environments

Interesting Story