We play games. We all do. I spend probably too many of my waking hours playing and/or thinking about games. So, of course I have asked myself, why do we play?*

But, now I'm thinking about types of games. Competitive games, those are easy to explain.** Cooperative, almost as easy.*** Score based single player games, almost the same as competitive ones.**** But I'm intrigued with the other single player games. The ones that do not keep score, the ones that do all the other things.

You play Zelda for the puzzles? Metroid for the world? Final Fantasy for the battle system? Metal Gear for the (crazy ass) story? You discuss all these with friends/family/strangers (with candy, preferably)?

* (1)Pass the time, (2)better than socializing directly, (3)everyone hates us, (4)just can't stop, etc
**(1)Kick friends ass, (2)kick family member's ass, (3)kick a stranger's ass, etc.
***(1)Not getting your ass kicked by a friend, (2)not getting your ass kicked by a family member, (3)Not getting your ass kicked by a stranger, etc.
****(1)Kick everyone's ass at the same time.

Now, this is not videogame related, at all...and I don't know if it makes much sense even then...

Wow. It’s a strange feeling. Emptiness? Kinda. Loneliness? Closer. Deception? Much better. Now I know better. Now I know not to waste so much time. Now I know to be not afraid, of anything. The worst that can happen may still be pretty good. The worst things, are the ones in your imagination. I doesn’t get much worse than that, and the things you imagine never EVER end up happening. It never gets to the point that you never wish it had never even started. It’s never that bad, no matter what. Is this the best place to put this? No idea. I’m guessing I would be better off talking about it with friends. Or family. But it’s quieter around here. I can flirt with the possibility of millions of readers. But I know I won’t get that. Not even 3, including myself. Is that bad? Not at all. I really don’t know if I want that number of people peering into my mind. Maybe about other things, but not deep personal stuff like this. Not at all. But there still is the possibility. And hope is the last thing we lose, isn’t it? So for anyone facing some hard times, be strong, it will only get better. And I’m out of here.

I posted this a little time ago on the forums. Just putting it here for convenience.

What are your thoughts on game lenght? On game formats? Do the games we have now best represent the formats that are the best for the industry? I have a few thoughts on these...

Ok...most games today don't really pay attention to the format they are in, and most gamers don't really give it much thought, either. The most common way to get games are:
1) $50 on a DVD or some CDs, and thats it
2) $50 on a DVD or some CDs, and a monthly fee for playing
3) Online transaction and distribution, but this method doesn't seem popular with the 'serious' games, the only company using it being Valve

And mostly the only way for gamers to know how much value they are getting from a game is based on genre expectations, like:
1) Action games - 10 to 20 hours
2) RPGs - 50+ hours
3) Most multiplayer games (RTSs, FPSs, Fighters) - In theory, infinite replay value
4) MMOGs - real-life cripling addictiveness

So why do we pay the same for each and every game we buy, no matter the entertainment time it's gonna give us? I have no idea why. And why do I have to buy a 180 hour RPG if I didn't really like the 1st hour? So, I guess my point is, games should be sold differently, specially because $50 is a lot to pay for a lot of people, and games are probably the only entertainment medium whose value decreases over time, seeing as year old DVDs and CDs still retail for full release price (well, most non overly crappy ones). Also soon-to-be-released and new games are the only ones that get ANY promotion, with very few exceptions, and that goes a long way to the almost-non-sales of old games, and the thought that the only 'hip' games are the new ones. So how do we change this? Here are a few ideas I have heard/read around the net, and (hopefully) somethings I came up with myself:

1) Put game demos on EVERY game released, just like movies do. This could help promote lower profile games, older games and it WILL reach the desired audience, no matter what. At least video previews should come with every game. They could even be sold as advertisements in the most popular games, imagine previous of other XBox FPS (Riddick, Rainbow6, Timesplitters, etc) coming packaged with Halo 2. They could have sold those spaces and made even more money on the game and the previews would reach the perfect kind of gamer, boosting sales of other XBox FPSs.

2) Games could be sold differently, 5-20 hour games could be sold as movies, one low charge ($5 to $10) for 1 play through, and a higher charge for playing it whenever, wherever ($20 to $30), and still be in a low price range, very close to DVDs.

3) MMOGs have the perfect time based charge format, but the upfront price is a bit high. It should be close to, if not totally free to get the game, and maybe even free 5 to 10 hours, just to hook players who have never tried them.

4) Other multiplayer games should just adopt the MMOGs for continous gamers, and could adopt a pay-per-play system for tryouts, just like arcades.

5) Really long single player games could adopt the oft-mentioned episodic content idea. Just release a free first episode, and make it the most engaging episode in the game. Then sell the rest of the game, part by part, maybe releasing each new episode once a month and make these episodes really accesible to buy.

The biggest problem still is getting new people to play games, and I think the biggest hurdle is the price of a gaming system, the complexity of most of the biggest hits, and the feeling that new games are the only good ones. Couldn't Sony sell really cheap PSOnes with the best games, marketed towards people who don't play anything? Too much rambling, starting to lose coherence, so Im going to stop now. Maybe I'll post more later.

What is the reason we play games? To entertaing ourselves, to take some time to let ourselves go into an activity with no importance whatsoever, taking us, at least for a little bit of time, out of the worries of real life. So when we partake in games, we expect to have fun most, if not all of the time we are dedicating to them. Some are more 'hardcore', or simply have more free time or patience than others and can endure expiriences that would seem extremely un-fun to others. And there is always taste, you can never account for the wildly varying tastes in games (and everything else) people can have.

Now, for some types of games this 'fun all the time' thing can be pretty easy to matain. Fun can manifest itself in a variety of ways, like learning some new game mechanic, perfecting an old game mechanic, watching (or reading) a story unfold, getting to a new place, and so on and so forth. One barrier that presents itself in huge/epic games with they're world traveling, going to places you've been before gameplay. The first time you get to a new place it's like someone gave you the key to a whole new playground. You are just excited to be there, to explore every nook and cranny, and most of us take all of this in as fast as we can. What is left after that? We are left with a boring place we have been to many times before, taking the exact same roads, in the exact same way, to see the exact same place populated by the exact same people saying the exact same things. And this can become boring, frustrating even if the location has to be visited too much.

How can we solve this? Some ideas are: (1) the player should be provided with different modes of transportation, so traveling the same roads does not always seem the same, (2) the world should be dynamic, seeming different everytime the player comes visit, make the world remember the player, the characters he met before greet him, the things he changed stay changed.

Now, RPGs have long since adopted different modes of travel to allow players to get to new places and to old places faster. Some examples are Final Fantasy with it's airshps, the 'Warp' spell on some RPGs, the animal rides in Zelda and the like, the warp rooms in Symphony of the Night, etc. I really haven't seen much of the dynamic world mechanic. Yes, in some games people talk to you differently in the first parts of the game than in the ending parts, but the change feels mostly static, forced, not that the world is changing for the player, but that the world is changing because someone thought is HAD to change at some time. We all know this is true, but we do not want it to seem like that in the game.

Journal, isn't this called a blog in every other web page out there? Yeah, I think that's it. So now that I've decided to start writing my own blog, journal or whatever you want to call it, I will bore you to death with whole sentences and maybe even paragraphs about absolutely nothing. Sounds fun, eh? I could also write stuff about, you know videogames and the like every once on a while. Yeah, maybe I'll try that. But I still can't promise those to be of any real entertainment value. I'l just vent off and pretend some of you care. So you have to pretend to care back. Or something.

Yay, one of those paragraphs about nothing at all! Well, later.