[QUOTE="Pangster007"]oh man...wall of text... Pleasure....hmmm that's all i thought about when i was reading...pleasure... anyway, handhelds can provide pleasure 1 and 2 > hotel dusk, monkey island, Age of empires, advanced wars blah blah... immersion: provided to a large extent to forms of input actually. Remember all the news of people 'throwing remotes', people losing weight 'playing' tennis, boxing etc. There is still immersion from 'input' not just physics. Simple, simple, simple, blah blah blah, actually, simple games have always made the game deeper than it actually appears. you've ever played 'Go', a very old and simple game, but to master it? phew. Pleasure 2 is not that greatly dependent on hardware, it is dependent on the developers. Clever art direction, lighting, and story telling is what gives pleasure 2. These aren't just dictated by hardware performance, it's all up to the maker.FoamingPanda
Again. I ask you, why are games that are designed to provide us with pleasure 2 not simply MUDS, 16-bit, or other VERY basic forms of technology if technology does not matter? Stop taking this post as an explicit attack against whatever paticular console you favor. Try to step back and view the industry in this light.
And, might I add, that clever art direction, lighting, and story telling all are related to the quality and depth of hardware. The more options hardware provides a developer with, the more a developer can create.
For example, let us turn to film. Why do you think Lord of the Rings films and Jurassic were not made decades before the advent of digital technology? The answer is that the ideas presented within both novels were physically NOT CAPABLE of being depicted on film (I'd hate to see the price of hiring 100,000 extras, dressing them as fully equipped orcs, and having them attack a life-sized replica of Minas Tirith, for example).
I'm sure many great and epic ideas that lurk in the back of developers' minds can STILL not be accurately programmed into a game simply because current hardware is physically not capable of projecting the magnitude of the their ideas.
Actually, LotR and Jurassic Park are both good counter-examples to your argument. None of the CGI used in either of those movies enhanced P2 to any considerable degree, but it was necessary to provide enough P1 to a broad audience.
Speaking of MUDs, are you seriously contending that WoW provides more P2 than any highly developed text MUD? Hop on over to www.aardmud.org and visit Aardwolf. You'll find a game and community that's been creating and consuming P2 game experiences for years.
But wait, you say. WoW is much more popular than any text MUD. That is easily explained. The graphics and technology employed in WoW provide a substantial level of P1, which is nearly absent from text-based MUDs. In this case, as with LoTR and JP, technology does not directly enhance P2. In these cases, technology is used to increase the appeal of a product by enhancing P1.
Good writing and good design are much more important to providing P2 than technology ever will be. Every platform has vastly more power than it requires to provide P2. There is so much headroom to increase the levels of P2 on current hardware that it's not funny. Before we start worrying about hardware limitations restricting the level of P2 that a game can provide, we need to start seeing some games approach those limits.
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