@dharh: I was merely pointing out that the audience already exists and isn't separate by any means. It's just mixed with audience that doesn't play that way.
The reason why i keep bringing GTA up, is because of the values what people find from GTA. If you take out the "sandbox qualities" from GTA, what do you have left? You and many others would still be interested in the game, but a large part of its audience would be gone.
If we would take out the "story mode" from GTA, that would leave us left with just fooling around. Maybe you wouldn't care for the game anymore, but a lot people still would.
The freedom in GTA is very limited, i agree, but it still is a lot. The same way people explore the game and do stuff without any purpose, they explore Wii Music.
It may be surprising, but the big scale adventure and RPG games have actually trained gamers to non-objective gaming. When you are performing a task which takes hours, including all the exloration, you feel like you need a rest from the task, so that you don't get frustrated and you start to do stuff that has no purpose. All the minigames, sidequests and interesting details in Zelda games are no coincidence, they are for you to take a rest from the mission and "recharge" yourself to be able to continue.
And no, this type of gaming isn't new, it's been there always. The text based RPG:s offered you to try out senseless stuff, you wanted to know what you could do in Leisure Suit Larry, or pick nearly any game from the past and you'll notice that the real value has been how you achieve, not what you achieve.
Ei Kiinasti.
Eikä Japanisti.
Vaan pannaan jalalla koreasti.
Nintendo games sell only on Nintendo system.
