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NYANKS on 05 September 2010
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RolStoppable said:
NYANKS said:

It seems an unfortunate thing that games that can't hook you instantaneously have no chance of keeping people's attention.  In a way I feel like this is just the failure of the consumer to expand their horizons.  And I know, the consumer is never wrong.  It's the games fault.  However, it seems the masses are unwilling to try anything that requires a bit of thought, so games that have stories that try to be coherent or any more complex than that of a Mario game are immediately at a disadvantge.  It seems that most people don't deem the medium to be worth the time  or effort.  There ARE somewhat more complex games that do a very good job of keeping a player's attention, but no dice.  And about Metroid, Fire Emblem, F-Zero....this saddens me.  Just like Uncharted.  And it's not for "some" people.  It's for most people.  Only people like ones on this site are playing Fire Emblem.  It's not that everything Nintendo does is insta-gold, they just have that devious old man behind the scenes....lol.  He has been the source of a good deal of their win, hasn't he?  Hell Zelda barely qualifies as a mega hit.  That's still mostly people on sites like this.  It's sad, the majority of people I've shown games like Uncharted or Zelda to can't believe how cool or fun they look.  Adults, kids, peers, you name it.   :(

Oh cool, my reply from yesterday got actually posted. VGC passed out for me, so I thought that everything I wrote got lost.

I don't think it's fair to say that the masses are ignorant. Let's apply all this to another entertainment medium: movies. Would you call people stupid because they stop watching a movie after 30 minutes, because they find it boring? "But the movie gets better afterwards and as a whole is actually pretty good." May not be worth it, if it means to endure boredom. Especially because there are movies that are entertaining from start to finish.

Or are people ignorant because they don't want to watch "cultivated" foreign movies that come with subtitles? They probably say: "If I wanted to read, I would take a book." Are they wrong? I don't think so, because the widely perceived purpose of movies is to watch them. If people have to read for about 90 minutes to understand a movie, then the medium is used wrongly.

Likewise, video games that use story as their main draw never find a huge audience, because these games interpret the medium incorrectly. Video games are about interaction and cutscenes put the player in the same position as a movie. The question then becomes: "Why should I play such a game if I could just watch a movie instead?" And movies are better at telling a story than video games by a long shot. If a developer strives to make a game like a movie, then he is the ignorant one, not the consumer. Because he is misinterpreting the medium.

Of course there's a niche for such games, just like there are people who watch movies with subtitles. Also, it doesn't mean that these games can't be good, but nobody should expect mega hits, because these titles don't stand a chance against those which interpret the medium (almost) perfectly. That's nothing to be sad about, unless sales have an influence on your enjoyment of a game.

Although couldn't it be that sales indicate something other than how good a game is?  They've resonated because they use the medium in a way most peole like, keeping it very simple.  I don't feel like sales denote excellence while small sales mean the game is a failure.  Commercially it is.  But not in any other way.  

I guess sorting out games other than those big successes are best left to "hardcore", or people on sites like this.  Just like no one watches Best Picture nominees lol.  It's just annoying to hear that every game Nintendo makes is better than all of Sony efforts because of sales.  But I guess people who only play casually and not like us necessarily don't even know about this lol.