That guy seems like the sort of guy who can't play a game without an online guide. Which I'm not going to blame him for, seeing that I used the hell out of the Don't starve wiki until I got comfortable with loosing the world when I fucked up.
But on the other hand I find it sad how people seem to have the need to put games in measureable categories in order to feel comfortable with them.
When people first started playing minecraft no one knew what you could do in it. No one knew the specific crafting recepies, or that a diamond axe is better than a golden one. People figured that stuff out on their own. Through experimentation, trail and error. And to this date Minecraft, Animal Crossing, WOW and so many others dont really have a point. Besides giving you the freedom to set your goals yourself and do whatever you like with it.
The way he kept asking about upgrades, reminded me about totalbiscuit (who I usually like) saying that in order to qualify as a game, it needs to have a failure state. That's bull if you ask me. The reason we have failure states in video games is that arcade machines got coins out of you if you wanted to retry. That, and that failure is, in a way, addictive. The desire to best yourself can be a great motivator.
But setting arbitrary rules like that seems unnecessarily limiting to me. Just because you don't like it, doesn't mean it's not a video game. If we can have a movie that is literally a blue screen with narration over it, we can have video games with no win state, no failure state and no explicit goals, because the medium is flexible enough to allow for it. You might think it's a shitty game, or a game thats just not for you, and thats fine.
As a game journalist I feel like he should be embracing and exploring new concepts instead of trying to cram them into a little box.
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