Again, Extra Credits raise good points in emphasizing the uniqueness of games as an interactive medium. The closest we get really in things like literature, as far as I'm aware without doing too much extensive research into interactivity, is choose your own endings. Remember those goosebumps books? :
Yeah, these were all written in the second person, the narrator leading you along your story, and you got to choose which way it arched, and whether you led yourself to your own demise or not. When it comes to passive media like books, then this seems to be the closest comparison we get to the 'choice' - or illusion thereof in some cases - we have in games, notably games with multiple endings. Yet in these kinds of books we still don't lay down our own path. We follow them, and then simply get given the choice of taking one or the other when we find a junction. So, ultimately, true interactivity only really exists in games.
One thing that is immediately pointed out is that 'a game without a player is nothing'. Which is entirely true; a game does not and cannot progress without the input of a player. As the narrator, Daniel Floyd says, we're 'setting out a canvas' that the player fills in, albeit a predefined one.
He also discusses games as expression, not only escapism, with which I can agree to an extent given that playing games of different genres will reveal different people's thinking patterns i.e. strategies in puzzle games or of course strategy games, or the choices players make in RPG's even down to whether they choose clothes for the character because of their bonus stats or just because they look nice. However right now a lot of games still only offer this as an illusion.
Floyd basically reinforces the idea that you should always remember that you are not making a game for yourself, you're making it for the player and have to cater to creating an experience for them.
This leads me to believe that the discussion of ergodic video games, as I've brought up several times before, is more relevant than initially thought. For argument's sake, if the player is both the bard and the listener, as is suggested by Portnow, then perhaps there is no need to fill out a predefined character for the player to fill. Perhaps the most important characters within a world are the non-player characters with whom the character - you - interact.
With this in mind, it could explain certain design aspects in other games, such as why Link has never once spoken in any Legend of Zelda game.
Again, addressing this could be interesting.
Floyd basically reinforces the idea that you should always remember that you are not making a game for yourself, you're making it for the player and have to cater to creating an experience for them.
This leads me to believe that the discussion of ergodic video games, as I've brought up several times before, is more relevant than initially thought. For argument's sake, if the player is both the bard and the listener, as is suggested by Portnow, then perhaps there is no need to fill out a predefined character for the player to fill. Perhaps the most important characters within a world are the non-player characters with whom the character - you - interact.
With this in mind, it could explain certain design aspects in other games, such as why Link has never once spoken in any Legend of Zelda game.
Again, addressing this could be interesting.
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