Slashdot Mirror
Should Games Be More Boring?
An anonymous reader writes "At Gamasutra, serious games creator Ian Bogost is making the case that video games should be more mundane, particularly discussing of Nintendo' Brain Age: 'It's certainly a very different kind of game from Halo or even Miyamoto's own Zelda series, games that allow the player to inhabit complex fantasy worlds. Instead, much of Brain Age's success seems to come precisely from the ordinariness of its demands.' Would games become more accessible if they tapped into everyday things a little bit more, as opposed to spiralling off into fictional realities?"
Mundane != Boring.
This title is just wrong. Zonk, is there any way we could please change it?
Mundane means commonplace, everyday, ordinary. Boring means uninteresting. Not the same. The article is not saying that games should be less interesting -- the article is saying that games could do well to apply more to real life, and to real skills (I.E. Smooth Moves having players balance brooms on their hands).
I'm all for making games more mundane -- I think it's a great idea, and it's a phenomenal idea for making games ultimately more fun. If "fun" is about learning patterns (as Raph Koster posits), then it only makes sense to build off of patterns that are found in real life (hence why driving games are so much fun).
However, I'm [b]not[/b] in support of making the games boring.