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Is The Best Game One You Were Never Intended To Play?
Wired has an interesting look at the sport of pushing proscribed boundaries in video games. Easter eggs in games have been around for years, but now finding surprises, intended or otherwise, is becoming a driving force behind the enjoyment of games. "In games as diverse as Fallout 3 and Mirror's Edge, players are pushing to find or create unexpected ways to break past the game horizon, and turn the designers' intentions on their heads. It's only a matter of time before someone releases a game where the best version is the one you were never intended to play. That's only to be expected, says David Michicich, CEO and creative director of Robomodo, the developers of Activision's new Tony Hawk: Ride, and a 14-year veteran game designer. 'Today's news gets old quick — we Twitter, blog, pass viral video. We thrive off the sudden excitement of the latest and most buzzworthy,' Michicich says. 'It's exciting to still feel like you can discover something new. It's stimulation, plain and simple.'"
A lot of vaudeville acts got into the movie business (The Three Stooges and The Marx Brothers among them), and they very quickly learned that a shtick that could last for years on the various circuits on the road got national exposure on film -and then they had to come up with new shticks. Games have something of the same dynamic going on with hedonistic adaptation. First the intensity goes up, but eventually the form itself changes.
See Warcraft 3 and DoTa. The DoTa mod is vastly more popular than the original game.
Unfortunately 3DRealms fucked it up
Is that you Joshua?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Nethack. The Devs Think of Everything. The best game is the one you didn't think you were intended to play, but were. Or at least can.
Not a sentence!