The Gamer's Quarter

[Ketch]

What games would you say were more about creating an "experience" rather than providing what we normally would call a game? Ie. they are more interested in atmosphere / narrative / feeling than on typical 'gameplay'?

-A list to start it off.

Shadow of the Colossus
ICO
Forbidden Siren
Silent Hill series (okay I've never completed any of them, but it is obvious what they are trying to do).
Fatal Frame series.

[Mister Toups]

Metroid Metroid Metroid Metroid Metroid Metroid.

(not counting hunters or prime 2. yes counting fusion).

the original zelda, and link's awakening. and maybe twilight princess (need to play more of it!)

castlevanias I and II.

actually, yeah, add SOTN there too... and HOD.

not silent hill 3.

REmake (more than any of the other RE, games, really).

killer7 (no duh), and contact

final fantasy VIII (more than the rest of the series... though I reckon it applies to VI and VII too).

Secret of Mana -- actually, probably more so than any of the other games I've listed so far.

In other words, a good deal of games!
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where were you when nana komatsu got a wii?

[dessgeega]

[dhex]

planescape?
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[Mister Toups]

oh yeah -- morrowind, despite its best intentions to the contrary.
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where were you when nana komatsu got a wii?

[Laco]

DEFCON. Also, everything else from the topic "Lonely Games".

[Maz]

Half Life 2, most definitely. An FPS where shooting things takes a back seat to exposition and atmosphere.

Majora's Mask. The entire game is constructed around surreal concepts (omnipresent scowling moon, constant transformation of Link throughout the story, the way the overworld abruptly varies between ice or desert or coastline without any real transition) and twisting the everyday lives of the NPCs into something sinister. The gameplay is constructed out of the basic tenets of what made Ocarina work, but with a dark twist on everything (using the ocarina to create mannequins of yourself, fetch quests simply resolving certain issues without the general "happy" ending one expects).

[boojiboy7]

[dessgeega]

knytt.
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[antitype]

Mostly games that place their aesthetics/narrative/themes above or congruous with the idea of being a game (in a way that makes them, as boojiboy7 says, "intensely about being videogames"): SotC, Ico, Killer 7, Contact, Rez, D2, Enemy Zero, Silent Hill (1, 2, 4), the survival/horror genre at large, Metroid, Cave Story (perhaps), Flow, Myst, Gran Turismo, Shenmue, most RPGs.

Of course, this almost reads like a list of my favorite videogames.
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antitype.livejournal.com | last.fm

[JamesE]

Most of the games being listed are intensely videogamey. Castelvania I is Mario with a whip, man. Things like Zelda and Metroid almost define videogames.

Anyway, Rez (because the mechanics are a bit lean in the bad "super model on a diet" way) and Deus Ex Machina for the C64 (because any interaction is mostly completely superficial) spring readily to mind.
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[OtakupunkX]

Animal Crossing?

Everything else I can think of has already been mentioned.
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[antitype]

[vision]

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[Pilgrim]

Shenmue probably applies to this list.

[benreed]

antitype: I agree that ALL games are about creating an experience of some sort. It's really a meaningless thing to say about them in that respect.

A better term to use would probably be something like "X game's appeal lies more in its atmosphere" or "X title thrives (or, in harsher cases, lives or dies by) more by the emotions it arouses than by its system".

For my part, I usually ignore such things. Most of the games I love, I love for the system that drives them more than anything else. The character is, after all, an extension of oneself in the videogame -- and sometimes what oneself really wants is not to rescue the princess and save the kingdom, but to see how fast and how hard he can beat the dragon's scaly ass, and perhaps how long he can juggle him in the corner with his Shoryuken.

The freedom to do so is, after all, an experience in itself.

[Wall of Beef]

[helicopterp]

Mario Party
Crash Team Racing
Chip n' Dale Rescue Rangers
Captain Novolin
Madden NFL 2002
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Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[Shapermc]

Some games tip the scale towards experience (in the empathic sense) more than to game (in the gameplay/mechanic sense). Some are of more equal balance. Many arcade games (or arcade style games) are in the gameplay side of the scale with an emphasis on score and collecting (and stealing your money). Early console games tried very hard to mimic this, while early PC games tried to do their own thing. What we have now (and have since the late 8-bit/early 16-bit times) is an attempt of merger between the overly story/atmosphere heavy games, and the bare minimum yet mechanically heavy games. This leaves many games in no man’s land with which they are trying to do and usually succeeding in neither very well. Some games realize that they can’t master the mechanical side, or don’t want it as a focus (killer7) and these are the ones that are generally more “experience” related. Alternatively, they do the mechanics well, but have a very limited skill set of them (Ico/SotC). Some games realize that they are just intended to be built well and use the story to give the most basic of premise for the game and occasionally entertain you (God Hand). Game like Metroid are great because of the balance they can create between the two.

This is what separates a game from the vocal minority of a cult favorite into the mainstream. Look at the top rated and best of the best games and you’ll see a heavy balancing act going on (Super Metroid is constantly getting on the tops of these lists, even though I think it is one of the weaker games in the series proper). I think that Twilight Princess does a pretty good job of the balancing act.

The games that become the more cult of the niche of favorites usually screw up one end of the scale while attempting to balance it (Siren was mentioned, which screws up a lot of the mechanical side). You have to be very forgiving of the side that went wrong in order to enjoy these usually. Some people fell this way about Killer7 also, but you won't find people arguing that Siren's mechanics are enjoyable as much as ignorable, while people will occasionally state they enjoy Killer 7.

OH, yeah, I need to mention Umihara Kawase on this thread too.
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[Pilgrim]

Rather than looking at games as part emotion and part mechanic, we need to look at the games that merge the two into one experience rather than as two parts that work without each other. A good example of this is the gameplay of ICO, where the intensity and desperation of the fighting lends itself very well to the narrative of the story. Another good example is Katamari, where the gameplay and the narrative are completely inseparable.

[crispus attucks jr]

Cacoma Knight in Bizyland, off the top of my head.

[internisus]

I disagree that Silent Hill is an obvious answer. I haven't played 3 yet, but 1, 2, and 4 all have gaminess wrapped up in their thematic horror. For instance, in the original, the nightmare world is brought into being by your need to progress where there is no real world route. SH has fascinated me for years because of this. SH2 is more ambiguous, but I think the argument could definitely be made that your descent into the abyss works by a sort of humorless parody of progress structure established by the first game, and it is pretty clear that the narrative generally employs your killing of the game's monsters. SH4 is very, very videogamey, and uses this as a base to do something interesting later.

[Cycle]

Marathon 2 & Infinity

List thread?
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[Ketch]

[player 2]

If you have a game with good "gameplay" that isn't a good "experience"... it really just seems annoying.
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Wii #: 8749 9109 9732 3653

"It is a peaceful way of understanding life, to play"
_Marcel Duchamp

[beige]

Chrono Trigger, FF8, Sonic and Knuckles, and Knights of the Old Republic.

[internisus]

I'm not trying to sound like a troll here, honestly, but looking through this thread just seems like people are tossing out completely random titles of games they like, and there doesn't seem to be any understanding of necessary tension between or mutually beneficial intertwining of gaming and aesthetic/narrative expression. The Grasshopper talk is the closest thing to an exception that I can see.

Let's stop listing games already and break it down. What are some possible relationships between gaming and experience (if these are even terms we are comfortable with)? For example, let's start with the basic question: must there always be an emphasis on one over the other? Why? Why not?

[Cycle]

I already pointed out that this is a list thread! I'm way ahead of you!

I'm also working on an article explaining my answer so it will have to wait.
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[internisus]

Yeah, but I don't know what the fuck everybody's been listing.

[vision]

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[Kipple]

[internisus]

I think that's just about the opposite of pedantic. This vocabulary is completely useless here. The concepts are simply too dependant on one another in practice for any theoretical progress to be made.

[vision]

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[internisus]

Okay, with that, I think we might be getting somewhere. What I glean from your description there is a sense that the game is disguised as narrative experience. Monitoring and affecting diet and tank conditions is essentially a gameplay system in which you can succeed or fail, but the form it takes is bound up with the narrative reward for doing so such that they make for a singular experience. Is that right?

[antitype]

[internisus]

[antitype]

Heh, well, I suppose any videogame could be viewed as a "simulation" of an experience, real or imagined, but for all intents and purposes we reserve that term for something that strives to simulate real-life occurrences. And there are of course grey areas: Gran Turismo is not what I'd consider a "pure" simulation (of a real-life occurrence), but it's closer to that idea than, say, Burnout. Rez is even further away from that idea, being so much abstraction.

So yeah, a lot of aspects of my analysis are quite subjective.

However, it may be worthwhile to consider the positions of Gran Turismo and Rez on the pongism chart, if we're to consider that an objective resource.
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antitype.livejournal.com | last.fm

[grumbel]

[player 2]

You guys are being really silly. I have to tend to agree with antitype's intent, even though I disagree with what he says.

Sonic the Hedghog aspires to be a great videogame as much as Shadow of the Colossus. Just because Sonic is about being fast and is very simple in an action reaction way doesn't mean it's not as much of a videogame. Shadow of the Colossus still uses button presses to express its story, but it's not just about actions and reactions. They both have emotions and attached to the narratives that you get out of their stories. The emotions are just different.

BUT ------

I think that antitype is on the right path. I like games that tie gameplay into experience. The experience is really just the narrative. The narrative is really just the story told. And the story told to us is really just what makes videogames entertaining. It doesn't matter what game. When you play Madden with your friends you talk about what team you played as and who you threw your awesome 80 yard touchdown to. You talk about how difficult it was for 3 quarters of the game, and then you talk about how you finally broke down their pass defense. If you can't tell that story.. well, it's not a worthwhile game.

A better example (at least for this crowd) is the Street Fighter 3: Third Strike Daigo SBO parry madness. Because we know how hard it is to parry we are super impressed that Daigo could pull an entire full parry when he already had so much pressure on him. The entire crowd also knew this, so when they saw the fight actually go down... well, the entire crowd goes home to put this video online to show their friends.

The narrative that happens in Sonic or Shadow or Street Fighter is dependent on the gameplay. Do you think Resident Evil would "have felt like the same experience" if it didn't control the way that it did? You guys are right. There is some sort of competition between the experience and gameplay. It's happened and one has suffered at the hands of the other. But, really, we're at a point with videogames that the two should be working together.
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Wii #: 8749 9109 9732 3653

"It is a peaceful way of understanding life, to play"
_Marcel Duchamp

[antitype]