Re:

I read the thread but couldn't tell the intended scope.

"Pointlessness" is the recognition of a subjective undesirable level of opportunity cost associated with playing the game. If, at a particular moment, you have nothing better to do than playing tetris, then, this moment of entertainment is not pointless, regardless whether there was a plot, whether there was a meaning. This is the situation that Tom described, where "having fun is not pointless."

The case is different is you have other opportunities. For some people, the opportunity cost is so high that virtually any act of game playing is pointless. This could include all kinds of playing, role-play, all toys, all cartoon watching, etc. The missed opportunities simply dwarfs whatever you could gain from playing the game. We now know that certain forms of play such as role-play are very beneficial. By role-play I don't mean RPG. I meant something like "I play the doctor and you play the patient".

In this particular scope of explanation, pointlessness has less precise relation to expectation, than to the perception of one's opportunities (the perceived alternatives to spend the same time and energy). It is not about the game per se, but about the other things you could do. People who have bad retention of their self-awareness cannot tell when they are about to do something pointless among the alternatives, but they could have a vivid expectation of the activity in front of them.

A pointless game introduces a problem to a player where solving the problem benefits the player at an unacceptable level compared to the benefits gained from other opportunities. An example of such is a situation "irrelevant to the player's internal concerns." Playing a pointless game is like filling a virtual designer hole while gaining substantially less than alternate activities. This was mentioned by at least Kest, AngleWyrm. But whether a game is pointless is relative to the options the player has.

A game that is not pointless is one that is at least on par with the alternatives in quantities of whatever it is that the player is trying to get at a specific period of time. But this is not a property of the game, but a instantenous status of where the game sits in the player's set of choices.

A question that logically follows:

How do you design a game such that once a player starts playing it, it removes the player's perception of all alternatives, and convinces the player to justisfy the meaning of the game long after it is played?

I like the concept ranking a given activity against alternatives. Sometimes I'll stop playing a game and switch to reading/posting on forums instead.

There seems to be something missing though, and that something might be the memory of other games played. I can perform a "what if" scenario where I choose between the current game, and the memory of some other game that I used to play.

Is it an unfair competition? Yes, because memory is clouded and jaded and full of emotional and situational prejudice. And subject to change without notice. Which seems to suggest that mud-slinging PR campaigns against remembered video games on the forums would work well.

Luckily I have a large collection of old games to verify/switch to. I've recently started playing Diablo II instead of Fallout 3. (Xfire time log)

[Edited by - AngleWyrm on January 19, 2009 11:03:56 PM]

Quote:Original post by Kest
I'm filled with closure a lot more by interactive conquest than by fulfilling the designer's hardcoded objectives or story based quests. I often have a hard time enjoying plots/stories/gameplay simply because I know it was designed to happen exactly that way, for every single player of the game, regardless of their past decisions, successes, and failures.

I'm the same way, and I'm not sure if it's worse simply because I know so much about what's happening behind the scenes or if it's because I've played too many games that have the same dynamics. But when my objectives are more of a "roll your own" style, I at least have the sense of accomplishing something on my own terms.

It's all illusion, of course, but for me if there's enough flexibility then I've been able to add something of myself to the experience, as opposed to having the experience rigidly dictated to me.

Quote:Original post by Wai
"Pointlessness" is the recognition of a subjective undesirable level of opportunity cost associated with playing the game. If, at a particular moment, you have nothing better to do than playing tetris, then, this moment of entertainment is not pointless, regardless whether there was a plot, whether there was a meaning. This is the situation that Tom described, where "having fun is not pointless."

Tom makes a good point and I think your description of opportunity cost is very well thought out. I agree that it's true to a point. However, I'm not sure that's the full picture.

I know this is highly subjective, but let me use two similarly themed games: Risk and Civilization. Both are chiefly about the same subject, world domination (and I think they both satisfy my inner megalomaniac). Playing both can engender a range of emotions and experiences, such as anticipation, anxiety, frustration and the thrill of victory. Risk gets you through these faster than Civ, but (for me) carries with it an underlying sense of purposelessness.

The game is fun, I play it repeatedly and it's great for a short break. But I have the impression that my activities don't really amount to anything. In contrast, I still remember with great fondness and can tell stories to friends about the carefully crafted empires I created in Civ.

I know that a large degree of my underlying dissatisfaction with Risk is that it's the gaming equivalent of junk food-- temporarily satisfying, but ultimately lacking. It does a good job for what it is, but what it is is so (in my mind) pointlessly small. Let me stress again that I realize this is entirely subjective, but if one perceives an experience, even a fun one, as ultimately pointless then it's not just about time, it's about an underlying expectation (which may not be realistic).

Quote:
People who have bad retention of their self-awareness cannot tell when they are about to do something pointless among the alternatives, but they could have a vivid expectation of the activity in front of them.

This might be true, but I worry a bit about this statement because it is easy to classify someone as lacking in self awareness yet hard to prove it.

Quote:
How do you design a game such that once a player starts playing it, it removes the player's perception of all alternatives, and convinces the player to justisfy the meaning of the game long after it is played?

Or maybe another way to say this would be how do you make sure that both the amount of work is worthy of the player's time and effort and the amount of reward is commensurate with their expectations. In my own experiences, maybe taking over the world in Risk is just too darn easy.

Re: Wavinator

What you call expectation is what I call benefit. When you tell the difference between Risk and Civ, I read that as your describing that one of your desired benefit is the sense of accomplishment.

In your scope of dicussion, that is related to the level of details, level of customization/individual choices, and the challenge involved in achieving that customized goal. What you get from a game of Risk is only the victory or defeat condition, and you do not perceive other variables being accomplished. Another way to say it is that the ending of Risk appears generic, coincidental, and easy to attain to you, and you were expressing that when a game only offers such generic endings (among its game runs, not among its genre), you find it pointless. You want an ending that is:

o personal
o planned
o requires intellectual effort to attain

Are those the components of your "satisfying completion"?

I am not suggesting that these desires are shared by all players. For instance, I am not at all interesting in learning game specific, imaginary dynamics such as what spell is effective against what monster, what character has what abilities, what kinds of stats or character build is the best, the sequence to use skills, the building order of an RTS, the tech tree of an RTS, damage types, magic counters involving fire ice water elements, etc. Regardless what challenge emerges from them, I see them as pointless. I think fake knowledge is pointless. For games that require a different mode of thoughts I would rather it be abstract, or have a unifying story with philosophy.

So I am usually do not require a personal, planned ending to feel satisfied. I don't need an opening ending. I don't need a setting where I could set my own goals. What I want is that the game presents an subject matter that interests me and that I could learn about the subject matter by playing the game. If the subject matter is philosophical, I don't need the game to be realistic, but I don't want to be forced to know make-up information to play the game. I don't mind playing in a fictional world, I just don't want to have to know it to play the game. I like games that reminds me of real information that I tend to forget. So that playing the game allows me to review certain information or concepts.

Quote:Original post by Wai
Are those the components of your "satisfying completion"?

Tip of the hat to you. Excellent analytical skills.

Quote:
I am not suggesting that these desires are shared by all players.

Yes, very much agreed.

Quote:
For instance, I am not at all interesting in learning game specific, imaginary dynamics such as what spell is effective against what monster, what character has what abilities, what kinds of stats or character build is the best, the sequence to use skills, the building order of an RTS, the tech tree of an RTS, damage types, magic counters involving fire ice water elements, etc. Regardless what challenge emerges from them, I see them as pointless. I think fake knowledge is pointless. For games that require a different mode of thoughts I would rather it be abstract, or have a unifying story with philosophy.

This is a fascinating insight to me. For you, experiences that enrich you in a way that's relevant to the real world provide meaning. It reminds me of the concept of "position identification" detailed by Greg Costikyan, where the role you play imparts some insight into some reality or another (when a game is designed well).

Now out of curiosity, does the social standing of the game matter in this respect? Do you find that you have some meta-criteria that applies to fake knowledge? For example, it could be argued that build orders and magic counters impart skills in memorization or logistical management, depending on level of detail in a given game. It could also be argued that venerable games like Chess and Go are filled with fake knowledge-- after all, what does memorizing the moves of knights or patterns of colors offer a person in the real world? (by the way, I don't mean this to challenge your view, I'm just curious)

When you say social standing of a game, do you mean, say, the social standing of a Starcraft player and the related gaming culture in Korea?

Things worth doing are worth doing badly; things not worth doing are not worth doing well.

It is true that any action is some sort of "practice". However if you say,

Quote:For example, it could be argued that build orders and magic counters impart skills in memorization or logistical management

The alternative activity could be to learn a new subject or a new language. My experience is that the meta-skills you get from games are dismal compared to what you get when you are equally motivated to learn a new subject. You not only get the meta-skills but also the real knowledge. The motivation to learn and the motivation to be entertained are subjected to cultural influence. They are not mutually exclusive, but some are culturally conditioned to think that they are exclusive of one another.

If there is an alternative activity with more benefits one would actually do those. Playing Starcraft could teach logistical management. But that only takes one day to learn the principles. The rest are mostly game specific information.

Chess and Go are filled with fake knowledge. You could always draw analogy between one context and another, because you could strip down a situation into its fundamental dynamics and principles. I think it is actually true that in some field of study, their syntax they have in describing their subject of study is more primitive that other fields. Those fields borrow syntax from established fields so that they could frame the problem they are studying systematically. I believe that in the past, there was no terminologies to systematically communicate or describe interactions, or dynamic properties. That was the reason why games like Chess were actually important because it helped people discover knowledge.

If you ask me to describe Chess, I would probably describe it as a problem containing a state which is a vertex in a graph representing all possible space, and each move correspond to an edge. The syntax I used in describing it came from computer science, not from playing Chess. I am not suggesting that Chess did not inspire certain perspectives or that Chess cannot inspire more perspectives. I am not trying to speculate how long it would take me to get a lesson from just playing Chess that I could readily apply to many other settings. I am just saying that there are other ways to learn something that could have more benefits in less time. In real life I am not in a situation where someone is actively plotting against me so that context of games like Chess do not apply to daily life. I mostly see interrelated systems, but they don't plot against one another.