Or do they? A simulation can have parts that aren't necessarily fair or even fun to deal with (taken alone, that is) yet nevertheless integral to how realistic it seems. Stalling while flying, for instance, can be an annoying aspect of fighter combat yet mastering this factor can make a virtual pilot feel like he has far more capabilities than someone who just plays an arcade air combat game where you point and shoot (Secret Weapons over Normandy versus Crimson Skies, for example). Inflation in an economic simulation or movement and aiming delays in a tactical shooter might be viewed the same way. When you're designing a simulation and deciding what parts of reality / plausibility to include do you really have to pay attention to the idea of balance? Consider things like no-win states or failure to control the early "game" such that the later goals aren't easily achievable; or factors which naturally grow beyond the player's control. The more you have a sim/toy as opposed to a game it seems to me the less you have to honor the idea of balance. Just like crashing into the ground because your airspeed is too low or having to print $100,000,000 bills because your economy is experiencing hyper-inflation, it seems to me that if the simulation follows rules that are understandable and faithful to some reality the player will be far more likely to try and master the rules than they will be to cry foul. When they die from a rocket blast to the face they'll say, "well, that's what would happen" and try to maneuver better rather be angry that the game doesn't allow rabbit jumping even though that ability would make the game more playable. Agree? Disagree? Why or why not?

Quote:Original post by tori
I fully agree. I dream of a boring simulation with no pro-gameplay artificialities and simplifications. I dream of a dramatic movie without bullshit love stories and clichés.

One day...

Since you say "boring simulation" I take your post to be sarcasm (which translates not too well on the net). But without a more cogent, thought-out reply I have no idea whether you just don't like simulations or disagree with the premise about negative game states.

How about another chance to respond with more relevant detail?

Simulators are things that don't really fit between games. They are not games. They are the ultimate frustration made with only realism in mind, which is also a very abstract term that has no meaning. You can call every game real and say that the player has 99% of luck. :D

Quote:A simulation can have parts that aren't necessarily fair or even fun to deal with (taken alone, that is) yet nevertheless integral to how realistic it seems.

I've examined simulators and I've came to a conclusion that almost nothing is real there, like in most games. Yet they are the most annoying / most time-wasting / least entertaining kind of games (if they can be called games) ever.

Quote:it seems to me that if the simulation follows rules that are understandable and faithful to some reality the player will be far more likely to try and master the rules than they will be to cry foul.

Then it won't really be a simulator. You can't completely understand anything in real life... like jumping, for example - can you jump exactly 0.314 meters (with a precisity of 0.0000001 meters)? Also, many players might not know the rules that are taken from "real life constants and formulas" and that's why they might fail to play the game even if they got super-fast reaction and a great logical thinking ability. But a game must test abilities not knowledge of some abstract terms thought out by some people in the basement. I look at games like challenges, and simulators aren't challenging, they're pushing you away from the challenge.

EDIT: Simulators can be built very fast - if something isn't fun, don't fix, it's real, if something looks weird, don't fix, it's real, if there's a bug, and it leads to frustration, it is a part of the experience and it's real. :D Games should be made carefully not hacked around like this...

Snake5, I think you don't really understand the concept of simulation games. The simulator part is that they allow you to do some 'realistic' activity which you can't actually do in real life for various reasons: it's too expensive, illegal, would normally take years, would require technology which doesn't exist yet, requires too many other people, or is too much manual labor. If that's all it is, it's only a toy, but often it is developed as a game by adding play objectives and scoring.

I've played some excellent simulation games, as well as many which were bad specifically due to balance problems, or due to failure to really develop the simulation into a game. I just the other day spent about 4 hours playing an amusing new one I found: Celebrity Pedigree

Wavinator I disagree with the idea that simulations can contain elements which are neither fair nor fun. All games contain elements which aren't fun, but those are the very elements which it is most important be fair. For example a farming sim, where the weather has a random chance to be a storm, and the storm destroys a random number of plants - the game will fail if the potential loss due to one storm can bankrupt the player, or if the average amount of damage done is equal or grater to the average amount of progress the player can make on the average number of non-storm days per storm. While farm-destroying tornado are perfectly realistic, they aren't fair in a game defined as 'succeed at being a farmer', and this this unfairness is exactly what puts them beyond the level of acceptable severity for random negative events within such a farming simulation.