Quote:I believe what Maitre was saying is that a book or a movie puts you in the position of a spectator. The author has the freedom to teach and preach, and if he does it well enough, you'll at least listen to what he has to say. A game should put you in a different position, that of a participant. All too often if the author of the game has a message to impart, you no longer have the freedom to participate (or, at least not on a level significantly beyond the participation of turning pages). At the least, your choices are greatly limited (e.g., SimCity where public transportation and nuclear power are the only viable alternatives).Well, combinatorial explosion prevents games from ever truly giving a "realistic" range of freedom in a game. You are participating in a kind of drama, a play that doesn't always have the same script or ending, but which isn't just improv, either. Participation is necessarily limited, but I think that's a potential advantage of the genre that must be dealt with carefully, and not necessarily a disadvantage.
There are games which offer some realistic, meaningful choices, and give feedback on those choices that are not just railroading the player down the "right" path, vs. the "wrong" path. (BioShock is both a good and bad example of that kind of choice.) For a positive example, the game Hidden Agenda that I mentioned in the first post offers a very wide range of potential policies, constrained by the kinds of constraints that actual governments faced: lack of money, underdevelopment, diplomatic pressures, military coups, etc. Acknowledging the obvious limitations of a game made in 1988, it really does feel like you have substantial freedom to make your own choices, and also suffer the consequences in a way which models reality.
There are also games, albeit fairly experimental ones, that actually do try to model a realistic range of action, overcoming combinatorial explosion by limiting the scope in some other way. Emily Short's IF game "Galatea" is like that: the whole game is essentially one dialogue with one character, but within those bounds, you are more or less free to act as you choose (and the game responds intelligently to almost every reasonable action or dialogue choice.)
Quote:So, the question is whether it is possible to simultaneously give the player a true freedom to participate and still impart something beyond game-play. And that is a poorly formed question, I think. Some people will learn something from the most mindless game and others will learn nothing from anything.It is, but some games try to push against those constraints more than others. Tetris teaches geometry, forethought, pattern recognition, hedging against risk, and path-dependent reasoning. But, for most people, it's just stacking blocks, and even for the most sophisticated observer, it's still just stacking blocks, plus the things you can learn from stacking blocks. Alpha Centauri, on the other hand, offers a gallery of quotes, concepts and references to dozens of philosophers, poets, authors, and science-fiction ideas about the future. You learn a little about all sorts of stuff, from Asimov to Aristotle. So, I think it's fair to say that they're trying, and I think succeeding, to do something above and beyond, say, Tetris.
-Jester