I would agree that looking at the appeal of a game (or indeed anything
else), to a majority is indeed important, especially if the game is to be
sold.
That being said, there is far too much in terms of capitalism which assumes
this is the only measure of what is good, or even worse, attempts to create
a majority preference by simply telling people what to think via
advertising.
For example, look at all the adverts that say to people "you won't be
attractive, popular, successful etc unless you use product x" irrispective
of whether the product is good or not, or even whether the product is
harmful.
of course audio games haven't got into these sorts of practices, but there
is a danger of stagnation if say every game was similar to Q9 because Q9 was
successful for being simple.
Indeed as I said in my recent message I'm not absolutely certain often what!
makes a popular game popular, let alone what makes it good or not.
With h2g2 and other games where the novelist or film director absolutely
forced the game designer to follow the game's plot, that is funnily enough
an instance in which i'd argue that the novelist did not realize what was a
good characteristic of a novel might not be a good characteristic for a
game.
For example, in the lord of the rings game for the Snes, there were orcs in
the caves around hobbiton, and Frodo, merry and pippin had to enter the
caves and find Gaffer Gamgee's glasses before they could progress.
In terms of the world of Lotr this is pure and absolute tosh! however for an
rpg which needs a first dungeon for characters to gain experience and level
a bit, it made perfect sense.
Indeed while I'd cryticise the lotr films for mangling the history and
consistancy of middle earth quite badly, I'd never level similar cryticisms
of any lotr computer game, sinse the goals of a computer game are
dramatically different from those of a novel, (far more than a novel is from
a film), and there would be no way to have a game even vaguely consistant to
the book.
Beware the grue!
Dark.
---
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