I want to add that I keep taking part in this conversation because I think it’s legitimately fascinating. Tom’s perspective is unusual (I think that’s safe to say), but it exposes interesting things about the nature of features in video games, different ways to play, and also unique features of games as a medium.
So Tom deserves a thank you for hopping into the firing line and being peppered with challenges, especially when it means he has to say the same things over and over again.
I wonder if an aspect of this debate has to do with Tom as a movie aficionado. Movies are just simply much more self-contained than video games, and I think Tom’s arguments here reflect a desire for games to be more self-contained, with fewer meta-concerns. In a movie, you might have to worry about the quality of the projector or the comfort of the seats or the disruptiveness of the audience, but you can’t lay these things at the feet of the filmmaker. I think the nature of games is that some of these kinds of meta-concerns are folded into the product itself, and that fact is exposing the fault line here.