Honestly I don’t find that approach pretentious at all. The meta-game is actually fun. You may engage as a pure consumer, but there’s a natural curiosity to the questions-- what makes this mechanic work? What makes it unappealing, or fundamentally broken? Eventually the questions lead to deeper insights.
It’s like the student of film really enjoying the way the director did a particular film. How he or she structured the story, what they did with certain shots, or how something was foreshadowed with clever cinematography. Sure, they enjoy movies, but they also enjoy teasing apart details and nuances that the average movie goer doesn’t even really notice, at least not consciously. They’re happy and entertained eating popcorn while watching the latest Avengers blockbuster.
I think the same holds true for games. It’s not pretentious, it’s just about being interested in games beyond just how much fun they had.
Yeah, I couldn’t imagine reading a book or watching a movie without putting it in some kind of context, etc. The study of literature and film interests me a lot. So that’s just a different way of consuming the medium.
Maybe not pretentious, no, but if you aren’t playing a game because it’s fun, if you are playing it because you are picking it apart to critique it, that only (to me) makes sense if you are reviewing said thing professionally (or of course, like for a blog you aren’t getting paid to maintain but want to generate traffic). In your example the student could well be me, and I totally understand the idea of taking a closer look at something that I think is awesome from a film scene to a gameplay mechanic and looking closer at it and figuring out why it works so I can look for similar stuff I know I like down the road.
But @Rod_Humble said he can play games even if they aren’t fun, and I can’t really wrap my head around that. And @Brooski said he’s is really mostly interested in game criticism, which I also can’t quite click with. I’m certainly not judging anyone, I just find it interesting.
This is probably the part that I’m not connecting with, so I appreciate the insight.
I don’t see it as pretentious but critiquing a film is a two hour endeavor. Or let’s say 6 if you’re going to watch it theee times to really ‘get’ it. A game is probably more like a 10 hour commitment and more if you’re looking to educate yourself on how it does it’s thing. Which is a long ass time to play something you don’t particularly enjoy. Obviously the enjoyment can come from the critiquing rather than the gameplay. Or you could have a screw loose. There’s always that.
Edit to mention that I’d ignored literature criticism and it’s much more analogous to games in terms of time commitment.
A bad game with friends is better than a good game with strangers!
I don’t disagree, but I’m not sure that’s what he meant. :)
People who don’t have a kind of structural interest in a type of thing often invoke this “fun” argument, as if “fun” can be defined and is somehow separate from the enjoyment that someone who does take a structural interest in a thing gets from the gratification of that interest, but it’s not true.
That’s why I said “to me” in the part you didn’t quote.
Playing a game is fun.
Analysing it is also fun.
I am a huge fan of strategy games and get enjoyment beyond the playing.
Agreed, but only with the caveat that I also have to find the game I’m analyzing fun. I would never have recorded dozens of Pillars 2 videos and character builds if I didn’t also find the game itself fun, for example. Same with my AoW3 tutorial, for that matter, where I go into how I think some of the mechanics work and how to learn them.
@Brooski @Scotch_Lufkin @lostcawz @Kolbex @BloodyBattleBrain @KevinC @Khelavaster
Good discussion folks. Nothing to add just enjoyed it.
Let me second Rod’s kudos.
I do like to pick apart games… but only on certain genres. I played only 10 hours of Mass Effect 2, and barely 1 hour of Mass Effect 3 because I found both games to be pretentious, bland and shallow. I have played pretentious, bland, shallow wargames for tens of hours, often because they are unique in some interesting way.
As I commented up thread, I supported OTC and this one in order to get a privileged view on the creative process involved in making strategy games. I think both games are flawed for different reasons, but I feel enjoyed then as much as I could, as I both looked critically at the mechanics and found specific aspects of their gameplay to be very fun.
Link please.
Sure, here you go. It was from 2014 when the game first came out, so it’s a little out dated as I’m sure they’ve adjusted things since, but the base mechanics I think are still sound and hopefully helpful.
Nice! I need to remember that one next time “I just want to have fun” comes up as a response to criticism.
-Tom
Beware: for many, criticism of the criticism is also fun. You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
This paragraph is missing the phrase Mise-en-scène along with with couple casual name drops such as Jean Luc-Godard and Federico Fellini. :-)
Well, I ended up doing this almost by acident.
I couldn’t quite put my finger on why some games just clicked and some really didn’t.
EL for example, sounds like a tbs dream game.
Then I realised the combat sucks, the game is a drag to play (too much end turning) and each faction has it’s gimmick that takes about an hr to learn and then you are pretty much done, 3 units per faction is a joke.
All of those are mechanics/game workings and it was instructive to criticise it.
At least i can confidently say why I didn’t and don’t like EL. It’s been a while since I played it though so maybe not so confident anymore, because the experience soured me on it quite strongly.
Learning how to analyse things a bit better led me to create a 42 point checklist for things I would change for a fantasy/future Aow4, and drawing up and discussing that list was also quite enjoyable.