unforum

[SirQuady]

[SirQuady]

[miss_seph]

[MageSteff]

[addlepated]

[Ehsan]

Hey this thread is about inferior games, not inferior people! Get back on topic! (Okay couldn't pass up the joke op so had to take a jab at myself there )

[Esteed]

Personally, I'm not entirely sure who defines when a game is inferior. A game that uses IMs and blogs may not be to Person A's tastes, but Person B might love it. The GBA wasn't to my tastes, but I bought it for FFTactics Advanced and Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories. Two games I thought would be great. In my opinion, Tactics was the only one worth it. Yet there are others out there that will sing the praises of CoM.

In the same fashion, there are those out there that will be against games using IMs, blogs, and other what-have-yous. There will also be people that are perfectly content to play these games. While I have no problem with a difference of opinion, what I do find a bit tasteless is Person A coming into a thread where others are enjoying a game and doing nothing more than moaning about why Person A doesn't like it.

Threads like this are great. It allows discussion and, hopefully, keeps things civil enough to actually discuss things. Meta threads are great ways to discuss differing opinions on games...but threads dedicated to solving the puzzles of the game and unraveling the story are not the place for that, considering one man's trash is another man's treasure.

What I find problematic is that there are more than a few instances - admittedly, not as many recently - where people have felt the need to state their dissatisfaction with what they feel is an inferior game in the thread for the game itself. That, to me, is inappropriate due to the fact that no matter how much evidence you have to support your opinion, it's still an opinion and is still therefore no more right or wrong than anyone else's opinion.

I do agree that it's great to see innovation, not just in ARGs but in any genre, but let's be real here, there's nothing wrong with tried and true methods. How long have RPGs basically been the same general gameplay structure? Or FPS games, for that matter? Yet Final Fantasy and Halo continue to sell enough units to be considered very successful. Just because methods have been done before doesn't make them inferior. Fantasy stories had been done before LotR. Yet Tolkien is still beloved to this day. Stories of space-borne horrors had been done before Lovecraft, though I'll give you not quite as many as the previous example. Yet to this day, fantasy stories are still written, and new material is created for Lovecraft-themed collections.

So is there really anything wrong with methods that have been done before? If first and foremost the way the ARG is played is your concern, then yes, there probably is. But for those that care more about the story than about the gameplay, using tried and true methods to tell a good story is perfectly fine.

It's a question that, I think, has no real answer. Just lots of good arguments for both sides.

[Phaedra]

[Esteed]

[Phaedra]

[Esteed]

[Phaedra]

[Esteed]

[Phaedra]

You know, for all the talk (and not just from you -- I've heard it elsewhere as well) about how people jump on possibly "quality" games solely because of the media they use, I just went through every non-clearly-commercial game thread in the News & Rumors section, and other than the games that had one of the markers I noted above (bad spelling, breaking the TOS, etc.) I didn't find a single instance of players harshly criticizing a game. Rowan did remark that games that used Freewebs don't give her a lot of confidence, but she had some very good reasons for that -- getting spammed with popups when you go there, etc.

I did notice a post early on in Justice Forsaken wherein the poster expressed a (pretty mild) wish that the first site had been something more creative than a blog, but in the same post, she also provided help with the cipher, which is hardly telling people not to play -- in fact it's facilitating their gameplay, and again, I don't see anything wrong with expressing that there's something about the game you don't like (after all, in ILB, one of the most widely loved ARGs ever, plenty of people were complaining about having to answer so many payphones). It's also worthwhile to note that that's the only direct criticism I see in the first two pages, so it's hardly as if people were "piling on."

So I guess I'd have to challenge you to show me regularly recurring examples of players harshly criticizing a game solely based on the media it chooses to use, and not on other, more objective markers of quality.

Otherwise I'm tempted to think it's one of those will 'o the wisps that haunt Unfiction occasionally, known by "everyone" but awfully difficult to pin down in fact...

[rowan]