This is a bit tangential, but since the subject came up. I’m reading this free e-book on game design. One of the essays in their makes the point that:
Since the industrial revolution and the commodity culture it brought to bear, games have increasingly been treated as media products like books, movies, or songs. The business models and patterns of consumption relating to books, magazines, movies, and music are all based on a short cycle of release, consume, and move on. It is into this model of consumer culture that videogames have positioned themselves, and in the process became a form of ephermera—quickly consumed with little or no expectation of lasting effect. But games are ever-changing, culturally shaped practices that have more in common with square dancing, and, as Frank Lantz has pointed out, butterfly collecting than they do with passively consumed entertainment products. And so the more we try to treat games like media, the less game-like they are. (Kindle location 2298 of 3810)
I haven’t decided how much I agree with this, but it does sort of seem to explain why some of the trends in videogames have largely turned me off them and back toward tabletop games. In any case, it is a data point in favor of “don’t compare books and videogames”.
This is a bit tangential, but since the subject came up. I’m reading this free e-book on game design. One of the essays in their makes the point that:
Since the industrial revolution and the commodity culture it brought to bear, games have increasingly been treated as media products like books, movies, or songs. The business models and patterns of consumption relating to books, magazines, movies, and music are all based on a short cycle of release, consume, and move on. It is into this model of consumer culture that videogames have positioned themselves, and in the process became a form of ephermera—quickly consumed with little or no expectation of lasting effect. But games are ever-changing, culturally shaped practices that have more in common with square dancing, and, as Frank Lantz has pointed out, butterfly collecting than they do with passively consumed entertainment products. And so the more we try to treat games like media, the less game-like they are. (Kindle location 2298 of 3810)
I haven’t decided how much I agree with this, but it does sort of seem to explain why some of the trends in videogames have largely turned me off them and back toward tabletop games. In any case, it is a data point in favor of “don’t compare books and videogames”.