GothicGothicness said:
Because a lot of the best games, movies, books and so on even these days require some investment before they become enjoyable. If you pirate a game and don't like the first 2 hours you might just drop it. However if you bought it you might give it the 10 hours investment needed before it really becomes enjoyable.
It kind of reminds me of something someone had as his signature on that other forum. Paraphrasing, it was about how if you only play a game for a couple of hours and don't like it you can't say it is bad because you did not play it enough, if you did play up to halfway through before leaving you can't say it is awful because you haven't seen all of it yet, and if you did play it to the end, you can't say it was awful because you obviously enjoyed it enough to finish it.
One of my favourite literature teacher always said that any author whose book you need to force yourself into reading even for a single paragraph has failed you as an author, and to the ovens it goes. Your initial reserve of interest, curiosity, enthusiasm, or hype should be more than enough for the author to capture you in the web of her or his prose and world, and if your original push is not enough for the author to do so you, like, there are far too many good books to read out there as to waste time with writers who aren't compatible with your own taste and interests.
The same can be said about videogames. There are no really great games out there that need more than the initial rush forward to capture you into its spell, and it is responsability of the designer to present the game in a compeling and intriguing way during that first encounter between work and reader. The reader has no duty towards the developer and the work other than opening it and reading the first few pages.
In other words, if they need an extra incentive to continue forward the game can be said to be badly designed. Even fifteen minutes are more than enough to give the player a good taste of the gameplay, the mood, the flow, and the plot, as well as to trap her imagination with vague promises of coolness and awesomeness to come. That doesn't means you need to throw everything cool into the beginning, not to go in medias res and the like. No, but the author is bound to find a way to make you want to learn more, see more, and experience more before you run out of attention. If they can't it is not your fault but theirs.
Take Bayonetta as an example, both because an over the top action game is an easy example to make and because almost everyone is of a mind about it being one of the best action games ever made. And also because I did not manage to find a video with the first fifteen minutes of Devil May Cry 3 instead, which would have been even better as half naked Dante is more than enough reason to play on and on, and on, and on, and on, and… Like, you get the idea.
Anyway,
Clicky click me!
Fifteen minutes and you already have a pretty good idea what kind of game you are playing, what kind of awesomeness awaits for you, and what kind of sass you are going to wade trough. From here on the game will get better and better, more and more over the top too, yet if you haven't enjoyed those fifteen minutes you are not going to enjoy the rest of it. If you have, you will. If you don't know, it is not really the game for you and you should leave it for a really dry season when even real life has left you hanging.
Or to use a role playing example, let's use Fnord's own and take Planescape Torment. By the time you have left the mortuary and started exploring around the city you have a pretty good idea of what kind of game you are playing and have had a taste of the mood, the style, the surreality, the mystery, and the weirdness that make it. If you are thinking that it is awesome, go ahead and keep playing. If you are thinking it kind of sucks, though, what's the point to keep wasting time on it just because others are telling you that you should enjoy it?
And now for a little bonus. Objectivity being born from detachment, how can you argue your judgement of a game you really like and enjoy as one of the best games ever, for example, is more fair than the judgement of those who did find it so awful as to not invest any time on it, other than the bare minimum to find it awful? Your blind investment of extra time, for if you still did not know whether or not it was something you did like the investment can't be described as anything but blind, is, by itself, attachment of a kind!
Fnord said:
Ah, I misunderstood you. I thought you were basically talking about games taking the God of war 3 approach, which is just a long sequence of set pieces, with no real rest time (those set pieces quickly lost their impact, because there were no base-line to compare them to.
I do believe a game should have no, say, dead time, but not that it should only be about set pieces and buttons of awesome, you are right on that. By not having dead time I mean that every single scene, line of dialogue, combat encounter, puzzle, room, character, etc, should be constructed with a mind towards economy and elegance and have both a meaning and a purpose, even if such meaning and purpose are just to be carefully constructed to create mood and a subtle tension, or to involve you emotionally, or whatever, as those elements will keep you glued to the screen and guessing, and will increase the effect of posterior elements.
Like, not every single line of dialogue should be pertinent to the plot but it should have a meaning and a purpose, be it subtle exposition of the setting, subtle exposition of the characters, establishing mood, etc. Dialogue just for dialogue's sake is kind of wasting time: If it isn't necessary and it doesn't have a point…
