"When we strive to understand a game to bend it to our will, we arrive at mastery. And when we master a game, we destroy it."

Try telling that to Wow devotees. Or poker players. This comment seems utterly naive to me - is he suggesting that once we win at chess we would never play it again? Very few games of any real note contain a level of mastery that kills the game - most these days are built to be almost endlessly replayable.

A game like Prof Layton is destroyed by mastery - it's hard to go back through puzzles you have already completed. But then a game like that is an oddity these days, and is charming in its own way because of it.

"Mastery is not a prerequisite to improvisational play any more than being able to sing is a prerequisite to being in a punk band."

But there's a difference between singing in the shower and singing in a band. If you put yourself on a stage, or participate in a game, you are in some way opening yourself up to being measured in some way or another. The only natural response it to cope in some way - however you are expressing yourself it is your own way of overcoming the challenge you are facing.

In Far Cry 2 players may do things their own way and at their own pace, but only because of the circumstances set upon them. Mastery or self-improvement to achieve goals is still the overriding factor. I see very little difference in practical terms between that game and COD4 in terms of the skillsets used and the challenges to the player - Hocking is underestimating that game, and vastly overestimating his own. It's nice to give players options - games do that in a variety of subtle ways.

Noby Noby Boy is a game that features almost aimless improvisational play, and I enjoyed it very much (for a while). But does it point to the future of gaming? Not at all. It's a cheeky challenge to convention. A novelty item, like silly putty.

(I do note that Hocking is being represented by soundbites here - it would be interesting to hear his full presentation on the topic.)

Of all the games to namecheck when trying to provide an example of why the other style of accomplishment is not as satisfying, Call of Duty 4 strikes me as a very poor choice. Why purposefully compare your title to one of the most successful games of recent years, especially when trying to say that they could have done things better?

As others have already stated, a little challenge and difficultly is no bad thing, and a few more games could suffer to add a bit more. That said, one thing that has been bothering me recently is that a lot of games seem to still be relying on cheap tricks and tactics to ramp up the difficultly.

Farcry 2 has to be the most underated game of last year. Its genius lies in making the journey to the mission as exhilirating and exciting as the mission itself. Far cry 2 offers you the tools and then allows you to choose how to use them. No one teaches you to use the I.E.D's (Improvised explosive devices) but they can be used to take out convoys, cover retreats, distract whole bases full of enemies so you can steal their vehicles from under their noses. Into this it injects the thrill of suprise, guns breaking down, reinforcements turning up, jams, malaria attacks. Because of this balance it offers a stealth attack can transform into a running retreat, laying traps, into a buddy supported ambush of the following troops, and so on. Farcry 2 asks for your involvement, your creativity and your intelligence, and in return it offers the most adaptive FPS in existence. The buddy system is an integral part of this, and long may this continue.

Personally, I loved Far Cry 2 and the open ended approach to each confrontation. I can honestly say it is one of the best games I have played. The sense of immersion was on par with, if not better than Bioshock managed.
It is precisely this sense of immersion that made the typical computer game devices stand out so starkly: the map felt strangely video-gamey, the setting and atmosphere was so believable and coherent that you expected to run into 'real' people rather than enemies who shot you on sight.

Of course, this style of gaming is probably harder to make and devise. There's safety in having only one way of doing things, after all.

I think he's got a point, but its not a blanket, all-encompassing thing. It can't be applied to every game or every genre. There's room for both extremes (full freedom versus perfection in play), with lots of leeway in-between. And, in all honesty, there's no reason why the two can't be used together when/where appropriate. A plethora of options, each with varying levels of required focus, technical proficiency and specialization, would be nice in some games.

Farcry 2 was terrible, uninspired and *gasp* unoriginal, of course his "philosophy" is to not punish the player, the player is already being punished, he is playing Farcry 2. I'm so sick of this 'lets make games easy' trend, it RUINS gameplay, why not at least include difficulty options for those who aren't 5 years old and have experience playing video games, its insulting. If the game is fun, I don't mind re-playing, adapting, learning and overcoming that challenge, its a good character building experience. I re-played Megaman 2, Ikaruga, DMC and failing didn't bother me because I had fun in the process and what joy it was to finally overcome certain challenges. The exhilarating tension was healthy. Developers shouldn't promote and celebrate incompetence, we hope these kids will explore Cosmos one day, with this sort of training they wont be inspired to push their limits. Working hard doing something you love is fun, lets not diminish the great potential. Culturally it's not that surprising that the most challenging games come from Japan.

The same can be said for BioShock’s design, which didn’t force players to reload a save point after being stomped by a Big Daddy, rather dispatched gamers just respawned in the closest Vita-Chamber to continue the challenge.

...and what is a Vita-chamber if not essentially a save point?

/b

This has to be a joke. Games have gotten so much easier over the past 10 years, and what bothers me is that it hurts games. Challenge is *integral* to a game being fun. If someone fails at your game, they will try again, if the game is fun. The problem many game developers today have to deal with is that most of the games being made aren't fun at all, and so they have to make it very easily, basically to minimize the amount of time the player has to play their new waste of 60 dollars. If you make your game fun, people won't mind failing, and they won't mind starting over, because it's FUN.

Great ideas indeed, except that after I carefully plotted my attack out in Far Cry 2 for 90 minutes to slip off an edge and die and have to do everything over again because there's no check point system, I felt a little punished. Maybe your buddy should throw his arm down and catch you every time you fall down...^^

To be fair though, I loved Far Cry 2's open ended system (the atmosphere was amazing), it was the closest to what I think it'd be like to really be there. No real fast travel system, had to take busses to far away bus stations, had to dive for 5 minutes sometimes to go to where I'm going, no real inventory system (or at least no unrealistic video game one). But those are some of the same things I also grew tired of. Being realistic is only good in some aspects, in others (the tedius drives everwhere, no fast travel system) wore on me. And having a hard time getting weapons, being stuck between either a sniper rifle or an assault rifle unless I wanted to use broken down enemy weapons also took it's toll on me. If I had more time I probably would have finished Far Cry 2. I guess I kinda contradicted myself there a little bit.