And lo On Fri, 04 Jun 2010 16:35:16 +0100, Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> did  
spake thusly:

> Darren New wrote:
>
>> In Black&White, you play a local God trying to keep your followers  
>> happy. It's also not particularly interesting. The hype sounded great,  
>> but it was like "Nice engine. Where's the game?"
>
> Maybe it's just me, but given a game where you can do absolutely  
> anything you want, my reaction is typically "so what are you supposed to  
> do?"
>
> (I had this problem with Frontier Elite II, which is supposedly the best  
> computer game ever written...)

But it can work, look at the MMORPG like World of Warcraft. I recall  
reading something somewhere about development of some such game and they  
left it completely open and it bombed with the testers. Just as you said  
the attitude was "so what are you supposed to do?". The questions are - Is  
that because games have evolved such that the player is expected to be  
told what to do all the time and thus anything outside that is deemed  
'confusing? Or is the case that we simply don't like such open-ended  
structures within the games that we are supposed to be playing for fun?

I think the difference is that in one type of game you're presented with  
tasks and in the other you're expected to go out and find them yourself.  
In the former you know what you can do and can chose to ignore it, in the  
latter you get the 'now what?'

-- 
Phil Cook

--
I once tried to be apathetic, but I just couldn't be bothered
http://flipc.blogspot.com

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