@pnathan I... kinda do understand it for games that you can't be bothered playing and don't intend buying but are sort of curious about what the story is.

But watching other people play Overlegends of the Ancient Watch II? I don't get that at all.

(I don't get *playing* those kind of games either tbh.)

@natecull @pnathan

> why one would self-limit

Time is finite?

I mean, some people want to get an idea of what the game is actually like from videos of actual gameplay, since trailers tend to be somewhat unrepresentative -- and some people really just wanna see the story, not play the game. (Plus, watching someone play through who knows what they're doing, on a game with a high difficulty, is FASTER than actually playing through.)

Different people got different priorities.

@sydneyfalk @pnathan right.

The point being that it's interesting what what we originally thought was a huge feature of games (immersivity! interactivity! a story that responds to YOU! a world you can get lost in for hundreds of hours!)

... has actually turned out to be a massive anti-feature for a lot of people who just want to 'cut to the chase and find out how it ends'.

@natecull @pnathan

well, I can see why it'd seem that way

but my take (and maybe this is silly)

is more that it's like projections of things

a 2d representation of a 3d image can't exactly represent it but we know such-and-such arrangement of lines is an 'isometric view of a cube', or three squares with certain rules in place is 'different views of a cube'

so some people want to see the 'movie' of the game -- not play the game -- it's just a different representation of the experience

@pnathan @natecull

it reminds me in a way of watching MirrorMask -- EVERY frame of that movie looks like a piece of art, to me -- every single frame

none of those single frames 'is' the movie, but they're beautiful in their own way, and each of them tells a strange little story of their own -- someone's hiding, someone's finding, that kind of thing

some people don't want to be immersed

alternately

some people don't need to be 'in control' to feel immersion anyway

I get lost in movies