@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

@sydneyfalk @pnathan I think there's something also about the rise of social networking.

Videogames can be profoundly private and anti-social. In order to 'socialise' the experience and make it shareable, the interactivity has to be removed.

Where this line of thought leads, I'm not sure. That's why it's interesting.

@pnathan @sydneyfalk But, for example...

... MMORPGs are hostile BOTH to sociability AND personal control.

When the doorbell rings, and you're playing a single-player game, you just hit Escape and freeze the game.

if you're playing a raid in an MMORPG, whoops, now you have to choose which of your friends / social group to disappoint.

And then with movies, you can freeze a frame or take a sequence and discuss it. You can't easily pull out a *playable* subsequence of a game. Has to be a movie.

@natecull @pnathan

> raid

I don't MMO, but that particular incident doesn't mean the interactivity's gone, it means the real world's a factor, and it always has been. I paused some NES game I can't remember once, an action somethingorother, when I had to go to sleep at night so I could finish up the next day.

My mom turned it off thinking it was on 'by accident'.

And this was in the days before saves were a thing and this game had no passwords. O_O ...

@pnathan @natecull

(I found out years later that it was one of those games intentionally designed to be difficult to prevent renting-and-beating. I had BOUGHT it. Sigh.)

> subsequence

I believe Tiny Tina's Assault On Dragon Keep would disagree with you on this. ;P

But really, there's plenty of DLCs that are effectively entire playable side stories, that a person could (in theory) play almost none of the main game and ONLY go play the DLC instead. Wouldn't that count?