[padobson]

If we follow this rabbit hole too far, we'll end up trying to answer questions like "What is a game?" and "What is art?"

But what you're describing is what I want. I want more immersion, I want the focus to be on the what the gamer experiences and giving them something meaningful to do.

But when you plug your brain into the NeuralCube4000 two decades from now, what are you going to get?

What I want: You're in a tilled field at the edge of a forest. Beyond the forest, you see the peak of a mountain escaping from the trees. You look to your left and see a farmhouse, and the farmer is starting his day at work. A fawn leaps across the field and birds take flight as the deer breaks the treeline.

At this point, you're going to want to do something. Chase the deer, climb the mountain, beat up the farmer and take his gold, whatever it is you want to do, the game should encourage and reward your action with feedback.

What the games industry is likely to give me:

You're dropped into a dark room. A disembodied voice speaks: "You are Reginald Brisbane, a young farmer from Bastogne in the 14th century. Your father perished at the hands of brigands when you were seven and you were sent to live on your uncle's farm, but you've never stopped nursing the need to avenge your father's death, and you're now ready to seek it." Then, you're in a tilled field at the edge of a forest...

Now, clearly both of these scenarios were written by me, but one was written to encourage interaction, and the other was written to tell a story.

Which one do you want games to be? I think I've made my desires clear.

[MrJagil]

There is a great book on film by David Mamet[0] in which he describes the authentic way to piece together a story. Roughly, stories should be told through editing and camera movement, somewhat following the montage theory.[1] You see a picture of a man staring. You see a coffin. He's sad. Replace the coffin with a bowl of soup, and now he's hungry instead. According to Mamet (and many others) even feature films should be done in this manner, no dialogue whatsoever (and definitely no voice overs or signs/texts to read).

In the same vein, a game should be told with the protagonist as the camera. You go to the farm house, no one is home. You go the forest, you see broken twigs and no animals: Somethings not right.

The upcoming game The Witness seems to embrace this sort of thinking. So did many rpgs (even vanilla WoW, to a certain degree. Much of the feedback from the game came through interaction with your surroundings[2] and you could always choose a different quest line).

[0] http://www.amazon.com/On-Directing-Film-David-Mamet/dp/01401... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_montage_theory [2] The first time you see a glowing plant you realise there's something called herbalism etc.

[mattlutze]

^^ Is why all of this has to be as much or more about the story as the tech. Story development needs to grow to do things like giving NPCs in the games personalities to deepen your immersion in the story and to help it grow toward it's confluences of "predetermined destiny" or whatever.

Fret not! Of your two NC4000 possible futures there, we're already getting some fantastic examples of the first case.

I'll be contentious though in that you've stood up two straw men there. A "here's different world simulator, go explore" game will take you only so far without story and motivation toward some end. And the second option would get the same reviews a game like that would today -- formulaic, boring, pedantic.

One aspect at the expense of the other gives you a not motivating game, it's as direct as that. You need an interface that becomes transparent over time, and you need compelling storytelling to engage you in the lives of the characters and their plight.

[darkmighty]

The realism is a bit orthogonal to the interactivity/discover-ability you describe. For example, some really old text adventure games fit perfectly what your ideal (while others fit perfectly the story telling example). A game that mostly fulfills that promise for me is Morrowind.