sounds like that game has some daddy issues!!!

I was looking at videos of Proteus and it got me to thinking what people picture when they imagine a video game.
 
I think there's a strain of conceptualizing games that doesn't understand how to put them together, and that's common with a lot of things, just thinking in general. You just have an idea, and it's vague, and you're happy with it until some force compels you to spell it out and then you see how undeveloped your thought is. Like I was posting in a Zelda thread and people were coming in and saying basically “yeah I'd like a Zelda that's basically, like, you can explore and the world is kind of open, and then maybe there's stuff to do”. I'm not fuming, and I don't think these people are stupid, it's just kind of funny to me when people take this vagueness out of their mind and they don't realize it's still incredibly vague when it hits the air and oxidizes. And then people will try to stretch out this opinion like it means something, this foggy idea of a game as an open place to explore and, then, stuff happens, I guess.
 
The continuing strain of this can I think be seen in indie games, where you have a rejection of open world objectives, which in light of games like Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption, and other games like that, I don't think is unreasonable. A lot of games have open worlds and it just becomes dead space. But this indie reaction to that is in the same vein of that thinking, “we still have an open landscape with scenery in it, but instead of including tedious stuff let's just cut out gameplay altogether”, and that somehow makes the game more pure.
 
There's this incredible sophistication in board games, and all these rudimentary building blocks are exploding into being, and you have designers taking these things, having a firm grip on them, a firm idea of them, and combining them together to create a sort of gaming Renaissance. But video games are mired in this swamp, where the picture increasingly seems to come into view as being: “a game, at its ideal, is some kind of open space or something” and then it ends. It's just so unclear. And the implications are easy to see. Like, for example, chasing after movie qualities for validation and content filling essence. That's a symptom of this half-formed conception floating in people's minds, this interpretation covered up hazardously by N64 fog.