Are experiences the logical next step in the evolution of video games?

They all focus on gameplay and replayability, and Prey 2017 got a DLC with randomized elements, much more so than BotW and SMO.

That graph is retarded. You need more defined categories.
Experiences:
>most of the single player games belong here
Pastimes:
>Multiplayer games, roguelikes, strategy games you can play into infinity, Arcadey games like tetris, bejeweled etc

Neat idea, but i feel it doesn't work
just too many games cna be called one or the other

Well, reading can be an experience and a pastime at the same time, so why not both?

Experiences can't really be split into two defining categories like in the op. Personally, there's memorable experiences, and shit that doesn't matter

>Are experiences the logical next step in the evolution of video games?
This is some retarded bait thread again, right?

It's more like the distinction between books and toys/sports, one isn't really intended to be experienced more than once and you can eventually run out of them, whereas toys and sports are more of the "make your own fun" type of pastime which never really runs out.

focusing on gameplay is not the same as focusing ONLY on gameplay

they are also not infinitely replayable because they don't have deep randomization.

clearly experiences.

That is entirely up to the devs, you could in theory create an experience using gameplay concepts from any of the genres in the second category

Experiences:
bioshock
persona 4
Resident Evil

Pastimes:
Dead Rising
Pikmin

It's not that hard.

all are experiences.

It's really not that hard.

Why are you so nitpicky about the gameplay part, while you're so loosely defining the replayability point?

BotW has a story, and neither SMO or BotW have random elements. Neither are infinitely replayable.

Every fucking game in existence provides an experience, user.

Are you saying the games on the right aren't games because you can't change anything about their outcomes?

Don't be pedantic. The OP is clearly distinguishing games crafted primarily to be experienced a couple times at most and provide lasting memories and games which are meant to be played frequently and repeatedly.

>Are experiences the logical next step in the evolution of video games?
Thats too opened ended a question, the answer becomes a prediction of the future which nobody can honestly answer.
I feel like pastimes have only increased on the back of 'esports' highlighting the competitive nature in that category. It attracts the younger crowd that still haven't learned that fun and winning can be mutually exclusive.

The older you get then the slower and more detailed you wish your games to be. So in the end, customers will exist for both.

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They're still gameplay for the sake of gameplay with no depth beyond that, they're essentially collections of shrines/levels which might as well be randomized like in a roguelike

All games are pastimes. Same with books, movies and music.

Are you being intentionally autistic or is that how you usually are

>Experiences
cringe and bluepilled
>Pastimes
based and redpilled

...

not the same user, but yes.
bandersnatch black mirror, is considered by
people and media as a game.

No they're not, especially considering how everyone and their mom keeps playing games like FIFA and the latest flavour of the month multiplayer game like Fortnite or Apex

>Its another Yea Forums creates some absurd dualism that makes no sense episode

what makes resident evil an experience and pikmin a pastime? they have very similar structures.

God Hand
Devil May Cry
Metal Gear Rising
Ninja Gaiden
Ace Combat

There's room for both. You can enjoy games like Mario and Tetris as you can also enjoy games like the new God of War or The Last of Us.

What's the game next to The Witcher? The first one is Persona 4, right?

>t.nintentoddler

it's a good dichotomy but it's also completely fuckin' arbitrary. Good for a friend recommending a game to another friend to help convey whether they'd be interested but useless for anything else.

I play all my games frequently and repeatedly. Metroid Prime is probably an "experience" and I've replayed it loads of times.

OP is on the right track and I've been thinking about this too. Some games really excel at the arcade style scoring gameplay where the greatest reward lies in learning to play the game well. I don't think that randomization is really a necessary element because a lot of shmups for instance are very static challenges. On the other hand there's games which have a rather low skill ceiling and even easily breakable but can still be really great, Thief comes to mind for instance. In these games the rewarding element comes from something else, like immersion or funny simulation or a nice story. Of course lots of games have elements of both.

But both existed for decades??? What kind of retard makes these kinds of images?

Bastion and yes that's Persona 4

If you read a book more than once, you could understand it more thoroughly. Revisiting it after your life has changed from the last time you've read it may make you view it in a brand new perspective, and result in a brand-new experience.

>experiences
SOUL
>pastimes
SOULLESS

No. Fuck off, retard.

>play NV well over 20 times
>play BotW and Odyssey once and never wanted to play through them again
I'm confused about this limited replayability thing.

ITT secret club idiots who refuse to accept their hobby is mainstream now, yet they continue in their futile attempt of differentiating themselves from "normies"
now that many normies are gamers, does that mean we are all normies? or that they are all gamers?
people that think their hobbies are them are just sad and devoid of personalities

I don't know if the term "Experiences" really fits the game on the right. When I think of a word like "Experiences" I tend to associate it with games like Pathologic, where the game actually stands up as an artistic medium on its own and doesn't feel incredibly video-gamey.

BOTW and Mario don't belong in pastime. Actually, let me rephrase that, BOTW belongs in there just as much as Fallout New Vegas and Witcher 3 do. Same goes for Mario, it fits there as much as Bastion does.

Though, ultimately I'd make this distinction not to raise any bullshit console wars because honestly I don't even own Switch and I know sonyfags will go "b-but nintedoh..". Fallout 1 and 2 and NV are an experience, Fallout 3 4 and 76 are pastime.

There is more to that than you think because in Fallout 3 Todd wanted to make a living world where some shit just happened at random, there are numerous random encounters that have their own wiki page and what you'll get is determined with various variables even like Karma, it's not to be confused with random battle from original Fallouts. Sense of loneliness and emptiness was more of a miscalculation on Bethesda's part, it was never the intention. And Fallout NV is more of a curated experience if you follow the road.

Even Fallout 4's and 76's building mechanic and Preston Garvey suggest that Todd and Bethesda are very much interested in very sterile repeatable grinding gameplay methods of sucking players in with tasks akin to actual chores.

I think BotW was an amazing experience. This is a really retarded dichotomy.

Isn't "experience" a meme word western developers have been using for years, and something Yea Forums use to make fun of? What the fuck happened?

Always

It's not about what you do with the game. it's about how it was intended to be played from inception. Also you can have experiences which are replayable - again it's about the intent of the developer.

Dunno about AC but I'd call the others pastimes over experiences

Cringe nu-gamer detected

No, games as a service instead of goods will be the next step. Next gen consoles are going to focus more and more on streaming games. Paying a monthly tiered subscription for unlimited access to a catalog of games. Pay a higher tier and you can download them to play offline, pay even higher for classics from previous gens. Video games are about to go through what the music industry did in the 00s now that the infrastructure is starting to support it.

I must compile a list of words that people only use when they are trying to trick you like free, freedom, family, equal, rights, the term "in history"...Experience is guaranteed a place

>being afraid of arguments

argument is a good one to add to the list, you are right...at this point is totally devoid of meaning

Devs meme and try to latch onto words that they know has a real and logical basis behind it. Buzzwords don't just come up out of nowhere, there are good games that actually fall into those categories and developers see it as an easy way to gain recognition and get their game recognized by an audience as something it really isn't, by trying to get players to associate the dev's shitty game with classics that the players got good feels from playing or thinking about. It's why people on Yea Forums get so excited or hyped about people claiming a new game has "soul", or the potential for "soul", because soulful games actually exist and they have fond memories of them, something sparks in your brain and you get a craving for that same experience.

Yes.

stop replying to bait threads goddammit

I think there's no reason we can't have both.

Random experiences are the only experiences that matter, even RPG's is good only when experience is unique for every player Builds, Non-linear playthroughs, etc
SS13, eve online and dwarf fortress was
best experience generators i have ever played.

Why is that user? Just curious, I think both random and handcrafted experiences have their merits, there's a reason art in the form of books and films took off the way it did. The way I see it, when it comes to video games, handcrafted experiences have the advantage of the developer knowing that it's going to come across a very specific way for every player, and being able to tailor the experience around that. If it's a good developer, a lot of thought, love, and passion can go into that experience, to create something that the dev KNOWS will get the point or experience that they were meaning to make across to the player. Sure, it'll never be as special playing through a second time, but what book or movie ever is? Secondly, these handcrafted experiences in games also have the advantage over books and movies that they can present handcrafted experiences with player interaction, if combined well this can make for some really memorable scenes.
Random, unique experiences can be great too, but you're far more likely to sit through tens if not hundreds of hours between ones that really are special or memorable to you, for the most part they either end up being random in a generic, irremarkable way or just happen to illicit a "huh, that was sorta cool" at the minimum.
Dwarf fort is a pretty fucking great game but out of the hundreds of hours I have in it, I can only maybe think of three truly memorable experiences I had off the top of my head, the rest of it has more or less blurred together. On the other hand I can look back at more linear games or non-linear RPGS with handcrafted experiences where I can remember more than a handful of great scenes from each game in around 20-30 hours of playing.

>make your own fun
No, fuck off, that's what I paid you for

>Just curious, I think both random and handcrafted experiences have their merits, there's a reason art in the form of books and films took off the way it did.
It's harder to immerse into the book or film, i mean it's almost impossible to get the same amount of immersion as in good game.
And immersion is a multiplier to experience.
>handcrafted experiences have the advantage of the developer knowing that it's going to come across a very specific way for every player
It works only for unsophisticated idk if that's the right word for it, my english is shit players, if you have years of experience playing vidya and enjoying other forms of art you'll find it hard to be immersed in the world with non-random events.
tl;dr it only works for people who just started playing vidya, but not for oldfags
>Random, unique experiences can be great too, but you're far more likely to sit through tens if not hundreds of hours between ones that really are special or memorable to you
Every art works on contrasts, i'd even say many things in the world work solely on contrasts.
If you never suffered you'll never experience true pleasure and etc, that's why if you want to have true fun you need to experience boring parts too.
>Dwarf fort is a pretty fucking great game but out of the hundreds of hours I have in it, I can only maybe think of three truly memorable experiences I had off the top of my head, the rest of it has more or less blurred together.
Same goes for me, i can't remember ANYTHING from videogames with directed narrative, literally nothing, even from my favorite RPG's, though i perfectly remember some really fun rounds in space station 13 or some stories from eve online.

>Same goes for me
Same goes for me BUT*

I don't understand that way of thinking at all.
Experience what exactly? It's not like you're travelling abroad or getting yourself a girlfriend, it's just playing a game.

>Games I like good
>Games I don't like bad

Deep analysis

>Literally all of the experiences have lacking gameplay
Lmoa

No, games should branch out and be both. Sort of like how in literature there's genre fiction and literary fiction. Both are good for different things. Experiences games would be for when you want to immerse yourself in the world and feel like the PC, while past-time games would be just for doing fun shit like jumping around.

Games with limited replayability are cancer.

Based normie retard poster

Only sensible way to call that split is "story focused" and "gameplay focused", and even that's misleading.
But the way you included those casual/mobile games on the right is so damn manipulative that this doesn't deserve any discussion

Why does it need to be black or white?

Why does it need to be a literal movie OR a purely mechanics focused game?

Why is something in between bad?

Because you're not an enlightened centrist, just a fence sitting retard too stupid to decide if 2+2 equals 4 or 5, so you pretend incorrectly that there is no right answer.

I guess this is where we can agree to disagree then, good thing there's all kinds of media out there for all kinds of consumers for every individual kind of taste.
>It's harder to immerse into the book or film, i mean it's almost impossible to get the same amount of immersion as in good game.
I have a hard time getting immersed into films, but I can't say the same about books. There have definitely been reads for me that have gotten me way more immersed than any game ever has and I just couldn't put the book down at all.
>It works only for unsophisticated players, if you have years of experience playing vidya and enjoying other forms of art you'll find it hard to be immersed in the world with non-random events.
Respectfully disagree with this too, been playing games for decades and I still get that spark of magic playing some really well handcrafted moments in games. Art is art no matter how much of it you have consumed, you wouldn't say the same thing about books or movies losing their effect on you as time goes by, if anything that effect has the potential to grow greater as you consume more media and gain a more refined palette and learn how to distinguish good experiences from shitty ones, especially once you developed an understanding of what your tastes actually are. Games included. In my opinion, for those reasons handcrafted experiences actually have the potential to go well above and beyond what any random experience can ever deliver (although it's extremely rare) because the developer can pour a TON of time into working on that moment, knowing that EVERY player will experience it and it won't go to waste like putting together a system for random experiences might if a player never gets lucky enough to stumble upon some of the shit that's hidden away in that system.
(cont.)

(cont.)
>Every art works on contrasts, i'd even say many things in the world work solely on contrasts.
If you never suffered you'll never experience true pleasure and etc, that's why if you want to have true fun you need to experience boring parts too.
Hard to say where I stand on this one. I agree and disagree with certain aspects of that statement. Will I do think a good balance is necessary for great random moments to truly shine (getting too many thrown at you in too short of a timespan will serve to dilute that feeling you get when you encounter them), the majority of random encounters still tend to be extremely underwhelming and playing for them alone gets old quick. The time period between such experiences shouldn't be as large as it is in games, but that's an inherent problem of randomly generated content. The RNG system has no concept of what is a "memorable" or "non-memorable" experience, it just throws random shit together in the hope that the player will find it novel. As such it's impossible to create the perfect balance between the kinds of experiences that random games have to offer, you're just as likely to get a ton of great experiences back to back as you are to play for a hundred hours and get none. Devs can try to polish this by creating semi-unique "templates" for experiences that can be modified with random elements, and implement a balanced rate for these "templates" to appear, but then it's not really truly unique, it'll be cool the first few times they appear but if you play long enough the illusion fades and you realize they're just slightly modified experiences of each other, I've definitely seen shit like that before in games. At that point it's just a shittier version of handcrafted experiences that not every player will encounter.
>Same goes for me, i can't remember ANYTHING from videogames with directed narrative, literally nothing
Guess at the end of the day we just have preferences for different shit

oops,
*>If you never suffered you'll never experience true pleasure and etc, that's why if you want to have true fun you need to experience boring parts too.
That should've been a quote from your post, not part of mine.

>I have a hard time getting immersed into films, but I can't say the same about books
I don't have hard time immersing neither into films or books, but levels of immersion are incomparable to games.
>There have definitely been reads for me that have gotten me way more immersed than any game ever has and I just couldn't put the book down at all.
Music is a serious percent of immersion, if music hits the right part of game action on the screen you'll be much more immersed in process.
>been playing games for decades and I still get that spark of magic playing some really well handcrafted moments in games.
Yeah, i had that moments too.
Nu-deus ex was really good in terms of immersion very shallow gameplay tho but it becomes rarer and rarer when randomly generated events keep their full power even after all those years.
> Art is art no matter how much of it you have consumed, you wouldn't say the same thing about books or movies losing their effect on you as time goes by
As you become more jaded there'll be less and less books you can consider REALLY good because you raise your own standarts and expectations, it's just like the life goes faster with every year you lived.
>In my opinion, for those reasons handcrafted experiences actually have the potential to go well above and beyond what any random experience can ever deliver
There is many factors that influence power of your experience tho, being directed is only one of them, for example if you get the same experience when playing with real people it hits you harder than playing versus NPC, when you think about chances of you getting outcome you lived through you'll another level of emotions.
> because the developer can pour a TON of time into working on that moment
Your ton of time should worth for you more than ton of time invested by developer
>knowing that EVERY player will experience it
Unique things have more value

BOTW has truly random scenarios that can take place user. Thats like the entire point of the chemistry engine, causing emergent gameplay scenarios that weren't explicitly programmed in by the developers.
And Odyssey has a bunch of largely varied tasks lying around the worlds in such quantity that one could consider it functionally random.

this.

>The time period between such experiences shouldn't be as large as it is in games
It's hard to balance those because peoples are different, yeah, but if payoff worth it, why not?
>The RNG system has no concept of what is a "memorable" or "non-memorable" experience
That what makes experience truly unique
>As such it's impossible to create the perfect balance between the kinds of experiences that random games have to offer, you're just as likely to get a ton of great experiences back to back as you are to play for a hundred hours and get none
That's the whole life for you, lol.
As i said, not only art works on contrasts, but many things. As example, depression is good catalyst for art.

Dark Souls
SMT Nocturne
Hollow Knight
Metroid
Pre-botw 3D zeldas
Games that create meaningful experiences through gameplay and atmosphere that adds context to the gameplay

A true experience, in a way is sandbox """open world""""' experience, your environment should react to your actions in a fun inducing way or it's a shit game like 95% of open world games out there

>Breath of the Wild
>Mario Odyssey
>Infinite replayability
Did you mean games that you can only play once?

You can consider them what you will, you can create a narrative for the round of Bejeweled you're playing if you want to, but in the end the only thing that matters is what the developer intended

SS13
Prey (2017)
Dragon Quest IX
Fallout: NV
Team Fortress 2

all games on the left are shit, if you play stale movie-like games and then shriek with excitement over some lame attempt to immerse you into the story then i have no doubt you are a lame brained deadweight to people who want good games to play, like when you beat up that chad in rd2, EVERY person in town is talking to you about it, and I know that every onions faggot was making their :D face every time it happened to them even though adding in fifteen voice lines after chad gets his ass kicked probably isnt very hard to do

Maybe with the exception of BOTW, those "pastimes" are closer to pure games and the "experiences" are split between "experience this world"/"be told this story" and "perform game-like tasks". Arcade games may seem like the more primitive form of game, but the more something is an experience, the less it is a game.

So you're saying it doesn't even matter what the developer intended, since the experience is subjective to the user anyway. Which is the opposite of the point you're trying to make.

No, I'm saying the subjective delusions of random players don't factor into determining whether something is a pastime or an experience

Of course they do. The classification of pastime/experience is player-dependent

I will never understand why anyone would choose the "experience" over pastime.
It's like you no longer want a game anymore.

Imagine trying this hard just to shitpost

I will never understand why anyone would choose the "pastime" over experience. It's like you no longer value your time anymore.

I can game once a day in 30 min. sessions and be satisfied. What are you trying to get at?

Both are fine and the medium needs both

>Irony, the post.

why is BotW on the right, it matches the descriptors on the left perfectly and doesnt fit any of the ones on the right
did the person who made it not actually play the game and just assume it's skyrim in the style of LoZ and not the other way around?

>titanfall 2
Curated and cinematic single player campaign, mechanical depth, wild possibility in relatively arcade multiplayer mode

>Halo trilogy
Structured and story driven single player campaign and a mix of serious and arcadey multiplayer modes. Also a level editor in 3.

>Deus Ex
An experience that is both extremely refined and has near endless possibilities due to emergent gameplay.

>Starcraft series
Long campaign will a lot of flashiness and story. Multiplayer mode with experiences on offer for all skill levels

> Warcraft series
see Starcraft

>TF2 is an experience
Couldn't have said it better myself.

>All those memes
>All those games
>All those mods and custom servers
>All those friends you made

>everything is gone now.

The whole image is a basedboy shitpost in disguise, I'm actually surprised this many retards are responding

Melee
Melee
Melee
Melee
Pokemon

Yeah Melee and Pokemon
Skyrim
Simpsons hit and run pc
Aria of sorrow

No, it's clearly fruit-shaped maps.

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>is two steps back the logical next step

This a retarded distinction.

Check the archives for "linear open world" if you want to see a best of- that autist compilation.

>Strive for depth in every area
>Chrono Trigger

You have got to be kidding me

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