Forum Overview :: Gamerasutra :: Yes, exactly.

[quote name="Senor Barborito"][quote name="mrs. johnson"]Here's my take on all this: 1) I guess I agree with SB about the terrible formulaic playing at the expert levels of games like Starcraft. Any game where the user essentially directs the action instead of controlling it will eventually be boiled down to some kind ultimate recipe, and the speed of the execution of that recipe will be the deciding factor amongst the greatest kings of said game. For this and other reasons I absolutely refuse to master any game. Yeah I know, “mrs. johhnson is terrible at video games, so he covers it up by saying he doesn’t want to master them. Fag.” Not quite. I used to play a lot of Counter Strike. I got good. There was a period of a month where any server I went into I instantly shot to the first position and was accused of cheating. Suddenly, I didn’t want to play anymore. I furiously uninstalled the fucking game and never looked back. Same thing happens in most RPGs I play. I max level out every character, get all the best items, reach the final dungeon and… I close the game and uninstall it. Why? Fuck you. I’ve learned that mastery of any game for me means that the game is no longer a game. Game, by definition, involves play. When a user (me) reaches the point closest to perfection in any game that has a limited number of possibilities, the user no longer “plays”. It becomes some sort of fucking stimulus/response exercise with only one possible response per stimulus. That is not how it works in every day gaming. An average player doesn’t always use the same response for any given stimulus. They vary. That’s a game. Decision making process. It’s not a fucking game when the decisions are no longer decisions but just reenactments of past “best” decisions. 2) Regarding chess. Chess is fucking wonderful. I try to play as much as possible. Thus far, I haven’t had two games that are even close to identical. The actual possibility that I may play three games a day for the rest of my life and never encounter the same game twice is the closest I can come to living in some kind of urbanized eternity. Chess, in my opinion, is the ultimate “game” because under most circumstances the players absolutely must consider what is happening, even if they have been in identical or similar situations twice. Sure there is opening preparation at the grandmaster level, but “skill”, however that is judged in chess, is pure up to some point. When two players at their natural peak play, without either one preparing an opening: that is the ultimate clash of intellect. It is pure and reliant on nothing external whatsoever except analytical abilities. But, I’m spouting. Anyone here want to play chess? Yahoo or something? the mrs. [/quote] Perhaps my C&C1 opponents were not as good as my Starcraft opponents, but I never played two more or less identical C&C1 games. I played a lot of identical Starcraft games, however. --SB[/quote]