Let's not play Humble Bundle 8 Behind the SCEEEEEEEEEENEEEEEEEEEEESby Worm 06/06/2013, 3:31pm PDT
Here I wish I made some joke about thinking it was Paradious and not Proteus, that I hadn't called Silverchair's album "THE Freakshow", that I said something like "gameplay is the craft, while music and graphics are decorations if a game isn't fun in vector mode then it's just painted shit", and finally that I had verified Little Inferno was parody so I could dismiss that as a justification of it being so lame.
This came off a little weaker than I wanted, but it sure is hard to hate something where they let you pay a cent for video games. I guess the issue is as a non-asshole, I feel slightly compelled to cough up for the steam codes and always regret it. I mainly regret it because I have more glut it in my steam library, and secondly because I feel like a rube for contributing to the overall success of a sale of mostly crappy games, even if I gave all my money to the Dear Esther(symbolically throwing it away).
The idea of non-games or even light games being classified and marketed as proper video games has always pissed me off. Ever since I first "played" Passage and screamed at my computer for people having enjoyed it, I've fucking hated this idea. It seems like these types of games are getting more and more experimental too where a game simply having some kind of forward progress is good enough for it to be a full fledged video game. You can find things in Proteus so it must be a game and not a toy, I can find things in my back yard, does that make it a game? Fuck no!
Before I fall into some kind of metaphor hell let me provide an actual example. You know how NiGHTs let you wander around the land scape before picking up the suit?(or assume control of Nights, I always thought of it was picking up the suit) That's Proteus, but you never pick up the suit. Now I think most reasonable people would agree that NiGHTs the game starts when you pick up the suit so what is all the stuff before it when you wander around? I'm not quite sure! However it's important that somewhere a game begins isn't it?
I'm open to a lot of ridiculous interpretations of what makes a game as well but certainly there needs to be some kind of objective or goal which is reached via some interaction from the player. When the player becomes unnecessary I don't think the game is a game anymore. When games don't have a goal they really don't need a player, when games have a goal that is literally braindead to reach they don't really need a player. I think that's the biggest difference even in something which is very much a toy, like Minecraft if someone had some kind of grievous brain injury they might not understand how to build there would be some goal they couldn't reach. However in Proteus it wouldn't be a problem, there are some events and you'll just walk into them or not, there is zero gaminess there.