Quentin Beck wrote:

Fussbett wrote:



This also reminds me to post Tom Chick's Yahoo.com coverage of the Chris Crawford/Monty Cantsin workshop at GDC.

Yeah, on the one hand, the whole "immersive fallacy" problem seems like a sort of subtle and obscure philosophical point, and then this thing happens and you realize that there are all these people that are totally confused about what games are and how they work and this confusion is based on a version of this fallacy - not about "realism" in the sense of graphics and so on, but a deep confusion about what is and isn't real within the artificial domain of a game, and why that's important. People are actually saying things like "The 'fakeness' of WoW is beside the point." OMFG. How could that possibly be? How is the fakeness of WoW not essentially the whole point of WoW in some way? (And not just because of a simplistic escapism.) Isn't this completely obvious? The Terra Nova crowd is the worst about this, btw. It's as if computer graphics have gotten really high-res, and all of a sudden people assume that representations of things can finally stop being "just" art or "just" games, and we can FINALLY EAT the delicious bowl of fruit in the still life. YAY! DIG IN EVERYBODY! What a fucking mess.

/mc