No matter how good you get, ultimately you *will* lose. The closest you get to winning in Tetris is being able to last as long as you can. However, the *frustration* and *monotony* will *always* trump whatever fun and pride in your skills you have.

No matter how much praise Tetris has gotten- including from you, sir- I won’t be coming back to play it for that reason. My time playing Tetris, no matter how sharp or skillful I become, no matter how well I compete, becomes meaningless and pointlessin the face of that defeat and frustration.

And when a player becomes frustrated enough, he simply stops playing- especially where he knows he can’t win. There’s even a chance he may stop playing the game completely, thus also totally negating whatever fun the game does provide.

Or does he?

There are people out there who continue on despite those, despite not just the challenge and how impossible it is to win but even the frustration. They do it for the high score, to beat their previous performance.

The problem there is that it’s at that point that it becomes a compulsion. It’s people like that who get called video game addicts as much as people who completely and irresponsibly shut out the real world in favor of Azeroth.

If all you’ve got to go on is a betterment of skills in a particular objective that makes a game, then no matter how much some games are more deserving of the term in your eyes, it’s still pushing a button to raise a number.

“who killed videogames? (a ghost story)” by tim rogers

I also enjoy Puerto Rico very much, but there, I am playing against human beings, the play does not involve speed and motor coordination, and my opponents have more or less the same limitations I have. In any game involving speed, reflexes, coordination, recognition and reaction, memory and recall, the computer has me beat simply from a hardware standpoint. The software has to be written to tone those innate abilities down.

For me, a game has to have a goal: beat the final boss, rescue the princess, complete the last level (implies there must BE a last level), solve the mystery, catch the criminal, figure out the puzzles, reach home base. To me, any game that MUST end with player death or resignation, does not have a goal. The third option, that the computer has nothing left to throw at me, i.e. the computer loses, must always exist in a game.

Finally, the computer must not be able to “cheat”, that is, if it is playing the part that another human may play in a multiplayer setting, the computer AI must not have access to any information that the hypothetical human player would not have. If I see a computer player making decisions that could only be made if it had access to information that should be private to me, then I have just lost all interest in playing that game.

Board games, hmm, I do like Clue; the others are just “roll dice and walk around the board” to me. I like Cosmic Encounter, Diplomacy, most of the Cheapass Games output – but I admit I haven’t tried most of the Euro-import games that are now highly recommended by my friends who are highly interested in such things (Carcasonne, Settlers of Catan), mostly because I can never find players.

Incidentally, without meaning offense, your comment further down about the danger of building games around a story is why I think we’ll probably always have irreconcilable points of view. To me the story is the first and foremost thing that attracts me to a game, unless it is a pure puzzle, which I play for the joy of finding the solution.

Also I would call Portal a puzzle-app. There aren’t “interesting, ambiguous decisions” to make in Portal, there’s just a solution that you have to find.

And with regards to Half Life – as much as I really like a lot about those games, I think even they only roughly qualify as classical games because of the saving/loading. Essentially, where we went wrong, I think, was in how we started building games around a “story”. This meant that “losing” could really no longer feasibly be an option… which of course means that winning is the only option and therefore what does it matter what you do?

I also suspect that your idea of board games is stuff like Risk, Monopoly, Clue, Sorry, that kind of stuff. Go to http://www.boardgamegeek.com and click on games. Sort by rank – notice that all of those MB-type games are on the absolute BOTTOM. If I had to play those games, it’d be for the social factors, too!

100 Rogues, just to clarify, is not that hard. The reason some people think it’s hard is because they have the mistaken impression that they’re “supposed” to be able to “complete the game”. In fact, this is not the case at all. Winning in 100 Rogues is beating your high score, and this is not that hard to do (although it gets harder as you get better, naturally).

This is an interesting conceptual divide. I have to admit that I didn’t play 100 Rogues because of the way death and difficulty was handled. If I hadn’t seen your thoughts here and in the Diablo article, I wouldn’t have understood your position at all.

Personally I think I would like to favor a middle way – I’d like there to be a purpose and a plot and some thinking involved, but I’d also like the games to be fairly forgiving, where if you decide you’ve done the wrong thing or made a bad choice, either you can work to overcome/nullify the consequences, or at least restore a save game.

For me personally the comparison to board games doesn’t hold up because, frankly, the challenge level of board games is irrelevant to me – when I play them, which is far too seldom because I have no nearby friends interested in playing them, it’s because of the social aspects; it’s something to do while chatting and being together. (This is the same reason I keep playing Rift even though I’ve pretty much seen all it has to offer – that’s the only place I get to interact with one of my friends.) In fact, I’d almost say that a physical game which is too much of a challenge gets in the way of the social activity.

The real question is how much challenge players want, and while there should be games for all parts of that spectrum (and I’m glad you’re addressing some of the gaps), some of us just don’t want our *recreational* activities to be that much of a struggle, especially if we don’t have all that much recreational time to allocate in the first place.

None of this is meant to get in your face, Keith, and I appreciate your taking the time to post here. But I do think we’re coming at this from very different directions – not that there’s anything wrong with that!