cafeman

You wouldn't happen to think that they may be cross-promoting between the 35-50 segment (who grew up with pinball machines) and their kids, would you?

Nah, that'd require thought.

Kyle Orland wrote:

'Ask any gamer who's gotten a 100 percent completion in Grand Theft Auto III if they were inclined to give up because it was "too hard."'

You're comparing strongly task-oriented gameplay with short-term highly achievable goals built on the same principles as a Skinner box against an activity that requires strong abstract and conceptual skills, both of which require a significant amount of development, and neither of which offers strong short-term pay-offs.

I don't agree with the article in that games are the cause of the lack of attention in kids, but saying that beating 100% of GTAIII is analogous to learning complex higher math or science is facile at best. I know you're supposedly "only" blogging (and pulling in an income from it, natch), but there's a reason *why* games and gamers cop so much flack. It's because of comparisons like the one presented by Kyle. People other than gamers don't take schlock like this seriously because it's not even close to rational - it's middle-school level logic. Gamers like to laugh at Jack Thompson, but what I think most don't realise is that when comparisons like this are made, it simply provides ammunition to the rest of the media to have a laugh at "gamers" as a whole. Somewhat unfairly, I might add, given that it's just one mouthpiece that's making such a statement.

There are plenty of rebuttals against what Cohen is suggesting (including a misguided educational system, a strong disconnect between learning and personal development / success, and so on), but saying that gamers aren't afraid of working hard because they'll do lots of short-term tasks with immediate pay-offs isn't one of them.

"Americans are big on individuality, hence they like free-roaming environments in games"

Different cultures do look for different things in games, but the first and the fourth bullet points are tenuous at best. I think this has more to do with a bad summary of the article than the article itself, as there's a heck of a lot more detail in the 1up piece.

Free-roaming games such as Zelda and Mario 64 have also been extremely popular in Japan. And, FPSs are also very popular in the UK and Australia, neither of which has a "gun-culture".

The free-roaming vs. cinematic gameplay only makes sense if you look at GTA and FF (insert generic JRPG here) at the exclusion of everything else. Western RPGs are equally as prone to linear storylines, no matter how they try to hide it. KOTOR, for example, was highly linear, even though characters would react slightly differently to you depending on your actions.

My personal opinion is that apart from the preference against FPSs, it has more to do with the role and audience of games in Japanese culture. A wider cross-section of society plays games in Japanese society compared to Western society. It's like manga - it's just something that people do.

That directly influences game design. Games like Oblivion are just not oriented towards people who don't play games for long periods of time. It's a *world* to explore, not just a game. That has implications for time spent playing, which in turn makes it unattractive to anyone who can't spare that time (which, to be honest, is most people). Games like Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing tell you what to do, give you very basic tasks, and set you to work. You can play a day of game time, maybe discover something new (or not), and then drop it and do something else. That's why I believe the DS is doing so well in Japan and why proportionally, open-ended gameplay experiences tend not to do as well in total marketshare as they do in the US.

Blake, either your teacher didn't know what they were talking about, they were generalising to make it easier for you, or you misunderstood. It's commonly understood that 30 samples is enough to approach a representative population mean. Depending on what you're trying to measure, 300 could be far more than you need, or far too few. The required sample size also depends on the tests you'll be doing.

What's more important is *how* those samples were obtained. Are they representative, or not? A sampe of 52 is more than adequate for identifying trends, but the more important question is whether or not the 52 were selected using any appropriate statistical methodology.

Where people frequently get confused is they think greater numbers = a better survey. That's not necessarily true - if you're trying to identify statistically significant differences between populations (such as preference for console A vs. console B between males and females), having too many respondents can actually magnifify the power of the test, making it identify differences that while statistically significant, are so small in absolute terms as to be meaningless. What difference does it make if 51.2% of males prefer the 360 compared to 51.3% of females, even if *is* statistically significant?

Guys, seriously. Wii Play isn't that much fun. It's worth about the AU$5 I paid for it over the standard price for a controller, and not much more. There's about five to ten hours of entertainment in it, and that's it. Really.

People are going to be *very* disappointed when they get their hands on it. It's basically a collection of training exercises to teach you how to use the Wiimote. Unless you're really obsessive-compulsive, you'll only be briefly entertained.

It's not quite what you're talking about, but there was a game from the 90's called Guitaropolis that used a game-like environment to run through exercises. The interactive games had more to do with tone recognition and reading music than they did with actually playing the guitar, but there were plenty of exercises to teach you how to play the guitar within the game.

I always thought it would have been great if the game had used the microphone to pick up what notes you were playing.

Re #5 - it's the prototype. See here:

http://nintendoinsider.com/site/EpluZVpZlZhJoXkYvf.php