The great debate

[A Black Falcon]

The problem with games is that they need to have gameplay. Have a game constructed like a film, with only rare, occasional action scenes and lots of other stuff in between, and it doesn't work... even in an adventure game you need lots of puzzles and such to solve. You need to be doing something most of the time. In an action game, that often means shooting or hitting people or what not... that's just a fact of the way games work.

I mean, a realistic war game where you spend a six month tour there and shoot like maybe a couple of people wouldn't be much fun... the nature of the medium makes realism very hard (your average combat flight game mission involves shooting down more planes than virtually any pilot who has ever lived has shot down in their whole careers...). Is this a problem? It can be at times, yeah... but there isn't really a good way out of it. How, exactly, do you make a game engaging and worth playing without gameplay content? Kind of hard... :)

Maybe "Games have to be fun" is somewhat of a restriction on the industry, but what is the alternative?