@OpinionatedGamer said:
I've never played it but I've heard of people who quit their jobs to play that game, lol. I honestly dont even really know what the gameplay is.
MMOs are like regular games, but much, much more tedious -- by design. If they didn't have operant conditioning working for them, no one would play them. MMOs aren't games, they're complicated slot machines. :)
Which brings me to my next topic, what makes a good game? [I wish I could say, "me," but that's patently not the case.] I'm sure there's already loads of posts on the subject, but I can't be bothered to search for them.
(1) Replayable. This pretty much excludes most story-driven games, unless you like watching the same movies over and over again. [Cut scenes are the spawn of Azathoth. The games my brother plays seem to be nothing but cut scene. I just don't get it. If I wanted to watch a movie, I'd get out a disc.] A great game can be replayed indefinitely. Good example: Civilization.
(2) Simple play. If you can't hold a conversation while you're playing, something is wrong. As for button mashers, I could get repetitive stress injuries doing something worthwhile. Turn-based games are great about this, with the only draw-back that they're not ideal for playing against other humans, since you end up waiting for your turn too often.
(3) Easy to modify. A truly great game has a scripting engine built-in that encourages you to make changes. Open-source games get points for at least the possibility of changing them, even if the developers don't encourage it.
Side note: At one time, the developer board of the Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup game was a great place to learn about the important qualities of a good game. (And it may still be.) One of the things I learned there was, "If there's one 'right' way to do something, that task should be removed from the game."
