@JaxonH There are plenty of personal, historical, and sociological factors that come into play when discussing something like the formation of a passionate fandom, though. Also, unlike Tetris, Zelda is full of themes, music, symbols, characters, plots, etc. that are easy to emotionally invest oneself in, which also drives fan passion. You can't simplify all of that to "Zelda is more fun than Tetris." A person might find Tetris to be more fun to play, but invests more emotionally in Zelda for any given number of reasons.
If [x] inspires more passion and excitement in more people than [y]. it's because [x] is more relatable to a wide variety of people for whatever reason. This is not the equivalent of saying "[x] is more fun than [y]." Fun-ness is not an attribute of a media product, it's a description of how a person relates to a thing in a particular way. Now, if you wanted to conduct a worldwide poll on this, you theoretically might be able to conclude: "Worldwide, more people describe [x] as being "fun" than [y]," but that still would be a categorically different statement than "[x] is more fun than [y]."
If you wanted to say "Zelda has a more passionate online fandom than Tetris," I'd be inclined to agree.
@JaxonH RE your last post, I think you're confusing wow factor, newness, cultural impact, innovation for "fun factor" though. Back in the day, Quake, Unreal, Half-Life was where the action was. Those were the games that mattered. Those were the 10/10 AAA games. The industry changers, the trend setters. And what was half the population of those gaming communities playing day in and day out? SubSpace Continuum and Tetrinet. Why were a bunch of Quake clan members spending their time playing Tetris and a 2D pseudo arena shmup? They were fun. Is Quake still played? Yep. Is Tetrinet still played? Yep. The rotating blocks may not have the same cultural impact as the slaying of Aeris, but it still is well received and well played, and people really stopped talking about shamblers and scrags ages ago.
Well you compare Tetris to Zelda, Zelda was once a way of life, how real it feels the environment is alive in Zelda games, the folk lore is there. Tetris is blocks of soulless concrete smashing each other.
I would prefer to compare to specific games, because I never rule out an entire genre of being capable of providing an amazing experience... even if history has shown otherwise.
But you could pick any other game. Job Simulator. Tales of Berseria. LEGO games. Doesn't matter really. Some games are better than others. Even if you account for the people who really like those particular games... some will be judged better/more entertaining/higher intensity of entertainment than others.
I'd argue that Tetris was one the earliest cultural phenomenon in gaming. Just because it is now played out and not new anymore doesn't mean it's any less of a game. Sure, nobody is running out telling people about this exciting new thing called Tetris on the Switch. But is that because it's not great or because everyone already knows about it? I'd argue it's more of the latter.
If how many people rush to tell people about it is the measure of how fun a game is? Then BotW is less fun than a lot of super casual games. Because if you were to rank game series based on lifetime sales:
#1. Tetris
#2. Super Mario (the platformer specifically)
#3. Pokemon
#4. GTA
#5. CoD
#6. Wii ____
#7. The Sims
#8. Need for Speed
#9. Final Fantasy
#10. Minecraft
#11. Mario Kart
#12. FIFA
#13. Lego
#14. Madden
#15. Assassin's Creed #16. Zelda
#17. Sonic
#18. Pro Evolution Soccer
#19. Tom Clancy's
#20. Gran Turismo
Justin Bieber music is not master piece it's with new age with culture of today. Again folk lore games like Zelda Pokémon and Mario are different then Tetris. You guys are arguing apples to oranges. Charts mean nothing to the heart it's unmeasurable. It's whatever the gaming industry is catering to the type of people in this world. They can write and say anything they want on that chart or article anyway.
Anyway great conversation. For my part I tend to agree Tetris is as close to perfection as a game can get.
Like others have noted it was perhaps the biggest cultural phenomenon in gaming bar none for a reason. There are definitely people more interested in Tetris than Zelda but it's not novel at this point and there's not many new hooks to grab people into buying the latest version or even writing articles about it.
Still for people like my mum, who would be impressed and interested in the concept of Zelda but have no chance of even walking around in that game, Tetris will always be a more fun game.
Personally, if it's the end of the world and I have 24 hours notice then I'm playing Zelda. If I have half an hour then I'm playing Tetris.
If how many people rush to tell people about it is the measure of how fun a game is? Then BotW is less fun than a lot of super casual games.
What I was saying that not only is it wrong to measure a game's level of "fun" by hype and/or word of mouth. But if you were to measure games based on that factor alone Tetris would be the "most fun" game of all time.
@Ralizah
Maybe, but one thing I absolutely refuse to believe is that a game is automatically fun just because it has good graphics and good sound and all that yada yada yada. And that was my whole point from the beginning is that the game is not necessarily the sum of its parts. And I don't know where the line should be drawn, but beyond a certain point, if there's only .00005% of gamers in the world who played the game who think it's the best thing ever, then I'm going to consider those people outliers and say that the entire world agrees the game sucks. Or that those 12 people just don't have any good experience with better games to compare it to, and therefore lack perspective. And good on them for enjoying it- by all means they may continue- but I'm going to refer to that game as a sucky game.
@StuTwo
Ya, it was a cultural phenomenon and a piece of history and all that. But only because people hadn't experienced anything even remotely that good before. Had all the modern classics released the same day Tetris did back in the 80s or whenever, well...
@skywake
I never said anything about counting how many. I said measure the intensity. Because I know some games are mortgage then others so you have to go by the people who play those games, but if the people who play game A and love the genre say the game is a 7/10 on the fun factor scale and people who play game B and love th genre say it's a 9/10 on a fun factor scale, then Game B is clearly funnier than Game A. It has nothing to do with counting how many. Has everything to do with the opinions of those who like the genre.
All have sinned and fall short of Gods glory. Wages of sin is death. Romans
God so loved the world He sent His only Son- whoever believes on Him has eternal life. Unless you believe, you will die in your sins. Whoever believes, rivers of living water flow within them. John
@NEStalgia
Never said the games weren't fun. But no, I am very specifically talking about how fun. I think you're the one confusing cultural impact. I'm strictly speaking about the amount of fun a game provides, and no two games are equal... and you're about to see that as I'm about to demonstrate.
Games reviews used to account for fun factor. And there were rounded reviewers who could pretty much play anything and enjoy it (if it's good). This modern notion that "all games are equal" and it's just a matter of having good components... that's the kind of thinking that leads to annual cookie cutter AAA always scoring 9/10 just because it has flashy graphics and snazzy presentation and expensive soundtrack. Yes, it's part of it. Yes, there is a correlation between having good individual components and the end result being fun. But correlation =/= cause and effect. Games are not always the sum of their parts... sometimes they're more, sometimes they're less.
And maybe we'll never truly be able to quantify it accurately, because there's so much noise involved with opinions (e.g. did the person just get done playing 4 other JRPG's? Maybe the game is fine but they're burnt out). But we do the best we can, and you absolutely can quantify it by having all gamers who enjoy the genre (no one else, otherwise bias will affect results) assign a numeric value for fun factor only. Then treat it like any other statistic. Take the average, calculate standard deviation, and there ya go.
THIS IS ONLY FUN-FACTOR SCORES AMONG FANS OF THE GENRE FOR EACH GIVEN GAME, TO ELIMINATE BIAS FROM THOSE WITH OTHER PREFERENCES
All have sinned and fall short of Gods glory. Wages of sin is death. Romans
God so loved the world He sent His only Son- whoever believes on Him has eternal life. Unless you believe, you will die in your sins. Whoever believes, rivers of living water flow within them. John
@StuTwo
Ya, it was a cultural phenomenon and a piece of history and all that. But only because people hadn't experienced anything even remotely that good before. Had all the modern classics released the same day Tetris did back in the 80s or whenever, well...
You see this is one of the things that makes this such an interesting conversation. I think that had Tetris never been invented in the 80's and hit for the first time today it'd be just as much "fun" and it'd still have an incredible impact on the industry.
A game doesn't need to be "complex" or lavishly produced to do that - Tetris in 1989 was already ancient and incredibly simple. By the time the Game Boy hit you could buy SMB3! You can see something similar today in a game like Rocket League - an incredibly simple and cheaply produced game compared to any AAA game but it's had an incredible impact.
To look at things in another context - ancient Egyptian art. It's all 2d and "unrealistic". It looks "primitive" and there's a tendency to think that it's that way because the ancient Egyptian artists lacked the skill to paint realistically...
...but of course that's nonsense. Ancient Egyptian artists crafted some incredibly lifelike statues and their painted art shows a high level of technical skill equivalent to that of today's artists. If they had wanted to paint realistic representations of people they easily could have. They choose not to.
I don't know the exact reason why. Perhaps it's because it allowed them to communicate the essential parts of their message without obstruction or distraction. Or perhaps it's simply because their culture had built up certain expectations over time and only that type of painting could really talk to an ancient Egyptian audience.
To take another example - medieval cathederals have a lot of visual language built in that's completely lost to the overwhelming majority of people today. We can see that they are beautiful and appreciate some of the craftsmanship but the impact is very different to us.
Playing a game like BoTW requires a particular skill set and familiarity with an accumulated cultural understanding of a whole host of systems and visual indicators. There are tens of millions of people who share the background needed to appreciate BoTW but billions who lack the underpinnings to even begin to appreciate it.
Tetris is different. As a very, very abstract but very simple game it has much lower barriers to entry. It's a masterpiece of design, in part, because it creates its own completely unique and innovative cultural language (although it's occasionally dressed as other things).
Which means that 1,000 years from now Tetris will still be fun and many people will still play it for fun whatever other options for having fun are available. By contrast BoTW will probably not be enjoyed by anyone other than academics who have studied the "language" and "culture" of early videogames.
@StuTwo
I never said A game has to be complex. But there's a difference between Rocket Legaue and a game with 7 shapes that rotate. A game doesn't have to be complex, but complexity does correlate with intensity of enjoyment. It's why youre not playing Tick tac toe and hopskotch right now, and why games with too much complexity can harm user enjoyment.
The increase in potential fun is exponential though, and beyond a certain point you get overlap, where simple games can be more fun than more complex games. But there is a limit and as complexity approaches that limit, there is an inflection point beyond which intensity of enjoyment increases at a decreasing rate, and before it intensity of enjoyment increases at an increasing rate. And then theres a point where it actually starts decreasing because the game is too complex to enjoy
But my argument isn't about Tetris, or complexity... people are focusing too much on that. I just pulled a random game out of thin air. But pertaining to it I don't think it would be a phenomenon today. Not in the slightest.
I think the diagram says it all. You can measure central tendancy and dispersion of any game among it's most loyal fans, and measure the difference.
The simplest way to express fun as a function of complexity is with a quadratic. But complexity clearly has an impact on fun... or at least, maximum potential fun
All have sinned and fall short of Gods glory. Wages of sin is death. Romans
God so loved the world He sent His only Son- whoever believes on Him has eternal life. Unless you believe, you will die in your sins. Whoever believes, rivers of living water flow within them. John
@JaxonH I don't necessarily disagree that games increase in potential "fun" as they become more complex but I do suspect that the inflection point is far closer to Tetris than it is to BoTW than you perhaps think.
Marketing and selling simple games like Tetris today though can be difficult because people seem to believe they should be free. This is one of the drivers that's driven certain genres out of fashion - after a certain point adding complexity to them (which is necessary to justify the cost charged) makes them more obtuse and less pallet able.
One of the reasons why BoTW is so great is that it draws back on some of the excesses of its genre and presents simplified systems that do exactly the same things but in ways which are more approachable.
I stand by what I said earlier though - it's built on a foundation and cultural history of decades of other games. If you don't have any history with the "language" established by those games then much of BoTW is going to be lost on you and it won't be a fun experience. Tetris doesn't have this problem - it's the origin and it's almost impossible for us now today to appreciate just how completely innovative the game actually is (and like many early games how completely abstract it was).
Of course as people who have the cultural background to appreciate it BoTW is an amazing culmination of 30 years of design. Which is why I'm going to play it. Right now at my desk.
@JaxonH Sure, I don't disagree with you that a game is fun or not separately from the quality of its assembled components. Naughty Dog games are some of the highest quality products on the market, for example, but I find the majority of them to be incredibly frustrating experiences. They seem more like interactive movies that give the illusion of freedom but won't allow you to stray too far outside the scope of their very directed design.
People are very passionate about their games, though. You should see the excitement with which people talk about something like The Last of Us Part II. Does that mean their games are objectively more fun than less popular ones I have more fun with, or that, for whatever reason, their games just didn't manage to resonate with me, and that they're more enjoyable for some people than for others?
It seems like the moment you start trying to quantify "fun factor" as some attribute of a product, you lose the plot a bit.
Are we really trying to establish a correlation between complexity and fun via graphs now? Is this how asinine this whole topic has gotten?
Let's add engagement, depth and number of physical inputs per minute, just for kicks. We might break into the third dimension and get something like this:
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