babark: By who? Certainly not the consensus. I didn't think Gone Home was the best thing ever in the universe, but I enjoyed it enough while I was playing it.
I just recently finished playing Qora, which seems to fit what you are saying very well. It could conceivable be labelled a "non-game" or whatever people use to denigrate this type of stuff, and I actually loved it. It took me about 2 hours to complete, the didn't really have any serious "challenge" to speak of (unless you're an achievement or multiple endings completionist). The entire game consisted of pressing either the forward key, the up key or the down key, and occasionally tapping the spacebar for whatever contextual interaction was on screen- there was no possibility to miss a jump or hit the wrong thing or such.
And it was great! Great music, great art, involving and humourous story, and I certainly enjoyed it, and enjoyed it in a way I know I wouldn't enjoy if I was watching a movie. I may not have bought it at full price, but then again, I never buy a game at full price anyhow.
Is somehow it worth less because it doesn't focus so heavily on mechanics? Should I care that developers (allegedly) don't like those sort of games? Is it less deserving of praise or notice? Is my liking it somehow proof that I want to ban games not like it? Who wants to ban games not like it? Nobody I've ever read or seen has ever said "Gone Home/Depression Quest/Qora is great, other types of games shouldn't exist!".
As long as it is clearly communicated what sort of game a game is, none of this should be any issue at all. I SO much more prefer games like this rather than games that pretend to be "REAL" games but turn out to be boring linear button-mashing (supposedly requiring skill) inbetween pre-built kill animations moving from cutscene to cutscene (Metal Gear Rising Revengeance comes to mind).
The way I see it, gone home requires more patience in state of mind to play through. If the player is not in the right mindset; ie wanting to skip the story and get the gameplay, gone home will fail to impress the player. For someone to enjoy it, IMO, there needs to be certain conditions that must be satisfied. They shouldn't be looking for a complex mechanical puzzle like Dark Souls or the like. Enjoying it proves you can immerse yourself easier basically, or that you can feel immersed without needing too much gameplay, and the game's writing is enough to do that. So people who are really used to being mechanically and narratively immersed and require both factors to be immersed won't feel immersed. So no right or wrong; just taste with this one. Some people may have the opposite. They may not feel immersed in the Souls-like narrative style because the narrative element is mostly hidden and can only be found through exploration. So mechanically and narrative are basically two parts of the whole game; and most people have particular tastes into how much they want of each. So its subjective is what I'm sayin :D
amok: well, if enjoying what I like to enjoy and let other people enjoy what they like to enjoy, makes me not a gamer, then I would more than happily say I am not a gamer. I will then just play the games I like to play, be it Psychonauts, Duke Nukem or Gone Home... but if this is the "common consesnsus", then please do not also say games should have "much more tolerant spaces", because what you are describing is the opposite of this - intolerance towards things you do not like.
So I guess this gamer is dead, long live doing what I like and playing what I find fun :)
Shadowstalker16: You do realize me saying that back then was a joke right? And you taking it seriously meant you have belief the proGG can support tolerance. So kudos for being a castle-gate more openminded than Vain.
Do you not see that antiGG has been shaming and hating from the start? Gamers are dead? Gaming=intolerance?? What kind of mainstream media slob would believe playing a game would cause someone to change their behavior to the delicious media fantasy of ''exclusion''? AntiGG and SJ in general suffers from HUGE intolerance complex. They don't just express their dissatisfaction on twitter, and get called intolerant. They try to remove the thing they don't tolerate. So yes, if AntiGG wants mechanically-focused gamers to stop insulting antigames, stop the stupid intolerance to any game which offends you [ie; them, not actually you].
Certainly it is true that Gone Home is something one might enjoy. And I don't see anything wrong with that. My actual beef with Gone Home is the way the press and award organizers have treated the game just because there are homosexuals in the story. They give it too much praise, possibly more than deserved, just because it is "progressive". Imagine if the main story was not about a homosexual relationship but about a heterosexal one, it would be panned by "critics" and win only awards fro bad games.
