To me this points to the fact that sensual experience is overrated. Not that is useless, of course. I like eating chocolate, and many other “sensual experiences”, and I wouldn’t want to lose them. But looking at games—well, I tend to find modern games more boring and less pleasant to play than good-old games of before, because they focus so much on making realistic graphics and thrilling music, and much less on making a game which is actually fun to play. Comparing comparable games, I enjoyed Planescape: Torment much more than any more modern computer role-playing game that has much better graphics than 640x480 2d tiles.
But well… that could also be a case of preferring the games I played as a child/teenager to the ones I play now, which is quite a general bias.
But there is another more dramatic view of this : the kind of games I enjoy the most are roleplaying game (the pen and paper version), in which sensory input is very low. We do add a bit of music sometimes (but not that often), and having a nice rulebook with pretty (or scary) pictures does add to the game, sure. Sensory input is not meaningless. But it’s not, at least to me, the most important part of a game—or even one of the most important part.
I’m also wondering how much I’m “abnormal” in this respect. I prefer books over movies, by far. I prefer pen&paper role-playing to graphically heavy game. Many people have the opposite preferences…
To me this points to the fact that sensual experience is overrated. Not that is useless, of course. I like eating chocolate, and many other “sensual experiences”, and I wouldn’t want to lose them. But looking at games—well, I tend to find modern games more boring and less pleasant to play than good-old games of before, because they focus so much on making realistic graphics and thrilling music, and much less on making a game which is actually fun to play. Comparing comparable games, I enjoyed Planescape: Torment much more than any more modern computer role-playing game that has much better graphics than 640x480 2d tiles.
But well… that could also be a case of preferring the games I played as a child/teenager to the ones I play now, which is quite a general bias.
But there is another more dramatic view of this : the kind of games I enjoy the most are roleplaying game (the pen and paper version), in which sensory input is very low. We do add a bit of music sometimes (but not that often), and having a nice rulebook with pretty (or scary) pictures does add to the game, sure. Sensory input is not meaningless. But it’s not, at least to me, the most important part of a game—or even one of the most important part.
I’m also wondering how much I’m “abnormal” in this respect. I prefer books over movies, by far. I prefer pen&paper role-playing to graphically heavy game. Many people have the opposite preferences…