Naked Ninja said:
Sorry, I have to call bullshit on this. Many studies have been done on the mathematics behind beauty. Here is an example of a principle that most people are familiar with, the golden ratio:
http://www.intmath.com/Numbers/mathOfBeauty.php
This must be why we all have the same taste in members of the opposite gender. I call reverse bullshit.
Wrong. Whether you like big butts or not, there are certain universals such as preferring women who are closer to symmetrical than not, those with clear skin, and a waist to hip ratio close to 0.7 that people find attractive. Why? They are indicators of genetic fitness and overall health. These facts are well established. The information is there if you care to look.
Nobody claimed that everyone thinks one person is the most attractive. Your exception is pointless because you misunderstood the premise. Outliers exist in practically every sample you could draw randomly. They prove nothing.
I get the impression that math is foreign to you because the logic you are using is just plain bad here. Next you are going to claim that because almost everyone is married almost everyone who is unattractive is married and that must mean at least one person thinks they are really attractive... completely ignoring that with a limited number of attractive people some are going to be forced to settle.
Naked Ninja said:
The mathematics of fun, if you will.
No, this maps average play experience (like how often they die on average, how long a level takes, etc etc) of people who already enjoy shooters. It doesn't map shit for people who don't like shooters.
Wrong again. First off, their system is far more sophisticated than you claim. They map health, ammo, and time spent in a location over time as well as where people die over time. This allows them to adjust the flow and pace of a level and add some lighting to a door people are missing or put in a cache of weapons etc. While average play statistics are part of this analysis, it's hardly what they are really interested in.
One of the things they are most interested in is bringing in someone like Gabe Newell's father who doesn't play video games and seeing how he does (I assume on the easiest setting). The testing is specifically to make the whole experience more fun, not to have a mean death rate of 3 per level on normal for people who play 2 new shooters a year.
Naked Ninja said:
You seem to think that fun is so esoteric that intelligent reviewers cannot easily pick out that pokemon is fun because it combines the progression of levelling inside a collection construct with a lite puzzle mechanic represented by battles
That is not what makes it fun. You could have 3 games all with the same principle gameplay concept of pokemon yet 2 suck and 1 doesn't. You don't need to pick apart the mechanics to me, just say "it's a collect and battle creatures game, with light puzzle elements". Then tell me which specific elements make it great or crap. Not a 5 page essay examining each feature and it's context within the history of every other game in the genre. In a similar manner you don't need to explain the mechanics of RTS to your reader every time, or go much further than saying Oblivion plays as a free roaming FPS RPG. All you need to do is discuss significant features/problems, unless the game deviates wildly from all the other games of a similar type which gamers have experienced.
Wrong yet again. There have been attempts to deconstruct fun into several distinct activities so as to better understand how to achieve it in games. I believe that 11 different types were identified.
A few off the top of my head that I remember are:
-Challenge
-Collection
-Exploration
-Building
-Destruction
-Learning in a safe environment
-Completion
-Something to do with resource management
Personally, I find collection and exploration mechanics to be less enjoyable than the others, so if I read in a game review that a game relies heavily on both of these I would suspect that the game is not for me. It doesn't take 5 pages (why do 5 pages scare you but not 4? lol) to do this, and it doesn't require a comparison to every other game out there.
It DOES, however, require the person writing the review to have relevant background knowledge. Without it you have the rediculous situation of a reviewer giving game X a 10/10 "because it is super fun" when game Y came out two weeks prior in the same genre with similar features and is not only more polished but more fun. The only reason game X gets a 10 is because the reviewer had no idea game Y existed. What is he then supposed to give game Y when he plays it after game X if he enjoys it far more... 12/10?
Reading that a game was "immersive" for the guy who played through the game in 2 days on-site of the developer after volunteering for it at the magazine he works for tells me jack-shit.