The zerglings aren't the logical center, ordering them is. You don't *do* anything with the visual and audio cues, you may react to them, but not by manipulating them.
But if there isn't a zergling there's nothing to order, even if the mechanics behind it are in place. Reacting to what you perceive is the precondition allowing you to manipulate the perceived object, meaning that even the very specific way in which you perceive an object will affect how you interact with it. To illustrate, an object made out to look slow and clunky would be more difficult to control in a virtual environment if it acted light and fast because of the false perception this would create. Your thinking on how to manipulate the object itself is reliant on what you know about the object, particularly from just looking at it, and rts games exploit that by making the units unique and memorable, thus instantly compartmentalizing your short-term memory which helps you in your goal of controlling said unit. Even when you're scrolled away from your base looking for an expansion you'll know by issuing the move command that you've selected a peon rather than a grunt -- and the sound-work follows a rigid set of basic criteria that need to be filled to adequately fulfill its function as a serviceable indicator on top of the "artistic" merit of making something that sounds "nice" and doesn't turn the player off from playing.
Is this sarcasm? You can't compare the two to find out which is better, it's like comparing Baroque paintings with Renaissance paintings to figure out which is better, when that doesn't make any sense.
It makes perfect sense, the difference is only in the criteria used for comparison. Which is a better game at a LAN party for instance. Which is better if you have 1 h to kill v.s a week-end. Which is better in a competitive environment. Which paintings are better suited for the Renaissance museum -- Baroque or Renaissance paintings? Which fits better in a pie -- apples or oranges? I mean, come on, we can't compare Fallout 1 with Fallout 3 because they're fundamentally different games? If it comes down to categories, you can categorize both Starcraft and Diablo 2 as mouse-driven games and compare them in their reliance to keyboard commands for effective gameplay as a drawback.
No. It was the bit on the balance side of things. They are right that you couldn't do anything against a force field and it was overpowered. The focusing on macro vs micro is a design decision which doesn't tell us anything about the quality of the gameplay. Though this is not really my field of expertise, so we may need a different way to evaluate them. IF the gameplay of both is equally valid then we can move onto other aspects of the game, like creativity. Does this mean that gameplay trumps everything else? The discussion about Starcraft is irrelevant to my question, I just gave a bad analogy which I wasn't particularly knowledgeable about.
What does valid gameplay mean, how do you validate or invalidate it? What's so overpowered about a force-field? Is there a rule that says every function needs to have an effective counter in the game, and who made that rule? How do we objectively judge a game on creativity? I think you're just throwing these words around without actually considering the implications.
It's not a personal preference, it's a choice. The personal preference comes into play from the player's side and not from the developer/creator.
How do they make their choices though? I mean, if it's forced on them, it's not a choice. If they make a particular choice, out of any number of other potential choices, that's preferential decision making. Look at the military industry, warships, planes, guns -- they all have their strengths and weaknesses, priorities and hard counters. The overarching goal is for the equipment to be effective in combat, but that ultimately also comes down to the men operating the equipment. Not saying that this is true in every instance, but in some cases great design may get butchered at the play-testing stage because of the boots on the ground, while at the same time we've become so accustomed to our six-shooters that any supposed superiority of an automatic pistol would be lost on us.
Ehhhh, this is convoluted as well. We have to differentiate between opinions which are based on actual arguments and information vs instinctual knee-jerks that have no such basis.
This is going to become more and more difficult as the argument grows. Perhaps we would be better served by simply restating our original points over and over.
Yes, we are the ones who choose the criteria, but by we I don't mean an individualized set of them. To be able to form an argument we need more concrete material i.e. the intersubjective. Home-brewed philosophemes aren't what criticism and new/better things are born of. The dividing point is the way in which we choose these criteria, not the criteria themselves, and that way is the intersubjective. The balance between and technical competency of the mechanics are the criteria in this context, from which we can actually extract useful information.
Look, I don't actually know what that means. What's balance between mechanics? What's technical competency of mechanics? When you make a machine it's supposed to fill a certain function. Technical competency the way I understand it would be a machine where every part of the machine does its assigned task with maximum efficiency regardless of whether the machine fills its function or does absolutely nothing. Balance between mechanics sounds like machine aesthetics, i.e worthless or more likely detrimental to the task at hand. I don't know, maybe this is some common terminology which I am simply unaware of, but if these are the criteria by which games should be judged then I don't have anything to say about any game that I'm aware of.
It's not though, because the elements of a game aren't interdependent. If the music suddenly stops you can still play the game.
I don't think that's honest. We don't know what the context here is, nor have we established that being able to play the game regardless of the conditions under which it is done separates gameplay from filler. It's sort of like arguing that if the game bugs out and your character is prevented from jumping, the game is still playable albeit you can't progress further. It's true that music generally serves secondary function in most games, barring mainly horror-themed games which become quite comedic rather than terrifying when the music stops or gets switched out for something inappropriate. But one also has to take into account how that shift in perception profoundly changes the way a player acts in the game which doesn't change the mechanics but sure as hell alters the gameplay.
If the whole action is in drab, gray corridors you can still play it etc. I don't like gesamtkunstwerk because it's easily abused and it's not logical outside of the operas of Wagner. Anatomy is not gesamtkunstwerk even if we take it outside of Wagnerian operas.
I hadn't even heard the term before, but I understand what the words mean and figured it for a symbiotic system in art. Movies, comics, games -- that sort of thing. Music if you count the roles of individual instruments, though here I would be at a loss as to why any particular instrument can't just as well be removed or replaced with the performance remaining musical despite that.
That's the thing though, I'm not interested in specific people's goals or ideals (some people literally like and eat shit, that doesn't make it gourmet etc.) because it still doesn't give us concrete info that we can use to improve.
Well, I think it does. People who like and eat shit should be able to state why they do so and shit alternatives based on these criteria could then be cultivated to fit this particular demographic. Same thing here -- you seem to be a big fan of Starcraft -- you might as well be eating shit in public as far as I'm concerned. Your thoughts on the objective qualities of gameplay and art are worthy of debate not because I expect them to be of use in improving the medium but out of the same morbid fascination you might experience when seeing someone chomp down on a huge turd in public, unable to restrain yourself from asking "Dude, what's that all about?"
What specific people want can be found in the variety that we have in the medium, but not in the medium itself. Not to mention that creativity and gameplay are qualities of all games and can't be individualized in any meaningful way.
Nor can they be objectively defined, other than as a byproduct of "what specific people want".
