Q: Is it enough to talk about Games Individually or do we need to talk about Games as a cultural whole?

One is a tragedy, many is a statistic.

Is it possible to gain insight into the art of Video Games (the storytelling, the cinematic design, the character design, the gameplay elements that make the package compelling or not) by looking at a game by itself? There is insight to gain in a market report sense, did you have fun, where the controls buggy, were parts of the game overly frustrating, but what I mean is on a digestive-sense can we learn from games in isolation steering away from the idea that all art is a reproduction of past art

To gain insight we look at games as a comparison of others, naturally fashioning some order of which is better than another in some respects but worse in others and we can discuss why things are better in some ways than others. But a lot of elements that make up a game that make it good don’t necessarily get carried over to subsequent generations.

For many games, there is no genetic evolution for its offspring, taking the best elements of the ancestor and passing it along to the offspring. For many games, they are incestuously stuck tweaking the best elements they have disproportionately augmenting their strengths to overcompensate for their weaknesses.

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