Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Starfox" data-source="post: 5160223" data-attributes="member: 2303">I think you're shooting beside the target here. For me, the "Illusion of Accomplishment" is where you begin at 1st level fighting goblins that take you 3 round to kill, then advance to level 30 to fight balors that take you three rounds to kill with similar mechanics. Effectively, you have been re-skinned from 1 to 30 and the goblin has been re-skinned as a balor, but nothing really happened. Winning a difficult battle is not in itself an illusory accomplishment. But if the only result of winning said battle is that all numbers are inflated by 10% for the next battle, THAT is an illusion of accomplishment to me. The key is how we use the word "accomplishment" - you use it to mean a task achieved, I use it to mean a reward garnered trough achieving said task. Yours might be better English, but the way I understand the use of "illusion of accomplishment" among gamers, I think my reading is the more common one and the one Celebrim is using (Celebrim, please correct me if I am way off)This is a VERY good illustration of the point I am trying to make here. And games like Torchlight can be very good entertainment - as long as you bye in on the illusion of achievement it provides. Which is in a way a good thing - we feel empowered, entertained, and can relax playing such games. Which leads me to my next point. Using my definition of "illusion of achievement", all gaming is really about this illusion, the difference is only if we accept the illusion or not. To seem real, accomplishment has to bring some qualitative change, not just a quantitative change. For me, qualitative change generally involves a story change - the goblins are a local threat, the balors a global treat. For others it might be the difference between burning hands and meteor storm. For yet others it is a tactic in Chess or Go that is carried out well. But if this qualitative change is felt to be not real, then you've seen trough the illusion of achievement and lost the magic of the game. Because none of these rewards are tangible and real in the way a pay raise or a new car is. (the real-ness of such material rewards can of course also be discussed, especially if you go into religion. Lets not go there.) We have to bye in on the illusion to make them real or it all becomes just useless die rolling.This whole post is kind of tangential to the main discussion and Celebrim's original thesis. But the problem with such a big issue as this is that you have to define the terms you are using quite precisely - this is what I've been trying to help to do here.</blockquote>

Verification