PARADOX DISARMED

But yeah, they can do no wrong.

But seriously, though, the point of my "right or wrong" comment is that there IS no right or wrong! Those are the presumptions that science tries to deal with. It's about trying to see past our subjective points of view and into a greater truth. That's something that I think is on common grounds with religion and a lot of the human experience. The classifying and putting things into a certain order is about rigor and objectivity. It's about creating a common baseline from which to build... everything!

Psychology is interesting because it deals with that perception of the world and that notion there's an ultimate truth out there but our minds cloud it. It embraces that ambiguity and tries to understand what drives it, what's it made up of. It's a study of who we are and that's incredibly interesting. Just like religion.

There's just something I don't get: "Psychology follow an exacting set of rules, but certain religious discussion, however, goes against those rules in a way more befitting the way the human works."

Doesn't religious discussion follow rules as well? It must follow SOME rules, even if both parties aren't following the same set of rules. Maybe the fact it's more free-form than scientific discussion means it can reach matters psychology would be unable?

I will give you one thing, though: religion is inherently more fulfilling, on a primal level, than psychology could be at this point.

Still a terrific game, but yeah, you need to lower your expectations to enjoy it.

I'm essentially talking about the critic's or the enthusiast's dilemma.

When someone is interested in film, they start off by loving movies. If they're curious, they'll try to learn more about them: how they're made, what are the "greats", how can they fail. Then they'll start noticing the flaws: poor delivery of lines, inappropriate editing, boom mics showing, plot holes, etc. They won't be able to stop doing this, they won't be able to avoid looking at movies critically and, as a consequence of that, movies as a whole will start to look bad. But if they keep at it, they'll reach a point where they'll be able to filter that critical eye; they'll be able to take in the experience as a whole and ignore those minor flaws as they coalesce the film as a whole into one critical unit. At that point, they're able to enjoy the movie not on the visceral level a child would, but on a larger scale that takes into consideration the hardships of production, marketing, filming, scripting, casting, etc.

Different people do look for different things in games, and I suppose some outliers, like professional artists, would be too put off by some of the flaws. But I think that anyone that really into games as a creative medium is able to overlook stuff like Bethesda's soulless automatons in Skyrim and Fallout and see those games as a whole. They're massive endeavors and they are ambitious and, for the most part, they succeed in delivering an entertaining experience. Well, at least for me. The shoddy textures and the weird writing and the still sub-par animation is not something I overlook, but they're just parts of the whole.

And the whole is pretty impressive.

Plus: mods. Personally, 50% of my excitement for Skyrim was the game itself and the other 50% were all the mods people would do. The great thing about mods is that it's like having an extra development team working long-term on the game that isn't bounded by time or resources. Oblivion had a total conversion called Nehrim that was leaps and bounds above the original game, in pretty much every single aspect. That alone was worth the price of admission.

Anyway, they were talking about older games and mentioned a game from a Eastern European developer. They said it was an ambitious game but it had a lot of bugs, like a jaguar's corpse glitching out and floating all over the place (amusingly similar to Skyrim's bugs). They were discussing how videogames (and entertainment in general) are about creating an illusion which an experienced player will inevitable see through at some point, like how when you start a game there's this magical period when you don't fully understand how the enemy AI works. An inexperienced player won't think about this much, but the experienced played will see the process of understanding the AI as a kind of meta-goal within the game. To them (the experienced player), the jaguar bugging out doesn't really take them out of the magic because they already know its all an illusion.

What I took from that is that there are several tiers to appreciating a game. There's the "child" tier, where you are fascinated by them - you appreciate games at face value. There's the "adolescent" tier, where you start seeing the systems behind games and become hyper-critical and jaded to the experience, where stuff like bugs and glitches completely take you out of the experience - you are only experiencing games on a critical level. And then, there comes a point where all critics (movie, book, game, etc.) break out of the jaded phase and start appreciating games on a meta level. This "adult" phase means you see the imperfections, but your appreciation is directed at the original intent of the creators. Basically, a "child" plays the game from the player's point of view, while the "adult" plays the game from the developer's point of view!

tl;dr: I don't really mind the flaws in games, provided they're not game-breaking crashes.