"I Don't Want To Be a Superhero"

"Ditching reality for a game isn't as fun as it sounds."

Interesting and ties back into this which I mentioned here (in passing, as I then went off on a mostly unrelated rant).

It seems like this whole "gamification" thing might actually be starting to become a Thing™. I'm kind of on the fence at this point as to whether this might be a good thing or bad thing (though after reading the above, I'm kind of leaning toward the latter, at least for the time being).

I think the most telling bit for me was this: "For McGonigal, Wikipedia is one of the most-convincing gamification success stories—a user-generated encyclopedia built on 100 million hours of free labor."

Yeah... and look at how much Wikipedia has been sucking for years now, thanks to exactly the type of people who are most attracted to contributing those "100 million hours of free labor" and as a result end up as administrators of the site. ¬_¬

Dear Video Game Industry, please stop putting escort missions in your games. Sincerely, me.

I hate escort quests. I don't think I've ever played a game that had an escort mission in it where that escort mission didn't horribly suck in some way.

(EDIT)

Actually, that's not entirely true. I just remembered that Ico was incredibly amazing. But then, this is a case where the entire game is based on having a companion following you around, rather than just being that one level of a much larger game.

Also, Half-Life 2 Episode One and Episode Two had Alyx following you around most of the time as well, and that was also very well done.

Beyond that, however, escort missions mostly suck balls.

(/EDIT)

I'm currently playing Folklore on the PS3. It's an awesome game, and I'll probably write a bigger post about it when I finish it, but for now I must rant.

( Rant behind cut )