"This game allows you to pluck chickens / pay respects / become a porn star, that was never possible in a game before!!!", but it's really just that you can press a button to trigger an animation.

That's fun for a while, but seeing a bunch of games and programming a bit, it kinda becomes transparent and samey, and those little touches of realistic decoration are also reminders that they had time for that $animation, but not for this $mechanic. Some people see redheads and blondes and brunettes, I see committees.

Here's a crazy idea: Replace all models by their hitboxes and all textures single colors, remove all ambient sounds, remove all padding from dialogue and let NPC just name the variables they need to have met, and what variables that will set as a result, and so on. A game or a simulation would of course look and sound terrible, but it would still work, while a interactive movie kind of "experience" will be reduced to next to nothing.

Take chess for example, playing with beautiful weighty pieces is certainly more fun than with, say, pieces of paper with letters on them. But if you're good at chess and longing for a good game of chess, you would rather play against an opponent with a similar elo ranking as you with pieces of paper, than against a child or a random number generator with nice chess pieces.

We can rank sciences by "hardness" all day, but the thought of "hard gaming" seems oddly offensive, why? I also noted that no comments seem to reference the article, which is understandable since it's such a fluff piece. And none of the comments are pointing out any gameplay challenge, clever AI, nothing.

> After a few hours, you can almost feel the ego diminution, the sense of “merging with nature or the universe” that Michael Pollan describes in How to Change Your Mind. (And at $60 for a copy, Red Dead Redemption 2 is cheaper than psychedelic drugs.)

60$, then "a few hours" until that effect kicks in, and you become one with "nature and the universe" on the screen.

Just wow. I would feel insulted by that. That's such a low view of both the universe and the time of a person.

> The soundtrack helps, too. You hear sounds of nature, long ambient notes in the wilderness, or the Irish-influenced strain of an antique banjo from a nearby campfire. “We have 192 interactive mission scores, and we thought about the music constantly from the time we brought in [composer] Woody Jackson in 2015,” says Ivan Pavlovich, Rockstar’s music supervisor. “Sam was always asking early on, ‘What’s the feel [of the game]?’ ”

Oh yeah, telling people how to feel about things, what would a good game be without that, right?

> Rockstar’s goal is to “slip as much art under the hood without players noticing it — but they don’t have to notice it,” says Dan. If you want, you can bypass much of the story with just a tap of the controller. “It can just be mud, blood, and gore.”

Mud, blood and gore with cutscenes, or just mud, blood and gore... what about gameplay? All the immersion on the one hand, then slo-mo and auto-aim on the other, and plenty of chores to keep your stats up. A huge map, a million NPC with a few binary flags each, and hours of voice acting. What did I miss? All I heard on youtube is the same I read in this thread, "you can go fishing or hunting" ("move to location X and press button Y"), how it's so immersive and detailed, etc. etc., but nothing about solid gameplay.