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One of my favorite games is called Scorgasm. It's a "bullet heck" space shooter where the story is barely a fig leaf - save the world and get a cookie. Very intense, demanding, purely mechanical gameplay.
I play it to relax.
I play it to relax.
Another one of my favorite games is A Short Hike, a "can't lose" game that has mechanic mastery and a goal and a story but is definitely on the casual side... a "walking simulator" that lets you climb, jump, glide, and fly around a Canadian parkland.
I also play it to relax.
I also play it to relax.
They're both games. Myst, a hypercard slideshow with embedded videos, was a game. Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda are both games... you ever start stacking up the differences between those two things?
You can say LOZ and SMB both pose "challenge" but as Dr. Moraine asks, how do you define that? They each challenge the player in wildly different ways.
One was designed for arcade cabinets, its challenge meant to be a single repeatable experience. The other for home consoles...
One was designed for arcade cabinets, its challenge meant to be a single repeatable experience. The other for home consoles...
... and its challenge is there to be fought gradually over time.
SMB was designed to eventually defeat even the best players.
LOZ was designed to eventually be defeated even by the worst players.
SMB was designed to eventually defeat even the best players.
LOZ was designed to eventually be defeated even by the worst players.
SMB lets you interact with an environment without backtracking. LOZ has a landscape that brings you back through the same environment multiple times, with new options for interacting with it all the time.
If you had no prior idea of a video game and you saw both SMB and LOZ separately and in isolation, you wouldn't necessarily think "These are two examples of the same thing."
