Should Games Be More Boring?

An anonymous reader writes "At Gamasutra, serious games creator Ian Bogost is making the case that video games should be more mundane, particularly discussing of Nintendo' Brain Age: 'It's certainly a very different kind of game from Halo or even Miyamoto's own Zelda series, games that allow the player to inhabit complex fantasy worlds. Instead, much of Brain Age's success seems to come precisely from the ordinariness of its demands.' Would games become more accessible if they tapped into everyday things a little bit more, as opposed to spiralling off into fictional realities?"

Boring vs Diverse

[Raindance]

Of course games shouldn't be more boring (with the caveat that games should stay away from pressing peoples' addiction buttons).

But yes, I think it would be good (for developers and for gamers) for games to break out into more genres. Here's a quote from Rod Humble, Executive Producer of The Sims, which neatly sums up a good way to think about this:

I don't know if there's any fixed lifecycle for the Sims franchise because I think that it can go a lot more places. Part of the mandate that I had when I took over the position is to really break this franchise out into a more mainstream audience. So the way I like to look at the franchise is walk into a bookstore and take every video game you know and just place them on a shelf in the bookstore. And I think you'll find they tend to cluster a lot in certain areas in the bookstore. And I want the Sims to fill up the rest of the bookstore.

Re:Umm....

[buswolley]

Hmm. Exactly. Why is the article equating boring with games like Brain Age? Maybe games which don't have a whole complex world in them can be..umm what's that word.. oh yeah.. FUN. Complex games can be boring.. Quite a lot of them are.