I've stumbled upon a great GameSpot article, which partly talks about the different types of gamers that there are. This grabbed my attention, so I was interested enough in posting about it here. Below are the descriptions of the various types of gamers.

Marginals: limited-interst gamers (looking forward to games such as The Sims 3 and enjoy Wii Fit).

Dabblers: Enjoy regular gaming and are more likely to be interested in GTAIV than marginals.

Loyalists: Play a lot of games, but love to stick to key franchises such as Resident Evil

Magpies: Play lots of games, but snack on many different games rather than always picking up the latest iteration of their favorite series.

Hardcores: They want all of the games, with as much interest in playing Wii Fit as GTAIV and Fable 2.

I'm definitely a magpie since I don't stick with the same franchises for long, moving onto other types of games that are out there.

Question:
What type of gamer are you?

Choices:
A marginal gamer
A dabbler
A loyalist gamer
A magpie gamer
A hardcore gamer

 

I tend to stick to open world, choose your own path games, after having played linear, strict games growing up that force you to get it right one way or you make zero progress, and usually involved jumping over a chasm without falling into the pit. When I realized I didn't have to put up with that in a game anymore, I stopped playing that kind of game. I like a challenge, but not monotonous, frustratingly difficult ones that insult the gamer.

I know how it feels to see yourself playing video games which are so linear. If only more games could be non-linear, but unfortunately, mostly games consisting of a crime setting have been offering up these options and because of that, it often tends to become a very dull experience. That is why I'm considering still to stick with certain linear titles. Also, I'll look at non-linear titles, but I want to go beyond the crime setting. Space trading and flight simulators have been offering open-world gameplay, so I might start looking into those types of video games. The Elite franchise (responsible for open-world and non-linear gameplay in the first place) is a great example for where I should look into a variety of directions of non-linearity rather than just having myself follow one type of setting with that kind of gameplay. Eventually, I will look at the means of non-linearity as a whole rather than at linearity because whether I create a game revolving mostly around the story or around the things outside of it, I want it to be as non-linear as possible, so that will lead me to look at linearity only/mostly through the likes of literature, art, and movies.

Open Map games give you the chance to change the scenery whenever you get bored. Linear hallway type games, no choice, so you end up seeing the same stuff everytime you play it, which eventually gets old, and finds a place in my pile of games over the years, that I rarely ever play again, but just to relive "the moment" I first plugged in the game...

Video games don't always need to offer an open world in order to be non-linear. After The Outsider is finished and released, it'll bring a whole new benchmark for titles that focus solely on the confines of the story, such that they'll be able to make script-free narrative to allow themselves to be called non-linear. That is why The Outsider is promising. You are Jameson, a CIA operative and the public enemy (in the eyes of the media and the public), and are left with a decision on how to continue. I certainly think that current generation games will need more than just better graphics in order to deliver spectacularly and this is how David Braben will change the way that we play video games.

I've noticed that a lot more open-ended games are showing up in this console generation than the previous one. We've seen games like Assassin's Creed, Burnout: Paradise, GTA IV, Saint's Row, Spider-Man 3, and among others. Now, there is going to be a bigger selection of upcoming titles that have an open-world. Some of these games included are Alpha Protocol, This Is Vegas, and Prototype. But the problem with many of these titles is that their amount of features probably won't surpass GTA:SA, and that their settings and/or stories are derivative. It'll be a long time before we truly see a highly innovative open-ended game, whether it's done with its story, its setting, or both. In addition, it'll really need to include things that haven't been possible before, or things that haven't even been thought of (much like The Outsider's non-linear storyline). While it may seem harsh to ask developers to abandon certain elements that we've grown so accustomed to, like "wizards, wenches, bards, bartenders, golems, giants, clerics, necromancers, thieves, gods, angels, demons, sorceresses, undead bodies or body parts (mummified or decaying), Nazis, Russians, spies, mercenaries, space marines, stormtroopers, star pilots, humanoid robots, evil geniuses, mad scientists, or carnivorous aliens, vampires, queens, leprechauns, Masai warriors, ghosts, succubi, Huns, mandarins, wisewomen, grizzly bears, hamsters, sea monsters, vegetarian aliens, terrorists, firefighters, generals, gangsters, detectives, magicians, spirit mediums, shamans, prostitutes, lacrosse players, simulations of 20th-century or current military vehicles, simulations of sports which are routinely broadcast live on television, real-time strategy games focussing solely on warfare and weapons production, lock-and-key adventure games, numbers-heavy role-playing games, and any card game found in Hoyle's Rules of Card Games," (taken from Dogma 2001's rules, which are influenced largely by the Dogma 95 movement's rules for movies) there will need to be people like this in the future.

Yeah, non-scripted events keep a game from going stale(like bread does). This way you won't know what to expect if that's even possible with AI characters. AI characters are very predictable, having only a few paths to choose from compared to nearly unlimited choices a real human opponent makes.

Another area which developers really need to start innovating further is multiplayer. I don't want to seem very harsh, but how many times have we seen deathmatches in FPS games? Perhaps the most innovative multiplayer mode that is the most recent one to come out would have to be the Spies Vs. Mercenaries mode in Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow. And that's probably because the stealth genre has been very absent from multiplayer. Moreover, there are still some genres that have yet to include multiplayer gameplay (i.e. side-scrolling shooters, platformers, train simulators, etc.). As for those genres that already have made good use of multiplayer, they need to look at new sets of rules that may take the experience further, if not changing the rules of these genres entirely.

GTA IV was special for a multiplayer game since it was an open-ended experience, so that allows players to either choose one location to play in, or to play all around the entire map of Liberty City. So many multiplayer games have small maps and have sets of them when they can try to experiment with having just one gigantic map and seeing how that will turn out. Also, the maps are usually pieces from the story mode portion of the game. Maybe each mode should have its own levels instead of having the same levels for each of them. Having different levels for each mode (multiplayer, single-player, co-op) would make the replay value of the game go up as this would mean that people not only should play co-op, multiplayer, or single-player, but that they should go back and forth between the three modes, from time to time.