Apparently Hackademic is icycalm AKA Alex Kierkegaard AKA Anthony Zirbas, etc., i.e. the owner of the website linked to in the first post which requires a €25/year subscription to fully view.
If this is the level of writing going on on that website, I'm pretty turned off to the idea of buying. This was a pretty poor advertisement. Rambling, incoherent text, inflammatory wording, little to no understanding of market trends or media as a whole, and arrogance that borders on hubris. It's a naive and pompous diatribe with pseudo-philosophical elements designed to obfuscate rather than illuminate. The comparison of Indiana Jones being better suited to an action game is ignorant of the (fiscal) popularity of Tomb Raider, and the failure of the Indiana Jones action games of the late eighties and early nineties.
Also, you did not refute my RPGs are a lot like baking cakes. Clearly they are. When you bake a cake, the person who wrote the instructions is getting you to use the oven to change the cake mix to a cake. In other words, this is a really shitty game, which amounts to watching something change slowly. Which is what RPGs are, if you take away the story and combat. This is undeniably true. The next time you see 'final fantasy x', you will think 'final fantasy cake-mix'.
I will refute this. It's also incoherent, but I'll try my best.
RPGs, in their purest, tabletop form, are mechanics for simulating the world. Good RPGs, like Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment, and others, blend together the story and the mechanics to create a believable world. Bad rpgs slice the two apart, and the story and the mechanics do not complement each other, they compete. In a good RPG, you USE the mechanics to advance the story. It is... like a car and a train with a driving toy in it. Both get you to the end, but the train will continue the story with the toy amusing you through it. The car has you use what you're doing to get you there. Active vs. passive participation in the exploration of the world. Final Fantasy will take you to the end of it's story while you play a different game. Planescape: Torment will use the game to tell the story.
Your analogy is quite frankly, baffling. Cake mix would be a sandbox game, in which you use the mechanics to build a story. What you are describing, is watching paint dry.
Also, if you remove the story and the combat from a story and combat based game, of course you are left with nothing. You just took out the core of the game.
People are being pretty resentful when all I am doing is giving them the gift of knowledge. Imagine for a moment if a Greek philosopher, one of the good ones not a loser like Socrates, got in a time machine, came to our century, crammed alot of knowledge about science, then played computer games and told you a little about them. What would you do? You would resent that person for claiming he knew more about games than you, even though you had probably put zero effort in to understanding them. What does that say?
So now you imply you are a great philosopher? Okay. These greek philosophers come and play the games, and what would they think about it? They lack the necessary cultural knowledge, filmic language, game language, to fully appreciate the game. To understand a game, you need to know a lot more than "things are made of phlogiston and ash". They would probably compare it to ancient greek theatre and literature. Would they tell us more than we already know? Maybe. But would THEY be able to fully appreciate it, growing up in a culture almost completely alien to the one that produced the game? They could, if they researched everything around the game, computers in general, and narrative conventions that have changed considerably since ancient greek times, when stories were told with choruses and masks.
Now, this is nothing to do with you as a person, hackademic, but your arguements are full of holes, and they are hidden in poorly structured purple prose. You think you know more than you actually do, and you are incredibly arrogant, assuming we know less than you do and that you are some great teacher of knowledge shining the light of your incredible philosophy dow...
Okay, let's try to get back on topic. Okay, so Mr. Gilbert made a game about a Jewish detective and it was a hit. Now, someone who hadn't read my insightful essay would think "I should make a point and click adventure game about a historian who discovers the holocaust was fake, and is hunted by rabbi assassins, because that would sell like Mr Gilberts". STOP. THINK. Should this game really be made, or should it be made as an action game? If your story was more like the movie national treasure, then a game in the SW section would be acceptable. But if your story focused on these ruthless rabbi assassins, who honed their combat skills punching palestinian children, then you should make an action game. It's about identifying niche stories for different genres.
... wait, what.
