Games you play with your own rules
Computer games by their very nature are rigidly defined pieces of maths/code*. This is compared to the likes of tabletop role playing where a fudge or two so as to keep the story, experience, or whatever you wish to deem it, moving are expected parts of the process, or in board games where house rules and mechanics external to the game (meta gaming being a term here but it can go further than that) are commonly in play.
"The Algorithm" however decided I would like a series of videos from a channel called FailRace called Survive the Hunt. The general premise is that a single player attempts to either blend in with NPCs in some measure of "living world" for a certain amount of time, or whilst having to complete a series of objectives. Various rules for the hunters and the hunters are enacted depending upon the game (typically they use one of the Forza titles or GTA5) to make it a viable mode of play. Ordinarily I am no fan of watching footage of such gameplay but it turns out we do indeed dance for our machines these days and it was massively compelling. But for the honking great yellow arrow various people I had met expressed an interest in such a mode as far back as GTA 1 (as in the 2d efforts), and things like Watch_Dogs had similar modes in its "randomly draw you into multiplayer" thing it did, but that series did well. Similarly if you wanted an example of the "asymmetric gaming" concept that was an E3 buzzword in years past then this is that, and a far better glimpse into what it can achieve than many of the offerings we ultimately saw.
Of course it goes beyond that and we have game mods (whether with developer made tools, or the likes of ROM hacking), the humble house rule (don't shoot a player without a weapon in Goldeneye), simplistic savestate efforts (in EA's Skate series the ability to designate a spawn point and play the pass the controller was almost universal), the increasingly large number of "challenge games" wherein emulator savestates and memory viewers are set up to create challenges for people, various communities make their own challenges (the Pokemon Nuzlocke Challenge being a good example), and even speedrunning could be argued to be a version of this.
*at least for now. While we have hidden rules in games they are just that. Eventually we probably will have some kind of self learning and altering code make a game, first likely coming in the form of rewards and weapon statistics being honed by an algorithm similar to suggested videos on various video services, but that is a discussion for another thread (feel free to make such a thing if you want though).
Previously we discussed the state of VR and 3D and whether they had once more failed to take hold.
the last game skill you unlearned, The game you invested the most money in, times where people said gameplay styles would not work for a platform, the value of online play, emulation vs hardware, a favoured game style that might have become less common in recent times, skills one might have learned or honed because of a game, games on the PS4 and Xbone that will stand the test of time, games that got better after launch, cancelled games and shuttered devs, and story canon in games.
You are invited to then discuss things such as your house rules, own games you made within others that you and yours play, ROM hacks/cheats to alter games such that it would fit here, and times where you take a small facet of a game and have things fall from that.
