I totally get what Sinclair is saying, and in many respects I agree. The issue, however, is that certain design choices can often strip away immersion from the game, or undermine what the original vision may have been. Since Doom is the main example within the article, I will continue with it. Just as with good music, a good book, a good movie or a good picture, good art allows you to get lost within it. The product must be seamless for that to happen. With Doom, the design choice to allow you to either use a flashlight or a weapon was a good choice. It was a unique dynamic that could have been implemented a lot better.
The big issue, however, the mechanic ultimately screamed "Video game!" It ripped me out of the immersion and undermined the role I was playing. Here I was, a Space Marine on the planet Mars. Humanity has come very far, it seems - we've got men to Mars and have begun building facilities. We have Space Marines - which, if the normal Marines is any indication - which should be pretty bad ass. Compared to an average person, Marines should theoretically excel in over a normal person in every aspect. And, not only do you play as a Space Marine in Doom 3, you play as a Corporal. So, you aren't a rookie.
Yet, despite all the training a Space Marine must go through, and despite all the technology that mankind must now have in order to begin operations on Mars, my Space Marine is incapable of holding a flashlight and a gun at the same time, nor does this facility on Mars have any guns with a very basic RIS on which a flashlight is, or could be mounted. I am not a Marine, but I can damn well hold a pistol and flashlight simultaneously. I can also duct-tape a flashlight to a rifle. Yet, my space marine can't. Based upon this, my space marine doesn't deserve to live through Doom 3, and Mankind doesn't quite deserve to survive since we've forgotten very basic things.
Thus, this whole flashlight mechanic - which added another dimension to the game - ripped apart the fiction, the lore, and any immersion they were trying to create. Having to switch between the two only drew attention to the fact that I was playing an inconsistent video game, the same way an actor may wink at a camera to the audience in a movie can destroy the movies impact.
Many comments here only seem to prove the point the author was intending to make. Whether or not the community raised valid and genuine points is completely irrelevant to how the community (the self-identified "faithful community") demonized another human being for disagreeing with the position of the employee. If people want to be heard, then they need to conduct themselves in a mature fashion. Personally, I think Helper has a valid point. People play video games for different reasons: some people play for the gameplay, others play to pass time, others play for narrative, and others do all three. There is no question that various games have different strengths and weaknesses, with some games focusing on gameplay and others on narrative or something else. This will be a balance that will remain in flux for a while. What's the difference between a game that allows you to skip gameplay to see the narrative and a movie? Well, in the case of BioWare's latest games: You still get to play a role within the story, and have a level of interaction even within the story. In a movie, you never get the choice to kill someone, or let them live because it is never your character. The gaming community will be split on these as long as people have varying degrees of tastes. There are many ways to go about bridging the gap, but dehumanizing a person who disagrees with you is never going to accomplish anything good for gamers at large.
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