From Pong to Next-Gen?

Games have come so far and done so well to be considered a buisness in its own right but do we actualy know what it means to own a game.
I have always asked this question as i have ever since i was small, classed many things as gaming, for instance just paying a game of football in your garden can be considered a game.
But it was not untill the creation of multi-media gaming that a true meaning for playing games truely arrived. You thought i was goingto say that football was great too, wel you would e wrong. Some dare to say it is foolish to play computer games but my question for them is then why do millions apon milions of games get sold every week?
Going back to what i said their are some games that have even originated from board games, like Dungeons and Dragons, which has seen the release of games like Baldur's Gate and NeverWinter Nights. This connection is important but should never ever be mistaken as the same thing.
What is gameplay?
How i would answer this is that i beleive this to be how games keep and continue to keep their connection to every other type of game, the fact that this is a muti-media gaming society makes this simple. It is what describes the interaction with the machine and person. In simple if games are'nt fun no-one would play them and the game would fail.
This is a perfect chance to use the Wii again as an example, with the great and new ways of interacting with the games it has to offer it shows that they have a good chance of having better gameplay. Or at least thats whats on the minds of all the Nintendo fans as they have to try and ignore how much that name SUX!!
When i went through some of the links for this task i was quite suprised to find this:
"Fortunately, direct recourse to paleontology is unnecessary. A trip to the zoo will suffice. There we find two lion cubs wrestling near their mother. They growl and claw at each other. They bite and kick. One cub wanders off and notices a butterfly. It crouches in the grass, creeps ever so slowly toward its insect prey, then raises its haunches, wiggles them, and pounces. We laugh at the comedy; we say that the cubs are playing a game, that they are having fun, and that they are such fun-loving, carefree creatures."
This is one thing i had never thought about, it talks about why we play games and that we were wrong to think that we were the first to make them as shown very well in the extract above.
So if we did not event games because anything that is fun is a game, then we deffinately get a tropy for how we developed ways of having fun. These interactions create the fun and that is exactly what the gameplay means is a game fun.
Most maybe 9 out of 10 games fail to be successful if they lack on gameplay.
This is the most interesting comment i found when doing my research on Gameplay as a word. It is such a common used word that it was hard to pin-point an exact meaning but this was deffinately the one that stood out the most.
"Many current game design theorists from the background of art theory argue that gameplay is a largely meaningless or empty term, superseded by other concepts established in the repertoire of perception, anthropology, and general diversified psychology."
I would say from a personal view of games i find it hard to pick the perfect combination for my perfect game, but if i were to put myself on the spot. The first thing that just lately all i seem to hear from people is the game was'nt long enough and it ended to soon. This is the first thing that i would try to fix but my only fear is that when games are made to be longer the story suffers.
I find for me to dicover the story and interact with the characters is my form of fun. I feel the acomplishment of unlocking the story as you progress than that of a film with no interaction at all. I think for that reason it was people like me who created DvD board games.
So as to keep games in check through their development they keep to a set design principles, this so that a game does not go off track and hopefully gives the desired result but my fear of this standard way of constructing games is that it is destroying the creativity of games. When new games come out that have tried something new, the media ignore it and let it pass by. This is wrong they should be praised from the mountains, but instead they are forced to go back to the same usual tactics of game development and develop the same old stuff.
Dont get me wrong we need structure without it we would fail but they forget they are just guide lines and not gods law. I would like them to mix it up a bit like an RPG-first person shooter, a Tekken style fighter with the limitless free will of games like GTA San Andreas.
They are all the types of games i would love to try. All we need is for companys to realise what gamers really want rather than worrying about graphics ike the 360 or whimpering on about how powerful their console is like Ps3. WE DONT CARE! we want games that are fun and playable. Im not sure we even have a leading light in game design but i love the Final Fantasy's as they are the closest i have seen to my perect game.
Till next time cya.