This is a given. A great examples of a game that pulls this off well Kirby: Canvas Curse.
Yea the first point is a given. My perspective on barrier-to-entry is one that is minimal in stimulating cognitive function in favour of emotional development within the experience.
Why should a graceful game be without challenge? Can you call it a game without challenge? Super Meat Boy is very challenging but also very intuitive and simple to pick up and learn. It really feels good to play, and dying is part of the experience.
It's a great question. My perspective is that so far, most games have been designed as if the player is in a interactive development environment where the player is fulfilling a missing piece to a greater and more emotional experience that is lost. Almost as if the game itself is a visual (both in architecture and in symbolism) representation of the input code; all the problems and the questions still go unanswered in the experience because so much of the process is designed by the rigid Coin-Op Paradigm. The experience is too mechanical.
Death is an instance of a fail-state on the designer's part. Challenge need not be based upon motor-skills, but deeper in the crux of emotional value and moral judgement etc. A game should spend more time being an experience rather than a game.
Ghost Trick is a masterful example of deconstructing what a game is. It starts out with you playing a DEAD character. So in many ways, it is the mirror opposite of conventional game design where the player can't die as he/she is already dead. Thus, the design process is completely inverted. It's breaking the conventions. Dying is just a reminder that challenge is arbitrary and more important than MEANING.
Alright, put away the thesaurus here and try to explain this again. It sounds like you're just describing some combination of a finite state machine and quick time events? I'm not really sure what you're getting at here.
You're actually quite close here, well done. Yea, I worded that awkwardly. My point is that chance should be presented as a main focal point in the dynamics of the world and how it changes. Majora's Mask is a long-winded example of this with a timer for the end of the world. This creates urgency because we are shown an immutable (even though it's false as you can retry again) consequence if we chose to be careless of the predicament at hand.
AI is a useless answer for creating meaning and moral/emotional decisions in the game. It's also an expensive and overly complicated "answer" for creating dynamic challenge built on the Coin-Op Paradigm. To eliminate AI is to eliminate the Coin-Op Paradigm.
As you said, I am talking a long the lines of a finite-state machine with QTEs. Though QTEs are simplistic and only come out as having binary pathways that either lead to life or death. I'm trying to state that there are more interesting ways to take something LIKE QTEs and have all NPCs scripted in a predetermined fashion. Puzzle-like in nature, but not an actual puzzle to solve like a jigsaw. More invisible and subtle but responsive within the frame of chance. The magic circle isn't based on the space with which you can interact, but rather, the way in which you interact with time itself. Timing of important instances that result in emotional harmony or conflict etc.
A simple example of what I'm trying to say is what you see in Braid - World 4, where the character moves as the world moves with him. The moment you stop, the world stops. This is a simple example of interaction relating to TIME over SPACE. Hopefully you can understand where I'm coming at here.
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