A Rousing Article

Richard Rouse goes through, in an easy to read format, the basic desires and expectations of gamers.

He says that Gamers want:
A Challenge
To Socialize or, alternatively, A Dynamic Solitary Experience
Bragging Rights (which fits into the social dynamics outlined above)
An Emotional Experience
To Explore
To Fantasize
To Interact

Giant, lazy, bullet-point lists aside, I find the aspect of fantasizing to be one of the greatest elements of modern video games.  There are two things in particular that Rouse talks about in relation to fantasizing that particularly caught my attention are that "computer games provide a good medium for players to explore sides of their personality, that they keep submerged in their daily lives".  Games have the capacity to be an introspective tool, allowing people to discover themselves in ways that are not available to them in their ordinary life.  I remember when I played Fable 2, there was a particular point of the story that faced me with a moral dilemma.  I had been placed in a situation where I was posed with having to choose between allowing a foolish young woman to lose her youthful body and become an old woman or to take that curse upon myself and become hideously scarred.  Normally, I play the stock hero who takes all the burdens upon themselves, in a completely fantastical and impossible way.  This time, though, I chose to not intervene and risk bodily harm to myself.  I remember justifying it to myself as the woman being a one-time write-off NPC character whom I felt no emotional contact to and therefore had no obligation to them as a person.  The judgement I cast on her was entirely unheroic and showed that, in the end, I would sacrifice my time, my blood, my effort and even my life to achieve a lofty end-game goal but that I wouldn't sacrifice my physical beauty to preserve the quality of life for a stranger who had made a mistake.  To this day, I still ponder on what my choice at that moment says about me as a person and whether or not I like what it means. This feeds right back in to Rouse's statement that games allow players to engage in socially unacceptable behavior in a safe environment.

Players Expect:
A Consistent World
To Understand the game-world's bounds
Resonable solutions to work
Direction
To Accomplish tasks incrementally
To be immersed
Some setbacks
A fair challenge
Not to need to repeat themselves
Not to get hopelessly stuck
To do, not to watch