Waiter, there are air bubbles in my gameplay!

So it seems our pursuit for fun is really just a pursuit for knowledge. Knowledge of some kind anyway. A game is like an injection of stimuli for the brain, with some titles evidently containing air bubbles in the syringe. There's nothing worse for a game experience than these air bubbles, these pockets of the game where your mind is suddenly disengaged from play, and the flow of your experience is taken down.

This crossed my mind as I continued to play Knights of the Old Republic. Solid game. Great gameplay. Engaging story. I've played it many times through, but not in a while. Until you reach this one planet known as Manaan, which is essentially a huge ocean with some cities on the top of it. The story progresses very well... until you reach a certain place where you are required to cross between one underwater facility to another. This is done using a space suit across the ocean floor. It wouldn't be so bad if... you had some form of weaponry, didn't move at 1/200th of the original running speed, and if the area you had to cross wasn't so large. It literally takes about 6 minutes to walk through (which is incredibly painful if you get eaten by the sharks along the way).

It's funny that out of all the great gameplay of the game, one moment of dullness where the player's mind is not engaged can destroy the momentum. Even though the developers did well to continually engage the player to this point, this void of new information has a powerful influence on the level of enjoyment of the game as a whole. It really is very important to ensure that new stimuli (that isn't droll) is constantly provided to maintain the "fun factor", the whole point of the game.

KOTOR has been highlighting something I've been thinking needs replacing for a while... I'll put more up in my next post.