Re: Oblivion
I don't put effort into it, I try to enjoy them. But if a single-player game shoots itself in the foot, I'm not going to whittle crutches for it. How much fun is it to play Go or Magic or Basketball against yourself? Not much, because any challenge is purely artificial. Playing Morrowind was, in my experience, like playing D&D alone, with yourself as the GM. I spent half the time in-game, and the other half trying to find a mod or tweak a setting to compensate for the pathetic lack of choice.
In a good game, there are tradeoffs. If Soccer was structured such that only forwards could score, but nobody was allowed to shoot on an undefended goal... any team with non-forwards would automatically lose, it would be a stupid game, and it would have died centuries ago. It's around today because it does not have stupid exploits that require you to play in a deliberately dumb way in order to provide an illusion of challenge for yourself. Oblivion did not have to include the same exploits - they could have learned from the person who modded it to remove them.
Games are self-enclosed. If you have to impose external rules on yourself to make them interesting (like going to the Olympics wearing lead shoes, going on "Who Wants to Be A Millionare" drunk and high, or playing Civilization without ever building buildings) then there is something fundamentally wrong with the game itself. In good games, people don't have to resort to such saboutage - they can unleash themselves and compete to the best of their ability. If I can't compete to the best of my ability, I'm not playing a game - I'm tutoring someone (like when I play ping-pong or raquetball left-handed, or "weakly"). I have no need to tutor someone when I'm alone.
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