Reading what
@Merkir has said, a new thought came to me. While I still maintain that body scanning shouldn't be a gameplay of exploration, let alone The main gameplay of it, but it is what it is, for historical (and lack of development) reasons. Now, stars are auto-scanned but next to nobody complains about that, because the vast majority of the time, they are uninteresting. Why not have uninteresting bodies auto-scanned with an alternative module (the usual question of alternatives, risk and reward, getting less credits for auto-scanned stuff and so on), and have a more involving mini-game that only needs to be done for interesting stuff?
Of course, defining "interesting" is the tricky part, but body types alone could help there. For more involved and more interesting criteria, one need only look at Elite Observatory. Toggleable options would go even further; some Commanders might not be interested in WWs, for example.
But the main point would be that Commanders would always feel they are rewarded for the effort they put in, since they only need to do so when something worth looking for is present.
(Imagine if Skyrim were like Elite, and 99% of locked doors would have nothing but some junk items behind them.)
Anyway, this was a question of what could be, if Frontier put in effort, so let's move on instead to what is:
2) My definition of mini-game pretty much aligns with Wikipedia's:
You've yet to say what your definition of it is, though. But assuming it's the same as Wikipedia's, then thank you for proving my point for me.
Let's see: "A minigame [...] is a short video game often contained within another video game, and sometimes in application software or on a display of any form of hardware. A minigame contains different gameplay elements than the main game, may be optional, and is often smaller or more simplistic than the game in which it is contained."
So far, so good. Something can't be both a mini-game and not a mini-game. But just to check what's referred, here's Wikipedia's definition of a video game:
"A video game is an electronic game that involves interaction with a user interface to generate visual feedback on a two- or three-dimensional video display device such as a touchscreen, virtual reality headset or monitor/TV set."
Once again, this reinforces that by following simple logic, something can't be both a mini-game and not a mini-game. If we follow the above definition, your argument runs into a contradiction. To solve that, you'd need to use a different definition, one that would allow for a sort of quantum superposition, where the FSS's default state is a combination of both mini-game and not mini-game, and depending on how one interacts with it, it suddenly breaks down to a different state of mini-game or not mini-game.
Which would obviously be false, as the FSS is always the same.
I don't feel like the FSS fits this definition, because first and foremost its a information source, similar to the system map or the orrery, as opposed to a "short video game."
Even the developers talked about replacing flying time with
gameplay, a more
engaging process and so on. On the reveal livestream, they mostly talked about how you scan things now, how you can cherry-pick better and how it's much faster to scan whole systems, and so on. Comparing it to the system map or the orrery (notice how they didn't talk about how to use the orrery, for obvious reasons) is somewhat amusing.
Oh, and let's not forget that the FSS is the only part of the game where the developers thought that it needed a separate
mandatory in-game tutorial. Little wonder, because it's quite divorced from the rest of the game, and rather unintuitive. Now why would an "information source" even need a tutorial? Let alone a mandatory one.
However, I feel like we've been side-tracked by this. The more interesting question (from earlier) is whether the FSS is even a mini-game, or a time sink. Given that it has no consequences for making mistakes, no possibility of failure, and the only reward for getting better at it is a decrease in the
time spent, I'd argue it's the latter.
Generally, people don't appreciate time sinks. (A good time sink is one where you only realise it's one if you analyze the gameplay.)
forums.frontier.co.uk
Its a bit odd how it works, because if you are still out of range for the flash scanning, the fss usually complains about being too close, but if you get closer so its flash discovered the fss will zoom in on it just fine. Great engineering there.
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