An absolute masterclass in turn-based tactics games, TBW goes above and beyond the needs of its genre to also provide amazing visuals, staggeringly witty dialogue, and a story that had no need to be quite so profound. Ingenious level design ensures a constant flow of new creative opportunities while brilliant presentation and worldbuilding ensure the mechanics blend seamlessly into the fiction. TBW even integrates wonderful innovations in how it manages side-content and exposition delivery! But above all: the core "foresight" mechanic for experimentation and correction, the "confidence" mechanic for on-the-fly difficulty adjustment, and the way that control over spatial positioning blends directly into damage mechanics, all lead to an absolutely unrivaled experience.
After delaying my playthrough of Tacoma by about a decade, I also finally got around to reading a bunch of decade-old reviews and analysis of the game and I was utterly astonished by the way that Ian's take was so much the opposite of mine, and yet perfectly parallel to it. I put this into a listicle form because it's really two essays, but I don't feel like it merits multiple posts.
Part 1: An “Additive” Model?
Ian views the game, fundamentally, as a vehicle for a story that, in his own opinion, is worthwhile but not great – and while I was perfectly satisfied with the story as such, his criticism of it is solid. For him, the main draw is instead the novel method by which that story is conveyed, a method that I considered experimentally-worthwhile but ultimately unsuccessful. He describes the hologram-scrubbing mechanic as allowing the game to “play around with simultaneity and atemporality in ways that are hard to do in other media”, and that this novel technique is what makes Tacoma’s design “additive” as compared to Gone Home’s “subtractive” approach.
And this is where I’ve got to fundamentally disagree with him – because as much as I love that Tacoma experimented a novel technique, I think Tacoma largely failed to demonstrate that hologram-scrubbing has serious value. To be clear, that doesn’t mean that hologram-scrubbing doesn’t or can’t have serious value, just that Tacoma isn’t the game that proves it.
In my own review, I likened Tacoma to a movie – but it isn't one: Fullbright didn't film the holograms with specific angles and shots, didn't edit those shots together to exploit the way that frames and cuts can help convey more information or enhance an emotional experience for the audience. Instead, Tacoma made me the cameraman and the editor, and I don’t know a damn thing about either of those. I am an objectively terrible choice for those jobs, and so my experience is made worse for it.
In the medium of games, it’s pretty typical to give players (who we do not assume are professional artists of any kind) direct control over things like cameras – but games replace cinematic techniques with gameplay techniques in order to achieve an equally potent emotional experience. Gone Home is thought of as the poster child of the “walking sim” genre, but it’s far more accurately described as a detective/mystery game, and it uses a whole range of mechanics and techniques from across mystery games, puzzle games, and even metroidvania games in order to influence the player’s experience. These are what make Gone Home just as compelling as any film or book.
But Tacoma erases Gone Home’s other mechanics almost completely, all in service of hologram-scrubbing – which, in its unadorned state, is just “cinema without proper framing or editing”. To me, no matter how you look at this, it can’t be considered “additive”. You’ve either taken the cinematic techniques out of a movie, or you’ve taken the gameplay mechanics out of Gone Home – the intersection of those two perspectives is unique, yes, but still necessarily less than either alternative.
Part 2: How To Fix Tacoma
Among Ian’s fixes are to extend the game dramatically, to create more time for exposition about the sci-fi setting, and to develop the cast of characters. He wants them to have dynamic arcs that relate to the central stakes, such that the characters can only overcome the crisis on the space station by also overcoming their personal flaws and interpersonal conflicts. It’s hard to argue with him, here. I may have liked the story, but I don’t doubt that those changes would be the sort of thing to put it into “masterpiece” territory.
Gone Home’s embedded narrative seems to prove his point: it features a (recent) historical setting that doesn’t require any exposition, fewer characters in total who each receive more development as a result, and it revolves wholly around their interpersonal conflicts. I don’t know that I found the embedded narrative dramatically more or less compelling than that of Tacoma, but it was undoubtedly compelling, and I certainly enjoyed Gone Home as a whole more than Tacoma.
The more important difference, to me – and the biggest point about which Ian and I are in total agreement – lies in the framing narrative. In Gone Home, player character Katie goes home from college to find her family missing from her childhood home. A powerful storm outside has stranded her and downed the telephone lines – and this being 1995, she has no cell phone – so she has no means of finding out what has happened except to start sleuthing. The player’s goals are aligned with hers, and the obstacles she faces become the gameplay challenges that drive the player’s emotional experience.
This is what’s missing from Tacoma. Player character Amy wants to access the space station’s computer core where the “ODIN” A.I. is kept, but her bosses won’t let her do that until she downloads the hologram logs on their behalf. She already knows the whole story – watching the logs is just a way to kill time while they download. As Ian eloquently puts it:
...for both Amy and the player, there’s no reason to actually engage with the game’s plot except that it’s there. And it’s a decent plot, one worth engaging with, but this makes it feel like nothing you’re doing or seeing actually matters.
There needed to be obstacles in Amy’s path that could only be solved by studying the logs. At a minimum, this would be escape room type stuff – passwords or the locations of keycards – but what she ideally needed was an open question, a mystery to solve, that would require the player to form an opinion about the events and personalities presented in the logs. Perhaps if she was trying to determine whether ODIN was somehow responsible for the crisis, or needed to evaluate whether the A.I. had become self-aware – some problem that can only be solved with the benefit of the holo-scrubbing mechanic.
It has been (checks notes) three years since I last updated this game, despite the fact that I have been sitting on actually a decent heap of playtest data that indicated a strong need for fixes. Here at last is the biggest overhaul to date of Serpents & Sepulchres – my easier-to-learn, easier-to-play, shorter, simpler, faster, lower-commitment alternative to D&D. Hit the link above to see the rules; keep reading below for an explanation of the update; and as always please send me feedback if you try it.
The most fundamental change here is that I have removed the "Effort" mechanic. Taken from Index Card RPG, this was something I originally included against my better judgment because I figured that my hypothetical target audience of D&D players would desire the familiar comfort of "dealing damage on a hit". I wrote a 1500-word diatribe over in this thread all about the kinds of problems that these abstract progress-tracker mechanisms cause, and that rant was informed (in part) by the very same play-test data that has prompted me to make this change, so go read that if you want to know more.
The other biggest changes are just in terms of polish. I have rewritten almost every word of these rules in an effort to improve clarity, detail, and consistency. I added explanations of basic processes like the conversational nature of the game, and how to improvise an adventure. The game master now has their own playbook to use during the game, which includes an adventure-creation workspace, "GM screen" type rule summaries, and spaces to keep notes.
Speaking of the GM, they've been renamed "The World Serpent". This is partly for the sake of theming, but mostly because I wanted to try to subtly cue people that the World Serpent is not the same thing as a Dungeon Master. They fill a similar need, but the responsibilities and obligations qualitatively different. The rules now also describe the game as "asymmetrical" to reflect that idea.
Finally, the "Plague Doctor" has been reimagined as the "Herbalist". I know certain folk who will be disappointed that I softened S&S's most unique/original class, but the new Herbalist is both a better thematic fit with the other classes, and has allowed me to incorporate some more monk/druid stylings into the game.
I have had occasion recently to go back through some of my older designs, and I couldn't resist taking another crack at my 200 word cosmic horror RPG, Dissociation. You can find the new rules after the break, and, if you're interested, you can see version one here, and version two here. I think this new iteration achieves the best of both worlds of my previous attempts – and it makes me think it might be nice to give Dissociation a proper full-sized rules document at some point. Maybe leave me some friendly feedback if that's something you'd like to see.
— — — — —
DISSOCIATION
Tell 3-5 other players to each create a character by picking a name (e.g., Delapore, Marsh, Pickman, Tillinghast), a personality (e.g., curious, cynical, pompous, weird), and field of expertise (e.g., academia, investigations, medicine, occult).
Write out the numbers 1 through 20 where everyone can see. Cross out 1 through 6. Circle 15 through 20.
Using the premise from your favourite cosmic horror story, begin a ghastly tale starring the players' characters. Then, ask them each what their character does next. Continue the story based on their answers, but: If they do something risky, or try to uncover new insights, mark a tally somewhere and roll 1d20. If their character's expertise is relevant, roll twice and let them choose which result to use.
If the number is…
Crossed out: Complicate their situation. Cross out the lowest uncrossed number.
Unmarked: They get what they hoped for, but at a terrible cost.
Circled: Reveal a horrifying revelation. Circle the highest uncircled number.
Both circled and crossed out: End the story with a grisly denouement.
Any time that a character consults their notes and the players erase 6 tallies, they can ask you any question about the story and you must answer truthfully.
My whole "out of touch old man" situation grows more severe with each passing year, it seems – and yet I can't seem to find any sort of tolerable way to stay plugged in to the latest news. Waiting for things to make a big enough splash to actually reach me through social media and word-of-mouth means I'm woefully uninformed, but any alternative exposes me to a firehose of bullshit that mostly ranges from "irrelevant" to "actively troubling". Anyway, here's the shit that made it past my filters this year!
Best 2025 Video Game: Dispatch
I normally split this into "best older game that I played" and "best current year game that I played", but this time there's no real contest. Dispatch handily beat out anything else I touched all year. I'm glad I managed to squeeze in an actual 2025 title at the last minute, and I'm even more glad that Dispatch was so damn great.
The "Left 4 Dead Award" for Best Cooperative Shooter: Helldivers 2
Whereas historically I just can't find the time to play very many games, this year had a separate problem that every new game I considered playing had to stack up against the default alternative: just keep playing more HD2. Last year I described HD2 as "worth turning into a pseudo-hobby unto itself", and that's exactly what I've done. Here's hoping that Arrowhead can keep the engines turning for a long while yet.
Best 2025 Tabletop Game: Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship
Just like with Dispatch, I only managed to play exactly one 2025 board game this year, but it also happened to be the best board game I played all year. That's maybe no surprise, Matt Leacock's Pandemic games are my personal GoATs when it comes to board games, and Fate of the Fellowship is, as advertised, the "most mechanically-rich Pandemic System design to date". It absolutely drips with theme and a clear love of the source material.
Best Double-Feature Movie Pairing of 2025 Because There Is No Way I Was Going to Be Able to Pick Between Them: Sinners and KPop Demon Hunters
It's lucky that these two movies happen to share a thematic element in their handling of music as a powerful, supernatural force that binds people together – and also have a radical contrast in that one of them uses monsters to symbolize imperialistic assimilation of culture in class society, and the other to symbolize the personal/interpersonal experience of guilt and shame.
Restored My Faith in the Idea that RPG Design is not a Dead Craft: City of Winter
There are a handful of RPGs that I am interested to try – Grimwild and the upcoming Apocalypse World 3rd Edition spring to mind, for instance. But while those look like they’ll be solid refinements of the standard form, I can’t shake the general sense that RPG design is kinda stagnant. It’s games like City of Winter that are here to prove that some folks are still pushing the boundaries in radical and exciting ways.
While I have some complaints about the mechanical nuts and bolts of this game, I have to say that I was absolutely floored by Dispatch, from start to finish. I can't get enough of these characters, the emotional highs and lows are potent, and the core dispatching mechanics add a new dimension to the game that I haven't seen in this team's earlier work. This is a must-play for fans of the new AdHoc Studios' former TellTale games, fans of the superhero genre, and probably a lot of other humans in general.
EXCEPTIONAL
I'm gonna talk about the big complaint that I have now. This game is close to perfect, so the urge to find ways to fix it is overpowering. Basically, the dispatching mechanics have a death spiral problem: Every time that a hero fails a mission, the XP for that mission is lost forever – which means that hero will never get to be as well-trained as they might otherwise have been.
Failed missions also cause temporary stat-reducing injuries, and, in the early game, they delay the unlocking of special abilities, synergies, and pharmacy items – all of which can lead to further failures. Then, across the game, as the difficulty of missions rises and heroes have to split up more often to tackle simultaneous crises, your poorly-trained heroes become an increasingly significant problem.
Now, AdHoc had the good sense to ensure that there's enough XP to still pull off any ending even if you perform poorly – but the bigger issue, in my opinion, is that a death spiral is directly opposed to the core themes of the surrounding story.
SPOILER WARNING for some vague thematic stuff.
It shouldn't be a terribly radical take for me to describe Dispatch, thematically, as "a game about redemption". The Z-team struggles with being identified, and self-identifying, as villains; they feel like heroic redemption is impossible. Robert necessarily redeems a minimum of six of them, and potentially as many as ten, depending on who you count. Meanwhile, the villain, Shroud, is a man with the power of foresight; thematically wrapped up in the idea that people are predictable, and that they don't change.
For this game, with these themes, to punish players' early mistakes with permanent consequences that are magnified as time goes on is... completely wrong. Maybe the worst thing is that because the game doesn't offer you ways to correct for your past mistakes, the only way to fix them is to reload from an earlier checkpoint. When you play again, you'll have the power of foresight and so you won't make any mistakes. Turns out, Shroud was right all along, I guess?
So how might this be fixed? I'm gonna spare myself some extra space here to make suggestions. Obviously testing would be necessary to evaluate them, but they're aimed toward creating a game with dynamic, responsive difficulty where players are incentivized to roll with the punches and turn things around, rather than restart.
First, award XP for failed missions! Maybe heroes earn XP per mission, regardless of outcome. Maybe heroes "learn from their mistakes", and so they only get XP from failed missions, not from successful ones. Or maybe we introduce a "breakthrough" mechanic where every time a hero fails, instead of getting XP they receive an XP-multiplier for their next mission, so that a subsequent victory can recoup their losses.
Let synergies grow any time that a pairing get sent on the same mission, regardless of mission outcome. You could offset this by either having it take twice as many missions to fill the synergy up the same level, or by having a random chance that synergy increases each time.
Make the pharmacy items available right from the start, and, after every nth failure in the same shift, have Robert requisition more pharmacy items to compensate. This way, players who are struggling get more chances to recover, while players who are performing well have to deal with limited resources, creating responsive difficulty.
Have successful missions lead to injuries. Basically, lower the odds of an injury from each mission, but have the chance of an injury happen regardless of the mission outcome. You could even have injuries happen more often for successful missions (explaining this with voice lines that indicate a hero succeeded only because they exerted themselves, or that a hero who failed ran away to avoid getting hurt).
When a mission fails, have an option for a hero to "push", suffering an injury, a delay (either more time on the mission, or more time resting after), or some other penalty, in order to reroll the outcome. Perhaps even a more extreme option where the hero can guarantee a success by being automatically downed afterward.
Create a generalized pool of non-shift-specific missions that can appear at random, during any shift, and have variable stat requirements – always the same high stat(s) and the same total sum, but the exact spread can fluctuate by ±1 on each nonessential stat. This way, every shift has at least a few curveballs that the player has to react to.
Within each shift, mark which missions are "plot relevant" and need to occur at a specific moment, and mark any sequential missions that have to appear in a certain order to make sense – but then shuffle the order in which all other missions appear to make the events unpredictable and nerf the benefits of replaying.
Most if not all "GM advice" that floats around is useless nonsense because it's completely divorced from, like, the rules text of whatever game you're supposed to be GMing at best and at worst is just what some guy had moderate success doing with his specific play group.
The existence of "GM advice" is predicated on the assumption that the GM is an auteur – the principal designer of their own bespoke game. To this mindset, a rulebook is nothing more than a formatted compilation of yet more "GM advice"; a collection of suggestions and techniques that a GM might choose to employ or ignore as they (the auteur) see fit. The idea that a rulebook could constitute a tested, refined, finished product; the idea that you might simply play a game as instructed with no further modification or input on the part of the GM, is incomprehensible (or even offensive) to them.
I recently edited and revised the older post where I first laid out my conception of the Auteur-GM, and how it differs from the Audience-GM. If this thread caught your eye, then you might also find that post edifying.
It's come to my attention that, while I have touched on it repeatedly, I have apparently never directly named or explicated the concept that I call "Calvinball" gameplay in tabletop RPGs. So today we're going to rectify that – and for context, I'm going to re-use this quote from Sandra Snan, describing her experience playing rules-lite RPGs with GMs who improvise:
I felt like nothing really mattered. The GM just made up what would happen according to their whim of what would fit the drama or what would be cool in the moment or what they thought made sense.
The academic jargon that we need to make sense of this was coined by Wolfgang Iser in 1993 to categorize play as either "instrumental" or "free". The oft-repeated – but wrong – explanation of the difference is that instrumental play involves explicit objectives and win/loss states, while free play does not. The more accurate explanation is that instrumental play is structured and driven, while free play is improvisational and directionless. More concretely:
Instrumental play is Football (governed by official rules that are applied in the same way in every game).
Free play is Calvinball (a fictional game from the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, in which "you make up the rules as you go").
For practical purposes, free play is often experienced as players "feel out" a new play space, experimenting and discovering what is possible. Sooner or later, it all-but-inevitably gives way to instrumental play (or at least play with more instrumental characteristics), because adult humans need a reason to do things or else they lose interest in them.
If you hand a Nerf blaster to an adult human, they'll spend some amount of time just handling it, seeing how the darts fly, et cetera: free play. But eventually, they either get bored and disengage, or else they start doing target practice: instrumental play. Setting a goal and some restrictions creates a "lusory attitude", a sense of orientation, purpose, and stakes, which in turn drive engagement.
This is the phenomenon that Snan encountered in the quote. The GM was making it all up – not the fiction (as that is always "made up"), but rather the game itself was being made up, on the fly. Just like a game of Calvinball, Snan's choices as a player had no causal relationship to the progress of play. All trace of instrumental characteristics had been destroyed and so nothing seemed to matter – it was just faffing about.
In Snan's own writing on the subject, the major cure for this ailment is her policy, "no paper after seeing rock" – i.e., that all judgments made by the game master have to be established in advance. The GM must be able to cite a precedent – a basis for their ruling, in something that was created before the players stated their actions. Specifically, precedent comes either from the written rules of the game, or in the GM's written "prep" content. This assures the players that their choices are being filtered through a definite and objective game system. Anything else, by definition, is either cheating or Calvinball – it doesn't matter which, because the stakes of the game would be destroyed either way.
I was unable to complete Virginia, a game that only takes about two hours to complete, because the wobbling camera effects (which cannot be disabled) gave me a headache. I tried repeatedly to return to the game and would make brief progress before this headache manifested again – and ultimately I decided (on chapter 19 of 42) that it wasn't worth the trouble. Virginia is basically the 3D-rendered equivalent of a visual novel: the player provides no meaningful inputs of any kind except to repeatedly press the "play" button on what is, at its core, a feature-length animated movie that stalls out every few seconds until the player presses the "play" button again. I can't speak intelligently about the content of that movie, either, because I was so profoundly frustrated by its form that I was unable to absorb anything of substance from my time with it.
Most if not all "GM advice" that floats around is useless nonsense because it's completely divorced from, like, the rules text of whatever game you're supposed to be GMing at best and at worst is just what some guy had moderate success doing with his specific play group.
The existence of "GM advice" is predicated on the assumption that the GM is an auteur – the principal designer of their own bespoke game. To this mindset, a rulebook is nothing more than a formatted compilation of yet more "GM advice"; a collection of suggestions and techniques that a GM might choose to employ or ignore as they (the auteur) see fit. The idea that a rulebook could constitute a tested, refined, finished product; the idea that you might simply play a game as instructed with no further modification or input on the part of the GM, is incomprehensible (or even offensive) to them.
AoE2 has a number of systems that are sufficiently compelling in isolation that they have gone on to become separate genres unto themselves. Here, they mesh together, creating pressures on one another to demand the player perform well at each one, while also multitasking between them – a sum greater than the parts. The systems are so gratifying that they all tend to induce a state of hyperfocus in me, which is disastrous, since it causes me to neglect the others. Over time, this caused me to develop a sort of generalized anxiety, where I emotionally associate "satisfaction" with "impending defeat".
Late last year, while I was gearing up to run the final playtest of my since-cancelled 4E D&D adventure Cursed Moon at Blackstone, I happened to discuss a lot of the setting lore with my partner. They went on to relay some of it to my niece at a family gathering, who immediately began asking me about this intriguing fantasy game I had made. Suddenly, I found myself trying to figure out how to not only fix the broken mess that is CMaBS, but also make it kid-friendly and build it out of Lego?
The resulting product doesn’t much resemble CMaBS at all, except for preserving all of the lore that caught my niece’s attention in the first place. She enjoyed the adventure, and my adult players agreed that it was a dramatic improvement over CMaBS itself, but the play-tests also confirmed the existence of some internal tensions between the rules system and the rigidity of the Lego model:
Goal tiles were meant to get the players to offer up adventure ideas to help the GM, but since the GM's adventure is already set in stone Lego bricks, there isn't a lot the GM can change at the table to accommodate an unexpected goal.
Flaw tiles don't create a strong-enough incentive over the course of such a short session to matter.
"GM describes success; players describe failure" has worked well for its own purpose, but we found that the possibilities of what a player can describe are heavily restricted by the reality of what's depicted on the table, so the benefit is hindered.
At the heart of these issues is this: the core benefits provided by the Lego model (i.e., providing a blorby point of objective reference) are in direct conflict with the core benefits provided by the resolution mechanic (i.e., letting players control the fiction). It seems to me that these are mutually exclusive: any attempt to blend them is just going to result in compromising both.
Which means it's time to fork the project!
One version of the game will emphasize the objectivity of the model, and use a new dice mechanic that provides randomized answers to any questions that aren't answered by the model itself (a sort of generalized version of the kind of mechanics being discussed in this thread). This version of the project will therefore also constitute the “fortune roll”-based successor to Determined.
For the other version, the core mechanic is going to evolve in a much more explicitly L&F-, FATE-, and PbtA-inspired direction. I'd also like to find a way to incorporate the idea of giving the players a mass of spare parts from which they can construct new objects to introduce into the game-in-progress – but even if the Lego ends up relegated to a mere visual aid that's still fine.
Today, almost ten years after its inception and four years since I last did any serious work on it, I am finally cancelling my 4E D&D adventure module, Cursed Moon at Blackstone. After dragging the thing out of the mothballs for a final play-test earlier this year, I have found that the only silver lining on CMaBS is that it is a perfect example of the foolishness inherent in trying to reshape D&D to achieve one's design goals, rather than starting from a clean slate.
The overall results of the playtest are that there are perhaps only two systems in the game that function as desired:
First, my tracking mechanics, from which players can obtain a loose estimate of the distance to their quarry, allowing them to triangulate an exact location by tracking in multiple locations. This system I designed completely from scratch. Even at the time, I remarked upon how it seemed to clash with the surrounding D&D rules, but felt compelled to keep it anyway because it worked so much better.
Second, the 4E D&D combat system, which I had left completely unchanged except for the custom stat blocks for boss monsters, and my good friend Jon's (excellent) bespoke tactical maps.
Every other system – that is, all of the ones that represent awkward attempts to compromise between the needs of my design and the need to remain vaguely compatible with D&D standards – were tedious, pointless failures. I tried to cleverly convert common tasks into 4E skill challenges, which only resulted in those becoming drawn out nuisances. I tried to create a crafting system, but it was totally undermined by the fact that most 4E magic items are too underpowered and insignificant to act as a meaningful incentive. Even my efforts to streamline and unify various resource-management and survival mechanics nevertheless resulted in little more than a dreary exercise in bean-counting.
While I must forgive my younger self for his ignorance when he started this endeavour, this is the inescapable conclusion: if you must play D&D, then adapt yourself to it, and not the other way around. Play it for the things for which it was designed, and don't expect it to meet any other goals. Or, if you must insist upon other design goals, then abandon D&D altogether and build systems that can achieve those goals without compromise.
At this point, for me to inflict CMaBS on the rest of the world feels like an exercise in hypocrisy. I cannot tolerate the idea of publishing it unless I start fresh and design it anew – and since I have precious little interest in it anymore, that's simply never going to happen. If anyone reading this thinks that there is something in that document that is worthy of salvage, then please, be my guest. As for me, I have already lost too much time to this doomed enterprise.
Since 2008, the Grand Theft Auto video game franchise has featured simulated television broadcasts – parodic shorts and ads watchable on in-game TV screens. GTA television is also perhaps the clearest demonstration I've ever seen of how having more features and more player freedom can easily result in a worse overall game, and it's a lesson that I desperately need more RPG designers to understand.
The issue is with neither the quality of the content nor the allocation of development resources. Even if the shows had been trivial to produce and were masterworks of cinema, they should still have been cut before release (or patched out after the fact). No, this is a problem of opportunity cost. GTA's core crime thriller gameplay offers both a transgressive fantasy and refined shooting and driving mechanics. By contrast, the television mode is both profoundly mundane and mechanically passive. If you have come to play GTA, it is therefore certain that you have not come to watch TV – and vice versa. Even if you are specifically interested in watching GTA's shows, you'd be better served by a YouTube supercut than by the game itself. GTA's television is such an obvious mistake that, paradoxically, it's only a minor blemish on the franchise: players can usually tell that it's a waste of time, and so they don't waste time on it.
But for other games and gameplay modes, things are not always so clear. It can be extremely difficult to discern whether a particular mode or mechanic is creating a net positive or net negative impact on the overall game, and to be frank, most players aren’t interested in studying their games that closely in the first place. If a feature looks valuable in isolation, they will engage with it, and if that drags down their overall experience, then they will simply Not Enjoy The Game As Much as they might have otherwise – and they will probably never know why.
A player who can identify a subtle, accidental opportunity-cost-trap, and then take steps to avoid it, is not the typical player that a designer can count on. That’s the equivalent of someone who, if they want to enjoy some music, buys a guitar instead of an album. It’s someone who understands the medium on the level of a fellow game designer. To design for a wider audience, we must not only facilitate desirable play, but also eliminate undesirable play. If watching television in GTA is always a net loss, then the best version of GTA is one in which it is impossible to watch television.
This need to remove distractions in favour of a focused, coherent design is important in all games, but especially sandbox games (where the player is afforded greater opportunities to have a bad time). Critically, that includes most tabletop RPGs. So if you encounter an RPG designer waxing poetic about how RPGs allow players the total freedom to try anything, instead of explaining how their specific game promotes a specific experience, you ought to regard them with some suspicion. "Anything", by definition, necessarily includes an infinite array of these opportunity-cost-traps – and that person is either ignorant of the problem, or they're hoping to blame the players for the inevitable consequences.
Serviceable core gameplay mechanics and a handful of above-average features are still not enough to make up for the overwhelming tide of jank and sloppiness across the systems, level design, and writing of this game. Cyberpunk 2077 feels like a Bethesda game – and I do mean that as an insult. It's the sort of skinner-box-driven trash that I play when I'm deeply depressed and can't muster the energy and focus to play something actually worthwhile. The video game equivalent of scrolling YouTube shorts because I can't even force myself to sit through a 10-minute-long video.
