#intended experience

[kissingdeadgirls]

i saw a twilight movie with 200 screaming women and i almost get it now

[pixelpoppers]

Wordle

I've written a few times about the idea that good games are beacons in design space pointing us to an area likely to have many other good potential games nearby and how much I like seeing the exploration and experimentation this creates. My new favorite example is Wordle.

There's a lot to be said about Wordle (and a lot that has been said), but in this context the really cool thing about it is how simple it is, and the democratizing effect this has on experimenting with it.

Like, sure, once it got popular we saw a proliferation of rip-offs trying to profit from someone else's design work, which sucks and which we always see when a game gets popular (especially in the mobile space but that's a separate rant). But because Wordle is so simple, it's very easy for individuals with some coding skill and zero budget to get involved out of interest and passion. Pretty soon there were solvers and reimplementations as people used Wordle to inspire their own projects. Next the exploration came, starting with jokes like "what if Wordle, but it hates you" or "what if Wordle, but it's horny" or "what if Wordle, but for prime numbers" or "what if Wordle, but for single letters". These vary in how actually-playable they are, but I think all of them make the world a better, more interesting, more amusing place.

But what really got my attention was seeing a version that was "what if Wordle, but twice". This is a genuine evolution of the concept applying the existing mechanics in a new way resulting in a similar but distinct gaming experience that's equally valid but which appeals to a slightly different audience. That's awesome and I hope to see more evolution like this.

And the coolest part is how fast this is happening. Like, what happens when a AAA game becomes very popular? A year later, other AAA publishers put out one or two games that superficially copy some of its more prominent design elements. What happens when a tiny, simple, indie game like Wordle becomes very popular? An immediate explosion of innovation. Within weeks individuals are putting out dozens of variations with their own spin. The really promising ones get more attention and the cycle repeats in a positive feedback loop of creative energy.

You love to see it.

[pixelpoppers]

Cheating Lets You Experience the Best Parts of a Game More Often

Right now I’m playing Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch Remastered on PC. I love it. It’s gorgeous, heartfelt, sincere, and touching. It’s also absolute rubbish. Movement is just too slow. Combat is uninteresting and offers low chance of reward. It’s a huge grind, and it’s a boring one at that. Only one thing is keeping me playing to experience the wonderful story, one tool giving me the patience to slog through the frankly terrible combat: Cheat Engine. Cheat Engine is a longstanding tool that lets users actively edit the code of a game while it’s running. If […]

I've been beating this drum for a while, but "cheating" in a single-player game, whether it comes from in-game systems or external modifications, is often a great way to increase player options and make a game experience better.

[pixelpoppers]

Entitled Developers

So like, I love Nintendo and everything, but this is also the company that decides there is One True Way to play their games to justify forcing you to unlock all characters in an otherwise tournament-ready game one by one, or selling you an expensive controller and then not letting you use it while destroying accessibility by unnecessarily requiring motion controls, or preventing you from backing up your own saves, selling you a save backup service, and then not letting you use it, or requiring an online connection to experience certain content even if playing alone on a portable console.

I've heard a lot of talk about entitled gamers, but none about entitled developers. I don't know what else to call it when a developer feels like they can decide for you how you get to enjoy the games and services you've purchased from them and hobbles those games and services in ways that cause real problems for communities, accessibility, and preservation all to stop players from having fun in an unapproved way.

See also: Atlus pretending Fair Use doesn't exist and dictating terms for using gameplay footage and screenshots (perplexing after their previous backpedaling on the subject), many developers tracking player activity even outside of their game, and on and on.

[pixelpoppers]

I’ll be completely honest with you. Even though I cover video games for work regularly, for a long time now I’ve had a hard time sticking with the games that interest me, of which there are a lot. I know many people have this problem where you start a game, aren’t immediately hooked, and then drop it a few hours later. For a long time I attributed this to stress, over having too many games to play and just being unable to keep my mind focused on one thing at a time. With so many games to cover and pay […]

Internalizing that there's a "right" way to play games can ruin your ability to enjoy them.

In this op-ed, Nick Calandra writes about how adhering to others' ideas of how several prominent games should be played was ruining the games for him. Once he let himself "set [his] own parameters for how [he] wanted to experience [them]" he was able to play in the ways that made the games fun for him.

Players have different needs and tastes. We should be willing to dismiss authorial intent in crafting our own experiences and we shouldn't gatekeep others from crafting their own.

[pixelpoppers]

Skill Tests are Delivered Experiences

Somewhere around 2007, I remember there being hand-wringing about how video games had started out as tests of skill and were transitioning to delivered experiences.

There had always been some variety in games, but the culturally-dominant games had once been things like Tetris or Asteroids or Space Invaders - games with strict failure states and no actual victory condition. The long-term hook was understanding and developing the skills required to do better and better on repeat attempts, so these games had high score tables. They were analogous to challenges like the high jump or 100-meter dash.

And as technology improved and games became more mainstream, the culturally-dominant games were becoming things like Half-Life and Uncharted - games where failure was a temporary setback and there was a clear victory condition. Here, the hook was the game's atmosphere and story and characters and the goal of finishing the game, so these games had save files. These were more analogous to literature and cinema.

A lot of people weighed in on whether it was good or bad that games (as an overall culture force) were becoming more and more focused on delivering experiences. Some people were excited about the possibilities while others feared losing their favorite hobby. But in hindsight, the fact that the discussion was framed this way at all makes it clear just how twisted and limited our view had been by the prevalence of skill-test games leading up to that time. Because in hindsight, it's obvious that games have always been about delivering experiences. "Mastering a skill" is just one small subset of the many, many kinds of experiences a game can deliver.

Back then, people were talking like there were two types of games - skill tests and delivered experiences - and the market was moving from favoring the first to favoring the second. But the truth is that the market was growing, branching out from the small area in experience space that had been staked out by skill tests, developing areas like "interactive storytelling" and "self-expression" and "relaxing escapism" and many, many more. Skill test games are still around, but now they can be seen as the niche they always were, since games themselves have grown beyond them.

The old perception of games as skill tests does still linger, but that's not actually inherent to what games are - it's more a consequence of the limits of the technology of the time and the social and economic structure of game arcades. It's an accident of history that a lot of people my age grew up in a culture that saw games this way, rather than as (say) a vehicle for exploring emotional states or experimenting with identity or creating collaboratively.

The situation is improving as more people grow up with access to a wide and varied gaming landscape, but you still run into people who think that Gone Home is a failure of a game because it's a bad skill test, when it was never trying to be a skill test in the first place. And things are a lot murkier with games that overlap niches and provide multiple experiences - some people will tell you that the only proper way to enjoy these games is to embrace their skill-test elements, even as other people plainly state they are only interested in the other elements and the skill-test aspects are an outright obstacle to enjoyment. And of course, the truth is that every game is an overlap that provides multiple experiences.

[pixelpoppers]

Halo 2 Changed The Way I Look At Games

Halo 2 is special game to me for many different reasons. It provided hours and hours of immeasurable fun and it pushed me to be more creative by allowing me ...

YouTuber Razbuten discusses how experimentation with custom modes in Halo 2 taught him to see games differently - not just as products to be passively consumed but toyboxes to be actively explored, resulting in limit-testing to find ways to play that can be even more fun than anything the designers came up with.

I wish I'd had this available to reference when I wrote my article about going beyond intended experiences - I absolutely would have quoted and linked to it.

[pixelpoppers]

Don't Be the Fun Police: Why Games Shouldn't Force Playstyles

The designer can only give the player a set of tools and suggest how to use them in ways that will be fun. It’s up to the player to decide what to actually do.

I wrote an article about forcing the player into particular experiences and why that's bad and stuff!