• xe/xer/any

mysterious individual


trashbang
@trashbang

come make video games, we've got:

  • players don't look up
  • players don't look down
  • players don't look
  • players don't read
  • players don't listen
  • players don't look
  • players don't look
  • players don't look
  • PLAYERS DON'T LOOK

bruno
@bruno

the cool thing about designing video games is that for every single piece of information you try to convey to the player there will be a player who either misses it or misinterprets it


bruno
@bruno

and the thing about this is that players will always discover new ways to misunderstand things, ways you hadn't even considered. you can deal with the idea that they'll miss some information, you can build in redundancies or try to work through a process of teaching and reinforcing and testing so that you can re-expose the player to the critical information they need. but they'll always find the one assumption you made where you thought something could only ever be interpreted one way, and they'll devise some absolutely diabolical misapprehension of what you're trying to convey. every time.


trashbang
@trashbang

In all sincerity: an important part of my learning process as a level designer over the last few years was letting go of the idea that it's possible to have everyone experience things the way you intended them. You can lock them in a room, point lights at something, have it jump up and down and make sounds, and unless the camera is physically wrenched out of their hands, they might still miss it. Chasing perfection is a road to madness.

This isn't to say that there's no reason to try—god knows I try. But you get diminishing returns for your efforts, and past a point, you have to examine how they negatively impact the experience in other ways.


mousefountain
@mousefountain

It's really natural to look at somebody fumbling around in your carefully constructed Experience Zone and tripping over your deliberately arranged guard rails, and think: oh damn, they aren't getting this at all- but you have to remember as a player that's a normal and even maybe fun (?) aspect of the medium! Let players bump around in a room for longer than intended before getting it! Normalize not getting it as a player too! I feel like this was my experience with every formative game I played when I didn't even understand where games came from and I think one of the more enriching bits of playing games is poking around until you learn HOW the designer is going to try and tell you things.


vectorpoem
@vectorpoem

If you've internalized mainstream industry thinking deeply enough then you probably do believe that it is possible to spackle up every last possible gap in player comprehension to have a perfectly frictionless experience. I don't think this is true even for the kinds of experiences the old AAA status quo prefers to put out (linear, narrative and action setpiece driven, maximum production cost + fidelity) but it's especially untrue for things like puzzle and adventure games, where a majority of the player's experience lives in those stretches of Not Knowing Exactly What To Do Next and puttering around, and you're far better off building around that negative space and making it enjoyable/interesting to inhabit than trying to fill it in, because all you'd be left with is a solid house-shaped block of spackle with zero habitable space left inside.


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in reply to @trashbang's post:

🦨I remember making some offhand remark about the "tutorial bushes" in our game because we had a note that said "if the player can't figure out how to get past these they can't play the game," and someone said "that's kinda mean tbh" and I'm like, literally the entire point of the game is to spin into things (which cuts down bushes) and if the player can't figure that out then they literally cannot play this game. That's like one of your two moves lmao

in reply to @bruno's post:

Giant sign saying "please wait to be seated". Barrier to force you to walk past it. People walk right on by, or even move or duck under the barrier. They then get angry that a waiter doesn't appear.

Some people will not succeed, no matter what you do.

in reply to @bruno's post:

in reply to @trashbang's post:

Skip tutorial and story dialogue "This game sucks! It expects you to 'just know how to do things' and I don't even know what the story is about!"

Game: "This character was a bad person, they did bad things. THey are bad"
Player: "Character wasn't bad at all you see-- [essay follows]"

Dev: "This character is trans. They are so trans!"
Wiki: bans dev from the Wiki "[Citation needed]"

in reply to @mousefountain's post:

Also I personally enjoy sometimes vibing in a room even if I already know what to do.

Like, I'll figure out what's being asked of me and file that information away for when I want to leave, but first I wanna see what's behind that filing cabinet real quick, oh and under the table too, and...

It's kind of like the "taking a path in a JRPG dungeon just long enough to get a sense for if you're going towards the end or not, then going back if needed to try the other way" but for any sufficiently-engaging space.

in reply to @vectorpoem's post:

This is how you get God of War's voice lines where your companions just backseat you on every single thing in the game. A deep fear of being in that Not Knowing Exactly What To Do Next moment for even a second.

Definitely yeah. It's often a weird blip of extreme low confidence in what is otherwise such a confident work, with dozens or hundreds of pros dumping all their talents into solving various problems.