djan

Reminds me of critiques of Flipside, particularly from people who couldn't find the needle/first ghost. To me, those things are relatively easy to find, but because others aren't familiar with the world/game/games I make, finding them might be more obtuse, even if people are still enjoying the game as they search. For the needle in particular, I added a change (for, like, a day post-launch) where Polnareff the parrot flies in the direction of the needle until you pick it up. And then the people who couldn't find it initially disliked that too! Nobody liked it! So eventually I rolled back the change altogether, and we're back to being illegible, but not leaning too far the other way either.

Your insights in your writeups are really interesting to read

lovely writeup! 😄 I feel like the core divide here is like... some people see weird stuff and think "this was made by an experienced designer who knows what they're doing", while others assume it's not. When you're looking at a game by someone you don't know, it's hard to tell the difference sometimes!

Part of me wonders how much this tendency has to do with some players having way less patience with smaller/lesser-known games, where when they play them, they just assume that when things don't work as expected, they have to be broken, or that the person who made it didn't know what they were doing.
Which I guess is similar to that "legibility" thing you mentioned, but I also think that players approach games of different sizes with different attitudes. Not all of them, but usually the moment something you made hits a broader audience, you tend to get this type of "this just isn't working" gamer/consumer type of critique.

For example, I had people refund GB Rober on Steam, because they thought the controls were broken, when actually they just had to sit through a two minute long, deliberately monotonous intro sequence that was supposed to show you the plight of the worker under capitalism.
I spend at least a week trying to figure out how to create this very small part of the game and it still makes me giggle, because it turned out so well. However it also seemed to have been a source of confusion for quite a lot of people actually. That however doesn't make it bad, or illegible to me, because there's a clear intent and purpose behind it.

At the end of the day, for me stuff like this always comes back to these two things: intend and purpose. The only moments where illegibility might be an issue for me, is when they touch things I didn't intend to be that way. For example, when it's hard to distinguish between foreground platforms and background graphics. Usually these things are not-intentional, but just slip by, so I fix them. However, you could probably also build a whole game around this "problem" and suddenly it become part of the game in such a way, that making it "legible" would completely destroy its initial purpose.

Anyway, thanks for writing this! It got me thinking about this stuff again and gave me some ideas!

I'm reminded of a book I read recently that talked a lot about the notion of people's "opacity", things that we don't and fundamentally can't understand about ourselves and others. The author argued for the importance of being passible to encounters with our own and other's opacity, to resist the urge to explain them or turn away from them but instead to let those encounters disrupt what we thought we knew. That doing so has the ability to elevate art to an aesthetic experience, so long as the artwork also (quoting Martin Jay) "treat[s] the other in a non-dominating, non-subsumptive, non-homogenizing manner"

Perhaps this is to say, then: Why did I enjoy Sylvie Lime so much? I cannot truly say. My heart is also illegible.

(The book was "Sexuality Beyond Consent" by Avgi Saketopoulou, who took the concept of opacity from the works of Édouard Glissant)