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
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
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.
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.
Wondering how much effort went into forcing the player to look at the plane crashing into the underwater tunnel at the start of Bioshock...
