Most of us know that without a playable demo, marketing materials like gameplay trailers and development blogs aren’t always enough to answer the question of whether a game will be enjoyable. Ben Bayliss points out that for those of us with accessibility concerns the question can instead be whether the game is playable at all, making purchases much riskier.
I hate how Alto’s Adventure won’t let you keep playing until it uploads your score to the leaderboards, even if the server is slow to respond.
At least, that’s what I assume is going on here. I don’t know what else it could be. I don’t have this problem on PC where I have my firewall set to block the game from connecting to the internet. On Switch, you can’t set that per-game so I have to put the Switch into airplane mode to prevent this.
I wouldn’t even notice this was happening if it didn’t block me from playing. Like how it’s easy to forget how commonplace day-one patches have become until one gets delayed, this problem in Alto’s Adventure makes me realize how bizarre it is that it’s become routine for games to connect to remote servers and upload information without any kind of permission. I never agreed to share my scores and there don’t appear to be any in-game settings to disable this behavior. I have absolutely zero interest in the leaderboards for this game, but it’s acting like there’s nothing the least bit rude, presumptuous, or problematic about it disrupting my play in order to go online and use my bandwidth to broadcast my scores without my consent.
Players approach in-game challenges in ways informed by what the game (and other similar games) have already taught them - in some cases, this can lead to missing seemingly-obvious solutions because the game’s affordances are pointing in another direction. (I ran into this during my playthrough of Right Click to Hack.)
This write-up illustrates that principle by taking a look at how playtesters approached a particular environmental puzzle in Immortals Fenyx Rising - and encourages designers to support more freedom and creative thinking in designing their challenges and to not be afraid of the opportunities this can create for “breaking” the game, as that’s often more satisfying for the player anyway!
Game designer kiva’s blog has some fascinating war stories. This particular write-up, part of a series about her work on Battletech, discusses her somewhat-failed attempt to create an event system that would create a bond between the player and their characters - what it tried to do, and why it didn’t achieve those goals.
If you find it interesting, I do recommend her other posts - she has fascinating thoughts on a game designer’s role (in a nutshell: empathizing with the players) and skill set (another nutshell: internalized understanding and intuition from deeply examining many games).
As I wrote about myself a bit recently, FarmVille's impending shutdown closes the book on an incredibly influential game (for better and worse) and a huge part of gaming history. This article takes a closer look at FarmVille's legacy, discussing its role in bringing games to mass market and early steps in metric-driven design and what we might today call loot boxes.
