Shamus Young coins the term “domino worldbuilding” to refer to storytelling in which events are (sometimes surprising) consequences to each other, rather than just a bunch of things that happen to serve the needs of the plot. He provides the first Mass Effect’s backstory as a particularly good example and discusses the value of this approach in games.
Continuing his series in which he watches his non-gamer wife play variousgames, YouTuber Razbuten now takes a look at how Minecraft is experienced by an inexperienced gamer.
Key takeaways include how Minecraft does a poor job steering the new player to interesting content (especially if you get unlucky with your initial spawn area) but that this encourages social experience and learning to play from someone else, along with the fact that failure modes and punishment make it hard for many players to focus on the content they find the most appealing - but that the inclusion of alternate play modes can solve this neatly.
While we often speak of games’ unique hooks, we rarely speak of the context around them. Chris Zukowski argues that a game’s “anchors” - points of familiarity which inspire confidence in prospective players - are just as important, and in fact that while a good hook may get someone to look at a game, the anchors are what will get people to buy it. It’s thus important to identify and provide the right anchors for your game - here, Zukowski provides an example of how he determined the vital anchors for the Metroidvania genre by using public data available on Steam.
We usually talk about replayability in a mechanical sense - whether a game’s systems allow for repeat playthroughs to be mechanically different. In this essay, Matthew Codd argues that emotional replayability is much more important. Some works are worth revisiting even for identical experiences because of the way we connect to them emotionally, and without that emotional connection varied playthroughs can’t hope to lure players back in.
Designing narrative choices for the player that feel meaningful and consequential is a recurring challenge in various genres. Branching stories and systematized changes to world-state are common but often expensive solutions; another approach is to update the player character’s emotional state. One prominent example of this is Depression Quest, which creates a feedback loop in which your choices affect your mood which affects which options are available to you in the next choice.
In this post, Artur Ganszyniec discusses a deeper version of this approach used in Wanderlust Travel Stories, in which the combination of the player character’s fatigue and stress levels determine how they see the world - which does modify which options are available, but also creates different emotional contexts in which the same options may be chosen for different reasons. I suspect this approach would only really work in games where you are playing a defined character whose emotional state is an explicit mechanic, but it’d be interesting to see it applied in, say, a Quantic Dream game.
As a followup to his previous video about watching his non-gamer wife try several popular games, YouTuber Razbuten has made a video about watching his non-gamer wife try The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The results may not be especially surprising for those who’ve watched the first video, but this different experiment gives Razbuten’s wife more time to get used to a single game and thus showcases how BotW’s design does and does not help her become more skilled and confident. Particularly valuable are its abundance of recoverable failure states and its problems that can be solved many different ways.
In a keynote speech for entertainment industry representatives, MIDiA Research’s Karol Severin argued that it’s time for service providers to aim for quality over quantity.
In a “post-peak attention economy” where consumers already have more than enough entertainment options to fill their free time, it’s no longer a winning strategy to optimize strictly for engagement - people don’t have more time to throw at your service. It’s increasingly necessary to target positive sentiment - make your service enjoyable to use so that consumers will want to choose it over competing services and not drop it first when money gets tight.
This blog post by James Margaris is kind of two articles in one, but I like them both. First, he looks at the value of alignment between a game’s mechanics (what you do and how it works) and its theming (how things are presented and framed) - mechanics are much easier to grasp intuitively if they match the theming. Next, he explains how most discussion about ludonarrative dissonance is not framed usefully and that the real problem people are pointing to is usually one of tonal dissonance that is more about the narrative than the ludo.
Toxic behavior in social media and similar platforms is not a new problem, but it’s worth pointing out that there are financial as well as ethical incentives for platform-owners to improve it. You can increase engagement through endless A/B tested UI tweaks, but you might be better off improving your community.
Key quote: “[P]eople are 300% more likely to never return to games or platforms where they experienced toxic behaviour. Conversely, players are three times more likely to return after positive interactions.”
The same game can affect players wildly differently depending where they are in their own life when they play it. For all its flaws, and whether or not you think it holds up today, Final Fantasy X matters a lot to people like me who played it and loved it in our late adolescence. In this wonderful, personal, heartbreaking piece, Leigh Alexander explains why.
