I love stories of how games improve through playtesting. This look at Moving Out features a few interesting lessons, including dialog changes to make sure players go in with the right expectations (the line about insurance), a mechanic that was added because players expected it to be there (the co-op throw), art changes to improve readability and player communication (color-coding rooms), and the introduction of an Assist Mode to increase accessibility and “help more people enjoy the game”.
When developers don’t add enough accessibility options to their games, modders can come to the rescue.
This provides an object lesson in one of many reasons why “git gud” is a terrible response to people who want easy modes or other accommodations - as seen in this writeup, the presence of such accommodations is exactly what allows many players to git gud when they otherwise couldn’t.
It’s also worth pointing out that this is only possible when modding is possible - and thus, things that take control away from gamers (such as cloud-based games) are a genuine threat to accessibility.
Did you know that Minecraft started as a self-described clone of a game called Infiniminer made by Zach Barth of Zachtronics? I sure didn’t.
This video presents an interesting angle on the history of Minecraft and also a case study in the value that can be unlocked by allowing player freedom away from the game designer’s authorial intent - and how strange it is to have a game you created get changed into the most successful game of all time.
It’d be easy to dismiss the success of Animal Crossing: New Horizons as an accident of timing, simply the result of releasing just as the COVID-19 pandemic was kicking into gear - certainly it doesn’t hurt that the world needs that kind of gentle escapism now (even if Animal Crossing was never designed to be binge-played). Here, Rob Fahey argues that this is a clearly incorrect reading that dismisses the obvious value of and appetite for variety in gaming experiences beyond what the AAA industry typically offers up.
Tangentially, for what such a misreading looks like in hindsight, see the narratives around Myst. As I wrote before, “[G]aming has always had more subcultures than the social narrative has accounted for and when we refer to gaming as a monolith we distort reality by ignoring the experience and perspective of many, many people.”
Continuing his series in which he watches his non-gamer wife play various games, YouTuber Razbuten now takes a look at how several popular online competitive multiplayer games are experienced by an inexperienced gamer.
Key takeaways include that good tutorials are if anything even more important in these kinds of games, as understanding how to play affects not just one player’s experience but all of them, and a fear of making the game worse for other players can easily drive away exactly the sort of people you’d prefer to interact with online. Yet many games lack tutorials entirely, fail to point new players to them, or just convey the game’s basic mechanics without teaching the player how to actually use their toolkit and be a good teammate.
Additionally, it’s often very difficult to find matches against other players of similar skill levels, which can result in being frustratingly steamrolled while just trying to learn the game. One of the best solutions to both problems is to let players team up against bots - though even this often fails to convey the necessary skills to then play effectively against other humans.
Localization presents interesting challenges, but cultural differences run much deeper than language. It’s easy to think of any changes as censorship, but market realities are far more complex than that. Here, Kate Edwards provides a fascinating look at how to handle the trade-offs and pitfalls that can needlessly render games unsaleable in particular countries.
Letting the player have an effect on the environment is a great way to make a game’s world feel alive. Here, Damon Reece examines how Metroid Prime’s world can seem much more real than that of Dragon Age: Inquisition due to the former allowing the player’s actions to change that world.
Internalizing that there’s a “right” way to play games can ruin your ability to enjoy them.
In this op-ed, Nick Calandra writes about how adhering to others’ ideas of how several prominent games should be played was ruining the games for him. Once he let himself “set [his] own parameters for how [he] wanted to experience [them]” he was able to play in the ways that made the games fun for him.
The effects of violent video games have been the subject of debate for decades, but most discussions miss a key factor: the context of the violence. This write-up summaries a 2013 study finding that playing as a villainous character makes players more likely to perceive violence in neutral faces (suggesting an aggressive mindset) and less likely to return a planted lost letter than playing as a heroic character, even when both characters behave violently - and that these differences were magnified when players were prepped with articles on the characters’ backstories that made them more sympathetic.
What we do in games may matter less than why we do it and who we are.
A quick look at what traits make inventory management feel worthwhile, and then examinations of what works about ten example approaches taken by prominent games.
Joost van Dongen of Ronimo Games (Swords & Soldiers, Awesomenauts) shares five useful insights about balance in competitive games. My personal favorite is the point that it’s far worse to have overpowered options than underpowered ones, because players flock to the strongest options. One underpowered option means the rest are still viable; one overpowered option means only that one is viable.
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.
