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.
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.
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.
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.
YouTuber Razbuten discusses how experimentation with custom modes in Halo 2 taught him to see games differently - not just as products to be passively consumed but toyboxes to be actively explored, resulting in limit-testing to find ways to play that can be even more fun than anything the designers came up with.
YouTuber Razbuten watched his non-gamer wife try several popular games and the results were fascinating. There are useful implications for game designers (regarding tutorials, player feedback, and how and when to present information to the player) as well as for anybody trying to help a non-gamer get into games.
It’s easy for those of us who’ve been playing games for a long time to take our game literacy for granted. But many common UX conventions are explained poorly if at all in modern titles, putting up an immediate wall for new players and making it hard to get into games without help.
Holly Gramazio takes a detailed look at player creativity and expression - why it’s valuable, what gets in the way, and how to get around the barriers and encourage it.
Five game designers each talk about a rule they follow when creating games. There’s good advice and useful concepts here, made even more interesting by each talk clearly being a glimpse at a distinct philosophy and approach with its own goals - some of them even conflict with each other. The varying perspectives are interesting and I’d love to hear more similar talks from people who make very different kinds of games.
