In an interview with the creator of the game “Braid”, and my further thoughts:
In “Design Reboot,” a November 2007 speech at the Montreal International Games Summit, Blow developed his ideas further. “Games are going to be huge. Games will heavily impact patterns of human thought, and thus what it means to be human.” Yet the industry is unethically exploiting all these players, because we don’t think about what we’re doing.
“All we care about is whether a lot of people want to play our game. We don’t care why they want to play. We don’t show concern for our players’ quality of life. … Would they still want to play our game if we removed the scheduled rewards?”
Citing Raph Koster’s A Theory of Fun for Game Design and Ian Bogost’s Persuasive Games, Blow said, “All games teach.” He poses the question, “What will we be teaching all these people?” – Shifting Intention
That last line reminds me of something I have often said: All circumstances teach. What lesson do we want ourselves to learn?
When we have an experience, good or bad, there are many lessons we can take away from it, some less obvious than others. Those conclusions that we come to, they change us. Reaching for the most obvious conclusion, without critical thought, is akin to external motivation. It is vulnerable to manipulation by others and the classic Hero tragedy of Shakespearean legend.
On the other hand, taking a moment to assess who you are, who you want to be, and the ramifications of your conclusions, that is internal motivation. It is a long-term solution that you are playing out, one question at a time. It is a through-line, a spine, to your own story.
(Yes, long and wordy – if you have anything to say in agreement or contrast, please do – this isn’t a “right or wrong” thing, just personal perspective, so don’t feel like your own thoughts will start an argument! :) )
The real difficulty of the question lies in the fact that not everyone will pick up the same things. One person’s mindless entertainment is anothers’ blueprint to life. Depth is only available to the relatively minor subset of individuals who actually seek it out (or the even smaller subset who intuitively notice subtlety and layers), while only the most superficial conclusions will be available to most.
I just worry that we oversimplify when we say “what lessons are we teaching,” but I don’t know that there is a better question to ask. It is much easier to evaluate your own process of learning, and virtually impossible to evaluate the process of learning for others (even if you merely evaluate the majority and ignore outliers)
I can agree with that, however, we don’t have any control over whether or not another person is learning what we as communicators are teaching (except to the extent that we make it available, or that we tailor our teaching to an individual).
It kind of follows what I wrote below – a person chooses, consciously or subconsciously, what lessons they learn from any given experience, and as someone providing that experience, the teacher/artist/communicator can only guide – who chooses to follow is not something one can know in advance.
Though I will say that knowing your general audience and understanding what group experiences they have and what methods of teaching/communicating/”arting” they get is important if someone has any hope of being understood by more than that one freak who happens to have grown up just like you.
Many fictional worlds, like Mage, have some concept of enlightenment for all, or awakening – some experience or understanding that everyone achieves; the idea that all of us would gather the same information from the same experience, despite our diverse intellects and histories, is (politely speaking) completely impossible.
I don’t disagree, but I think a valid point is that it matters whether or not game developers care about how often their game is played (and therefore the likelihood of their sales increasing), but about why people might want to play their game (and therefore how they can continue to improve game mechanics making them even more fun/challenging in the future).
This only matters in when your profit comes from a continually renewable method such as World of Warcraft. In a single-purchase game, your sales does not necessarily increase if someone plays it many times (other than them being less likely to sell it to a game store).
No, but they are more likely to share it with their friends and then get their friends to play, and buy a copy… repeat as necessary.
Case and point. :)
I don’t think replayability is a factor there – lovers shake their booty on the wii fit board, that’s enough :D
but notice the comments… they started playing somewhere else… and then acquired their own. :)
Yes, I was there when they played it :) But if it is a good game and they want to play it through themselves, that’s different from replayability, unless twice counts. :D
But they bought in!