Playing videogames is worthwile, but the cost of playing any particular videogame quickly becomes overwhelming compared to the available depth.
Zeigfried (Brevity is the dark souls of wit)
There’s something about games as an art form that I find myself increasingly capable of entertaining: each game as not a world or a hobby unto itself, but a single rock skipped across the surface of a great pond.
The KNOWING WINK of mokesmoe’s I can’t carry all these ducks! relies on an acknowledgement of 10,000 hours spent not playing it, but spent playing games. But what games, whose games? If I gave that game to someone without the same investment into games-in-general as I have, would they have the same chance at being astonished as I did?
Perhaps my relationship to this game is intensely personal and has almost nothing to do with a history of playing, and knowing, games.
The games I love most are the ones that propelled me forward, that made me think about games-in-general and perhaps life in a novel way, not the ones that folded inward and demanded increasing levels of understanding and mastery.
I loved learning Cinco Paus; I loved navigating that truly, deeply incomprehensible world and using the key of Portuguese and guessing at words and occasionally using google translate; I loved learning to understand how to play a game that I never played again once I finally felt I understood it.
What’s that about?
“The KNOWING WINK of mokesmoe’s I can’t carry all these ducks! relies on an acknowledgement of 10,000 hours spent not playing it, but spent playing games.”
I was thinking about this just today. Every so often I come across potential clients that reach out to me cause they want me to make a “deep and artistic” game for them. But they don’t have much knowledge on the indie world, so they’re usually amazed by anything I show to them as an example. But we talked with my producer about how careful you need to be about what you show to them, cause a lot of the games I find deeper are the ones that motivate me to write and reflect and rant about them; games like yours Droqen, or the likes of Stuffed Wombat. But I can’t show those games to someone without game literacy. You can’t find the beauty and irony of breaking the rules if you don’t know the rules in the first place.