What (or Who) is responsible? Whoever takes responsibility.

Oops, turns out I wasn’t done. Jack, this is what happens when you make two blog posts in quick succession: I do too.

After writing and packing away Emerging, I immediately recognized: an emotional theme I’m very interested in is something like “revealing freedoms through contrast.” Seeing and owning the transformation from being constrained to recognizing a greater freedom.

Through this lens, the resolution problem is a problem of freedom of choice, but in particular, recognizing that freedom. In particular, the answer to “What (or Who) is responsible..?” is “Whoever takes responsibility.”

The (or perhaps a) type of emersiveness I’m interested in is the player emerging into the realization that they can take more responsibility for the resolution problem.

Games and their designers do this for the player to varying degrees. I think of how much disdain I once held for achievements; they seemed like a step towards “the game designer is responsible for the resolution problem.”

If I design a game that takes more responsibility for the resolution problem — that is, a game that says “look deeply into this, it’s cool,” there should theoretically be nothing stopping me or anyone else from also saying “look deeply into that, it’s also cool.”

But…

[..] if so, why aren’t I making up my own challenges? What is stopping me?

-Jack (What (or Who) is responsible for the Resolution Problem?)

Perhaps the act of giving systemic legitimacy to developer-designed meta-goals has the potential to detract from the perceived value of non-developer-designed meta-goals.

On the other hand, maybe this is just the nature of games in general; they are a playspace with rules applied. Is making up your own challenges really “playing a game” anymore?

I could make the argument that it’s no longer gameplay, but design.

Do games have a resolution problem, or are we mixing up videogames with fantasy consoles? I mean, I know “is X a game” is the eternal argument a decade in the making (to which the only answer is “yes”), but seriously, is hacking a PuzzleScript game indistinguishable from playing it? Is writing an article about a game part of playing it?

Is speedrunning Game X the same as playing Game X, or is it something different? Using the equipment of Game X to perform a “speedrun.”

Is struggling to get an achievement for Game X the same as playing Game X, or is it something different? Using the equipment of Game X to play a different game, albeit one also designed by the game’s developer and presented as part of the game by the platform or even the game itself. Hmm.

If we play soccer (football) on a big field, and then we play tag, we’re using all the same equipment (though we’re ignoring the ball now).

Whoever takes responsibility.

I think the ‘responsibility’ of solving the resolution problem is fluid, and is, practically speaking, always decided by its players: they are the only ones who can choose what they do.

However, players can be coerced, tricked, manipulated, convinced, and a large part of videogames culture involves actively seeking out the designer’s intended way to play. Through the lens of responsibility, some players strongly prefer to defer the responsibility of the resolution problem to someone else, and it can be useful to recognize this dynamic. The videogame itself may be expected by some players to take responsibility in this way.

It’s a social dynamic, although in the case of a single-player videogame it might only involve one human and a heap of technology.

Who is responsible for deciding what a group of friends do when they gather? Which restaurant they go to when they get hungry? What time they’re going to disband and go their separate ways?

Whoever takes responsibility.