thread: 2011-05-11 : The Un-frickin-welcome
On 2011-05-19, Josh W wrote:
Fair point Vincent, so even if your not going for unwelcome stuff for the sake of it, unwelcome stuff is a failure mode of pushing players in new directions creatively?
Well in that case it's not very macho at all!
To pick up the semi-unsaid threads here, I'm guessing you think that's a problem because when that happens, the natural freeplay response of some people is instant retcon, or in archipelego-speak, "try something different". That's an issue because it breaks stuff your game needs to be good;
eg
weakens the in-fiction chains of causality your working with,
destabalises events that the game needs to be solid,
means people are editing moments out, (that are important to the kind of stories you want the game to help build)
it shifts decision making and can make it harder to identify with characters
or whatever.
Right? I'm sure there are probably other ways it could mess things up, like people compromising in the middle of character conflicts or something!
Seems a productive point to go from.
Sometimes people won't like a bit of the track, even though you hope to get them somewhere good, and you're just navigating. So you need to ....
And then there's the thing with people sticking things out cos you're the designer, when they are actually using the game in a way you didn't intend, and they'd be better of using their own moderating system stuff...
To my mind this suggests a compromise, that there are areas of the game where you might be happy for players to retcon, and other areas where you'd be like, "for this game to work, if you get to these things, stay the course, I've come across them before".
