thread: 2011-05-11 : The Un-frickin-welcome
On 2011-06-01, Vincent wrote:
Joel, good question!
I don't think there's any one crucial difference. There are a bunch of things we could look at, top to bottom, from way up in the social setting way down to how the game's rules coordinate interaction moment-to-moment.
It's significant to me that in the unfruitful example, somebody got their way over others' resistance, and in the fruitful example, nobody got their way but the game design. But I wouldn't draw any sort of general principle from that.
This is weird to talk about, but I'll give it a try: this whole unwelcome thing, it's really about how I design games, not about how I expect people to play them. Trying to understand it from the players' point of view is like trying to understand, I dunno, writing from the reader's point of view, or filmmaking from the audience's point of view. It will take you so far, and no farther. There's architecture to a game's design that is hidden from the game's players, just like there's architecture to a novel that's hidden from its readers and architecture to a film that's hidden from its viewers.
