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I think you touch on a deeper point about games. Part of the joy of games is agreement on the parameters of what is and is not in bounds for the game. Knowing

I think you touch on a deeper point about games. Part of the joy of games is agreement on the parameters of what is and is not in bounds for the game. Knowing that boundary lets you focus on only the things within that while pleasantly mentally unloading all of the myriad messy things outside. Even though each videogame is different, there is a surrounding videogame metagame culture that players tacitly assume defines what all videogames are allowed to do. When learning a new videogame, players assume the rules of that metagame still hold true. (This is one of the reasons videogames today can be so difficult for non-gamers to get into: they don't have this absorbed culture.) One of the rules of that metagame is "NPCs do not mislead the player." (Other rules of the metagame are: "Your savefile cannot get into a state that makes it impossible to beat the game," and "It should not be required to die/fail several times in order to learn how to proceed.") It's valid for a game to break that meta-rule, but it will be very unpleasantly surprising if they believe they are playing the stock videogame metagame as they learn this game's rules. This is kind of unfortunate because there's a whole giant space of possible videogames that could be made with interesting rules if only you could set the expectation for players that this game steps outside of typical game culture meta rules. You occasionally see experimental games that do this like Lose/Lose, which deletes random files off your hard drive when you lose (!).

xapata 6y ago
> It should not be required to die/fail several times in order to learn how to proceed. I played a game a while back that made a sort of Groundhog Day repeated dying a requirement to make progress. That was a central theme to the game, so it ensured the player understood the situation pretty quickly.
- kibwen 6y ago
  Indeed, any time there's something that a creator ought not to do, that creates fertile ground for interesting subversion by doing exactly that thing. However, the point remains that the consumer needs to be briefed properly in order to avoid a sense of betrayal; a game like Dark Souls is chock full of characters that will lie to and mislead you, but the game does a good job of communicating its own atypical nature to the player via a prevailing atmosphere of despair and callous indifference.

xapata 6y ago

> It should not be required to die/fail several times in order to learn how to proceed. I played a game a while back that made a sort of Groundhog Day repeated dying a requirement to make progress. That was a central theme to the game, so it ensured the player understood the situation pretty quickly.

kibwen 6y ago
Indeed, any time there's something that a creator ought not to do, that creates fertile ground for interesting subversion by doing exactly that thing. However, the point remains that the consumer needs to be briefed properly in order to avoid a sense of betrayal; a game like Dark Souls is chock full of characters that will lie to and mislead you, but the game does a good job of communicating its own atypical nature to the player via a prevailing atmosphere of despair and callous indifference.