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> Games like Getting Over It are also a special case, because their state is almost entirely defined by the position of the character in the game environment. T

> Games like Getting Over It are also a special case, because their state is almost entirely defined by the position of the character in the game environment. They do have a clear ending, but failure is implicitly measured by how much forwards progress you lose when you fall. A mistake which takes you all the way back to the start is analogous to dying and starting a new game, though, so that still feels like the game has win and lose conditions. As one of Getting Over It's appreciators, I offer a different perspective: Progress is not measured by the position of the character, but by the growth of the player. A mistake which drops you back to the beginning of the game is progress; you've learned something, and you have an opportunity to learn more while getting back up. The only way to fail is to give up. The true ending of the game isn't even when the credits roll, it's when you voluntarily ride the snake.

dane-pgp 5y ago
That's an excellent way of viewing the "state" of the "player-game" system, thank you. My favourite example of this, and one of my favourite moments in "gaming" generally, was (SPOILERS:) a sequence of online puzzles, one per page, where solving the puzzle on one page would give you the address of the next page in the sequence. The game was constructed (if I remember correctly) such that the first page actually had two possible answers: an obvious one, and a more subtle and complex one. By missing the subtle challenge, you ended up following a trail of relatively simple puzzles, which increased in difficulty over time, until they took you right back to the first page. At first it seemed like a mistake, that after all these puzzles you were no closer to the end than when you started, but, as with Getting Over It, the "player-game" state had changed, because you were not the same person you were when you started the game. So, you knew to be more careful in looking for clues, and you knew how to solve those clues, and you could then find the single answer that was there from the start and took you straight to the success page. Experiences like that really change how you view the world, and yourself, so I'm really glad I found it when I did.

dane-pgp 5y ago

That's an excellent way of viewing the "state" of the "player-game" system, thank you. My favourite example of this, and one of my favourite moments in "gaming" generally, was (SPOILERS:) a sequence of online puzzles, one per page, where solving the puzzle on one page would give you the address of the next page in the sequence. The game was constructed (if I remember correctly) such that the first page actually had two possible answers: an obvious one, and a more subtle and complex one. By missing the subtle challenge, you ended up following a trail of relatively simple puzzles, which increased in difficulty over time, until they took you right back to the first page. At first it seemed like a mistake, that after all these puzzles you were no closer to the end than when you started, but, as with Getting Over It, the "player-game" state had changed, because you were not the same person you were when you started the game. So, you knew to be more careful in looking for clues, and you knew how to solve those clues, and you could then find the single answer that was there from the start and took you straight to the success page. Experiences like that really change how you view the world, and yourself, so I'm really glad I found it when I did.