tester #12
And… we ended our series of alpha testing on a light note yesterday. The player knew absolutely nothing of games, or how to interact with a virtual world. Also, she was left handed and a Mac user who hadn’t really used a two button mouse before. We spent the first hour helping her understand how to navigate. It was kind of fabulous though. It turned out that the joystick was the easiest way to play for her. She approached the entire experience unlike any of the others. Slowly and with wonder. Everything was a sign, a symbol. She herself is an inventor of games… analogue ones that children can play (she was an educator.) She discussed how she often had to find solutions to problems, changing traditional physcial games (football, running races etc.), remixing them to help girls and boys play together or for kids who are of different skill levels to be able to play together without problems. This, she said, made her sympathetic to the way we are trying to make a video game that is remixing the idea of what video games are.
Her reactions were the polar opposite to the Game Designer we had as tester #11. All of the things he said we “should do” would have totally turned this woman off to the game. She was here because she found the game beautiful. That perceived beauty and interaction with the characters was entertaining for her. We don’t interfere with her experience with lots of hardcore conventions. Maybe where we are coming from is just not from the place of conventions of game design. We are simply applying the same principles of art and aesthetics from our past experiences. It is about entertainment but not necessarily fun. Why are games supposed to be fun? (I mean, action! fun! whoohoo! fun.) Are video games fun? I posit that games can be about dreams. And we invite you to visit one.
Post is a little old but I will try to make my comment fresh
I would say that here we get to the gist of game design as we know and see it today. Or maybe rather: of game design expressed by games that we are capable of playing today. Even though I’m not a fan of your games (because horror is just an opposition of what I look for in so called art), I can’t resist to see and appreciate how much difference you make in the videogames world and how, ironically :), your ideas (or just experiences, contemplation, thoughts) are similar to mine.
To me the whole point of having a good game designer is to have a person whose background is something much more than just passion for games. I might be very rude here but I would say that game design TODAY is something quite easy to learn because of a simple reason, there is maybe a dozen of game designers I heard of (and none of them is a major industry designer [which is my personal opinion, of course]) that do things differently and seem to take from Life and Experiences rather then from “hey, it was a fun game, so let’s make another fun game, yupi!” which is shallow, boring and as repetitive as letting Michael Bay make his another “brilliant” movie.
In the situation we experience now where tons, tons, over 99% of games are fun and entertainment and barely offer anything else, I would say videogames as a medium require people who turned into videogames to try something new and have previous experience (either it’s art or science, or humanism of any sort).
Let’s face it, deep artworks in human world base on human experiences and thus they treat about human condition. The moment 10% of gamers will realize games expressing game designer saying “I love you” or “you broke my heart” or “it was a loss for me” or “I have been through something I intend to tell about” (hopefully you already get the idea :)) are not only The Games but also The Valuable Games different from fast food & porno that floods the market will be the moment were videogames will make a step ahead huge enough to make other people consider it an art.