Fifty Days of UFO 50: Day 46

Screenshot of the UFO 50 game menu with its original orange diagonal stripes. The array of fifty pixel art cartridges is sorted by "My Progress" and shows 36 blue default, 4 golden yellow, and 10 cherry red icons

    Been thinking about the "challenge structure" of UFO 50 lately. It's a three-tiered system applied to every game:
  • Gift - This is the easiest to earn and generally unlocked for playing enough of a game to "witness the core of the thing"
  • Gold - This is awarded for "beating the game," which obviously varies a bit depending on structure
  • Cherry - This is the completionist tier for "doing everything," which doesn't necessarily demand perfection but is highly likely to show you all of the regular content...
    • Slightly controversially, this objective isn't visible in the menus until you've earned Gold on that game
I think I'm going to be forced to agree with the decision to hide the cherry info, given even my guesses or assumptions about the nature of the objective has already had warping effects on my play; I'd have golded Rock On! Island days ago if I stopped quitting missions every time my cave takes a single point of damage! My prediction that the cherry is going to be "perfect clear all missions" has indirectly caused me to waste a lot of time. This is squarely on me as a fussy completionist wanting each mission "fully behind me before advancing" of course, I'm just pointing out that cognitively reaching "past" the goal in front of you isn't exactly a desirable player pattern, so I understand doing what you can, (within reason) to curb it. At the same time, I can easily sympathize with a player's desire to know all the parameters of a challenge before taking it on...

It's tough. Being a game designer can be a little like parenting at times; players will confidently tell you that they want a pure sugar and carb dessert diet, and then barf all over the experience. Is it a good idea to tell a child about all the harsh challenges they're going to face later in life? At the very least that's going to depend on the kid, right? We've all met the oddly mature rugrat that could digest the info without worrying too much about it in the moment, but a huge percentage of children would develop a complex in response to being told the "cherry conditions" for holding down a job or buying a house.

A lot of gamers would resent the above framing on principle, objecting that this is a somewhat insulting framing of the asymmetrical relationship between the developer and player. No one likes being called childish, even if the objective was to grapple with gaps in knowledge and experience, not infantilize them. There's cogent arguments to be made that a healthier outlook is one of a Game Master and tabletop role player engaged in a collaborative campaign. Each party has differing kinds of agency over the outcome, but at least they're both framed as consenting adults! The thing is, any GM can tell you that withholding information from the players is a critical part of the job. It's more a matter of which pieces of information lie near a theoretical boundary between the stuff you need to know in order to engage with the game, and the stuff you don't want to know because finding out is part of the game's appeal.

For some, it all comes down to, "does the cherry condition feel like a spoiler to you?" And your individual answer is probably a strong indicator of whether or not you feel like it should've been there prior to clearing the gold one.

[Look at all that philosophizing up there... metaphors about parenting from the childless? Wasn't the plan originally to do a roundup of all the remaining gifts you have yet to collect? Maybe you should work on that.]

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