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.]

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Void Stranger and Player Expectations

Image
     After hearing murmurings from Super Eyepatch Wolf and others, I decided to jump into system_erasure 's latest game  Void Stranger completely blind... This is normally where spoiler warnings would be appropriate, but I'm not sure how much I could possibly spoil given I haven't really started the game yet. That's right; I'm stopping to write this in response to playing the game for all of 5 minutes! + + + Void Stranger appears to be a game about defying player expectations. Before even getting past the title screen, I am confronted with a dynamic representation of the simple controls; Up , Left , Down , Right , A , and Start , in black, white, and gray against a field of rising particles. The interface responds to inputs and makes it clear that my controller is indeed working, but pressing Start simply causes it to light up; it does not allow me to actually start the game... How strange. A bit of thrashing around on the buttons yields a minor discovery; did the...
Read more

FFVIII Junctioning Isn't That Complicated, But...

Image
    A  common refrain you tend to hear from Final Fantasy VIII 's detractors, (a group I certainly belong to, despite my devil's advocacy) is that its reviled Junction System is "too complicated." That's a bit reductive, and putting stock in stories of forlorn players pushing deep into the game without ever engaging with the system is difficult, given how exhaustively they teach and over-explain it. You can tell your 18 y/o teacher is into you if she slow blinks Heck, given her age and status as a pump-fake love interest, I suspect the only narrative reason Quistis Trepe was written as an instructor and not just an upper-classmate boils down to naturalizing her unhinged level of tutorialization on the topic! Individual spell casts get sucked out of enemies and act like consumables, and Guardian Forces buff you by equipping stacks of spells to your stats; that's about it! Core player understanding of FFVIII 's Junction System wasn't really one of its ...
Read more

Ahab Souls

Image
I am haunted; kept up at night by visions of an enormous whale-like creature that certainly will exist, but whether or not being devoured by it will satisfy me won’t be revealed for another two months…      The first time I played the Lies of P Demo, I was duly impressed by the audio-visual design and charmed by its over-the-top premise, but the experience didn’t manage to fully entangle me in its strings; not yet. You see, combat is well over 50% of what makes or breaks a souls-like title, (with the rest being monopolized by level and world design) and when it came to dismantling frenzied puppets, I bounced off; the meta-narrative driving this whole release seems to be “Elden Ring is lovely, but the world wants a sequel to Bloodborne very badly,” and so this vertical slice of a Pinnocchio-based spiritual successor convinced me to play it like one.      Everything about the Victorian steampunk setting told me to find a rhythm of attacking and dodging that...
Read more