Thread by @birdlegscass, Pac-man's ghosts really really fascinate me. It's amazing how Iwatani could portray [...]

Pac-man's ghosts really really fascinate me. It's amazing how Iwatani could portray not only four distinct styles of offense, but simultaneously four distinct personalities, all through their movement alone. I can imagine an alternate history where Iwatani had the means to--

--differentiate the ghosts further via their designs, animation, and sound, but as it stands these personalities are communicated pretty much entirely through behavior that's directly relevant to the gameplay. How many game characters can you say you've come to understand--

--primarily through gameplay? How much could you tell about most game characters without animation, story, and dialogue building out their personality?

I don't at all mean to say it's a virtue to ignore giving your game aesthetics. I mean to say we as designers can probably find the future in creating meaning through games by focusing harder on what makes games unique--interactivity

I think what a lot of my thoughts on game design have come back to lately is asking why the player plays a game. I think some basic facts about games are easy to ignore as a designer, such as: your player can put down the game at any point they don't want to play anymore

This fact kind of looms over my head and scares me lately, because how could you ever properly convey the experience of *any* character's struggles if the player will never share them, since they can just turn off the game and make them vanish instantly?

As designers, we have to answer that question in one of three ways

-Making struggle inherently engaging
-Offering external incentives for overcoming struggle

Or, maybe the most interesting to me:

-Trusting that the player wants to experience more than just "fun"

Obviously, the moment you stop designing *for* the player, I think you alienate like, 99% of people. It's scary as hell to make any decision as a designer that might disenchant a player with your game. It's easy to center the player in everything we do as designers

But I've seen a rare few games that are more concerned with creating systems almost completely external to and independent of the player. The ecosystems you navigate in Rain World have way more depth than almost any player will ever even appreciate, let alone knowing about it

Not even the player character's movement abilities squarely center the player. They're intentionally messy, made more to convey the awkward mix of clumsiness and agility that is a slugcat than to facilitate player freedom.

I think I want to have more experiences like that. I think all of gaming will be better if more of us dare to stick our toes at least a little into the murky unknown of indifference to the player

What a game says as a piece of art is partly defined by the designer and partly defined by the player. The more control a designer relinquishes over their game's meaning, the more is given to the player to find meaning in their experience. To tap into the unique abilities of--

--games as art, we ironically have to decenter the player at least a little, because by agonizing over the exact experience we want them to have, we're restricting the conclusions they might come to about our game systems

And this is another thing that scares me as a designer. Allowing the player to create their own meaning in a space *I* created requires faith and vulnerability. What if the meaning they derive from my game systems reinforces, say, a pro-capitalist worldview? My first instinct--

--if I thought someone might derive that from my game would be to restrict their experience to minimize such outcomes. The designer of monopoly made a simulation of capitalism and land ownership so potent that the predominant narrative peddled by the game now is--

--that fucking over your fellow humans and owning everything is super fun, completely the opposite of what the designer wanted to convey. As I said, it requires faith and vulnerability to allow the player to derive their own meaning from your game

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