observation lately: our approaches to gamification & game design (philosophies, design practices, etc) don't always make things funner they often just make things unnecessarily competitive.

saying this bc i had a conversation about making Electric Zine Maker more "gamelike" and-

ideas like "unlocking" tools if people complete X, Y, or Z, or assigning progress when making a zine, ended up sounding like a nightmare.
it would break a lot of what people love about the program (simplicity, welcoming, approachable, easy to get into, basically non-competitive).

i think sometimes we view game design as a specific set of things, and it kinda gets ideas "stuck in a rut" with what we default to.
idk but i don't think games, at heart, even need to be competitive or challenging. it's interesting to me how that tends to be our default language

conclusion: game design is so much more fun when you look at what you are doing in other ways than "game design". imo it's better to question why you think "unlock" or "progress" is a good idea to begin with, and maybe solve that design problem a different way.

adding to this: the tendency toward making things competitive is what alienates a lot of people from games. it can be frustrating, unnecessarily complicated, too tedious, or too stressful...

idk it's a big topic, that doesn't fit well into tweets, but i love how in these discussions about design the default is "unlock" "achievement" "goal" and somehow that sounds fun?
if you look at it from another angle it sounds tedious too.

imo not everything is made better by trying to make it challenging and game doesn't always need to mean "challenge".

added take, while i'm thinking out loud on twitter:
most of the time things like unlockables are implemented they don't actually serve to improve the play experience, they exist to artificially bloat playtime

this is how i feel about a lot of ways that games are made challenging

example: i miss older fighting games where you just had all the moves, you didn't need to unlock them. the way that type of design is normally handled (imo) forces people to engage with something longer than they need to in order to enjoy the full experience.