Comment on "Benefit of the doubt" is a very important aspect of a game's success
RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Probably a result of living in a highly judgmental global society that would rather form an immediate opinion, even if it is objectively wrong, than spend the time to actually investigate what the facts about something are.
As an example, some people say that any person named in the Epstein files should immediately be jailed. I feel this is a wrong opinion, because any person can be named in a conversation that they aren’t party to. I could, for example, start talking about Mr. Rogers, and he is technically named in my comment. But some people say that the name just being in my comment is enough “evidence” to jail him forever. Rather than spending the time it would take to realize I was only saying “I liked Mr. Rogers’ show on TV,” they want an immediate resolution despite however wrong or inaccurate it would be.
Investigation and research matters, and we live in a global society that villifies this ideology in favor of forming immediate and often wrong opinions about things they spend almost no time actually investigating.
I mean, I remember a time where you were expected to not be able to win a game in a single sitting, and in fact, you might not get all the information about a game in the actual game. We had to read manuals for tutorials, maps, and story exposition. Try releasing a game nowadays that does that and you’re going to get slapped with a 1/10 because people nowadays have less patience than a goldfish.
Personally, I primarily blame legacy news outlets and social media for this. But I digress.
MurrayL@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I kind of get where you’re coming from but it comes across as out of touch, ‘old man yells at clouds’ type stuff.
The shift has far less to do with patience and more to do with designers getting better at integrating tutorials into the games themselves. Games now are designed to teach you how to play through playing, so reading a manual became unnecessary. That’s not a flaw, that’s an improvement.
The only reasons this wasn’t done earlier was because the field of UX was still developing, and because cartridges limited how much text could be crammed into the games themselves.
That said, there are still well-received games that rely on manuals, but it’s now an explicit design or aesthetic choice rather than something everyone has to do to make up for limited tutorialisation. Check out Tunic, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, or TIS-100 as examples.
snooggums@piefed.world 1 day ago
A lot of good older games had gameplay explained through play, but it wasn’t as common as it is now for the reasons you stated. Other people had to catch on and then learn how to implement the better design.
And there are still plenty of games that do a terrible job of explaining how they work or have complex mechanics with no apparent way of conveying it to players.