I've made a secret gameplay demo that really excites me along these lines, but I won't go into great detail yet.

The common version of this feeling is given by bullet hell games and games like... Geometry Wars, Vampire Survivor, things like that. There is a shifting mass of things which you are trying to avoid, and so you move to try and avoid them.

See also games with interesting movement mechanics and momentum, e.g. Superflight, where the obstacles are static but your movement produces a living, shifting relationship to that static obstacle-space.

P.P.P.S. A great low-key example that I didn't fit into the above description is the iconic dilemma between a bunch of people deciding what to get together for lunch. It's best when exactly one person takes initiative and proposes an idea, and everyone else agrees to it.

Also I need to test my math at some point, is the best success rate for 10 disorganized players really 10%?
Is there a better individual strategy for such a group than 'choose to lead 10% of the time, choose to agree 90% of the time'?

P.S. Any kind of hierarchy/leadership/whatever solution to this game only works if the group maintains a good strategic consensus - and I'm not advocating for any kind of dictatorship here, you can have a 100% success rate in a group where the 'shot-caller' is constantly changing as long as everyone agrees who it is for any given decision!

It's as important for that one person to propose an idea every time as it is for everyone else to agree every time; this is something that I didn't quite get, I found it easier to assume that agreeing was a net good. It is only a net good to be 100% agreeable if there is someone else who is proposing an idea (i.e. "taking responsibility/initiative").

P.P.S. Some factors noticeably not covered in this simple game:
 * In a group of 10 people you definitely prefer the best of 10 ideas rather than 1 random idea from 1 random person. For simplicity's sake I am not considering idea quality, only group consensus.
 * I am only considering group utility - I think this is a good way to think about things, but there is a Prisoner's Dilemma-like factor to take into account when individuals value having their idea chosen rather than someone else's.

The Prisoner's Dilemma is a well-known game theory 'game':

Two prisoners (players) are each given the option to stay silent, or snitch on the other.
If they both stay silent, they both get 1 year in prison.
If they both snitch, they both get 5 years.
In one snitches and the other stays silent, the snitch gets off scot-free and the loyal silent one gets all 10 years.

I've been thinking of simple alternative 'payoff square'; it started while observing cars at an intersection:

Two cars (players) are each given the option to accelerate through the intersection, or slow down and wait for the other.
If they both wait, they both lose a few seconds of time. (and then they have to play another round.)
If they both accelerate, they crash and both lose hours of time to insurance, repairs, costs, and whatnot.
If one accelerates and the other slows, the fast car loses nothing, and the slower car loses a few seconds of time.

What does this look like in an environment where two (or more) collaborators have to come to an agreement together?

Two collaborators (players) are each given the option to agree with the other and support their idea, or commit to proposing their own idea.
If they both agree, they both lose some time because no idea was proposed for them to agree with. (And play again.)
If they both propose their own idea, they both lose some time because there was no consensus. (And play again.)
If one proposes an idea and the other agrees, they have come to a decision.

Obviously this is a really stripped down and silly version of how agreements are formed, but so are the prisoner's dilemma and the cars-at-an-intersection dilemma stripped down and silly versions of those real-world examples. The interesting thing here is that it describes a dynamic which gives rise to hierarchies: I've understood on an intuitive level for some time that it's useful for someone to take responsibility for a thing, to take charge, but this game makes it more clear to me exactly why that is.

~

Aside: It's easier for smaller groups with no explicit leader (or, let us say, shot-caller) because the probability shakes out better: playing this game with two players, there's a 50% chance in every randomly played round that we will come to a consensus. With three players, a 33% chance. (Or: 2 players have a 1/2 chance, 3 players have a 1/3 chance, etc.)
Also, with smaller groups, the rounds go faster, but that's not an interesting new observation: everybody knows that already.

There's no winning strategy for this game at the level of individual players. If everyone does the same thing as everyone else, the winning chance cannot get any better than those probabilities given above. The only way to develop a better winning strategy (and one is clearly available) is through communication -- and asymmetry.

~ SYNAPSE I don't make art to make people happy, I make it to provoke epiphanies.

~ Art is Life-Changing, and that's not an obsession with the end result, there's something in there that is what I like about design at all. My favourite thing to design, to think about designing, is how to help someone (finally) understand something huge and overwhelming. Although I prefer when it's about a 'real' thing that's the feeling I'm targeting, because it's the thing I think about most myself -- those moments in life when I look back at an experience and think, "This changed me."

Now that is the design puzzle I want to tackle.

In Get Over Yourself, McWilliams says: ~ "If you do it right, everybody likes the same stuff in games. They want an immersive experience that makes them feel like they did something special and they're unique and special and they develop skill while doing it."

-an immersive experience
-do something special
-feel that you're unique and special
-you develop skill while doing it

I felt a dissatisfaction with this short list, though I recognize it certainly has an appeal. The important thing is that when I think about processes that bring me joy in design, an 'immersive you're-so-special you're-improving' feeling isn't what I like to think about.

...

There are no normal people.

There are only people.

And we are of them.

I'll end by saying I watched this talk because it was linked to me by Momin Khan -- not via Twitter, but I've linked his enthusiastic retweet here since the original recommendation was done in a private work Slack, and this one is more enthusiastic and has more commentary about how he feels about it :)

I love that his takeaway is that it's about loving the craft of gamedev. Maybe the tone wasn't for me, I didn't need McWilliams to counter all these awful internet and workplace arguments I never wanted unearthed in the first place, but I expect somewhat that the talk is for an audience other than me. That is, it's a talk written for someone else, and for these people, the talk correctly addresses many familiar prejudices and frustrations.

I'm not at an objective place when it comes to designing or giving talks, but I like to think I'm getting there with game design.

Even still, I think the more important thing is the common feeling. Not marketing, not audiences... I don't know, I can't get over the feeling, not the one she's talking about, but a different feeling. I suppose the feeling could merely be a more deeply crenellated version of the position she's attacking; I think it is more worthwhile to develop one's sense of the universal craft of games, rather than to practice a divided craft, for limited audiences. But in many ways this 'universal' sense is simply aligned with what I want to... play, or see, in the world.

Is this something I will ever get over? I guess time will tell.

But I'll remind myself, here at the end, that the first splinter in my brain was McWilliams' insistence that we are not normal people. I hate that idea, the idea of identifying myself as separate.

Extracted from the overview:

The last slide (with content) is a comment which 'gets it,' and yeah, I agree with this. Maybe I'm just enjoying my little isolated island a bit too much, I don't need to be exposed to all this internet vitriol and discourse. Ugh. Here's something I can agree with. McWilliams does too. (Or rather, this comment agrees with her!)

"You can either make games with yourself as the target audience (and then hope that others like them too) or you can try to make games that you enjoy *making* even if they aren't ones you would necessarily enjoy playing. Even if you aren't in the target audience for your own creative work, you can still get satisfaction from it, and still get motivated to do it." (slide at 42:xx)

I would say that the negative is not so important for me anymore. 'Even if they aren't ones you would necessarily enjoy playing.' I mean, yeah, okay, but the important part is everything else, not the negation, the rejection... this is non-timeless stuff. The timeless stuff. Let me extract it.

39:35- "I'm creatively fulfilled by whatever I'm working on, because I'm making games. The problem we have is that we have an industry that grew up with personal creative fulfilment being very closely linked to people's jobs . . . but that doesn't work if your personal creative fulfilment is only about making a game that you would play. And it's why the Zyngas of the world are killing, in terms of the number of people playing. They're killing it. And they're killing it because they're getting past themselves, and they're making games for the rest of the world. And it's cool if you don't want to do that, that's fine, you know, you're, make the games for people you want to make the games for. But let's stop crapping on the people who are making the games for the rest of the world."

I think it was in particular this last sentence that riled me up, that made me want to consider this quote more carefully. "Let's stop crapping on the people who are making the games for the rest of the world." This is... how do I describe it? I want to say it's reactionary, defensive. "I'm creatively fulfilled doing what I'm advocating for!" "Let's stop crapping on people for doing what I'm advocating for." It's... narrow... and though I wouldn't go so far as to say these people are strawmen, wwhhoo cares? Who cares? "Let's," McWilliams says.

I once used language like this. This is a talk from 2012, over a decade ago, keep in mind. Part of my cringe is mere cringing at my past self, my past aspirations and hopes for the scene, the industry, the world. Hmm.

Ah, wow. The next section is literally McWilliams reading negative internet comments and responding to them. It's so, uh, internet cringe.