Unlocked Doors, Everywhere

[droqen]

Retiring Beyond NFTs into this new thread in order to avoid a thought process that revolves around what it seeks to avoid.

But the starting point is this: NFTs are bad because they impose arbitrary scarcity on a medium where resources are basically free. (Of course, computer usage and the internet are not entirely free -- the hardware comes with costs both financial and material -- but in general these costs are massively reduced.) Let's imagine a new world based on freedom of information, where everything is increasingly information.

[droqen]

Unlocked Doors, Everywhere

In reference to my NO DOORS tenet, itself a counterposition to wombat's "All Game Design can be seen as Doors" essay, Unlocked Doors, Everywhere is the title I'm giving to this new thing binding a lot of ideas together --

Games without restraint, open source software, free information, etc. What if every door was fundamentally unlocked, designed to be held wide open? If information should be free, and pay-to-play games that demand money or time are bad, why do we accept 80-hour games, or 2-hour games, or boss fights that make you lose an hour of progress, or a minute?

I don't think it's a matter of scale, it's a matter of attitude and kindness and trust. I'd like to allow anyone to skip anything in my games, but it could detract from what the game is meant to be.

Can I trust people not to push through the unlocked doors that say "Please don't open", or should I just lock those doors?

[droqen]

I want to be clear that I don't know what the right answer is, even for myself. There is a degree to which "Unlocked Doors, Everywhere" does not, and cannot, apply. Instruction and hard restriction are useful tools when dealing with large numbers of people -- strangers -- unfamiliar with a space. You can't open up the elevator control room to just anyone because someone curious (or malicious) (or both!) could cause a lot of trouble. A small child might bumble in and sow entirely unintended chaos.

Videogames play with locked doors for the purpose of entertainment.

Surely if there is a correct solution along this axis, it is not that all doors should be locked all of the time, as these two examples make obvious. Locked doors sometimes, somewhere.

[droqen]

I'm going to be talking about Opulent Games or something like that soon, basically the idea that surfacing the development process and creative decisions and all the love for the thing is good.

The problem I have with locked doors is they make it more costly to appreciate the whole work.

But the upside is that they are a material for the player to interact with, to make their play more interesting for them to look on from above and examine.

I want to beautifully expose all the processes at work, which is an evolution on the idea presented by the original zine, Opulent Artificial Intelligence, which advocated for beautifully exposing all the processes at work in AI. What I liked about that wasn't the AI, but the beautiful exposure. I want to know the creative HUMAN impulses that drove the work -- not just the rules and datafiles of artificial intelligence, but that of real intelligence, too. I don't think it's done enough.