Into the Black: On Videogame Exploration

[droqen]

Regarding Electron Dance's
Into the Black: On Videogame Exploration

[droqen]

Technology empowers us to visit places that do not exist. Places that cannot exist. But we do not celebrate this enough. Critics and players often denigrate virtual environments with demands for purpose, the developer god must corrupt places with mechanics, poison them with meaning, proof of intelligent design must be demonstrated through challenges or collectibles. The journey itself is never enough.

[droqen]

Why replace genuine exploration with a bunch of errands?

[droqen]

As a tourist in Venice, I don't have to go to the Bridge of Sighs, or St. Mark's Basilica, I can wander the backstreets and alleyways without fear of collectibles rewarding me. Are there brave games that do the same? Let me wander, and find my own meaning?

I'm so tempted to give in to this. I think I must have watched this video. It's a compelling mindset, a beautiful question: Why have pointless busywork gameplay when a place is in itself enough?

When I explore the backstreets and alleyways of a real place I know I am exploring a real place, a place that belongs to people, a place that has or once had a purpose. I've lost that sense in videogame places. Maybe it's gameplay that poisoned me, the resulting gameplay-sense what keeps me from enjoying exploration. Maybe I perceive a videogame place without gameplay to be pointless primarily because my experiences have conditioned me to look for gameplay in videogames.

But without gameplay what am I exploring? Exploration, exploration, relies on movement through space. Exploration is gameplay. Turning pages is gameplay. Seen this way the quote from the last post may read, "Why replace one form of gameplay with another?"

Through that lens, we can ask: what is the purpose of exploration, and what is the purpose of errands?

Exploration is something that the player does. Running errands is also something that the player does. What mechanics enable each of them?

Collectibles are a simple game mechanic that fuels a simple player activity. Exploration is much more ephemeral: What drives a player to explore? Given a task, a player will likely perform that task. Errands are a way to push the player through the world, to give an implicit promise to them that they are doing the right thing by exploring. Errands, collectibles, are exploration gamified.

Rephrasing the original question, "Why replace genuine exploration with a bunch of errands?", I get this:

"Why do game developers use {errands [and collectibles]} to encourage non-genuine exploration, rather than {other methods} to encourage genuine exploration?"

I am intentionally framing this question in a way that draws attention to the leading and incomplete nature of the original: it implies errands and genuine exploration are necessarily opposing and also, I think, that the method for achieving genuine exploration is relatively trivial: don't give the player errands. But the true nature of the beast is much more complicated. We need a new question, or several.

- What design problems do errands and collectibles solve, in the game design context of a player moving through a space?
- What impact do errands and collectibles have on the feeling of moving through a space?
- What other methods could be used to solve the same design problems?
- Must those design problems be solved? What happens if they are left unsolved? (i.e., What makes them problems in the first place?)

[droqen]

my attempts at answers

1. Errands and collectibles are useful when developing a game in order to draw the player's attention to things!

2. It's a double-edged sword: The effect of using a specific signpost to draw the player's attention to things means that they see the rest of the world as negative space by default.

3. There are many strategies! A few ways to draw the player's attention to things:
- Visual tricks like they employ in Half-Life 2
- Moving entities that you want to chase (e.g. frogs in Proteus)
- Moving entities that you want to run away from?
- Unpleasant, costly, or dangerous gameplay features that drive the player *away* from the negative space, rather than towards a positive space

4. This is a tricky question! What is design and what isn't? If we're considering a scenario where we do not solve the "design problems," what does that mean? Is it a game where the player's attention is never directed intentionally? Or is it a game where the player's attention is never directed by 'gameplay elements' or 'gameplay'? What is the difference between 'compelling text' and 'compulsory instructions'? I'm not sure this question has an answer in the abstract.