But a big part of the surprise and delight of unwrapping a new genre of game or new level of technological sophistication is letting you visit those mountains The shock and wonder people experienced when 3D games actually let you walk through the world as a real place
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Replying to @arthur_affect @loudpenitent and
Which is tied to the shock and wonder of, you know, playing a game at all Plenty of people feel immersion and investment just reading a book or watching a movie, but if everyone were completely satisfied with that there'd be no games
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Replying to @arthur_affect @segfaultvicta and
I dunno, man, a lot of folks like either stuff in the background or references to other off screen places. And of course you don't have to be able to seamlessly travel to that mountain without transitions or in the same game.
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Replying to @loudpenitent @arthur_affect and
Open worlds are specifically constrained by their demands that the world be seamless and without *paths* and *hubs*, which inevitably results in a world that paradoxically feels smaller and more banal
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Replying to @loudpenitent @segfaultvicta and
Of course the themepark vs sandbox tradeoff is real, and of course when a themepark works perfectly it creates a much "bigger" world in the player's mind
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Replying to @arthur_affect @loudpenitent and
If you successfully get me to suspend my disbelief and I feel like this four-room house is a completely real, living environment then I walk away with the feeling that those mountains in the window are just as real too
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Replying to @arthur_affect @loudpenitent and
And the vaguely implied universe I'm imagining of millions of houses just as real as this one is more satisfying in that way than the probable disappointment if you had to try to get a dev team to procedurally implement millions of houses
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Replying to @arthur_affect @loudpenitent and
The problem is, of course, this is only if it works If it DOESN'T work, if I try one too many times to go somewhere and get "This door is mysteriously locked", I'll just go "Fuck this" and your effort was wasted
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Replying to @arthur_affect @loudpenitent and
Sandboxes exist because they're trying to give people something they want and even though they often don't do it well they will continue to exist because the impulse "I want to turn left here and just go off the road" is an eternal one, it's the reason people even play games
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Replying to @arthur_affect @loudpenitent and
This is like the eternal debate over "railroading" in tabletop gaming and what the Forge used to call "illusionism" Of course, to a certain degree, "railroading" is inevitable and games with no railroading are really just games where players accepted the railroading
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But the least productive response to this is to *blame the players* and say they wanted the wrong thing "If you could just do what you're obviously supposed to and stop being assholes" If you're outnumbered then it doesn't matter if you're the GM you're the asshole
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Replying to @arthur_affect @segfaultvicta and
That's another area I don't quite agree. The table make an agreement going in about what they want. And there's a very strong tendency to forget that the GM is also a player.
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