The ultimate goal of all this micro-design and shuffling about malarkey
March 26, 2024 4:17 AM Subscribe
"Procedural narrative is the design strategy, emergent narrative is the goal, the player’s experience." Game design previously.
I don't play video games.
But I absolutely love to watch videos from folks like HitboTC, as they play Sea of Thieves. It's a game that has a lot of structured TiE-In WoRlD eVeNtS, but the developers have long had a motto of "tools, not rules", and their upcoming updates seem to have returned to this focus in a big way. This has been the kind of game for a long time where you could start a fire on one end of a ship and leave a gunpowder barrel on the other, and swim away to watch it blow. It's a game where you can stow away and interfere with the operations of the sails, rudder, and anchor without the crew figuring out why they're off-course. It's a game where you can sneak in and steal the treasure from a vault that someone else unlocked, carry it in a rowboat to another island, and leave the other crew a misleading treasure map to the opposite side of the game world.
There are plenty of channels where you can watch expert players enter into ship-vs-ship deathmatch battles, and I find these crushingly dull. But Hitbo is a merry prankster, skipping across the map, sneaking onto people's ships, negotiating himself out of tight corners, and setting traps for unsuspecting pirates. He's charming, good-natured, principled, and manages to bring out everything in the game's sandbox that can create new and surprising stories.
If I were to design a game, my goal would be "How can I best enable as many Hitbos as I can?"
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 5:23 AM on March 26 [6 favorites]
But I absolutely love to watch videos from folks like HitboTC, as they play Sea of Thieves. It's a game that has a lot of structured TiE-In WoRlD eVeNtS, but the developers have long had a motto of "tools, not rules", and their upcoming updates seem to have returned to this focus in a big way. This has been the kind of game for a long time where you could start a fire on one end of a ship and leave a gunpowder barrel on the other, and swim away to watch it blow. It's a game where you can stow away and interfere with the operations of the sails, rudder, and anchor without the crew figuring out why they're off-course. It's a game where you can sneak in and steal the treasure from a vault that someone else unlocked, carry it in a rowboat to another island, and leave the other crew a misleading treasure map to the opposite side of the game world.
There are plenty of channels where you can watch expert players enter into ship-vs-ship deathmatch battles, and I find these crushingly dull. But Hitbo is a merry prankster, skipping across the map, sneaking onto people's ships, negotiating himself out of tight corners, and setting traps for unsuspecting pirates. He's charming, good-natured, principled, and manages to bring out everything in the game's sandbox that can create new and surprising stories.
If I were to design a game, my goal would be "How can I best enable as many Hitbos as I can?"
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 5:23 AM on March 26 [6 favorites]
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posted by SaltySalticid at 4:39 AM on March 26 [19 favorites]