“I think I have some high level critiques of the way Mako is pursuing this – there’s a stereotype of a game designer pitfall where a designer’s got a vision they’re attached to that resonates with them, but which doesn’t quite resonate with players.”
I find it amusing that, in response to a post dedicated to fundamentally challenging prevailing paradigms of modern games (y’know, the ones predicated on metrics that invariably narrow into adversarial dynamics), you’ve, perhaps inadvertently, suggested that OP might be failing by a narrow extrinsic measure of success. Time to abandon the vision and pursue mass-market appeal!
I think if you want a game to change the world, it actually does need mass market appeal. (If he’d phrased the goal less ambitiously I’d be orienting to this differently).
That doesn’t mean catering to current mass market whims, but it does mean finding a way to connect to something that people want, even if they don’t know they want it.
(But also, this feels like a kinda uncharitable misreading of what I was actually saying. I didn’t say anything about honing in on metrics and following them off a cliff)
I find it amusing that, in response to a post dedicated to fundamentally challenging prevailing paradigms of modern games (y’know, the ones predicated on metrics that invariably narrow into adversarial dynamics), you’ve, perhaps inadvertently, suggested that OP might be failing by a narrow extrinsic measure of success. Time to abandon the vision and pursue mass-market appeal!
I think if you want a game to change the world, it actually does need mass market appeal. (If he’d phrased the goal less ambitiously I’d be orienting to this differently).
That doesn’t mean catering to current mass market whims, but it does mean finding a way to connect to something that people want, even if they don’t know they want it.
(But also, this feels like a kinda uncharitable misreading of what I was actually saying. I didn’t say anything about honing in on metrics and following them off a cliff)