[...] przez niektórych negatywnie – jako tani chwyt mający na celu zaszokowanie gracza. Obrazowo ujął to Ernest Adams, twórca i znany teoretyk gier: (…) I personally dislike having emotional [...]

Michael, that’s why there is a “Recent Comments” area on the sidebar.

Useful in theory, but only if I check your website obsessively and slip inside the 10-post mark. I stopped doing that after some periods of low activity. I would go back to RSS, but sometimes I only want to track certain threads and not others.

The main takeaway from this thread seems to be, “You can’t write about emotion.” Maybe the article should have been a poem instead.

i tend to believe they were not decorative craft, but religious items used for totems for mans position in the universe around him..aka nature.)

Games have an equally long standing as religious rituals used to represent man’s position in the universe around him. Ie, the Mesoamerican ballgame.

Our present language is rich with game-metaphors to explain our world. Consider the “three strikes laws” – an interesting example of one of these “toys” affecting the legal system.

We tend to be hyperfocused on the recent computer games and lose the larger context of “games”.

I also like Brenda very much and I have a great deal of confidence in both her sensitivity and intentions.

But I personally dislike having emotional switcheroos foisted upon me as a player. That’s the game designer toying with me. If you ask me to spend time and effort to achieve a goal, and I duly work hard at it and become invested in it, then telling me partway through that I was an idiot for trying is going to piss me off.

I think that feeling of pissed-off-ness at having been lied to, or at least misled, is what Eric Schild is referring to, although I feel that his personal condemnation of Brenda is over the top.

Brenda is not a bad person. But her game would annoy the hell out of me and I certainly wouldn’t take anything more than annoyance away from it.

I wondered if the person cried at the tragedy of the trivializing of such a serious matter.

Iag Bogost always annoys the hell out of me with his political correctness and intrusiveness. The worst thing going would be if we suddenly had to endure a wash of PC instructional flash games on news stories. The only good thing is that they’d likely engender a backlash of brutal parodies that are likely to be hilariously funny because they’ll be totally un PC. Well, I can dream, can’t I.

The problem, really, is the same reason Brenda isn’t going to publish Train. The message is in its delivery mechanism–her–and everything else is supporting it.

What that means to me, though, is that listening to Brenda present the game is one of the game mechanics.

Yes, I’d say that all makes sense.

I agree that game mechanics and plot/narrative shouldn’t be mutually exclusive (and indeed, I think that the best games I’ve played – the ones that I consider to be legitimate works of art (whatever that means!) – but based on what was presented in these comments and the article linked in the main post, I’m not sure that that’s the case with “Train.” Granted, I wasn’t there, haven’t seen the presentation, and haven’t played the game, so take everything I say with a grain of salt….

With that proviso in place, though, what the game appears to be is a ‘standard’ transport your people here, put obstacles up in front of other players, and try to get to your destination first (almost Mille Bornes played with train-cars), with no narrative context built into the game up until the trick-ending when somebody finally ‘wins.’ This does not seem to me to be particularly innovative. Many games that already exist have ‘trick’ endings in them where you think you’re playing the good guy, but then oops, you were blinded/tricked/etc and were actually carrying out despicable acts. This is all well and good in many cases, but I think the impact of such games doesn’t actually come from the gameplay, but from the narrative around it.

Games seem to be in some ways unique, because the actual mechanics of gameplay – and not just the story around it – can be used to express complex ideas, and when used in concert with a solid narrative they can really cause us to question ourselves and how we play these games (and possibly, by extension, make us question how we generally operate in everyday life). The Slave-passage game sounds like it has mechanics that have built these things in – a unique gameplay mechanism that forces a player into an interactive and legitimate moral dilemma. I just don’t see ‘Train’ as doing anything similar, based on what was presented (like I said; it seems like a game of Mille Bornes where instead of winning and going ‘Yay! I won the race!!’ you lose and go ‘Oh…. I was tricked.’

Maybe Train does offer some context or interesting mechanics that haven’t been clearly expressed that could lead a player to examine what he’s doing during the actual gameplay and the ethical and moral implications of his actions. But from the narrow window I can see the game through, all I see is a trick ending coming out of left field that doesn’t bear any intrinsic relation to the game that preceded it.

The saying goes, “God is in the details.” Details are very important in games. A lot of designers have become so detached from the process as a whole due to “design by committee,” (not saying that this is necessarily bad, just calling it what it is) many a time a game feels disjointed and “off” because what the player is doing (via the controller) and what they see in the big picture do not add up. This causes the player to pull back from the game, either from confusion or frustration, and diminishes the experience overall.

Does any of that make sense?