Opportunity
Don’t let Opportunity pass you by
The End
This began as an experiment in making a game without an option to restart. I decided that Steak had too much else going on for the sense of finality to stand out. Players were too busy laughing, feeling insulted, or being confused, any of which would qualify as a “desired” reaction to what went on there.
In any event, my answers about finality in a game were left unaddressed.
In a longer game, the sense of finality might represent a major loss of progress. That is a known frustration to players, and isn’t something that warrants a night’s project to investigate yet again.
Instead, then, I aimed for a game with extremely short play iteration time. This is precisely the type of situation where a player would most likely look to a “try again” button, so this was my best chance to explicitly not provide it.
To further exaggerate the effect, I used a simple message upon loss to convey that you aren’t supposed to play more than once. Of course, you can (and probably did) refresh the browser - but in doing so you almost certainly felt like a cheater. To give benefit of the doubt, lets agree that you refreshed out feeling like a detective - wanting to know how it ends on a win.
Self-Aware Audiences Make Bad Sample Sets
If I am right that players replayed via refresh button, then I believe that I’ve succeeded somewhat in getting players to come at these objects more as art, investigated with an open curiosity, rather than attacked as a source of transient, empty reward. At that I am pleased. But it unfortunately also somewhat defeats my intent, since there is little finality to a scientist in a lab; rather than talk about the game as if it wasn’t analyzed as something to be analyzed, perhaps I’d just as well get to the intended message, apart from the experimental tactic I tried applying to meta-play.
On Second Chances
As DJ has already pointed out, second chances do, under certain circumstances, happen. Whether it’s in fact the same opportunity or an entirely new one I wish to not argue either way, for it seems to me very close to the old questions of whether who I am now is the same as who I was last year, and a great many smart people have surrendered considerable lengths of their lives to such matters without satisfactory resolution.
Same or different, to my mind, second chances are not a particularly useful part of forward decision making. In PianoFall, the player does well to follow certain tactics, even when such tactics are equally doomed, on the simple grounds that those mistakes are justifiable as the smartest mistakes one can make. In the same way, even though pouncing on opportunities may not always produce the best result for every situation, at the very least I believe that doing so affords a much more concrete and self-guided learning experience.
Presenting Conclusions
The notion of self-learning isn’t embodied in the mechanics here - just my own conclusions, based on personal reflection, personal experience, and things that I personally have read and accepted as true. This is not a matter of generalized strategy formulation, like HotLavaMonkey or LaserLock, nor is it a question of communicating my perspective as my perspective, as was the case for GoodNotGood. This was an overt expression of simple end-results derived from complex internal rationale, in the vein of Steak or ManipuLie’ted. And like Steak or ManipuLie’ted, or for that matter JoyOfDishes, in the best case all I want is for someone to be provoked to thought, even if in open disagreement.
DJ was right that what I presented here is in no way an objective or complete model of opportunities. Could opportunity cost be presented in mechanics? Of course. The importance of investigation into pros/cons prior to making the jump? Sure. Second chances, traps in disguise, dead ends, and tough battles? All of these things can be modeled in interactive mechanics. Rather easily, in fact.
But rather than present a more complete and objective model, leaving analysis up to player and hoping that he or she will independently identify underlying patterns through a simplified or exaggerated model, I presented a single, certain message: “When the opportunity is there, act.”
There’s no telling how long an opportunity will last. There’s no way to know whether it’s going to work out for the best or for the worst. But particularly if the cost of failure is low to nil - which is certainly the case here - then all other things equal, I’d err 10 out of 10 times in going for it.
The Danger of Presenting As Systems
My concern of a more fully modeled system, is that no matter what my best intentions, I am still more artist than scientist. I read a lot of business books, but it would be a gross misrepresentation to suggest that I “researched” opportunity in some generalizable sense for the creation of today’s Game-a-Day. A more fully robust model of opportunities as I might create it therefore would be like the city model from Will Wright’s SimCity, necessarily embedded with loaded assumptions (”raising taxes = riots”), and what you’d be left playing would still just be a complex system of one person’s opinions, albeit wearing dress clothes that didn’t fit.
The intended message of those models would likely be lost in the complexity, not only from the player, but from me as the developer. It would be hard for me to identify what about the program I intended versus what about the program emerged between the cracks or through its overall mechanism of presentation. The value of KamikazeRush as a playable metaphor was in its utter simplicity, in the fact that “I can pretty well wrap my mind around [the] activity in its entirety - which is important since it minimizes the odds that unintended negative messages are conveyed.” Trying to simulate systems in all their intricacies has a tendency to get carried away in minute details, the big picture falls out of focus, and the incoherent experience that results may wind up disconnected from any message altogether.
Furthermore, in trying to fully model something, rather than a selective position about something, there opens up a danger that the medium itself may take on a disproportionate role in the player’s relationship to the ideas. Much in the way that, as Neil Postman points out in Amusing Ourselves to Death, televised religion takes the holiness and sacredness out of worship activity, because unlike in church, lulls can be easily replaced with another channel’s entertainment, or a perspective the listener finds disagreeable is easily turned off. I should like to keep more thorough analysis of opportunity, what it is and how it works, in written word.
The Written Equivalent
My message: Pounce. If it works, then great; if it doesn’t work, then you’re that much wiser than everyone else that didn’t pounce. But pounce. Speak up, step forward, try it on, try it out, try out, go out, get out, expand horizons and put yourself in every temporary, non-endangering situation life makes available, as soon as its made available.
That’s my way of going about things, but if more people thought like I did there’d be a few more Vegan Atheists running around. A game like this one is 4/5 expression and 1/5 (or less) attempt at objective education. At the moment, and on this particular topic, I don’t feel qualified to go much further than that.
Although I’m working on it.
January 2nd, 2008 at 5:23 pm
Perhaps I’m just the eternal optimist, but I partially disagree with the message of your latest game. In certain cases, yes, but I wouldn’t say always.
Okay, true, opportunities do pass. Often, the wrong kind of opportunities go unseized by the right kind of person. However, what if said person didn’t proceed to destroy what brought upon the opportunity in the first place? Mightn’t there still remain the chance that he or she could sometimes create or seize the opportunity once more, depending on the situation? Then again, one might argue that it would subsequently be a “different” opportunity, even if the same circumstances were to arise once more. Interesting.
From the presentation of your game, it would seem that you have to be ready and able-bodied to seize the opportunity (moving the mouse erratically or smoothly and passing the eye over the visible area, so as to “pounce”), which in the case of your game, is the only way to win…*unless* you just happen to be in the right place at the right time (say, if you just allow your pointer to rest where it is). However, the probability of such happening within the context of the game seems highly unlikely, given the approximate area of of opportunity, so to speak.
Opportunities are a funny thing. Erratic, yes, as you present with the differential timing of appearances, as well as the shape or “window” of opportunity availability–so one never can know what to expect (as in life). I suppose that’s why you have to know what you want ahead of time and be able to jump on it at any given moment…or know that if you don’t, it’s just not a guarantee that it’ll come back again (at least in the same form). However, one concept to consider from the perspective of human nature is our tendency to place fixed time constraints on “opportunities,” when they can end up being as arbitrary as “moments.” Moments, pass, just as opportunities, but as your game illustrates–time is often irrelevant in the moment in which one could seize an opportunity. You never know how long it will last–but one can usually tell with more assertion when it ends.
I think the one catch I have with the game would be that, sometimes, there are second chances (or more) in real life, whereas it seems not to be the case in your game. Perhaps I’ve not experimented enough here to know whether such a loophole actually exists. And perhaps, if such a setting existed within your game, people wouldn’t be patient enough to wait around and see…because the world tells you *not* to wait and see. They tell you to keep going and keep your eyes open for the next one.
Just felt like tossing in a few thoughts before you made your grand write-up about the game. :-) Keep up the great work with the game-a-day endeavors.