More incentive talk

by RC , UK, Wednesday, July 10, 2013, 17:38 (4197 days ago) @ Cody Miller

A decent designer looks at the evidence, uses their mind, and can see the truth without people having to explicitly TELL them what's wrong.

This is why Portal 2 dropped challenges and advanced chambers. "We looked at Steam, PSN and XBL, and only like 11% of the people playing the game ever tried them, and fewer than 1% finished them all. So we didn't put them into Portal 2"

No. That's an example of someone thinking a feature/mode has to get used some arbitrary amount in order to justify it and can't be justified on simply making a game better.

That'd be like putting in a reference or some plot subtly or background detail in your movie and then saying that 'X' amount of people have to 'get it' for you to bother doing it in future movies. Or including an instrument in your piece of music and turning it up REALLY LOUD because unless everyone realises you included it (even those with crappy listening skills) then it's not worth doing. That's a stupid way to think.

I also included the 'uses their mind' as a qualifier and that's basically the same thing as you saying to look at your 'gut.' It's the difference between 'knowledge' and 'wisdom.'

But you can't just use intuition when you're building systems for other people to use since you don't think like everyone else.

Incentives don't justify modes, they don't replace solid core gameplay. They're multipliers. Multiplying zero by anything still leaves you with zero.