More incentive talk

by General Vagueness , The Vault of Sass, Wednesday, July 17, 2013, 16:09 (4190 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Jason mentions that it was just a shadow of an attempt at incentives, but I definitely thought the skulls in the later Halo games felt pretty artificial and gimmicky. I don't want to be encouraged to replay boring sections of a game for the satisfaction of earning a neato little prize or to fulfill some kind of artificial desire to "collect 'em all!". Make the game fun and I will come back to explore it again, just because.

Yeah, this is absolutely bewildering, in part because as I have explained many times, 'incentives' tend to ruin games.

Did he not pay any attention to the Halo community?

What, you're confused that your explanation wasn't enough for the co-founder and lead designer of Bungie to shift around how their games are made? Maybe you just didn't explain well enough how incentives are evil, or maybe you didn't talk long enough about how bad they are, or maybe you didn't hate them hard enough for it to be felt all the way over there. Maybe if you yell loud enough you can still save Bungie from themselves.*

I don't think anybody complained about lack of incentive in Halo 1, and the Halo games that DID have this 'incentive' were replayed far less than Halo 1.

If ever there was a time a citation was needed**, it would be now.

I'll say this though, apparently you were right about him not being fully engaged or interested in what Bungie was doing (at least their primary projects at the time) for the last 2-3 games. I wish someone had been straightforward about it back when regular people were asking about it (giving interviews more than once a decade might also work, but I don't blame him for not being that comfortable with them and wanting to do other things in his free time).

* BTW, I realize you said "...in part because as I have explained...", i.e. you're referring to those explanations, not saying they're a reason to act differently or that the supposed tendencies of incentives would be the only reason, but you still did slip that part about you explaining things in there and directly followed it with asking if he paid attention to the community

** Does this really only allow the colors in the little color-pick box thing? I tried to change the numbers around to get a different color and it just showed the tag itself.