Over on Henry Jenkins’ blog, there is a fascinating write-up of how Raph Koster‘s original vision for Star Wars Galaxies was twisted around in the name of making the game more accessible to fans. The six bolded points at the end of the article are worth reading even out of context. My favorite is this one:
1. Don’t confuse “accessibility” with simplicity. As Steve Johnson notes in his best-selling book, Everything Bad is Good For You or educator James Paul Gee argues in his new book, Video Games Are Good For the Soul, contemporary media audiences are searching for complexity, not simplicity. The video games that succeed in the market are the ones that demand the most of their players — not those that require the least. The key to successful games is not dumb content, but complexity that is organized and managed so that users can handle it.
Words of wisdom!
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That post led me to downloading some of the videos of the Cantina Crawls…
Man. If I’d seen that back before all the goodness was gutted from SWG, that might have been enough to get me to sign up and give it a try– not because I’d want to go off and produce huge dance numbers in an MMORPG, but just because I’d want to play the sort of game in which huge dance numbers were possible and in which the players thought it was worthwhile to get together and practice and perform huge dance numbers just because they can…
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