& when i'm not trusted in turn & allowed that discovery, genuinely i feel betrayed in a (v minor) way. it's the second-easiest way to make me dislike a game. so as a designer, every core design decision i make is audited by this like lens + razor of trusting players & rewarding their trust in me.

a defining part of my ethos both as game designer & game player is trusting the other party. as a gamer, i trust designers to let me play with their mechanics & systems && discover wonders. i trust that seemingly impossible challenges can be overcome & that they're designed to let me discover that.

finally, i believe that in the domain of video games specifically, there is an apparent design philosophy that either does not value or explicitly minimizes "discovery" & the opportunity for "discovery"—& every game i've ever experienced that seems to subscribe could absolutely be improved by it

plus i read thru hella replies & quotes after settling my mind on this & i have...moderate to fucking extreme disagreements with literally everyth i saw apart from meta answers like "all devs being paid a livable wage & credited"

& the prompt does say "video games", but game design is game design. a video game can be designed purely via board or card game principles, tabletop rpg philosophy, etc, so. anyth that "all video games should have" is requisitely a desirable *universal* ✨game✨ quality imo.

(this is not just about politicians)

it's like a spiritual sequel to this

i genuinely cannot find another meaning for gcc in my brain

gamecube controller

I _really_ blame Unity and Unreal for pushing variable-timestep gameplay as an unexamined hard-coded assumption (and worse, Unity defaulting their secondary "fixed update" to PAL-oriented 50fps rather than standard 60). Variable draw-times is rendering problem, _not_ a gameplay scripting problem.

This is what I wrote at the time and I still believe it even though it made a lot of people mad.

inthesetimes.com/article/publ...