The Cult of the Peacock
▻http://blog.brendanvance.com/2014/01/05/the-cult-of-the-peacock
Consider this. Each game (as well as any other work of media) possesses a ‘burden of learning’: All the things a person must understand in order to consume it as its authors intend. This burden of learning falls somewhere on a spectrum with two opposite extremes. One extreme emphasizes the discovery of features by the consumer, which is to say it ‘burdens’ her. Works on this end are often challenging to the audience in the Art sense (not the Super Meat Boy sense); they require time and energy to parse. English poetry, for example, burdens the reader by assuming she is literate and therefore omitting any kind of tutorial explaining what each Roman glyph represents or how verbs work. The other extreme of this spectrum emphasizes the teaching of features by the designer. This work is accessible to the audience, which is the opposite of challenging. It includes things like airport signage, Bolshevik propaganda and of course videogames, all of which tend to deal in clear and elegant ideas because those are the easiest to communicate.
By pushing the burden of learning further and further towards the designer (and demanding less time and energy from our users) we have managed to create all manner of wonderful games that many people can understand instantaneously without the aid of manuals, previous videogame experience, The Rosetta Stone, et cetera. These games sell really well and a lot of people like them. But each step towards the accessible end of the spectrum carries with it an unseen cost: The designer’s time and energy. A designer is kind of like a Turing machine: Given enough iterations she can figure out how to teach any player any game mechanic without causing boredom or confusion. But those iterations are not free and time is not unlimited, and for this reason there is an opportunity cost to performing them. The time a designer spends discovering how to better explain one mechanic cannot be spent improving the game in any other way. Thus, the more accessible you make a game the more time each feature costs, and the less time is available to do really anything except work on accessibility.
