Is The Best Game One You Were Never Intended To Play?

Wired has an interesting look at the sport of pushing proscribed boundaries in video games. Easter eggs in games have been around for years, but now finding surprises, intended or otherwise, is becoming a driving force behind the enjoyment of games. "In games as diverse as Fallout 3 and Mirror's Edge, players are pushing to find or create unexpected ways to break past the game horizon, and turn the designers' intentions on their heads. It's only a matter of time before someone releases a game where the best version is the one you were never intended to play. That's only to be expected, says David Michicich, CEO and creative director of Robomodo, the developers of Activision's new Tony Hawk: Ride, and a 14-year veteran game designer. 'Today's news gets old quick — we Twitter, blog, pass viral video. We thrive off the sudden excitement of the latest and most buzzworthy,' Michicich says. 'It's exciting to still feel like you can discover something new. It's stimulation, plain and simple.'"

Comments

doing this for years -- house rules

[panthroman]

Surely lots of people make house rules to certain games, no? And isn't that a game "you weren't intended to play?"

My buddy and I still play the 17-year-old Super Mario Kart regularly, but the game's evolved with a ton of house rules. Some exampes:
1 - If you get a ghost, you have to either steal the opponent's current item or the very next one, but you can't just hold onto it waiting for a red shell.
2 - If you get a banana, you can yell "GAME!" and the other player has to stop. Then you position yourself, and try to hit him by throwing the banana.
3 - If you have one hit left, your opponent has all three, and you get a green shell...

This wasn't the game the designers necessarily had in mind, but it's the game we like. Ghosts are too powerful. Bananas are too boring. So we tweak the rules.

TFA mentions Easter eggs rather than house rules. Easter eggs just can't be what they were before; the internet makes it too easy to learn everything about a game. There's no way the new Zelda will have a secret room that nobody knows about for years, but ~10 years went by before I found out about the secret room in Zelda for SNES. You just can't have secrets like that in popular games anymore.

Re:doing this for years -- house rules

[mikael_j]

Ah yes, the "house rules", the best way to play pretty much any RTS game.

I've found that every RTS I've played with others over a LAN has gotten boring pretty quickly, but after adding a few rules (that are enforced by throwing stuff at those who break them) like "2v2, no breaking alliances and no one is allowed to cross the river in the middle of the map for the first n minutes" tends to make the gameplay a lot more fun, I kind of wish they would build such features straight into the games but most times it's just speed, resources, tech level and map when playing multiplayer.

/Mikael

No.

[DMUTPeregrine]

Nethack. The Devs Think of Everything. The best game is the one you didn't think you were intended to play, but were. Or at least can.

Logic fail

[DaveV1.0]

It's only a matter of time before someone releases a game where the best version is the one you were never intended to play.

If the best version is one in which one must unlock something, find as an "easter egg", or some how activate a cheat, and it is intended to be that way, then the game is intended to play in that mode and finding how to activate the mode becomes just another part of the game.

Re:This isn't anything new

[mikael]

While playing Pilot Wings 64, I always wanted to see what would happen if the giant balloon was bounced into the cave entrance just above the waterfall - it literally went ballistic.

Going into the caves with the jungle-hopper boots was fun as well. Actually managed to get bounced out of the cave and into the ground plane of the moutains and was able to see the tunnel network clearly.

Re:Real cheap way to extend gameplay

[billcopc]

I frankly think the WoW achievement system is entirely done wrong, because it is neither social nor rewarding. You get absolutely nothing for all your troubles, save for a few near-impossible meta-achievements that give you a mount or shiny underwear or something equally useless. A challenge needs a reward to make things interesting, and warm fuzzies don't count in most cases.

I much preferred LoTRO's achievements, which offered minor improvements to your stats for experience-related things like killing N spiders or completing M quests in a city, while being separate from the singular XP total. That gives struggling players other avenues to improve and customize their characters, and high-level players something to appease their OCD. They made the game-within-a-game worth playing.