"The journey is the reward.
Come nightfall
I tally up my blisters."
"The journey is the reward.
Come nightfall
I tally up my blisters."
With this fourth passage, Master ian reminds us:
Nobody said it was gonna be easy.
Dan Ness
Wrapped up in the techno-wizardry as we are, we all too often triumph over insuperable odds to create something that lights up the sky with its brilliance, only to see the same old darkness fall the moment the light fades. But I guess we're all agreed that the mark of greatness in any kind of title, be it a movie, a piece of music or whatever, is that it leaves you someplace different from where it found you: it changes you, however subtly.
One of the joys of interactivity is that it allows the user to set their own pace, and to be their own judge of whether such change has taken place or not. No more testing at the end of a section, no more final patronising summaries for those who might have missed the major points, no more "Is everybody keeping up?!" Indeed, no more need for a final anything: the journey is the reward and the only mark of success or failure is how long the user chooses to spend on the journey.
But it's too easy to forget that, rightly or wrongly, we're all schooled to think in terms of Concrete Achievement: say what you like about exams, at least they demonstrate you've learnt something, that something has changed, that somehow the journey was worthwhile.
With adventure games, it's usually fairly obvious whether your efforts have met with success (in Spaceship Warlock, for instance, you get to make a victory speech and be kissed by the platinum blonde.) That's a lesson that might be usefully picked up by some of the more academically-inclined titles: you spend three hours immersed in the finer details of the Renaissance, and what do you get at the end? "Are you sure you want to quit?"
This is not to say that every project should have a passing-out parade. But it seems to me that, at the very least, most projects should include some kind of gauge of achievement (a blister-count as it were) even if it's only a raw count of how many buttons were pressed, or how many cards remain unseen.
i.
