game over?
I just had a game over in a massive multiplayer game.
In this game, all players analyze a lot of information at their disposal, which is basically a rhizome of small ideas, opinions, and predictions that each one chooses to believe in.
The game has 3 stages where you have to select an option based on the information you gathered during the exploratory phase. These options open branches that change the next stage.
In the last stage, you have 2 options, and that determines the end of the game.
This time I got game over.
(I assume you know what I’m talking about, but just to clarify: The 2023 presidential elections in Argentina)
Now I started thinking, how can I channel everything that happened in the mailing list?
Here it is:
Today I was listening to some people who voted for the candidate I did not support, and basically, they were saying that they didn’t agree with most of his proposals, but they wanted a change. Something different from what they already know, because what they know isn’t working. They also say that anyway, all those things he proposes, he won’t do.
They are right that it’s not working, but I find it very interesting that they choose an option believing that something is not going to happen.
This reminds me of a game design concept proposed by Brian Upton in Aesthetics of Play (yes, the same book I mentioned a few emails ago).
He talks about the horizon of action and the horizon of intention.
The horizon of intention is the group of actions and effects that the player expects to happen or believes could happen.
The horizon of action is what the game effectively allows them to do.
In this case, the horizon of action was choosing between two candidates.
The most interesting thing is that the choice was made based on what each one interprets as the horizon of intention.
This intention horizon was fabricated, intentionally or accidentally, by everything that person has lived through up to that day and by the campaigns of the candidates.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this comparison, but I found this intersection between game design, narrative, and reality interesting, and I thought it could be a good starting point to think more in the future about the options we give to our players, the probabilistic analysis of why they choose one option over another, and how we can play with expectations and outcomes to create interesting narrative situations.
I hope the most interesting thing that happens for us is that Argentina begins a process of economic reconstruction where people don’t lose rights, but the truth is, as a society, we threw a d20 yesterday, and we don’t really know the probabilities of each outcome.