Unreliable Narrator
ur entertainment masters have identified the enemy in their efforts to connect us to a smooth-flowing, never-ending pipeline of content. That enemy is: friction. The roughage in our gaming diet is bad because it might cause us to turn off or tune out. At first glance, this sounds reasonable. I tell stories and don’t I want to tell the whole story? Developers are painfully aware of the statistics that show that only the minority of players ever complete a given game – and, this cuts out the effort of navigating an open world to find a mission trigger and lets you quickly hoover up side-objectives. But what does this say about the experience? The game already goes out of its way to streamline things with easy-to-access fast travel and map markers which lay out a red carpet to each of its snack-sized missions. Streamlining further is like giving diners at a buffet a hoover. Side-objectives were originally added to open worlds to encourage players to engage with their spaces – now the side objectives themselves are the point?
