When somebody reads a text, regardless of the text’s intent, the reader is being prescribed a scenario. The moment the designer moves away from the abstraction of the visual or the abstraction of the sound or interaction, they move away from showing what the player can do and into telling them what to do. The example and perhaps most commonly used method involves showing or ascribing a prompt. Press Button X to run (color-coded and iconographed and almost visually identical to the controller in your hand). Press Button Y to jump. These seem like helpful and useful ways in which you can, without subtlety, explain how to do something. The issue in doing so is that it kills certain motivations with regards to discovery and player interaction. Discovery is an integral part of engaging interaction, and the more explanation given to a player, the less likely they are to attempt to discover for themselves.
When I talk about writing as being prescriptive and gaming being conscripted, I mean that writing tells you something while a game attempts to get the player to “join in” on a performative action. Despite seeming obvious, quite a few games seem to miss that action is the primary means of allowing players to take part. As games have become increasingly influenced by conscription, the creativity of available actions in videogames has greatly waned in favor of increasingly systemic derivation. Games move further towards the logical in an attempt to simulate ordered, derivative actions available to them after being told what they are.
It is the difference between optimizations and breaking intent. Between quickening the logic and being able to question or corrupt it. Finding glitches of course is not the only methodology for questioning a system’s intent, but the less questionable the content, the less likely exploration is to occur. Past a certain point the instruction becomes pointless, redundant or even obnoxious. Games are intended to serve as a window into the intent of a designer but if the trend towards linearity is any indication, it is that design is no longer the intent nearly so much as abeyance. Those who play are intended to look on at the creation, reprimanded for breaking its order, frequently pushed or pulled in the direction they are told, and done so in a manner that frequently readily convinces them. Yet such a design is one refusing to question. Such a design is pushing a boulder uphill, waiting for a tipping point.
The user is the tipping point, and now in the age of internet culture, the user is silenced frequently for their exploration. Rather than attempting to adjust the game for the sake of the user’s exploration, whenever a new hole is discovered it is patched because it was not the designer’s intent. But if design does indeed have intent, do the holes not also speak to it? That these imperfections are a voice in that design and they too have an intent, expressing freedom within these boundaries must also speak to a population. In a sense, these holes are the modern day graffiti of design, artistic realities of design that the artists themselves are loathe to accept. Patching these to some degree serves a purpose in the case of competitive games, but the majority of games are not, yet receive patching. The conundrum lies here, in what one perceives as broken and what one perceives as beautiful, or at least, malleable.
Designers must make careful choices regarding these gaps in design, as they both encourage and alienate certain populations, often for very different reasons. Understanding which ones and why makes compromise possible, but carelessly hermetically sealing design flaws may also ruin part of the natural beauty of that design. The design may also lose something integral. Something precious, that tipped users onto it.