In some ways, World of Goo is cheating. World of Goo is a game about architecture, but games themselves are architectural constructs, houses of meaning built with virtual connections, a data space where rules are brought together to delineate active memory. Thus, to make a game about construction is, in many ways, a game about games. Perhaps what World of Goo fails to realize is that signposting value and questions into the architectural construct is not exactly useful. Rather, the connections are of greater interest if made independent of outside aid.
Games are played best with a certain sense of anthropology as it relates to critical distance. The system is intended to be poked and prodded, but actively making the player aware of its existence puts the designer in a weighty place where they must deliver a grander meaning which, perhaps categorically, is nonexistent, or at least problematic. Thus, to create a game which engenders value judgments on the systems requires a deconstruction of the contexts within which the game plays.
World of Goo is a game that is entirely about constructs, and as such has a narrow contextual structure. While potentially a great space for exploratory deconstruction, the actual game is disinterested in questioning constructs as they are given or discussed. The hints and notes are thus of a designer inserting their crayon on the playing field, drawing their own constructs, framing the creativity, and problematizing the experience despite having the opportunity to exist outside these judgments.
Arguably, such difficulty drawn onto the field makes the player aware of the intimacies of the construct, but as a result, the discoveries available shrink enormously. What is worse is that the player is then not only directed, but feels compulsion towards the direction. When games are presented as systems, the judgments about the interactions with the system become vital, and telling the player to interact in a certain manner slides further away from a game as an interactive system.
A directed system is uninteresting to the individual because they are told what their expectations should be. The limitation of the possibility space is, in a sense, bludgeoning both creativity and interest. As curiosities are expanded upon, rather than linearly played towards, there is an expansion of what the player feels they could do, rather than what they feel they should. Thus an exploration of the system becomes compelling due to the inability to differ differences between the possibilities presented.
World of Goo fails somewhat as a system due to its overly conscious direction, yet the game is an interesting remix of the construction genre. To build is to play in a way that relates to our urge to create, even in the theoretical space of a videogame. There is a cheapness to a virtual reward, less real than the physicality actual construction provides, but nevertheless, the puzzles and construction are quite reflexive.
Recommended: Yes