I think you may have overpowered the keyboard upgrades a bit too much. The final message doesn’t make much sense when you can reach 10 million words in a few minutes with five editors, no monkeys, and no RNG (in fact it was much more efficient than when I spent words to get those). Maybe the true moral of the story is that the most effective way to write a blog is by actually just writing it and not caring about distractions.
In a weird way, this tells us something interesting about proceduralist approaches to games, and how striving to understand the rules of a game’s system can give the game a different meaning from what was intended.
This sort of thing happened to me in A Short Hike as well. When I started the game, I saw we were next to water, and decided the first thing I should do isn’t go the direction the game obviously wants me to, but to test the rules of the game by seeing if I could drown. So, I walked into the water, and when that didn’t kill me, I swam further to see if it might happen after a certain amount of time or distance. The camera turned around a few times, and I wound up lost on one of the other islands in the game, without having learnt about the beginning phone call. Because I started with an approach aimed at rule-learning, I never experienced the forced exploration or the goal driven push towards the mountain that others have talked about in their blogs. I just took an actual short hike around some cute and colorful islands, talking to people and picking stuff up.
I think you may have overpowered the keyboard upgrades a bit too much. The final message doesn’t make much sense when you can reach 10 million words in a few minutes with five editors, no monkeys, and no RNG (in fact it was much more efficient than when I spent words to get those). Maybe the true moral of the story is that the most effective way to write a blog is by actually just writing it and not caring about distractions.
In a weird way, this tells us something interesting about proceduralist approaches to games, and how striving to understand the rules of a game’s system can give the game a different meaning from what was intended.
This sort of thing happened to me in A Short Hike as well. When I started the game, I saw we were next to water, and decided the first thing I should do isn’t go the direction the game obviously wants me to, but to test the rules of the game by seeing if I could drown. So, I walked into the water, and when that didn’t kill me, I swam further to see if it might happen after a certain amount of time or distance. The camera turned around a few times, and I wound up lost on one of the other islands in the game, without having learnt about the beginning phone call. Because I started with an approach aimed at rule-learning, I never experienced the forced exploration or the goal driven push towards the mountain that others have talked about in their blogs. I just took an actual short hike around some cute and colorful islands, talking to people and picking stuff up.