I found this week’s discussion and games quite intriguing as I was able to learn more about my behavior with certain types of games. In brief, I will be discussing my experience with difficult games this week, building off of my experience at Monday’s difficult games play session. The difficult games play session allowed me to view games through a new lens. It helped me to realize that I am not the biggest fan of playing difficult games, though I do enjoy watching others play it. I do enjoy playing such games for a short period of time, but once I begin to repetitively fail or die, I also begin to lose interest and the motivation to continue. And, eventually, I completely stop playing the game. So, to avoid this, I began to rely on playthroughs and tutorials on Youtube to advance to the following parts/levels, though some may say that it takes away from the “fun of the game.” This was the manner in which I first approached the games at the MADD center at the play session. My natural instinct was to avoid playing them immediately.
Luckily, I was familiar with three of the games that were there: Getting Over It, The World’s Hardest Game, and Jump King. I had played The World’s Hardest Game quite a bit during middle school and had watched streamers and Youtubers play the other two. Regardless, I stood back, watching others play to regain a sense of how to navigate through the game. After a while, I began to think that the games didn’t seem so difficult and that those playing were just lacking experience with the game. Once I gave the games a shot, I quickly realized this was nowhere near true.
I believe I am quite good at timing things when it comes to games, so I tried playing Jump King. However, I continued to fail in the same area, causing some frustration. This frustration eventually built up to burst and I immediately passed the controller to the person next to me and left to watch a different game. I feel that this experience best describes my behavior when playing difficult games. I would say my attention span and motivation when it comes to playing difficult games is quite short. This best describes how I played this week’s games. As we know, Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment does not let the player win at all. It forces the player to fail no matter how hard one tries. I luckily caught onto this early on, so I tried some other ways to possibly find a loophole in the game design that could cause an error and let me win. When playing Sisyphus, I tried changing the speed of my clicks at the end, tried to reach a certain number of failures, and even left the game to sit on its own to see if the game would let me through. Obviously, none of these strategies worked, so I resorted to walkthroughs and tutorials on Youtube. Yet, after watching others fail to complete the game as well, I began to think about why the game was designed in such a way. Instead of having the player actually complete the tasks or punishments in the game, the developers purposely designed it to be impossible, forcing the player into an infinite loop of attempt and failure. After some thought, I came to realize that the element of infinite failure is most likely used to emphasize the idea of ‘punishment.’ It allows the players themselves to have first-hand experience of the Ancient Greek punishments and truly gain a sense of how frustrated those being punished may have felt.
