T w e n t y S i d e d

One thing still worries me about the ARK: Can you stop participating? Can you die? Kill yourself? Erase yourself? What if you become monumentally bored and frustrated with your existence? Sure, it’s a nice simulation and all. But no matter how idyllic the setting, after a few thousand years you might really be done with it. Human beings haven’t experienced lives that long, and we don’t know what kind of mental health challenges that sort of timescale might pose.

The more I think about it, the more I think I’d decline an Ark invitation. Unless it comes with a level editor and some space to call my own. And some tools for composing music. And maybe some programming tools. Actually, this is starting to sound pretty good.

So that was SOMA. The best part of this series has been the interesting comments. People have offered numerous bits of analysis, background, alternate interpretations, and philosophical viewpoints that I’d never considered. This really is a game that gets larger when examined in greater detail.

I feel like I didn’t give this game enough credit in my initial play-through. I went in expecting “Amnesia, but in Sealab” and when that didn’t work out I got frustrated with the crappy monster encounters and sort of plowed through the game. I liked it, but I think I missed out on a lot of interesting things the game had to say.

We don’t get a lot of this sort of science fiction in the world of videogames. Sure, we get a lot of games about shooting aliens with zap guns. And maybe we shoot robots once in a while. But proper speculative fiction? There’s not a lot. And lots of it is strategy stuff like Alpha Centauri, Master of Orion, or Homeworld. Don’t get me wrong, those are wonderful games. But aside from Mass Effect and SOMA, what other major releases feel like someone took science fiction ideas out of a novel and put them in a story-driven game?

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

We keep coming back to the question of “Did Simon need to be such a dummy?” Which leads you to the question of “Who was this game designed for?” The problem facing the design team is that there’s a huge difference between people who read sci-fi novels and people who get all their sci-fi from television.

I’m reminded of the time we showed off Good Robot at a trade show. Everyone played through one or two levels before they died and walked away from the game. But then one guy completely destroyed the demo. Instead of reflexively running from bullets like most people, he held his ground and weaved between them. He was obviously a fan of bullet-hell shooters, and so our game was completely trivial to him. He plowed all the way through the entire gameWhich wasn’t done, so it was maybe half the size of the completed version. The game was also much easier at that point. on the first try.

This led to a question, “Who is our game for?” This guy is obviously our core audience, but anything that’s fun for him is going to be impossible for everyone else. Do we tune the game to appeal to the most likely fans, or to the masses, where we might have some prayer of making money? And really, somehow we’d like it if the same game could satisfy both groups.

I guess I’d feel better about Simon’s apparent slowness if I got the sense that a large number of people needed the extra explanation. I can imagine a scenario where a bunch of relative sci-fi newbies were working with the mental model of (say) consciousness working like a “soul”. They begin with the assumption that there can never be more than one version of you at a time, and they never examined the idea of what would happen if you could copy a brain. Maybe those people needed the extra hand-holding not just to explain how a mind-copy works, but to disabuse them of their original assumptions.

There’s going to be a massive difference between people who have never been exposed to these ideas before, and people who have read dozens of different versions and detailed explanations of this over many sci-fi novels, to the point where the core concept is now boring and needs to be mixed with some other idea to be at all interesting. Maybe the developers were thinking, “Better safe than sorry” when it comes to explaining the premise that drives the conflict.

Still makes him annoying, though.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.