I wanted to let you know that I had read it, but at the time I couldn’t express what I felt or thought about it in only a sentence or two.

Definitely worth reading. Left me with a similar taste as Lord of the Flies, I’d say.

I would like to see a game like that. I do think it would be worth pursuing at some point in time.

Is it different from what you’ve expected?

Not sure what to say right now.

As for the Art Critic description – that’s what confused me. It says that the system is random but when I play it, the critic clearly tells me what I did wrong. If I do the picture according to his demands (using certain colors, shapes), it works. Maybe it gets more random later on?

In any case – since you CAN win, people don’t bother if there is reason behind it or not. It would be different if not only understanding but also winning was impossible.

Great experiment nonetheless…

About the goal, I wasn’t thinking 4x (fourecks?) so much as a typical game where you have one limited avatar, like a shooter or something (Space Invaders?) or maybe a space resource-harvesting game (Motherload?)… And if you give it a tourist-y flavor, even better.

Not sure if you saw this in the description for Please the Art Critic, but my point was that it is an example of a game where you try to understand a system that is impossible to understand. And that players did not give up in frustration and despair quite to the degree that you had feared. Instead, they believed they understood more than they really did.

“The critic asks you to draw things and decides if what you made was good enough, but unlike most games the probability of him approving is random. Instead of the yes-or-no deterministic games everywhere, can people realize when a game is ruled by chance? No one in the comments seemed to notice, only complaining that once it was beaten there was no replay value.”

What do you think of that?

I wonder what this goal could be, then. I initially thought somewhere along the lines of a 4x. But now that you mentioned opportunities for reflection, I thought maybe of a tourist game like Shadow of the Colosus or Endless Ocean. In Endless Ocean, one of the goals is to visit every spot on the map at least once. I thought that worked very well.

We’d rather deal with that which we (think we) understand. Few people have the tenacity to continue to poke and prod at something in hopes of understanding it even if they never will. At least if those other “goals” are there they would continue to play the game (rather than just quit playing) which gives the the opportunity to reflect, on occasion, on that particular task/puzzle (the planet) which they refuse to explore. If they stop playing the game then it will no longer call to them, beckoning them to at least admit that they refuse to engage with something so far outside their established parameters of meaning.

I agree that a real Soliars might not receive that kind of attention. That’s how the Pluto case was solved anyhow – you just invent a new category and continue. But on the other hand, things might get different when we start actually going to all that far away places. So far, the furthest man was from earth was the moon and even that was only temporary.

@having some other goal – good idea! Might work. Would be somewhat like Alpha Centauri. My only concern would be that it might distract from the message if you make that alternative task to engaging.

@Please the Art Critic – I don’t know about that. They say you can’t win the first 12 times but I have been able to beat the first level on my second try. They have some EXCELLENT collection of games on their Website though! Thanks for that link, great source for inspiration.