Daily Archives: March 7, 2023

Playing With Your Food

Do you find yourself doing this thing in games where you can end them, where you know the game is done, but you keep doing things that let you keep playing?

I’m not talking about games like Skyrim where there’s a whole instrumentation of the game being built around giving you more varieties of tihngs to discover and where you can break ‘the game’ apart into lots of smaller chunks of ‘game experience.’ In that case you can view the game at large as an archive, where the conclusion, the ‘end of the game’ is a kind of unimpressive tome in the whole arrangement of these things, but where the driving play experience you focus on is instead all the stuff that builds up to that point. Nor do I mean something like Minecraft where the game’s ‘end’ is very superficial and expects you to return to the play experience over and over inventing new reasons to want to keep engaging with it. They’re not unrelated kinds of experiences, but I really am referring to something that I’ve noticed in myself when dealing with a particular kind of digital card game.

It’s Star Realms, but it’s true of its cousin game, Hero Realms as well.

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