How things end

[Administrator]

It's 1978. You're standing in front of a cabinet of monsters. This is Space Invaders, and you'll fight the monsters until your space-craft is irredeemably compromised. Once that happens, the game will end. Once that happens, you'll begin again, with the world wiped clean. Every game always ends. Nothing remains between games but high scores, memories and finger grease.
There's no cosmic, fundamental reason that it worked that way in the beginning. Look where we are now. Now we've got games that never end, games with unlocks, games with sessions players join and drop from, games that require you to die in order to continue... and that's the mainstream stuff, before we get into the indie experiments. So how did it start that way, and how did we get here?
Two invisible hands shape and guide every design decision ever made, sometimes subtly, sometimes overtly. One hand - let's say the left - is the Hand of Commercial Context. In the case of 70s arcade machines, that meant the companies needed you to drop 10p coins at regular intervals. (Hi, American readers! 10p coins are what we have instead of sidewalks.) So they made sure that every game would end, and you'd have to pay to start a new one.
Read more…


More...