Yeah, this is a long-standing debate about whether designers should make choices for the player or not. Do you let players save anywhere or not? Do you make character death permanent or not? So yeah, everything is a designer choice. I tend towards the side of accessibility and more affordances.

Players can simply choose not to use the provided affordances. That is one of the choices a player can make about their own experience!

Yeah, exactly. Games requiring notes should have in-game affordances for this. One of my favorite examples is The Outer Wilds, which tracks everything for you. You still must discover things, but then they are logged and you can reference them from within the game any time. Also: automaps are great.

Okay, yes, and ... ?

🫂

The example I use a lot is Payday 2, which current has something like 70+ missions available. Contrast this with Payday 3, which launched with 8 missions. Suffice to say, the community did not react favorably.

That and content bloat, which is stealing from the future to prop up the past. By that I mean a new title would be asked to take on the burden of supporting the old title's player base, along with their expectations of available content. But the current version was built up over many years.

Oh yeah, I have a bit of a rant about GaaS and live service trends that are ... well, they're weird and problematic. For one thing, the underlying technologies change gradually, and if the games aren't able to change with it, then they become stuck in time.

This gets very confusing when you realize there's a different org "Women In Games International" run by different people, and neither one is the IGDA SIG.

I assume this about the Overwatch thing?

I dunno, that seems excessive, but I can *maybe* see a scenario where their partner isn't online so they're effectively running it as a joint posting account. Not an immediate red flag, but I hope the relationship is stable, because if they break up there will be *problems*.

I thought entire point of having a PR manager was to avoid shit like this? They're not sending their best. Or maybe they are, which would be a different problem.

Anyway, this is all an anecdotal view from "the trenches." I don't know that any of it necessarily reflects a broader strategy or culture within the company, but it sure taught me a lot about expectations, consequences, and business metrics.

I had seen something similar a few years before: a multi-million dollar acquisition that mid-level executives were scrambling to justify through increased revenue. Opportunity cost and scooping your competitors only gets you so far. At some point, the numbers folks want to see the line go up.