In a recent interview with Gamasutra, the indie developer Jon Ingold He talked about a most interesting topic related to his latest game Heaven’s Vault; specifically of why it’s good to let players get it wrong to make your mistakes a more satisfying experience.
If you want to read what he said about it, we leave it to you
Allowing mistakes when playing felt like something out of place in the design language of the mechanics of the title. However, it also felt like something right: we wanted to make a game about archeology, and archeology is not about doing things "right." You can't even know if your interpretation of a finding or a culture is correct. You have to guess the best you can; but you also have to be open-minded to new interpretations if new evidence comes to light eventually.
Games are usually very cautious when it comes to dealing with that kind of ambiguity: there is that instinct to let players "complete" a game, make them dominate. We wanted to get away from that and say: here is one. world for you to discover, explore, contemplate, and never fully understand. My favorite science fiction pieces have that sense of mystery: whether they be the clues of ancestral stories in Star Wars or the bizarre and difficult to assimilate worlds of Gene Wolfe and Jack Vence.
What do you think about his statements? What are they interesting for? Do not hesitate to leave your opinion in the comments!
