Current Events > i'm so glad that the current game-dev mindset isn't universal

(+) Yeah! (+)

when i hear dudes like jonathan blow (braid, the witness), edmund mcmillen (super meat boy), phil fish (haha) talking in panels/interviews/etc, they all seem to share this approach to game development where games that don't intuitively teach you how to play are in fact doing something wrong

some of my favorite games are pretty much defined by not being very intuitive, i guess the most extreme example being dota. a game like that could never come out of the current indie zeitgeist, the dev would get torn to shreds by their peers

I think maybe it's just true for the simplistic kind of games those guys make. Some genres couldn't be designed with intuitive learning in mind because they're simply too complex by nature. Strategy RPGs, for example. Ultimately there's room for both approaches and there's no reason to think it has to be one way or the other.
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If you want the counter-argument for that, just watch the post-Jon Game Grumps play any game made after 1994. Arin Hanson is really, really big on that same mindset and spends 90% of most games complaining about the difficulty of something because he didn't bother to read a tutorial.
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