This is world's greatest con. I'm Brian Brushwood.

Creating a game is shockingly close to creating a car.

Your players might be given some instructions,

but largely the engagement comes from them

making decisions for themselves.

And in the game world, the level of hand-off making decisions for themselves.

Down in the game world, the level of handholding can vary, like you got board games where everything has a rule book

and when there's an argument, you can go consult the ancient tome or whatever but video games on the other hand they

drop you right in suddenly you're the lead character only you don't know any of your

lines you don't know your motivation you don't even know how the world works.

And it's up to the world to teach you every bit of the way.

Every character, every setting, every idle bit of chatter is something the player assumes might be important.

The Creator might be tempted to make this process super blunt, just very forcefully guide the player through the story,

restrict where they can go, who they can talk to, eliminate ways to waste time on

missions that don't go anywhere. In the video game world they call that an on-rails experience and it's a bad thing.

It's a negative mark on the story.

But you can also go the other way.

You can make things too open-world, too open-ended, too expansive. Create a world that's very big but also easy to get lost in so you lose the thread,

the story that is the whole point of the thing.

Man, if you get that alchemy just right.

That ability to trick somebody into thinking they were the first person on the planet to have

this genius idea? Spoilers for a decade old game.

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