Comment by thrance
1 day ago
Except Dwarf Fortress is an actual game, and I've sunk a lot of hours in it. Same with the city builders TFA is trying to mimick.
> Also those https://research.wmz.ninja/projects/phd/index.html style games are a bit vapid.
I agree, but please try to engage with what I'm saying. Both the PhD game and TFA are made with the goal of teaching an issue to a broader audience. Do you think TFA is an effective tool of communication? Don't you think its messaging could have been better conveyed had it been designed with more intent, less focused on piling on feature after feature for a game that isn't designed to be replayed more than once?
Both TFA and the PhD game should be considered "educational", people won't come back to those again and again because of how fun they are. They're designed to appear in HN feed, be played once, learn maybe a thing or two in an amusing way, and never be opened again. Do you understand now why I find this complexity so counter-productive? It's fine for a game to be complex, if it's designed for players that will sink hundreds of hours into them. It's not fine for a silly project to demand the same learning effort from its players.
> This runs into the reality that the game maker knows who his target audience is, but you don't.
Have you considered that TFA was vibe-coded, and maybe the "game maker" hasn't put much thought into who his target audience could be, like, at all, and just asked Claude to make a game about NIMBYism?
> the PhD game and TFA are made with the goal of teaching
The PhD game came across as a blog post masquerading as a game. The city-building one was fun even if you ignore the lessons it's teaching. (You don't have to read the news articles. They're cleverly written, however, and so sort of fun to.)
> Both the PhD game and TFA are made with the goal of teaching an issue to a broader audience.
I mean, are? It looks like it might be trying to create a San Francisco housing simulator. Simulators aren't necessarily tools of education. That's why I picked DF as a comparison - it is a Moria siumulator, but it isn't supposed to educate its players on the nature of Tolkien. It is more about exploring a complex environment.
And the PhD game doesn't look like it is going to teach anyone anything. It reads to me like some guy blowing off steam without having much of substance to say. Which is also fine, it just isn't much of an educational journey.
You're implicitly assuming that you have determined the target audience and goal of the game. And while you might be accurate, you might also be inaccurate. There is a decent chance that the target audience is people who look at this and think "ooh, cool". It is great fun to criticise games but claiming that a game is in the wrong genre altogether is just a bit much for me today. If you don't like this genre that is cool, but the game maker might just be doing his own thing and having fun.
> Have you considered that TFA was vibe-coded, and maybe the "game maker" hasn't put much thought into who his target audience could be, like, at all, and just asked Claude to make a game about NIMBYism?
His target audience could be himself, in which case he's probably got a deep understanding of who they are and whether they enjoy the game.