See this

 Game Design has become a profession. When I started writing games the programmer (sometimes the artist) was the game designer and most of it was considered self-evident. You didn’t waste hours of time deciding whether X feature took away from the player’s focus or whether Y feature interrupted the flow of them game.

Now, this did pave the way to plenty of poor games, some that were practically unplayable. I don’t doubt that there’s a need for more thought and particularly more testing for modern games. But I’m sure I can’t be the only person who’s noticed that modern games all seem to be homogenized in their accessibility. There’s no mystery left – half the fun of a game is discovering or unlocking the potential in it, learning the tricks or locations where certain things happen, learning the game. Nowadays we get a walk-through with some irritatingly west coast US accented guy with a husky voice explaining some unintuitive game move with a ridiculous jargon name and that’s it.

“You’re supposed to be able to just pick it up and play though!”  Perhaps I don’t want that? Perhaps I want the reward from putting in a little bit of effort that immersiveness gained by investing a little brain and the subsequent reward? Besides there are many great games that you couldn’t pick up and play (Kick Off, Elite, Falcon). They wouldn’t have been great if they’d been any other way either.

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