Response to the first half of the third episode of Paper Labyrinths (a game design conversation podcast by my discord pals Brendan and Nic), and here is my response to Nic’s offhand musing about the possibility of systematizing faith in a game.
- Immediate thought: you probably can’t, if you’re going to have a system that gives feedback to the player. Because the feedback coming through means that there is some tangible effect to the “faith” action.
- But I guess I read Cameron Kunzelman’s The World is Born From Zero and he argues that we’re “speculating” what will happen whenever we provide any input to a video game. And so we empirically develop a set of expectations (I think? I read it a long time ago. Sorry, CMRN, if I messed it up).
- So maybe it’s not systemically modeled, but every interaction with a video game is an act of faith?