the-terminator.jpg So, to revise the errant word "fun" out of some stuff I might have said yesterday: maybe some games are too hung up on Inalienable Truths and the Human Condition to remember to also be compelling. There! Moving right along.

In this spectacular entry," Didacticism in Game Design," designer Clint Hocking looks at why designers try to imbue games with bigger, deeper meanings and "socially responsible messages," rather than how (although maybe there comes a point where 'how' and 'why' become interchangeable).

There are so many significant arguments in Hocking's piece I feel like I can't begin to try to sum them up, or to high-five the sections I like. Instead, I will simply thumb over to my favorite paragraph, which is an easy read despite its length, about the Inalienable Truths permeating a certain mid-1980s killer robot movie:

No one set out to make Terminator with a socially responsible message. In the end, though, the fundamental underlying takeaway of Terminator is that love is an unstoppable force for human salvation. This is because ‘love as unstoppable force for human salvation’ is a message all people care deeply about. 'Unstoppable killing robot' is a message that ten percent of people care deeply about. Perhaps, in certain cultures (like ours), you need those ten percent to leverage the rest of the population, but if you only have unstoppable killing robots, you only get the ten percent. In the film industry, this is potentially a failure. That said, clearly Cameron did not set out with the explicit goal to make a movie whose message was ‘love as unstoppable force for human salvation’ -- rather, he set out to make an awesome movie about unstoppable killing robots, and in order to do so in a way that was creatively meaningful to him and resonant with a significant audience, he chose more general, more human, more socially relevant themes for the indestructible titanium skeleton of his unstoppable killing robot opus.

[Didacticism in Game Design]