December 13, 2010
Art Game Alert: One Chance
Have you played One Chance yet? Go ahead and give it a go, then we’ll talk about it. I’ll wait.
You played it?
Good.
On the Jick and Skully show, Jick said that he thought the way that the developer actively doesn’t want you to play the game a second time is “really cool.” Or something to that effect. That’s certainly what sets this game apart, I suppose, from other games of its ilk. You can’t go back and play it again. Feel free to try, but without actually working at it, there’s no way to restart.
I suppose that does say something, I guess, about how your own actions can’t be rewound like a video game. At the same time, there are only a few very binary decisions in the game, so it really kind of lessens the impact to some extent. I chose to work hard every day but the last, where I gave up and spent time with my daughter. It really seemed to be the only way to go for me. I suppose other things might have been fine options for other people to do, and I saw that there were options, but I didn’t really feel like I could make them. Maybe you made different decisions.
Still, I guess I’m just not struck by something like this, because when I play a game with multiple outcomes, my initial reaction is to not WANT to play it a second time, because it belittles the experience by letting me see the systems. For example, watching my brother play through Mass Effect after I had beaten it kind of cheapened the experience for me, as it let me see how tricksy the game had to be to give you the illusion of choice. I certainly don’t want to replay Mass Effect 2 for that reason. I understand that some people would, but I’m not that person. So the fact that this is a game that doesn’t let you restart doesn’t really affect me. Hell, I wouldn’t even had noticed if I hadn’t heard discussion about it after I played it.
So… yeah. I guess it didn’t affect me as much as other people. I felt my interaction to be so limited that many of the things happening didn’t affect me as much as some other sorts of art games. If you’re someone who wants to see every possible outcome, maybe this would affect you more? Who knows. It’s an interesting little tidbit, anyway.