To counteract the tendency for players to reject something that didn't make any sense, Pinchbeck knew the environments had to be pretty enough to keep people moving forward and curious about what might be around the next corner. And if you played Dear Esther, maybe you were extremely irritated by its pacing and deliberate opacity. That kind of approach was risky, admitted Pinchbeck, because if presented the wrong way it could be extremely irritating to players. They key here is we're never saying to the player 'you have to understand this.'" Instead, according to Pinchbeck, it's important that players simply feel the emotional impact. "What we're doing with these things, even though they're not necessarily making any sense, is we're lining up a bunch of emotional assets for players, which we can then use as a way of manipulating their experience. In order to strengthen the emotional connections between the story and the environment, objects like bird nests were built into the game to link to the overall theme. It's irrelevant whether or not the story makes sense, what's actually important is whether the player is following the emotional path at that point." Pinchbeck described that realization as liberating. "Story is simply a tool which enables us to create an experience, in the same way that physics enables us to create an experience in the same way that AI does. "As far as we're concerned, story is gameplay," said Pinchbeck. It's just an experience we can engage in." Because of Dear Esther's story randomization and the way all the pieces lock together, the mystery of the story drives the experience. We're not looking for the sense in Angry Birds or in Tetris. Play "We don't look at a Jackson Pollock and it's critical for us to work out in which order the paint hit he canvas," said Pinchbeck.
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