alt Hacker NewsThis runs into the reality that the game maker knows who his target audience is, but you don't. If he wants to make a spreadsheet simulator or something targeted at people who like complex interfaces he can do that. I point at ASCII-UI Dwarf Fortress, one of the great games of this century, as evidence that a game does not need to be accessible to be true art.
It is frustrating to be excluded when a game developer builds a game that looks interesting but targets a niche you don't fit in.
Also those https://research.wmz.ninja/projects/phd/index.html style games are a bit vapid. At any moment a person has more than a handful of choices and the simplification abstracts away the important ones, like ranking what ideas are important or changing strategies for idea generation in this one.
Except Dwarf Fortress is an actual game, and I've sunk a lot of hours in it. Same with the city builders TFA is trying to mimick.
> Also those https://research.wmz.ninja/projects/phd/index.html style games are a bit vapid.
I agree, but please try to engage with what I'm saying. Both the PhD game and TFA are made with the goal of teaching an issue to a broader audience. Do you think TFA is an effective tool of communication? Don't you think its messaging could have been better conveyed had it been designed with more intent, less focused on piling on feature after feature for a game that isn't designed to be replayed more than once?
Both TFA and the PhD game should be considered "educational", people won't come back to those again and again because of how fun they are. They're designed to appear in HN feed, be played once, learn maybe a thing or two in an amusing way, and never be opened again. Do you understand now why I find this complexity so counter-productive? It's fine for a game to be complex, if it's designed for players that will sink hundreds of hours into them. It's not fine for a silly project to demand the same learning effort from its players.
> This runs into the reality that the game maker knows who his target audience is, but you don't.
Have you considered that TFA was vibe-coded, and maybe the "game maker" hasn't put much thought into who his target audience could be, like, at all, and just asked Claude to make a game about NIMBYism?