"REDISCOVERING MYSTERY"- DESIGNING GAMES WITH SECRETS AND EXPLORATION IN MIND

Coincidentally enough, I just watched another stream of The Stanley Parable today, so my mind has kind of been on this subject, too. Personally, I'd agree that it can be very satisfying to discover hidden or obscure new content in a game. The problem I see is that in order for this to have a positive effect on the player, one of two conditions has to be fulfilled: Either the player must already be invested enough in the game to begin with that they find it worth their time to play it again and again and start thoroughly digging through everything. Or the game itself has to explicitly make it clear that hunting for secrets is a major feature it has to offer, like The Stanley Parable does it.

In the first case, you could make a good argument for a certain sense of exclusivity in hidden secrets that enhances the experience further for veterans of the game and ensures some replayability. But on the other hand, deliberately making parts of a game obscure or hard to find effectively results in keeping parts of the content hidden from "casual" or first-time players, and thus not showing the game's full potential to everyone. Which is why I find it completely understandable that people use the internet to view this content if they want to see everything a game has to offer without having to replay it again and again. Of course, the flipside of this is the huge danger of unexpected spoilers that comes with looking things up on the internet.

In the second case, where exploration and finding all the hidden content is the main focus of the game itself, the fact that there are secrets to be found to begin with should usually become clear to the player rather quickly. And if a game actively encourages you to explore and find everything, most players who are interested in that type of game will probably try to search for as much content as they can. But exploration as the main feature can cause a different problem, and this is the biggest weakness of The Stanley Parable, in my opinion: It's fun and fascinating the first time, but once you have found and experienced a certain path, that's it. The novelty has worn off, the sense of discovery is gone, and you have no reason to ever do it again. So while ironically enough, replayability is one of the largest priorities of this game, the replay value of the individual bits of content is practically zero. And as much as I like The Stanley Parable, I have no desire to play it for myself any more now that I already know it.

In short, I think hiding secrets in games is always a balancing act between potentially keeping valuable content from the player and making the game's appeal too dependent on the fleeting joy of discovery alone. And I'm not sure yet how to find a good compromise.

My MUD has a pretty unusual approach to secrets. There are a handful of quests which involve riddles, puzzles or secrets. They're separated into a different category from other things you can do in the game (which are all called "missions" instead of "quests"), so players can very easily tell which is which. Unlike other missions which start naturally from NPCs or cut scenes as you explore the world, quests all start from a list of quest clues, accessed through a special menu.

What we do that's unusual is make it against the game rules to talk about these quests in any way or to seek help with them, even outside of the game. Any player caught doing so will have their character deleted and have future characters banned from participating in quests. We consider this about as serious of an offense as botting or trying to hack the game.

If someone posts a guide online somewhere, we also usually change the quests. (Not always, sadly. Some of them are harder to change than others.)

This system does not work very well! But a very small online game like this one, where the developers are online at all times along with the players and are talking to them all day, is basically the only situation where it could possibly work at all. So the game's founders thought it was a really neat idea to approach secrets in a way that other games can't.

Overwhelmingly, players fucking hate it. Even after playing for years, most of them haven't even figured out half of the quests, which locks them out of the rewards. The online nature of the game makes them feel inferior to the players who have. They feel like this is an unfair advantage granted by the ability to read one particular developer's mind, or simply by dumb luck, or by searching every object in every room in the game, or by cheating and not getting caught. I can't even say they're wrong, because many of the quest solutions really are quite hidden, and many of the clues are very vague.