Brütal Legend

Epistemological Issues in Understanding Games Design, Play-Experience, and Reportage

This paper examines the epistemological difficulties involved in understanding games at three stages: their design, their play, and their subsequent reporting and critique.

• Designing and analysing games are both 'second-order' problems: designers only indirectly shape player experience, and analysts can reach in-the-moment play only through reconstructive, error-prone memory and reportage.
• The authors propose a flat-ontology 'Game Space Model' in which a game exists as multiple linked 'units of being' (designed, created, published, expected, played, recalled, reported, analysed), and argue that critics and designers must specify which unit they mean.
• A mismatch between player expectations and actual gameplay tends to produce strongly negative post-play criticism, as seen with Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, Brütal Legend, and No Man's Sky.