The fun factor of the video game Uplink
vertette.github.io
vertette.github.io
Here's a snippet from the book:
> Many simple things can be made complex when you dig into them, but having fun is something so fundamental that surely we can find a more basic concept?
> I found my answer in reading about how the brain works. Based on my reading, the human brain is mostly a voracious consumer of patterns, a soft pudgy gray Pac-Man of concepts. Games are just exceptionally tasty patterns to eat up.
I do think that Uplink has some super tasty patterns in there, which is exactly what the author is talking about when he's talking about the feeling of noticing how much better you've gotten when you start the game over. Of course, fun isn't a binary classification, and there's definitely a bunch games that are very heavy on the 'juice-factor' and other such things in an attempt to bump up the fun.
[0]: https://archive.org/details/theoryoffunforgamedesign2ndediti...
I'm struggling to think of any examples that are arguably random.
Games with fewer meaningful choices and less exploitable patterns tend to be games that game enthusiasts move away from pretty quickly.
But they stay interesting as casual diversions or ways to spend time with kids for people who are less-game-oriented.
So I think there's two types of ways games are fun, and the latter one is simply "something to do together with friends and family" where the game itself is a diversion, not the primary enjoyment source.
And outlined features probably align to the original creative intent of demonstrating "monopolies suck and are unfair."
If you think about it... lack thereof probably being why it's still such a popular game.
Monopoly I think doesn’t quite fit with those others. Seems to me there’s a difference between the optimal choice being too obvious (monopoly) and no choice at all except whether to pull the lever again or walk away with whatever shred of your dignity remains (Candyland, slots)
Although I'm sure that with enough abstraction you could find a pattern, but that's true for everything.
There's nothing like your second playthrough of a game like Factorio, Cities Skylines, Stellaris, etc. All of the experience and knowledge you've gained feels like a superpower when you start fresh.
Unrelated to the game, but hitting on this after 36 pages of public updates made me sad about the state of forums.
>> I know it's a 2 years bump. But I hope development is not completely dead :roll:
> Actually more active lately than more recent history, but most discussion is taking place in Discord these days.
Yeah, if I recall, once you figure out all its mechanics you are able to hack anything in about a month of game time. This is marvelous once but obviously does hurt replayability.
It is fun to think I can never really replay uplink, short of some rather severe amnesia.
Maybe I suffer onset dementia or something, but I enjoyed that game back then, but absolutely remember shit about it. Like, absolutely nothing. Maybe it would all come back 5 minutes after firing it up again, but I doubt it.
I absolutely loved this game when it first came out and I played it on my Snow iBook G3. I subsequently re-bought it on Steam, and it’s had about five minutes of playtime since then. I want to replay it, but every time I start it back up again I’m just like, “Nahhh.”
That's the feeling I got out of Return of the Obra Dinn. Turns out that a carefully crafted whodunnits becomes a lot less interesting when you already know who's who what the "it" is that they've dun.
But not all is lost - I get almost as much enjoyment out of watching other people play through it and uncover the mystery.
1. It's kinda what helped me find a career. I had trouble tolerating work for long enough, and while I could do it, it would get to me. I realized a LOT of the play patterns in this game are mostly optimization and data entry, so decided to take a start there and eventually wound up in tech.
2. It has a really cool, if possibly impossible to now play, fan made version called onlink. To memory it's not a mod so much as a separate application and has a lot more depth (annnnd unfortunately bugs). I know they were working on trying to make a standalone "movie hacking" simulator, but I don't know if that ever got off the ground (Cerberus I believe)
I'm the original author. There's one other that works on code, and Vert (this blog) has been a tremendous help with asset updates.
Turns out however that rewriting the graphical engine takes a while.
From there when the game only sorta worked for me I figured "well someone else has to have made a quality movie hacking simulator" and the answer was "not really no". It seemed really clear that Onlink really understood what made these things fun, and gave them depth, so I hope you can pull it off.
An important mechanic in that game is that monsters have different types of attacks, and you need to be wearing equipment and/or maintaining temporary buffs that make you resistant or immune to those attack types. There are 30-40 relevant player flags, and as you collect stronger equipment more resistances will be available to you, making it safe to adventure deeper within the dungeon.
You have to fit those few dozen player flags into your actual equipment, which is one helm, one amulet, two rings, a pair of gloves, a chestpiece, a cloak, a weapon, a shield (if your weapon isn't two-handed), a pair of boots, and maybe a ranged weapon.
You also need a lot of stat point pluses, which are another thing you get from your equipment.
One of the things I found most enjoyable in the game was sitting parked in my home in town, looking at the pieces of equipment I'd collected and saved, and thinking about how I might shuffle my equipment around for a better overall setup.
I remember a quick way to increase your rank was by hacking the international crime database and put many hackers into prison. Hehe good old times.
Definitely want to play another game like this (an updated graphics is certainly nice addition).
Perfect timing as it's on sale on gog :) thanks for the suggestion, will ride that nostalgia wave and check out hacknet as well!
Got stuck for over an hour because I could not figure out how to hack a node to route my connection through it. The Eureka moment: You just click on it! No hacking needed, it is magic.
The impossible IP addresses were anusing too.
I absolutely loved the game. Really made you feel like a "hacker" in some sense.
Games are no different in this regard to books or movies. The bulk of the market is looking for escapist entertainment generally associated with positive emotions, but there are many others that are looking for other things like learning something new or exploring darker emotions. Video games have a unique challenge though in that it's very difficult for those niches to be served with games of the scale and quality of AAA. Movies have that to some extent, but not nearly as extreme.
I really enjoyed upgrading my workstation to 40Ghz and such, optimizing for attack time and stealth.
Darwinia is great as well, I really dig their style.
I wonder if it inspired the creation of imgui at all. Or what kind of engine the game had because it had pretty compelling UI capabilities, stuff I hoped to see on UI frameworks of the future.
SDL was used for mac and linux versions, windows used glut.
I quickly scrolled through then ISO content and saw it’s C files, and a spurious mention of Borland (from SDL) got me :)
Looking back now the intro is so simplistic, and no way anyone now would have the same experience (it's a different tech world now) but at the time I was really amazed at the thought behind the design choice.
For a kid with no modem, it was revolutionary.
The larger amplitude of emotions makes the positive ending stand out.
PS I remember now someone (Scaevolous? WolfLord? Rkiver? Zaptan?) had written an irc bot in python, and it was the first time I’d ever contributed to an open source project :)
Maybe someone on HN still has the game, or a clue how to get it?
https://web.archive.org/web/20120212100603/http://cholo.ovin...
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/3r649q0mij35sbwooufih/cholo.z...
I remember downloading it at the local cyber-coffee, for which I bought 2 boxes of diskettes! The owner saw me trying very hard to split apart the zipped game and told me "do you want me to burn a CD?". That's how I got my first CD game :D
https://scoutshonour.com/digital/
Excellent visual novel you can finish over a weekend or two.
They're both great indie games, with a great ambiance from the graphics and music, but otherwise I see them as fairly different in terms of gameplay.
I think it's addressing the fact both could be described as "boring" and "not fun" due to their somewhat dry UIs but also their subject matter ("hacking and networking" and "borders admission & stamping passports", respectively), but in practice they are both innovative and very engrossing games, rightly lauded as gems by gamers.
There was also a big culture of downloading games illegally, and I remember people were trading burned CDs at school -- it was a big thing to have a CD burner then. While it was certainly not legal, it contributed greatly to the spreading of niche, foreign or rare games.
By 2000 personal computers had become sufficiently cheap that many people had individual computers rather than family ones. Windows 98 had made them accessible to everyone, and XP which followed up was truly the beginning of everyone having a computer.
The concept of a "gaming PC" doesn't really make sense, any PC can play games, and it only costs 100-200 euros to upgrade relevant parts to play the latest games on high graphics settings (but as we all know, graphics don't matter anyway). I guess it's a concept that appeared with the new generation being unable to assemble parts.
The time period you speak of, the mid-2000s, was actually the end of an era and the beginning of mainstream over-marketed gaming, and a general dumbing down and drop in the quality of video games. I guess it also came with the rise of "digital purchases", but digital didn't really fully take over until the 2020s.
For a long time Internet connections were not sufficiently good to download games on a massive scale, which is also part of the reason why people reselling copies was popular.
As for the difficulty of online payments, I don't buy it. First, you could always go physical, and second, the Netherlands were part of the eurozone since 1999, so hardly isolated in currency or financial systems. I remember buying stuff online in 1999 from other European shops, and it was indeed much easier than in pre-euro times.
And again I want to stress that the stores near me didn't have many PC games and online payments were a much bigger pain for us until iDeal got more international support. Maybe there were cheap dedicated PC game stores and hardware stores and easy digital payment systems (read: not PayPal) but if so I wasn't aware of them and didn't know who to ask about it. What does it matter anyway? This was the situation for me as I remember it and I got little reason to lie as it's just a flavorful intro to an analysis into a game I love and want to talk about.
This game is not 'fun'. Well, it might be if I could read it.
This game, like so very many others, should be a lesson in accessibility.
Disagree? Fine. Bookmark this and come back in 10 / 20 years.
Six years ago: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1510/discussions/0/1474221865...
It does have other UI quirks though. IIRC, focus was determined by mouseover so if you bumped the mouse while trying to type in a textbox the keys would get lost. I found that significantly more of a problem (without an easy fix) than the screen resolution.