Replay Value in Research: Lake Ridden
When players talk about games, or when games are judged for their saleability or merit, one of the attributes sometimes talked about is their replay value. Replay value is a choice really for most players; the idea is that after their first play through, a player will want to come back, at some time in the future, and play the game again. It's not a major factor, but it is significant, so the higher the supposed replay chance, could supposedly mean a slightly higher game value.
Research knocks this lovely mechanism all off spin, and I'm looking at Lake Ridden, and trying to work myself up to a replay, because I want to write about it. Technically, playing a really good game shouldn't count as a hardship, but I'm feeling a little hard done by. My issues are these. Firstly, my gaming interest is presently invested elsewhere, oh ye of the obsessive attention span. I've had a word with it, said that logically we need to relook at this game, but it's being a complete child about it. “NO. I've PLAYED those. I'm playing THIS one now.” We can change the path of the laser beam here but we have to really concentrate, I'm not gonna lie it comes at a cost. Secondly, I've played this one, in the last eighteen months or so, and while my disability does weaken my memory in some areas (names, terms, words) it's as strong as ever for stories, and I quite liked Lake Ridden's, despite it being confusing and purposely inconclusive. This means I've actually lost the freshness, so I already know that when I start playing, I'm going to have to be careful not to jump straight to remembered conclusions. They can often be wrong anyway, we don't remember in the detail we think we do and a game can change (through DLC and updates) to become unrecognisable in a year.
So what is Lake Ridden? I stumbled across the small independent game designer, Midnight Hub, at the EGX games convention in Birmingham, where I had randomly joined an open gameplay team testing the first chapter of their new dark story, Lake Ridden. It was a stand out experience from the whole day for me. Other people were spending two hours in queues to play games like the new Sonic, while I was more interested in the new independent games tent centre that had been set up, and the vintage games consoles. (I had to show some of the young people how to fire at space invaders on old consoles like the Ataris, they had no idea there were shortcuts to make firing faster. Everything is labelled on new consoles, it's only looking at it now that I realise you didn't really used to get much guidance on using things. Anyway.)
All that Midnight Hub had running was the first chapter, but that was enough, and I was fascinated enough to watch for the full game release from that point, and to follow the developer. There was clearly going to be a dark story, well thought out background music, and excellent graphics in a beautiful environment, the setting stood out. I will go so far as to say it was the only game of its kind that I found at EGX that year. This was one of my first moves into puzzle games from walking simulators, and the puzzles were beautifully presented too. It expanded my understanding of what the art house genre might or might not incorporate, and also why, and gave me new ideas for delineating parameters in my own mind, without this game in particular ever being part of the genre. All of this equates to a strong replay reason.
My view now on research and a lot of work in general over the years has been that there is good information to be gained from both the first, freshest look at something, and from the replay view that comes from a closer association. The fresh view is sometimes the easiest to get, because a subject is easy to be interested in when new, but sustained interest, or resurrected interest is far harder. A games study makes this kind of research issue easy to see, but I'm not sure the subject actually matters; I think the replay value, in all it’s forms, has maybe held true no matter what subject I've researched.
