Periodically a wave of discussion about game difficulty occurs in game developer spaces, so I wanted to share some thoughts that Zach Barth and Keith Holman of Zachtronics* once developed related to this topic that I think are helpful.

Before I start, though, by “difficulty,” I mean the friction and adverse factors that impede or prevent players from arriving at what the game defines as an end or win state. (Does this mean that the difficulty of the game is the game? I think so, but that’s for a different post.)

On the One Cool Thing podcast, Die Gute Fabrik’s Hannah Nicklin speaks with game makers about a non-game thing that's inspiring them lately.

I decided to talk about “Two Visions of Zen” — the story of two Zen Buddhist teachers who came to San Francisco in the late 60s from China and Japan, well before today’s era of “practical Zen for everyday living.” Their approaches couldn’t have been more different!

This topic is endlessly fascinating to me and it was wonderful to have the chance to speak about it.

If I were a partially-voiced NPC with a set of generics to cover most of my non-recorded written lines I think my set would need to be something like “Hello,” “Sure,” ”Hmmmm,” “That’s weird,” “Additionally,” “In other words,” “Of course,” “Thank you,” “Take it easy”

20th Century Food Court is one of the games-within-a-game in Zachtronics’ final game, Last Call BBS. The idea in Last Call BBS is that you’re pirating games on an old computer vaguely reminiscent of an Amiga or PC-98. We had back stories for each game, including who the developers were, so 20th Century Food Court was fictionally created by a company called Zachmatics, located in Harrogate, UK. Zachmatics was Zachary McGann, one of the so-called “bedroom coders” of this time and place who were making and releasing games from their homes. In some ways McGann is a kind of back-in-time British doppelganger of Zachtronics founder Zach Barth.

The game itself also has a story. In the far future, there’s a theme park called The 20th Century Experience where curious tourists can go and look at how people used to live way back in the twentieth century. Zach (the real Zach) liked the idea that the people of the far future would have some spotty research and wouldn’t always get things right, leading them to do things like serving cigarettes as food in their “authentic Parisian cafe,” and so on. In the game, you design factories to create the different food items. Each level is based on a specific restaurant concept. There’s a brief description of the restaurant in the menu, sometimes highlighting the misunderstandings the people of the future have about how things worked, and when you finish the level, you get a selection of “customer reviews” of the food, for no real reason other than we thought it would be funny (technically, customer reviews like this didn’t really happen until well into the internet era and wouldn’t have existed when this game was supposed to have come out, but that didn’t stop us).

Anyway, I enjoyed writing these. They’re even better when seen in game, as the character portraits give each review a sort of “SimCity 2000 advisor” feel. Plus, there’s plenty more fun bits of text to discover in Last Call BBS. You’ll have to play the game to find them! Or just look at the data files, it’s all there.