The Joy of Incompleteness

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I think about a special entertaining aspect that can occur when an early access game is played.

Early access computer games are a special form of games as they are still in development and hence lack integral game mechanics that will be implemented in the future. Despite not being complete, early access computer games can already be very entertaining and provide players with an interesting and often even innovative gameplay. The main reason for early access games to exist is a result of the good availability of powerful game engines and the emergence of independent game designers who develop games without being supported by a computer game publisher and hence use the revenue generated by selling early access games for the purpose of funding their developments. In addition, early access games are also used in order to improve the quality of a computer game as players often provide useful feedback about the current status of the game.

Despite being incomplete, the gameplay of those games often is not that different to the gameplay of full-fledged games. The reason for this is that the gameplay of any computer game is a result of a player’s interactions with the game world by executing the provided game mechanics. Naturally, a player of an early access version might not have the same possibilities like a player of the game’s final version, but this does not affect the enjoyment of the game’s current early access version. However, playing early access games can also result in some unexpected problems that are a result of the game not being polished and finished.

This especially is problematic when some errors and bugs result in the game being instable or even unplayable. In such a case, players rarely enjoy the gameplay as they get annoyed by the game constantly crashing on them or showing severe performance issues. However, experiencing errors and discovering not fully polished gameplay elements can also result in some hilarious moments when certain actions lead to completely unexpected outcomes, such as hostile creatures getting stuck on tiny obstacles due to issues with their path finding routines or game objects breaking the laws of physics due to errors in the game’s physics engine.

As a result of this, players, depending on their interest in exploring the game world, dedicate a large part of their early access gameplay to the exploration of the virtual worlds in order to test a game’s limits and experience events that were not intended by the designers. This, however, is not unexpected as the explorer trait of computer game players often goes along with the desire to develop an in-depth understanding of the game’s underlying principles and mechanics.

In sum, early access games have shown that games do not need to be complete in order to be enjoyable. Instead, the factor of incompleteness can even cause a different aspect of entertainment as players are able to experience hilarious moments that will not be a part of the final game as they are a result of an error.