I came to this idea about there were, well, I call creative constants, sort of like physical constants, but for games. And in a sense, they sort of, they define the form of games to an extent, but they don’t limit them at the same time. It’s not like sort of saying, you know there’s lots of things that you cannot ever do in a video game, and that will never work, and all that sort of thing. But it is to say that there are some, if you like, precepts, some things you kind of need to be uh, both aware of, and that you really need to kind of work with or through, because you won’t easily work your way around them, essentially, and that’s what I kind of mean by creative constants, and I came up with seven. And fascination for me is one of the most important. It’s to say that, even though your game may have lots of, let’s say, aesthetic ambitions, or maybe you want to tell a story in the game, maybe you want to create a certain kind of experience, it still needs to have a sort of a, a kind of underpinning of a sort of system of rules and logic, and good mechanics, and resources and tokens and stuff like that, that the left brain of the player will find sort of just an inherently fascinating sort of engine. But, almost like the gears of a watch, that they’ll kind of stare at and try to understand and try and master and trying, kind of um, get behind, as it were. And, if the game is not fascinating on that level, what you tend to see again and again is, players may engage with it for, say, an hour or two, and find, let’s say, the story or the idea kind of interesting, but they’ll eventually sort of drop out of it, or they’ll eventually sort of conclude pretty quickly that it’s-it’s then, or it’s kind of substanceless, or it’s kind of, that they’ve seen the whole thing like, within only a few minutes. And so that’s why, that’s why games need to be fascinating. Specifically, it’s to get away from, and to avoid, if you like, that sort of lossy moment when people kind of drop out.
