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21 " Imagine you’re a playwright on an experimental theater production. You get to write the lines for every character — except one. The protagonist is played by a random audience member who is pulled on stage and thrust into the role with no script or training. Think that sounds hard? Now imagine that this audience member is drunk. And he’s distracted because he’s texting on his cellphone. And he’s decided to amuse himself by deliberately interfering with the story. He randomly tosses insults at other cast members, steals objects off the stage, and doesn’t even show up for the climactic scene. For a playwright, this is a writing nightmare. The fool on stage will disrupt his finely crafted turns of dialogue, contradict his characterization, and break his story. Game designers face this every day because games give players agency. "
― , Designing Games
22 " One of the worst clichés is the crate. It seems like every game you see, whether it’s a modern military shooter or a fantasy role-playing game, takes place in a world scattered with pointless crates. The problem is so bad that back in 2000, the humor site Old Man Murray created a game review score system measured in Start to Crate (StC), the idea being that the longer it took a game to show you a crate, the less lazy the developers had been in avoiding cliché, and the better the game probably was. Of 26 games tested, only five had StC times of more than 10 seconds. A full 10 games managed StC times of zero seconds by starting the player with a crate in view. "
23 " Games are simpler and more mechanically elegant when everyone mindlessly fights to the death. "