Jamie Antonisse

Make no mistake; this game starts out simple, but it quickly becomes a tightrope walk. The folks behind N are of the New Old School.... the school that believes that, until a player is perfectly in lockstep with the design, they SHALL NOT PASS. Punishment is the central game mechanic of N, as much a control as the shift and arrow keys that map to your carefully tuned run and jump.

I am not very good. I have died hundreds of times, and beaten a small triangle of the levels. But I keep playing, in part because I am fascinated by the Process of playing N. Most levels don't give you the comfort of processing the environment around you consciously. It's like a round of Guitar Hero: you need to react before you can think, and if you can achieve success, its magical.

While my reactions eventually and inevitably led me astray, I noticed an interesting pattern. On my first pass of the level, I'd stay alive at least twice as long as I did on any subsequent attempt. And if I didn't beat the level on my first try, it would take me at least ten tries after that to clear it.

When a level was new to me, I was good. I could see everything in my vicinity, and while I couldn't respond perfectly, I could usually work my way through the lasers, machine guns, missiles and drones. After a few tries, however, I started to develop preconceptions about optimal paths. I knew where the switches I needed to reach were, and I was inpatient to find the best and quickest way to reach them. I knew how to traverse certain dangerous spots, but in the process of my manuevers I'd either cut my stunts too close or forget about some other element (such as a loose robot wandering in my direction). And so I'd not only die, but run, headfirst to my demise in a way that would have been totally unnatural on my first time through.

I've heard the popular wisdom that children's brains are more "elastic" than adults. I can't speak to the biology behind that claim, and I'm sure there's something there. But N served as an object lesson that convinced me that the dichotomy of "elastic thinking" and "rigid thinking" is not age-determinant, but experience-determinant. As more-or-less-adults, we are constantly experiencing familiar situations, for which we by now believe we have optimal strategies. Usually these strategies serve us, though once in a while a situation is not as we believe it to be, and we run straight into a land mine, wishing, as we pick the gravel out of our teeth, that we could have "thought outside the box" a little more.

It strikes me that I enjoyed N... but what I REALLY enjoyed were my first passes, the sense of being in a completely new environment, and the adrenaline rushing of figuring the space out on the fly. The process of "beating" the level in an optimal way was not rewarding... it was simply my problem-solving instinct after the insult of defeat. It's the first passes, the elastic play-throughs, that really stretch my brain... they're the reason I play games.

What does it take to keep a game feeling fresh, to keep players aware of their environment through challenge and stimulation while still allowing them enough leeway for elastic, fun play?

Exhibit B: