The shopping cart (Spoilers)

[Miyako]

So I always kinda wondered what the shopping cart was doing on top of the mountain; I dismissed it as another random asset, but then I was listening to Bennett's GDC talk on QWOP and I heard this:

Originally posted by Bennett Foddy:

There’s now over 11,000 YouTube results of people playing QWOP, right, and I’ve thought about this a bit, and I’ve tried to understand why that’s the case. And I’m sure a big part of the reason is that QWOP is just like, really goofy to look at, right, I mean I’m acknowledging that, that’s a big part of the reason.

But I thought about it like this, I mean, if you ask would all those videos be there if QWOP had a high score? If it had achievements? Right? I put a high score table, a global high score table, in my iPhone version of QWOP, and you can count the fan videos for that on one hand, right so maybe that’s because the iPhone port blows, maybe it’s because it’s hard to take video of an iPhone game, but I don’t think that’s mainly it, I think people look at a global high score table and they think to themselves “well, you know, somebody’s taken care of that, right, somebody’s, somebody’s solved that”. I think you look at the high score table on Game Center on Kongregate, and it’s a bit like getting to the top of Mount Everest and finding a shopping cart that some kid’s left behind. Really it’s kind of a letdown, it’s demotivating. And I think people set their own goals, if you don’t provide official metrics of whether they’re succeeding or not. And I get letters all the time from people going “I’ve done so well in QWOP, I’ve really mastered it”.

And it looks like this, right, I mean they’re basically just crawling around on one knee. I would be ashamed to show anybody that, but people are really proud, right, they think they’ve succeeded. I think we should think about high score tables and achievements as being something that you put in for determined gamers, right, for the real kind of hardcore gamers. But you just have to understand that it takes you away from a mass appeal, it takes you away from the mass market. And I think it’s a shame that so many modern social gaming services insist on putting those features in, cause I think they can wind up being anti-social features.

Kinda funny and kinda blew my mind. Here's the talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rk2Lm6WzqhM and the quote starts at 22 minutes and 15 seconds.

Not the first person to find this, but still very cool!

[bennett]

Yeah, here's the slide[imgur.com] I used for that part of the talk:

[Miyako]

very cool reference :)