Being lost

I don't think I'll be pursuing it, but I tested Legend of Valour recently, intrigued by its quasi-mythical pre-Elder Scrolls status, which "allows you to wander around a living city with people moving around, chatting, night falling, monsters, quests, trafficking in various commodities.... Legends of Valour, [which] with its encounters, its conversations, its urban expanse, is one of the premises of world games". (http://merlanfrit.net/Eclats-de-jeux).

The Germanic aspect of the world is very appealing, reminiscent of Darklands, but less historical. However, this was not the main charm of my short experience – what transported me for a few minutes, worth 150 hours of boredom on another RPG, was this impression of total disorientation and idleness – which, before inevitably becoming boring, had a taste of freedom and magic, of mystery and innumerable promises.

Legends of Valour drops you into an unfamiliar town, where you'll have to eat and sleep, work and avoid jail – and apart from a vague hint at the start (find your cousin in such-and-such a remote tavern) you haven't the slightest idea what to do. The game doesn't take you by the hand. All the buildings look the same, and you'll have to enter them, explore them, find out what they are (shops, temples, guilds, lodgings) and gradually get your bearings.

Entering a private home, otherwise absent and therefore inexplicably open, I discovered a cellar leading to caves where a monster of some kind attacked me. No one warned me of the danger, nor explained why one could arrive so easily in hostile corridors, and the juxtaposition of "evil" and safe, familiar, welcoming zones is almost dreamlike in its surprise aspect. We don't understand the rules that govern the functioning and daily life of this city, and this impression of being out of place, lost, produces an effect more exotic than any universe with an encyclopedic background. Being lost, discovering the world and its logic, like an immigrant, or more fundamentally, a newborn.

This almost ecstatic impression of disorientation and openness to the unknown, to the event, is what I've always found most motivating about video games, and to tell the truth, almost their only charm – I definitely belong to the explorer category, although I'm talking about exploration in the broadest sense, and not strictly geographical. Their only charm, or almost their only charm, which makes the games boring after a while. As soon as you have to work to continue the experience, basically.

What, if anything, can be done to keep that early feeling throughout the game?

Undoubtedly by regularly confusing the player, with new zones to discover throughout the game, but also constant innovations in gameplay and interface – for example, in an RPG, only introduce crafting at a certain point in the story.

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There are no puzzles in my games - but creating them is, for me.

An exploration sequence for the player begins with a "waking dream" sequence for me.

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I'm in the process of completing (crazy as it sounds) a little parser I.F., entitled La Tempête, which should therefore go online in the next few weeks, after a bit of beta-testing. I didn't think I'd ever get back into parsing, but I was so enthralled by chapter 1 of Untold Stories that I felt like getting back into it. Not for very ambitious projects, because parsing is the most demanding thing you can do, and shows up a game's shortcomings as quickly and unpleasantly as possible – but for small projects, short games with a limited number of rooms and objects, I think I'll give it a try...