Well, we aren’t. So why build your game using dry, dead, soulless metrics? Metrics aren’t fun. Metrics don’t laugh when an NPC says something funny, or cry when a favorite NPC dies. Metrics don’t take screenshots of other metrics so they can try to figure out what the heck armor the other metrics are wearing. They don’t (virtually or otherwise) high five their team mates at the end of a fun gaming session, or curse those fool devs and their dev-ilish ways when a feature pack turns out bad.
Metrics, if anything, are remains. Old bones. Dead bugs trapped in amber, footprints in the exposed stone of a dry creek bed. Fossils. You can use metrics to tell you where someone was, maybe what he was doing there, but they can’t tell you with any degree of certainty why that person was there, or what he was thinking, or feeling, or whether he was having a good time or a bad time. You can expend profound quantities of time and energy trying to wrest these things from forensic reconstructions of fossilized bone fragments…
…or you can just open up your (metaphorical) window and look out.
At us.
We’re right here. Living, breathing, flesh and blood, brawn and sinew, guts and glory.
/e wave Hi, there!
We’re here because we’re gamers, and we want to play your game. Forget the metrics for a while. They’re dead and they’re not going anywhere. We, on the other hand, are still alive. Still here. Still playing. Even though it seems that more and more of us are on the endangered species list, losing that struggle to adapt to conditions which no longer suit us, conditions that increasingly seem to be devised for people long since gone. Hint: they probably aren’t coming back.
So, here’s a thing: instead of building game based on old bones and footprints in dead stone, why not try building it for us?
The table is a fable.
