As someone who spends a fair bit of time online and playing videogames, I thought I was going to be well prepared for this “game”; I have played non-intuitive or “meta” games before, and I thought this would simply be another one of these games. The initial “click HERE” gag seemed to point to that, but this game was slightly different from others that I have played: this one genuinely frustrated me. It was an interesting mix of meta and off-meta functions that were set up in such a way as to somehow obfuscate what I thought would be intentional design choices meant to mislead people familiar with this genre of game, that it almost felt like the creator had read Issa & Isaiahs or Woolgar and incorporated use and usability trials into the game.

It is an interesting take on gaming and web design, this sort of thing. On one hand, once you know what you are doing, it can be completed in very short order, but the struggle to get there almost feels like the point of the game; it become reminiscent of speedrunning to me (the practice of breaking down the functions of a game in order to complete it as fast as physically possible, most often by playing the game in a way that was unintended by the developers), in that they took the same design elements and functions of your average website, but they employ them in such a way as to break immersion and intuitive design. It’s a topic that comes up in speedrunning as well; should developers try to fix the exploits that these players are using, or should they embrace the culture and add in additional features that can only be found by playing non-intuitively (here is a fun clip of the DOOM developers talking about it. I would suggest watching the whole video, it is rather entertaining)? Off-meta, or non-intuitive gameplay opens up extremely interesting opportunities when it comes to game design. A prime example of this that comes to mind is the game Superliminal (another dev’s react video can be found here if you want to see some of the fancier gameplay), wherein players need to go about solving puzzles in ways that wouldn’t occur to the average user (like changing the angle at which you are viewing something to make it appear larger before you interact with it). It is an interesting challenge to how we view use and usability, both on the user side of things as well as the creator’s side.