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[Hide] (305.9KB, 2605x4096) Reverse >>317905
Sorry for responding so late. I'm still looking into a lot of things that may or may not have some kind of tangental relevance to this, and I'm messing around with some of them IRL.
In regards to your question, why ask whether it's better to force players to respond to a situation or encourage observation when you can do both? Each is a natural fit for the other. This isn't so much a matter of using one technique as it is of interrelated ones. In my earlier example, Peripeteia gave players a lot of tools to encourage exploration, and rewarded persistent ones with a lot of routes and neat hidden stuff, but these tools became more effective after players were pushed to be observant in the first place through escaping the spawn pit.
To help make up for how late this is, here's some extra autism.
Something I have realised is that there was a connection between those old playground rumours about games, and the initial struggles new players used to have when they first tried playing vidya, as both fell for the artifice of games and believed they were way more expansive than they actually were. They didn't know what was interactive and what wasn't. They didn't properly distinguish between level geometry and skybox. They imagined all sorts of hidden techniques and secrets behind every piece of geometry, all of which became increasingly unlikely as games grew more over-streamlined.
Part of becoming an experienced player meant optimizing away this overly-expansive view of games. They learned to recognise what they could interact with and what they couldn't, developed a feel for how game mechanics worked, and thus constructed necessarily more limited mental models of games. To some extent, doing this was necessary, as it gave players a better idea of what games actually were and often increased their ability to play them. This process also takes place within you as you familiarise yourself with an individual game. I've also noticed on my end that when I dream about games, that initial over-expanded view of them returns, along with a sort of fog of war and sense that anything is possible within them.
The problem was that as new players made their mental models around increasingly dumbed-down games with theme park-ified levels, their idea of what a game could be shrank too far. They shrank so far that they basically optimized away their own thought processes, conscious observation, navigational skills, and memory capacity as unnecessary. They became less able to interact with older or stranger games which actually did have odd secrets, hidden mechanics, or unusual level design. The very same process which made older players more efficient at playing games ironically made newer ones less capable.
Mental models aren't bad. You just don't want to get stuck inside overly-limiting ones which fool you with a false sense of completeness. Furthermore, something of that childlike wonder and uncertainty is necessary to make truly insightful observations, or even to build good mental models in the first place. It's worth noting that said wonder stuck around long enough in players of old games to create those out-there rumours at all, whereas now it's very quickly optimized away, and it gets dismissed as worthless by people who internalise game wikis and mistake them for the games themselves as they play them.
Much of what I talked about earlier was partially an attempt at dealing with this issue. I'm not the only person who has wrangled with this either. Yoko Taro actually talked about a complimentary approach in a GDC talk called Making Weird Games for Weird People ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQxhyHMUJ74 ), and Frictional Games' old blog had really good series of articles on mental models and decision making in games that I can't recommend enough (I'll link them later). But there is still a lot of unexplored territory and ideas which have not been brought together, and my intuition is that if this inversion of game design which thinks and remembers for the player is taken far enough, it could reverse a lot of the cancer that plagues modern game design.
>>317933
What I've seen of the level designer's unannounced game runs a lot better, huge levels and all. Applying his Unity HDRP-debloating experience to something inherently less fat and retarded does wonders.