Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator's deliberately designed friction

gamedeveloper.com:

“Transcendent, singular gaming experiences cannot exist without friction.”

Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator is an experience in finding buyers for a starship filled with body parts, buying, selling, and trading for top dollar so you can become wealthy through the organ market. Its systems will push players pretty hard, challenging them to keep up with client demand, the organ selling market challenges, and the fact that some of your organs eat one another. It can be demanding, to the point of feeling taxing and unfair. But this is all by a purposeful, meaningful design.

Following a deep dive into Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator's narrative arc, Game Developer spoke with Xalavier Nelson Jr. to discuss the purposefully taxing elements of the game, the “friction” it creates for the player, and how that helped contribute to making the work a more meaningful experience.

Game Developer: What is purposeful friction in games? What is that purpose behind it?

Nelson: When I talk about friction, I’m referring to every time the player is forced to adjust from the brain that they use in everyday life, to the perspective and mindset of a different world. It can be a unique control scheme, a design that forces you to practice new rituals to succeed (Papers Please being the most prominent example), or even something as simple as using in-world terminology for common objects. The best-case scenario of friction is that its presence quietly and insistently enforces the reality of the world we want players to be immersed in.

The degree to which we are constantly tempted to reduce the virtual lives of our characters, the virtual lives of our NPCs, and the virtual worlds that we've built for the purposes of a moment's convenience