My company's main product is a game consisting almost entirely of text. We have called it 'the largest reading comprehension test on the web'. Our UX could politely be described as 'imperfect' (we couldn't afford to hire a UX developer until our third year). So more than one friend sent me a link to Brendan Vance's piece, The Cult of the Peacock, on how games should be have manuals again instead of interactive tutorials or smoothly buffed user experiences, expecting me to cheer. I didn't hate it: but I didn't cheer. I had to write this blog post to work out exactly why.

To unpack the shorthand of 'games should have manuals again': Brendan suggests that too great a concentration on smooth, digestible user experiences leeches the originality and creative challenge from games. We should make players work harder, he says, instead of making designers work harder to pander to them. In a companion piece (where he talks about Liz Ryerson's interesting, indigestible, deliberately rough-edged game Problem Attic) he says -

"The intrinsic features of Art media like literature or film, unlike those of hammers and map APIs, are not easily reducible into language [...] this is what makes ‘Art’ so famously difficult to define, and why we speak not about ‘novel designers’ or ‘film designers’ but about the authors of these works [...]Videogames inherit a little from Art but mostly from product design, which has been kind of a problem for us."

But novels and films don't have manuals. More to the point, very few novels and films have aggressively challenging or unfriendly affordances. A minority of self-consciously experimental ones do, sure, and some of those are very good. Tom Phillips' A Humument was "written" by painting over most of the text of its precursor book, leaving haunting phrases like 'let the lake love my children.' Gaspar Noé's Enter the Void adheres so strictly to first person point-of-view that the screen goes black every few seconds to simulate blinking. They are both compelling, thoughtful, innovative pieces. But if every book or film required that much re-learning of the act of reading or watching... that actually sounds like actual Hell.

Films and books have developed stable and versatile idioms that creators can use to affect audiences, without needing to reinvent the whole system every time. We have similar, although less long-standing, idioms in games: Escape opens a system menu. Start again if you lose. In a platformer, gravity points downwards. Problem Attic plays with some of these conventions to interesting effect, but I'm glad that most games don't. I can remember the days when 'left-clicking on the ground' in an RTS might mean 'move to' or 'deselect', before the idiom stabilised, and my memories are not fond ones.
I'm sympathetic to a lot of Brendan's article. I'm certainly sympathetic to Brendan, whose vivid description of his stress headaches from designing a game where 'the user exists perpetually in a state of 'about to abandon your game in favour of watching cat videos') sounds godawful. But I think he recruits distinct desires under one banner - a craftsman's desire for creative freedom, but more dangerously a gamer's nostalgia for exclusivity, and the games industry's resentment of its low cultural status. (This last is very apparent when he says bitterly: "as game festivals and other high-brow critical establishments pay more and more attention to challenging works the critical pressure towards accessible games will start to subside; ultimately we might even gain a better semblance of balance (like every other popular medium enjoys). ")
Great art is often difficult, but difficult art is not often great. We are entering an era when the cultural conversation about games - their production and their criticism - is growing noticeably better, year on year. Insight, maturity, inventiveness and self-awareness should continue to be the goals - not exclusivity and obscurity. We may be able to bluff our way to a seat at the big table, but we can't fake the conversation once we get there.
ADDENDUM. I don't think this has anything at all to do with Brendan's choice of title, but isn't it gorgeous?