Quiting Games

How one badly-placed checkpoint made Ars Technica wonder… what makes us walk away from games?  This is a fascinating area of debate within gaming.  Their superb article ‘Why we quit: the moments that push us away from gaming’ is well-worth a read, and merits further discussion.  I can totally relate.  Bad checkpoint placement for example, can ruin a game’s flow.  How do you feel on this?

The LBP Community shot me down

I’d like to start off by saying that first and foremost, my experience with LittleBigPlanet as a whole, and more specifically, the community, has been really good.  Great, in fact.  I’ve been making my way gingerly through the story mode; loving the visuals, level-design, and uniqueness of the whole LittleBigPlanet universe.  I’ve even ventured online properly, playing a couple of levels with other people, playing user-created levels and passing judgment.  Then I created my own level…

The rating system is out of 5 stars, then you can sum up what you think of the level with a one-word answer, which gets rid of any profanities I guess.  After doing a few story levels, I was itching to create something.  However, due to being away at University for most of the time, I admit it has taken much longer than I planned to get my first level out of the door.

After working my way through some of the tutorials, I started to piece my level together.  I admit though, that because I haven’t completed the whole story mode yet, I don’t exactly have a full list of parts to select from!  I created a fairly short level, named it “Life’s A Beach“, and provided a description saying something along the lines that it was my first level, please be kind. I put some sand castles in it, added a bit of humour, an obstacle or two, and offered some prizes.  Fairly reasonable, no?  So I uploaded the level…

I checked back a few hours later and my level received 3 stars- hooray!  But the words I got describing what people thought of the level was: horizontal, empty, rubbish.  Fair enough with the first one, probably the second as well, but rubbish?!  That struck me as being a bit mean.  I did state, didn’t I not, that it was my first-ever level?

I suppose what I’m after, Is some support here.  Of course, there are some great levels out there, and I’m just starting off with my first steps into LittleBigPlanet level creation, but was a label of ‘rubbish’ really required?  I’ve seen some pretty dire levels myself, but would never dream of labelling them rubbish.  I only go so far as calling them empty, or horizontal.  Am I being too nice here?!  I want answers dammit!

Any thoughts my fellow sack people?