![]() The texts, each hidden more deeply than the last, create a curiosity to understand more of the narrative that lead us here and the meaning behind it all. The puzzle gameplay elements draw upon our natural desire to solve problems and to seek out new challenges. The Talos Principle provides that tantalizing knowledge in a variety of ways, encouraging players to think and explore on different levels (or mess up and get blown up). The game's God will not be kind to you along your journey, for you want the forbidden knowledge. You will come to know all the game's storyline, but struggle and suffering will meet you. You want to know how the story ends? Fight through a few hundred of these soldiers, enduring death dozens of times. More commonly, we're offered the cursed fruit. Perhaps knowledge can be gained through a simple walk, reading documents and looking at lost photographs as you meander through a countryside at dusk. Here, the developer can be the benevolent God or the snake with the apple. What challenges will they find beyond the next loading screen? Curiosity, even for something that could cause us trouble, continually drives us forward. They wish to know what else is out there. It might be as simple as "What's to my right?", but the player still craves this information. What is more exciting to the imagination than a place where anything can exist, any rule can be created or broken, and worlds can be created out of nothingness? The game world is a place where anything can occur, and as players, we want to see those things. "Games achieve much of what they do through worldbuilding." "The interactive aspect of games means they lend themselves particularly well to exploration, which includes exploration of texts, themes, and ideas," says Kyratzes. "The Garden of Eden a very rich source of imagery and ideas, and a perfect fit for a story about creating a new intelligence." We just want to know, no matter how much trouble it gets us into. Your curiosity drives you further through The Talos Principle, mimicking that damning moment in the Garden of Eden as well as the kind of attitudes that motivate us to get through the crises and troubles of our everyday lives. You start taking on larger problems, asking the overarching questions about why the game world wants you to solve these puzzles. ![]() Over time, you get curious as to why these problems exist to begin with. So, when a game gives you a series of problems, you hop right in and get to work solving them. We seek solutions when we are presented with a challenge. The connection here is that humanity has always loved games and problems. It's an essential part of our nature and something our entire civilization is based on," says Kyratzes. "What you do in your everyday life isn't that unlike what you do in this game." It's something you've been doing since the first time put a round peg in a round hole as a child. What would make for a fulfilling life for a fictional, digitized being and the person controlling it? What makes players so willing to jump into the worlds a developer creates? It's something, as players, you've been doing since you started playing video games. You have limits in creating your realm, though, as you must make it sustain the digital lives that will be inhabiting it. ![]() No matter what, you've created this pocket of existence with its own rules, physics, stories, and existences. Maybe you create a beautiful island to explore, or maybe you create a city where the streets are filled with grime and dangerous thugs that players have to beat up to create peace, or maybe your world is a box that tasks players with rearranging tiles to form solid lines. "On some level, every game developer is a deity of sorts" On some level, every game developer is a deity of sorts, tasked with creating life, giving it a world to exist in, and providing it with some means for its existence to feel fulfilling. The god/creation relationship at work in the Garden of Eden story frames the relationship between developer and player.
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