“Modder’s Law – The more meticulously hand-crafted the game, world, and lore, the more fun it is to make an absolute mess of it.”

Replacing Skyrim’s dragons with Thomas the Tank Engine is fun because it’s ridiculous.

Players like the feeling of getting away with something, doing things in ways other than the devs expected. We can do this within games too, and it applies to the ways we set up and overcome challenges as well as the style we do it in.

Breath of the Wild’s classical fantasy expectations made it more fun to defeat enemies by abusing the physics-based exploits of the stasis mechanic, by launching a tree across the known universe.

Warframe’s players found an exploit that let them basically fly through levels by abusing a weapon’s animation. This let them launch themselves over twisty mazes of walkways that the devs had expected them to fight through. The devs responded by reinventing the core movement system so you could do similar movement more easily, without being bound to a specific weapon.

Warframe makes you feel so powerful so early on, by breaking the implied routes of the walkways to launch yourself through the sky while raining gunfire down on the poor mercs below.

Elden Ring included a glintstone staff (caster weapon) that couldn’t be upgraded, but provided endgame-worthy performance the moment you got it. Was it buried behind an all-but-inaccessible endgame area to make sure no one got it early and shattered the intended progression? Of course not, they put it in Caelid right next to where the surprise teleporting chest sends you within the first major area. If you know about it, you can get a crazy overpowered staff that ignores the need for progression materials within the first 20 minutes of the game.

Let’s jump to drama. Expedition 33 is a somber contemplation on loss, grief, mortality, and what it means to hope in a hopeless world. And yet… If you put your whole team in swimsuit skins, the “final” boss shows up in one too.

Games are made to be broken. Build them accordingly.