Ever since a child, I always liked games that didn't have many goals to them. I'd have more fun, for instance, playing the first level of Bubble Bobble over and over again than I would trying to get to Level Infinity. Why? Well, whenever I came to a challenging part, I'd become extremely angry and frustrated that I couldn't get through it.
An example: earlier this weekend, I tried the first Rainbow Islands (NES) and I became very frustrated after having encountered the first boss. I thought, "Why the hell can't they just have a bunch of levels?! Why do there have to be these big spots where you have to stop and figure stuff out?"
Well, it occurred to me that maybe I'm approaching games all wrong. Maybe the trick isn't the score anymore, maybe it's in trying to figure out what the designer did and how the game plays. Maybe that's the whole point of games.
But is it?
Did Namco purposely place patterns in Pac-Man so that people could figure out how to get so good at the game they could crash it?
Does every boss have a special pattern that needs to be figured out?
Or are all these things just happy accidents? Something the designer never really intended but didn't realize he was creating at the time.