One of the memorable games that I played is Good Pizza, Great Pizza. It evokes a strong feeling within me because it gradually shifts my attention from simply learning pizza-making to noticing the stories behind people visiting the restaurant.
At the beginning, players are assigned as owners for a newly opened pizza restaurant. One of the first character players players meet is Alicante, who opens a rival pizza restaurant across the street and always teaches players how to make pizza while making sarcastic comments. Initially, I saw Alicante as just a tutorial character who introduced increasingly difficult recipes. However, as days pass, recurring characters such as the vagrant and the mystery man appear. The vagrant always asks for some food, and the mystery man always appears with a broken lock, which made me realize that there was actually an ongoing story connecting with these customers. So I start focusing not just on making pizza but also on the story progress behind it.
As said in the passage “Learn to Play Closely,” players often begin playing by learning rules and mechanics before noticing the deep meaning behind them. In this game, the “verb” is pizza-making, while the storyline players later discovered gives a meaning. Because of this gradual progress, I gradually stopped seeing each order as just a task and became curious about the stories connected behind it. This shift in perspective is what made the game memorable to me.
