via A Fair Game? (TEI ‘24)
What it says
Effort is not a side-effect of an interaction. It is a channel. When your arms burn from hauling a rope and the other player’s does not, no scoreboard is needed to tell you that the game is unfair — the message has already arrived through the muscle.
Does it hold for my work
This is the cleanest available answer to my own seed about feedback. I claimed gamefulness needs a feedback mechanism. A Fair Game? shows that the mechanism does not have to be visual or numeric at all.
The condition is that the interaction must cost something physically. A gamepad costs nothing. Phosphor has a performer sitting still, moving a thumbstick — the body is involved in the sense of holding an object, not in the sense of being tired.
The real question it raises
If I want bodily feedback but not exertion, what is the low-effort equivalent? Balance, reach, having to stand in a particular place, having to coordinate with someone else’s timing — these might carry information the same way effort does, without a rope.
Under v4 the interesting version is the last one: the cost is not physical effort but the effort of coordinating with a stranger.