When we were first assigned to play Breakout I looked at the giant list of Mods and thought I would play like three levels and get bored. The first level I opened was the one I was assigned - Spaceout. I was initially intrigued by all of the different mechanics in the level. This level is a mash up between a typical game of breakout and space invaders. Not only do you need to do the normal breakout activity of hitting the bricks, but you also need to avoid the bricks as they come down across the screen. After losing the game a few times, I gave up.
Not all of the breakout levels are this complex. Some of the levels are a very simple change to the original breakout, like “Eke Out”. Some of the levels just change the way you view the game, for example, “Breakout VR” which makes the player view the normal Breakout game through VR glasses. Additionally, some of the levels are more or less disconnected from Breakout altogether. For example, ‘social breakout’ takes the player to twitter with a preloaded tweet about the game. ‘Bleakhouse’ is the full transcription of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House.
However, each level I would play, I would play for a few bounces of the ball at the most. Some of the levels were easy and some were hard, but after I figured out what the point of each level was, I gave up on beating the level. In fairness, trying to beat each level would take an insane amount of time. Each level of Breakout is different and exciting because you get to discover what the difference of the level is. The point of the game is not to break all the bricks, but to understand all of the formal features of the game.
I think Breaksout definitely does well in not pressuring the player to actually complete any individual level. However, from a brief replaying (because I have bad memory) it seems that there isn't actually an in game option to leave a level without either losing or winning entirely. One actually has to exit the window of the game to go into something else without winning. Was this intentional? Who knows!
Anyways, every time I exited out of the game, I had some extra time to reflect on the nature of each modification that I might not have had if there was an in game exit button. Exploration is cool!
I felt similarly to you when playing Breaksout. In some ways, I think that it functions as a double-layered metagame. The first layer is that obviously there are different levels/stages/versions of this game that are clearly based on the original game. However, because our goal wasn't to beat the levels, but simply experience them, there is a second level of meta-game-iness that includes our efforts to discover what makes each stage unique. It almost functions as a puzzle or interactive film in the space of a metagame.