i appreciated this paragraph as someone who has become increasingly like an Old Games Enthusiast entirely. sorry it basically has to feel like a SNES / PS1 / PS2 game to be good to me atp. im exaggerating but also not
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oh yeah I don’t disagree that basically every development decision CCP has made since like 2008 has been “how do we milk these little piggies for all their cash flow”. I actually was forced to stop playing as a byproduct of one such decision in 2011, the famous “monoclegate”.
that said I still find a lot to value in the game despite this. but there are many longtime eve players much more on the cheerleading side than me (see YouTube) and many others who are way more on the hater side than me (see reddit)
nowadays I basically don’t believe in grinding for plex. if you have to work for it, I’d rather work my actual job and pay a pittance of that on a sub, rather than let them modify my play behavior on the vain hope of getting the game for free
the things I actually like about eve were always in the player interaction. rarely the systems. there is such a thing as too much systems thinking in gamedev honestly.
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I really liked this book that I think goes really in depth about why all this stuff we’re talking about is just such a bummer
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I wrote about flow in 2015 and it seems relevant to this conversation, even as I am generally a person who enjoys Vampire Survivors / Balatro and thinks they are clever and well-designed. I draw mostly similar conclusions to everyone here. Forgive any cringe affect, it was almost 10 years ago lol.
The gist is that I think flow is neutral as a concept but bad as an ideal. “Aiming” for a flow state, particularly for tentpole AAA open world slop releases, is a net negative. But you can achieve flow states with something like Mushihimesama or pinball (at the arcade or at home alike) and I don’t think that’s a negative, but a byproduct of mastery akin to speedrunning.
I generally agree that the games coming out of “the industry” have been getting worse and worse, turning into endless time suckers playing pretend at infinity, and it super bums me out. This is why I usually advocate playing old or indie games to people instead of whatever big new hotness rolls along.
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I am starting to feel like the more I revisit older designs (PS2 etc) the less this stuff can be felt but I also worry this is just nostalgia for a time. Maybe I’ve been radicalised by SB.
But also the games I play the most atm are ‘live-service’ where they set up hundreds of timers and incentives to ensure you keep turning up to your job to collect your cheque. This stuff seems like flow but sort of the bare minimum flow channel hack to get your brain thinking about it. I suppose it’s not bad per se since we’re all admitting we like to relax and turn our brains off but we’re surrounded by so many terrible examples that just eat people up without them even noticing.
A common thing I hear from students and younger players is how much they hate playing certain games that they have thousands of hours in or complain about the gacha in the gacha games which practically say ‘Warning: Only play if you want to engage with the grimiest gacha’. You could play things you love!
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i mean i do the same when doing destiny shit
i think i still play the game because i don’t have a nice car i can just go for long listening drives in
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Weather permitting, I go for aimless walks to listen to audiobooks. Unfortunately, the PNW rarely has the right weather for it
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Yeah. I would maybe advance some midwit thesis like “earned Flow is good, unearned flow is bad.” many of the heights of artistic achievement are the results of flow, but if you just sit in front of a canvas or a piano - or paddle out to a wave - all that you’re confronted with is a blank canvas, or a keyboard, or a bunch of water. you’re the one that does something with that.
in a video game sense it might be the difference between doom or god hand on the one hand, and hades or Balatro on the other - these simplified, sometimes random inputs which have out size influence on the course of a game, and a very low skill ceiling (to use that term)
idk just spitballing. I like that you used counter strike as a counter example, I tend to agree that the flow you encounter there (also, I will note, after dealing with a ton of friction) is a positive thing. this is beautiful for example
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another thing I think about this is that you really do have to train yourself to avoid dark patterns and act with free will. it’s a skill that is very distinctivized, and there are many apps/games that just aren’t worth the effort to do this since the dark patterns are so pervasive (Facebook, Twitter, etc; for me a looooot of games), but there are some where you can mostly ignore the gacha stuff and still have a good time. but you really have to train yourself to listen inwardly and ask: am I having a good time with this, do I find value? And many times the flow state is there to make you stop introspecting, stop thinking, just dissociate and spend time in game.
yeah I think game design has uncomfortable overlap with social media design and not enough game devs question that.
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I am pretty resistant to this type of stuff, thankfully. I stopped playing vampire survivors after 2 days, etc. but it does make it easy to put time into frictionless games. a lot of games that I really like are too much work to put a ton of time into, at least for a lazy asshole like me, whereas the hours can pile up in something way worse. it just doesn’t last for me, I’ll do that for a while and then dump the game in question after a week or two and never touch it again.
now this didn’t stop me from being addicted to wow long in the past, but that was mostly a social thing. I’ve been thinking about social addiction in gaming a lot recently because my god damn ex girlfriend plays on a GTA roleplaying server 15 hours a day, and the way it works is everyone that plays all day every day gets together and pressures everyone else who is susceptible to it to never log off, because doing so boosts their own enjoyment and feeds back into the loop. classic enabler stuff, basically, but because the ‘product’ is sociability it has this veneer of legitimacy. in this RP realm specifically it is required for people to pay attention to you for you to get anything out of the experience, since there is little to the game mechanically. people are encouraged to demand unreasonable amounts of time from each other, and the people who never log off end up with elaborate, unspoken systems of attention exchange to power the engine, because if they don’t it falls apart and they are forced to reckon with the lack of substance behind their relationships. I’m trying to figure out what, if anything, is intrinsic to gaming about this setup
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Nothing as far as I can tell! I feel like I’m pretty resistant to that particular kind of insanity because I spent a lot of time doing socialist organizing for a while and you start to pick up on unhealthy social dynamics and learn to avoid that.
On another note, I don’t like how flow has become this thing that is thought to lead to mastery of an activity, rather than being the outcome of a certain type of mastery. There’s another interesting book on this called “The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance”, which despite its general gushing tone, does state that flow states arise from activities which are autotelic - I.e. done for their own rewards. (there’s some other points, like the activity has to be risky in some way, and it has to provide instant and fine-grained feedback, etc. so, surfing is fun, has a risk of dying, feeling of the wave under your toes, etc)
So it feels like it’s almost missing the point to talk about how to “build flow” into your game, unless you are literally just trying to build an addictive product (in which case shame on you). that question leads to, well let’s build in FOMO to fake risk, and Skinner box mechanics to fake autotelia, and a million pop-ups to fake feedback, etc.
The question might rather be to start from the first requirement: how do I build something that people will like? and even that’s the wrong question, because the only way to answer it is to build something that you like and then put it in front of others. and if you build something where engaging with it is its own reward - Whether ‘gameplay’ or ‘themes’ or ‘narratively’, whatever - then you’ve engendered a flow state, sure, but it’s thoroughly besides the point, what you’ve actually done is create a piece of art, and now we’re having a discussion on those terms, not the terms of behavioral psychology.
I mean, I get a flow state reading Moby Dick.
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Lol this and all the stuff you describe afterwards is exactly what was going on with my ex-gf and the “cyberpunk western” Garry’s Mod RP server I would have to play on to get her to talk to me after she became addicted to it.
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it’s also pretty interesting how modern games need attention for cash in exactly the same way arcade games used to, but the way they go about it, the ‘markets’ they are dropped in, and subsequently the markers of both success and quality are more or less exactly the opposite.
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I can’t even do that because the server she plays on is gated. you need to pay a monthly fee to apply to get in lmao
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Is it the server you have to pay to reserve slots on because all the streamers play on it. Spending 250 dollars a month to stand around in GTA 5 all day. Though I really wouldn’t be surprised if they were all monetized in some way, this is also something that gmod rp servers started doing a long time ago.
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all the streamers do play on it, but I don’t think you have to pay once you are accepted. she doesn’t, at least, but she also has a permanent slot because she’s been on and off the server since like 2018 (and before that when it was an arma server)
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about once a month i think about the slavery economy of the fallout 2 MMO mod where western users would literally shovel shit all day to earn money before the well established gangs of russian guys would show up to kill everyone and steal their shit, and this cycle went on for months before people decided to stop wasting time literally shoveling shit in a videogame
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Tangentially related, but I remember some time decades ago when my dad deleted all the pack-in Windows card games from our family’s computers for vague religious/anti-gambling reasons (he only ever did this once). (I remember this because I wanted to play FreeCell once and it wasn’t there suddenly.)
I thought it was very silly/weird of him even back then, but as I rapidly inch towards the age he was when he did that I can’t help but think now of how hilariously, hopelessly, and increasingly quaint of a parental worry that was for him.
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I also think about the demographics of this server, because, hmm, weird, all the cops are 20 something white people (though, to be fair, not all 20 year old white dudes, there are a pretty good amount of women involved) and most of the criminals are, uhh, not
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White people love being the police on RP servers. it is always the best thing to sell because they will buy access to it. in darkrp the ability to be a criminal was always an excuse to have guys around for the cops to brutalize
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