im not even sure what my original point was other than designing a monster made me see monsters everywhere
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What if the doodads werenât just doodads? What if the thing that gave you reason to engage with the fantasy was less transparent and obvious? I think what frustrates me is it becomes so easy to boil a lot of games down to doodad-collecting and mostly just doodad-collecting (have I said doodad enough to make my point?) to the detriment of the fantasy component. Itâs a distracting and uninspiring pattern to me.
Itâs like having a shitty real world job where the things youâre doing are repetitive and so clearly in service of simply making money and nothing deeper than thatâŠ
I also think films that do similar with their plot structure without complicating it in a novel way are just as uninteresting.
All of this to say that these things arenât necessarily terrible in and of themselves but that the ways in which they are being used in such a predictable manner is maybe the problem Iâm having.
I mean sure, but I also think these are structures in some way particular to games in general and they are prevalent to the point that taste canât really help me out of this problem beyond making my own games in response to these patterns (working on it!!)
It would also be cool if other people had thoughts about this beyond just accepting it as a given⊠Like I struggle to believe this is just a simple matter of taste⊠I dunno 
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its ability to surprise is really high which is something that sets it apart from most of its contemporaries but also i have sokoban fatigue (+meta puzzle fatigue) and itâs v. much a genre piece sooooo itâs a mixed bag for me
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i am replaying essentially the same game twice in a row just to fulfill childhood dreams and so far still having a great time im sure that relates to this larger meta conversation somehow
sequence breaking Red (by trading over PokĂ©mon that have learned HMs from my completed Blue file) has been neat in giving me a different sense of Kanto, since i havenât been able to proceed linearly through it and just FLY back to town (i donât even have the badge that lets me do that yet!). Like getting through Rock Tunnel early was pretty rough but it feels even better than ever to open up Saffron City and have it available as a regional hub to travel through. Itâs also stayed somewhat challenging since i cant let my traded PokĂ©mon get over level 30 or they wonât listen!
Having seen the truck now though, i think the rest of the game is gonna be a quick sweep of the gym leaders lol
whatâs also nice is i can emulate the Stadium games and see my beautiful babies in eye-popping 3D 
itâs cool im getting to finally do all the extra fun PokĂ©mon shit i always wanted but couldnât because i didnât have the peripherals and neither did any of my friends for some stupid reason even though we all liked PokĂ©mon. i guess we/our parents were just collectively doing a nose goes on that
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the shotgun in doom feels so satisfying to shoot that itâs immoral
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Iâve been playing Doom wads lately and it is the most thrilling, pleasurable shit and Chris Hu saying âthe best feeling of the manâ echoes through my head whenever I kill two imps with one shotgun blast. There is nothing better than that, not even taking a big olâ piss, blasting imps is number one and I love it
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chaingunning multiple cacodemons in a row without releasing the fire button is also very good
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what if I play a game out of spite
what does that say
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Work Time Fun is a great example of something that thoughtfully uses pre-existing game structures to satirize them (feels prescient now that gacha is eveywhere). But if you look at contemporary reviews & sales its getting beat out by Secret Agent Clank or whatever the fuck. Same with Damien Hirst or whoever in the art world, or whatever YA novels are the best sellers on earth. At some level thereâs going to be an appeal to something that is immediately recognizable, approachable and engages a desired experience, even if thatâs junky for the soul
The path to more consciously interrogating experience, âi recognize these as game doodadsâ is to play or put effort into thinking consciously about what youâre doing with your time and reflecting on what is happening or discussing it with others. Being able to connect those thoughts between and outside of games. I think of that as the process of developing taste, in the same sense that like, there are people who exclusively listen to radio pop forever as their experience of music, and I would say that too is an issue of exposure and disinterest in reflection.
I think taste can help because thereâs a lot of games out there, now especially, and while sifting through them all is a tiring process thatâs also what taste, discourse like this forum, and experience expedites. As youâre saying, itâs a âlot of gamesâ that have this issue & would gladly suck up your time if you insisted on seeing them through, and thereâs a lot of bad books that share that quality. But if we agree itâs not a problem fundamentally endemic to games, then I think the solution is the same.
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so much of what got me into indie games was that they promised the opposite of this - like some kind of escape from gamer culture into something more meaningful. the reason âmeaningful gamesâ meant something as an idea is a lot of people wanted an alternative to this endless loop of gamer culture and something that actually directly spoke to their lives vs. just like pandering to fandoms. but ofc no one could agree on what the âmeaningful gamesâ were and a lot of kind of boring middlebrow stuff was elevated over perhaps more interesting but less respectable-looking stuff. and ofc gamergate made games a large site of like revanchist resistance to any kind of cultural progress.
a lot of old games people love work because of the craft that comes out of them working within genre and commercial limitations. these things are really valuable in a lot of ways. itâs very easy to overvalue that, though, and sort of deify these genres as forever unchanging aspects of human nature instead of very imperfect things that exist as a result of time and place. people become so focused on the craft aspect of older games that they idealize them to the extent to mostly self-imposing those limitations in a completely different context. instead of looking at how games transcended their limitations and pushing to create our own definitions, we praise the limitations as the thing that created them in the first place (ignoring all the mediocre and forgettable games that are forever defined by their limitations). we end up just remaking the 90âs or whatever as a result.
i think it just goes with the general RETVRN sentiment around everything lately and the feeling of no new cultural horizons, which is further reinforced by fan communities online. this really is not inevitable - so many spaces exist to celebrate and reinforce your limitations as a person because itâs easier. we should be celebrating things that transcend their limitations - but we inevitably come up against these like deeply entrenched fan armies every time we do. but in some sense that fight has to happen and gamer communities really arenât good enough. like we do have an have choice in the present make spaces that are something else vs. just reinforcing empty RETVRN nostalgia. thatâs why i do think cultural literacy is really important. also in a world run by STEM brained people any of us who have basic awareness of the humanities have something fundamental those people lack.
anyway Balatro and the convos around gameloops i think are starting to put people back into the place of âoh yeah, thatâs why we had these conversations 15 years ago. too bad most of them were wiped awayâ. but i hope the conclusion this time is not that like, you have to make a puzzle platformer about keeping your family together. you can get âmeaningâ from a vast array of different experiences. but in some sense - again - fan communities are definitely a drain on human potential that are not âgood enoughâ and people should be actively pushing stuff in their own spaces further artistically instead of defaulting to 90âs RETVRN bullshit out of fear and lack of openness. it requires more active participation from like the dev and critical side - which needs to be rebuilt after online platforms, professionalization and reactionary gamer communities cut those things off.
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Blue Prince including so many Meta Puzzles they forgot to include any Actual Puzzles outside of a deterministic riddle and number salad is sooooooo much more damning than whatever dice roll bingo the rest is attempting.
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Work Time Fun (and its PS1 predecessor) is an all-timer!!
I think ultimately I am just sorta venting frustration at how prevalent this pattern is/just having a whinge⊠I do still occasionally come across stuff that surprises and delights me, just seems rarer these days and makes me a bit bummed from time to time⊠I do understand that the path forward is not to wallow too much in these feelings but sometimes it feels a bit overwhelming how samey stuff can feel and I canât help but feel frustratedâŠ
I think some of @ellaguroâs points about there needing to be more active participation in opposition to this stuff is probably the way forward for things getting better as a wholeâŠ
Anyway, I appreciate everyoneâs thoughts on this. It does help to vocalise this stuff even if I donât always have the clearest picture of what the hell Iâm trying to articulate most of the time⊠Thanks for being patient with me, hehehâŠ
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oh worm?
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Fwiw I think people have been struggling with the idea of the calcification of game design along completionist âbest practicesâ lines and abandoning surprising and novel dead ends for like as long as people have been critically thinking about videogames. Hereâs Old Man Murray in the year 2000:
My read on this is that itâs cyclical, or rather that the avant garde is always tearing against the orthodoxy of the mainstream like waves beating against the shore⊠itâs not like a war will be fought and victory will be achieved, boom we took the Reichstag and itâs over now; itâs more like an evolutionary struggle, always and forever playing out against the background of context and environment.
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agree with this â @ellaguroâs perspective never quite rings true to me because I just donât quite get the idea that the early 2010s scene was somehow going to have some impact on large scale commercial development but then didnât. art games are always a rounding error and obviously the broader issue of livability and commerce has gotten worse (and the tools to make and publish your own free games are now less novel, which I think if anything has had a greater discouraging effect that doesnât get brought up as often because itâs less structurally interesting), regardless of when you were 25, it seems like a weird thing to narrow in on other than anecdotally
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what do you mean by this, exactly? my read is that there is a lot more weird stuff than there used to be, and itâs almost entirely bc accessible game dev tools are more prevalent and thus more stuff is being made, period. maybe the signal to noise ratio got worse, but there are objectively more experimental games than there have been in the past.
now the lack of experimental games at a budget, i attribute that to the industry not the tools.
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Iâm not sure that was the point being made? I think it was more broadly the idea of the indie scene itself doing more interesting stuff and there being a sense of some larger cultural movement within game spaces rather than just⊠having an effect on AAA⊠If anything that seems like kind of a grim goal to meâŠ
This part I do agree with to some extent. As someone whoâs been working on my own projects on and off for years in Godot⊠I kinda hate these modern game-making tools. They seem overly complex for the average hobbyist and more skewed towards large-scale commercial development. That being said other stuff does also exist. Iâve been heavily considering using an older free-to-use copy of Construct just to simplify things⊠Iâve also been toying with the idea of trying to make my own simplified tool in Godot but having to spend so much time touching code may trigger a post-traumatic flair up from when I was in college⊠
(although this has already been happening to some degree just trying to make games in Godot too)
This part I legitimately cannot parse⊠
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??? lol
regardless of what you personally believed, a lot of people in that scene in that time believed in that. i was there! i spent time around those people! it happened. some other people here did as well. there was a lot of rhetoric about pushing the boundaries of games and changing what the marketplace looked like. i can give you like documented proof of if you want lol.
yeah i mean i had no interest in new games by the late 00âs and playing a bunch of freeware games and the occasional commercial indie game changed that, and made me aware that games could be something else. plenty of other people believed in that too. thatâs the point iâm making. people can disagree about if it was a broad feeling across⊠i dunno the entire game playing public, fine. or if it did or didnât have a massive long term impact. but a lot of people got into games around that time on that basis. i have talked to many people making games now who felt this way. i donât know why thatâs under dispute.
iâm sorry if this bothers anyone on here (i genuinely donât know if it does or not! i just think the skepticism on something that i thought really wasnât in dispute is funny) but i do think just being a passive consumer of media is not good enough and thatâs why i try to engage with the space in some sort of critical way. other people can disagree on the approach but i donât think the basis of doing that is a controversial point really at all. i thought that overthinking about games was the whole point of this forum in the first place lol.
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Re: the point about âcollect all 78 doodadsâ within the large discussion I feel like I should mention the demo for to a T (upcoming Keita Takahashi game) that came out this week. At the point when you realize you are late for school and need to get there soon they also first put random coin looking things around the game world for you to pick up for reasons that are never stated in the demo. I mention it as while you start running down the street you are on to the school with these collectibles in the way you can see other kids on other streets also running to beat the school bell and when they run into one of said coins they also pick them up. Combine this with the post-school bit where you walk home in a funk yet can see other kids in the distance also slowly walking home with thought bubbles saying things like âIâm so tiredâ or âI wish it was the weekendâ and it sorta captures the whole âyou often feel like you are the only one going through this but in truth you are surrounded by others who are having their own different yet similar strugglesâ experience that is high school. I thought it was a small way of taking a familiar trope/mechanic and doing something a bit different with it.
Interesting demo BTW. At its core it is basically a game about a good natured kid with a disability that treats it all as a very normal thing yet also doesnât ignore that theyâd also be teased about it and is very playful with how it tries to use the dual analog sticks in less typical ways, plus it has a new Rebecca Sugar song as a giraffe who loves to cook. Itâs also so mechanically simple and the demo ends right as it teases it could become something more in that area. Hope it ends up okay.
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