I think there’s a lot to be said about aesthetic and mechanics being married in order to sell people on a given play style.
Like, I think Super Meat Boy is a really good example. It’s hilariously over the top with how it’s going to kill you. It doesn’t even pretend this is going to be anything but a game where a cheery cartoon blob of meats gets chopped, burned, and otherwise torn up over and over again. I think this does a lot to sell the game’s mechanics to people, and something that developers really need to consider tonally.
If we take doujin games into consideration, a lot of them are ridiculously, idiotically hard and also have incredibly cutesy happy cheery anime moeblob aesthetics. This doesn’t work for a lot of people and makes it harder to sell the games to a wider audience and also does a poor job selling the content of the gameplay itself.
Another example: as Castlevania transitioned to rich, sumptuous illustrations in 16-bit the stiffness became weirder and weirder, to the point where the comic book style of Dracula X actively fights against the locked-in jumps. And you can tell that as they were making it they were starting to loosen up on some things but they didn’t have a strong vision: this is why Castlevania is so stiff; you must hold your ground, plant your feet, and be a bulwark against the night horrors.
Given their confusion it was rational for Symphony of the Night to just drop the remaining stiff bits and go full superhero. The 3D games made a similar transition but, lacking a strong design template like Symphony laid down (“do it like Metroid!”), they floundered around until they shipped development off to Spain and no one could say it was the wrong decision.
What kind of new gameforms do you think would respond favorably to full internet virtuality (which I take to mean limitless ephemera like Wikipedia hypertext holes, endless Youtube “recommended video,” or following Twitter reply chains)? I don’t want you to think this is a cheap question (since you yourself make games and the answer could easily be “my games”), I’m honestly interested in your theories for appropriate mechanics (and the aesthetic theming of those mechanics, a fruitful point that’s been made in this thread) that would replace the drive for mastery with that kind of experiential drowning.
Back in the day there was a fairly unknown cosmic horror RPG called De Profundis that was designed to be played by mail. More recently there was the RPG called ViewScream which is also a horror rpg but played over a video chat interface.
I guess, these aren’t the most novel forms of game design but they are more specifically adapted to new media than trad video games or even trad rpgs are.
Well, I think the feeling of an abrupt shift in gears when you move from the internet to playing say a webgame is mostly due to the latter having a kind of temporal quality the former does not - like there’s a shift in concentration and focus required but I think that shift is specifically one of moving from a space of timeless, diffused microevents to one of having to maintain a sense of personal continuity, causal effects, lived duration as it manifests in videogame-mechanical terms, being asked to focus on something for the next while until it’s done before you flit onward to the next. So I think seeing what would happen if those temporal aspects were sort of flattened into spatial ones would be interesting, but here’s the part where I reveal I’m just secretly talking about Vasily Zotov games!!
Which for the record are almost impossible to actually play but which specifically fascinate me for this very flat quality, within the individual scenes. Representations of places chopped together with only the points of interest present (a facade, a sign, a door), and kind of scattered around a box. Text of ambiguous function, somewhere between UI and narrative, further scattered around. Some sudden shifts in representation all crammed into the same area (a huge, staring head of some kind tracks you around). The actual actions you perform being just a relatively small part of this meaning-machine.
Most of this - the chopping between points of interest, the modular levels of representation - are already done in videogames. What I think is distinctive about Zotov’s work is that the hierarchy within which they’re held, which eg let you distinguish framing systemic elements from the world from the player, is broken down, that all these things inhabit the same space at once, and that as a result they kind of turn it into a new symbolic space, which has to be read in a new and content-specific way. And there’s a kind of ambiguous figural element where even though a certain thing means something - the giant head being a symbol of the surveillance state, etcetera - the fact that it’s embodied in a new context kind of makes that figural meaning unstable as well. It gets closer to something like the tensions in allegorical painting between symbolic meaning (peasant being strangled by the demons of Greed) and literal meaning (these monster people are just hanging around inside a house??) and affective meaning (holy shit, look at the red on that dog guy’s giant tongue).
So in a sense this is still the old videogame thing of coherently mapping a system, it’s just that the system itself has been split into something far more diffuse, discontinuous and disembodied, in a way which resists iterative step-by-step interrogation as opposed to more purely conceptual interpretation. Zotov’s levels are atemporal (everything’s on the surface, very little happens within them) but still lend themselves to a kind of more abstract attempt to map or visualise all these different jarring data streams into a coherent figure, which I think is a process with immediate correspondances to that of using the internet in general anyway - it’s a micro-model but one which could I think have a two-way relationship with that system, both in terms of a way of describing that system and also of using borrowed techniques FROM that system to describe different kinds of content in perhaps new and different ways.
So I guess what I’d posit as a possible launch point for new gameforms would be something more akin to visual/conceptual art that takes from videogames techniques of spatialising/focalising/embodying abstract virtual spaces, while still placing those moments of embodied focus within a wider structure with an uncertain relationship between the parts. I have no idea whether it’s possible or not, or whether this is something that would tend inevitably towards purely static imagery rather than ones with room for some level of interesting input… I guess part of that would rest on how productive the tension ultimately is between the two modes of engaging with a thing, and whether that tension could be sustained. And obviously whether these things could still be thought of as videogames in any way is an argument in itself. But it’s a format which I could picture plausibly emerging from videogames, specifically from some certain traditions - single-screen arcade titles, Jet Set Willy-style Spectrum games, certain indie/art things like Jake Clover’s work or the La La Land series, probably a whole tradition in itself of flash games and weird experimental webcomics that I don’t know enough to talk about. Hopefully these predecessors would give hint for how this notion could end up being less bloodlessly formal than I’m making it sound at least…
So yeah apologies for digression but I guess to answer your question a form I at least abstractly think would work would be a cross between Screwball Scramble without the timer and mystifying 13th century religious art…??
“difficulty” is a term as useless as “fun” in describing video games. it can mean anything. most people who use the word fun recognize on some level that it is meaningless, but difficult remains stubbornly unexamined
I’m sure you’ve seen it. But still. I mean, like, it’s important enough that you shouldn’t dismiss “fun” so out of hand.
And I think that’s related to our discussion. Fun, difficulty, and, I would add, engagement are all intertwined in our experience of games. I would say that our dumbest part of our brain looks for the fun while the difficulty manages how much fun our brain can get at a time and the engagement is how well those to work together. That last sentence may be the dumbest part of this post, though. I think @janitor was right to mention that pacing is a magic word that is very much related to the discussion at hand.
Sometimes games are more-or-less puzzles with a solution we have to find. We can intuit the solution, reason it out, use brute force, or more likely a combination of the three.
Sometimes games are tests of skill with a solution based on some kind of analog. We time things correctly, press buttons correctly, or we read the game correctly (while games’ displays are digital, I think they’re analog enough when they’re so incredibly HD).
More often games espouse a variety of these traits. And I think all of these traits have interesting ways that affect fun, difficulty, and engagement. This all seems obvious, but I’m mostly interested in a solid foundation in figuring out ways these traits can be put together to create more meaning than those three boring words.
So that’s what brought the Souls games into the discussion. Difficulty and engagement create a thematic narrative. This is hugely different than something like Call of Duty on its highest difficulty. The ability to overcome consistently as a function of you the player is what drives the series’ popularity. Players are hooked because they have something they once thought was difficult and are now able to overcome with relative ease. It’s some kind of fun, sure, but along the way you have the game and its story and its meaning in the same spoonful.
I’ve never thought about it like this, but this is kind of amazing. I never was into the enemy-engagement-levels mods for Souls-PC, and I think this might have been a good reason to back that up.
I think your expansion about pacing and time is super super important. I feel like the turning point in this industry will occur when we stop talking about games’ length as some positive trait. It’s correlated with a game’s value, sure, but in so much that length means content. Time is really just the payment we have to endure for that content. It’s like saying a wedding ring is more valuable not because it’s beautiful but because it costs a lot of money.
I do not intend for this thread to find value in difficulty in that way!
It’s funny because all I can think of is “these are adventure games,” which just goes to show the way the dominance of genre has straitjacketed the way we (ok, I) can conceptualize games’ possibilities.
It may be somewhat unexamined, but it’s certainly not meaningless nor particularly subjective. It essentially means the space of inputs to reach the win condition are either narrowly constrained or difficult to discover. Common ways to directly narrow the space are to shrink timing windows, reduce number of mistakes allowed, or increase the number of flawless inputs consecutively required. The discovery-side part of difficulty is somewhat more varied and hard to pin down: it can range from excessively fast or subtle tells indicating when to perform an input, to having a lot of information presented to analyze and reason about, but it basically all has to do with objective computation limitations of the human brain.
There are plenty of numbers a game can tune to become objectively more or less difficult (I listed some of them in my earlier post). That’s why games allow you to select your difficulty level but not your fun level
I would have thought he’d at least have tried to read the thread before jumping in with “this is stupid and useless and nobody is examining it like they are right here in this thread.”
I’m not sure geist is saying the thread isn’t examining it, so much as “the game playing scene at large doesn’t know/think to examine what difficulty means”
as someone who once upon a time was surrounded by 4channers, I know that a glut of people have no clue how to even describe the basic aspects of a game beyond “fun” or “tough”
not saying these people are stoopid, just that they don’t have the resources to lift themselves up. that is changing lately, though, particularly thanks to youtube gametalkers.
There’s something really ironic about people telling others to ‘gitgud’ in a game where you can level. Because it’s less about system mastery than time dumped into the game.
ok I need download links for Vasily Zotov’s games and his site appears to be down and oh no! Does anyone know where he lives on the Superhighway these days?
I’ve been reading a lot (a whole damn lot) about final fantasy xi over the past couple of days. one thing that I think is really neat is that they made it extremely numerically difficult (I.e. slow exp gain, high enemy strength, you lose exp on death) to force players to communicate and team up and work together. and apparently it worked! all the stories I’ve read about the game at launch are of players talking about how the world beat them down and felt super oppressive and they formed really strong friendships with other players because of the difficulty they had to overcome together.
it’s arguable that the difficulty in this case is just grinding, but I think within the context of an mmo it really accomplished exactly what they wanted
There are other ways to encourage player cooperation and communication than just jacking up the numbers, though. Let me tell you about this game I talk about sometimes, Star Wars Galaxies…