I said I would start a thread for discussing non-habit-forming games and here I am. There was a time when “addictiveness” was considered a marker of the best games. I don’ think that time has changed. I have been enamored with many an “addictive” game in my time, don’t get me wrong. That’s changing now. More and more, I’m becoming a hater whenever I see something with “Rogue-like” elements, deckbuilding, experience points, report cards, random drops, dice rolling at all please god no more dice. More and more, I love writing, detailed tableau, and credits. Don’t think of it as a dichotomy. Treat it as a continuum from totally compulsive to full conscious willingness.
You take away all of that, and what’s left? Many older games lack these behaviorist levers. Text adventures and IF are my personal antidotes whenever I feel oppressed by compulsive gaming. I played a tiny bit of Despelote and I had to stop myself because it was too good and I wanted to stretch it out. That’s an antidote, too.
Even long games can be non-addictive. Pathologic 2 fits that for me. I am engrossed in that world whenever I play it, but I feel like I’m always drawn by the writing and intrigue, not any need to see numbers increase. Help me refine these thoughts by talking about it. I don’t know if I’m making sense.
List of the most voluntary games:
Infocom’s catalogue
Myst
Riven
The Beast Within
Despelote
Ico
Wattam
Case of the Golden Idol
The Forbidden City
Super Mario Bros. 3
The list goes on, but I’m finding the most recent examples get buried under a pile of games like Slay the Spire, Vampire Survivor, and Balatro.
shenmue 1 springs to mind because it is phenomenally maximal but intentionally left somewhat “empty” in service of contemplation. a richly detailed but functionally sparse environment and an ever-present but intentionally generous in-game clock both invites meditative examination of extremely small and otherwise insignificant phenomena in the game world during “downtime” (or just stepping away entirely) and ensures constant forward motion towards a defined ending (the arcade functions more like a gallery space than an invitation to binge in context imo). i think panzer dragoon saga does something similar with different means in that same era of sega but my brain isn’t working well enough to write about it today.
also this is probably an obvious take coming from me but i think it’s totally possible to make games with aspects like experience points and randomness that are non- or anti-addictive, as generally repellant as i find their mainstream contemporary use. i’m particularly interested in voluntary rpg design that uses those means towards different ends.
Lose/Lose is the best example of this as it’s the first notable game to do this neo-organically rather than being shackled to typical intragame design principles.
i dunno if i could call a cyan game voluntary, you put one of those in front of me and i’m pushing buttons and pulling levers until everything happens, though i get that’s not what this is about
i like how underrail has the system that only gives you xp for like finding strange or unique mementos. it means you can build your character however you want and roleplay however you want. idk if this even relates to what you are talking about but it’s what i thought of, this is good shit to me
you compare that to like avowed and that game is basically a numbers go up lawnmower. i mean honestly this is my problem wth a lot of “RPGs” now. i’ve heard people say pillars of eternity has too much writing. nonsense!
i have to mention vesper.5 because it inverts the idea of ‘dailies’ with only letting you move one tile per day. i think it takes like half a year to complete
Saying Super Mario Bros. 3 lacks feedback loops feels a little rich given how fast-paced progression is in that game. Each level is like 1-2 minutes tops - you can just keep biting them down. Game overs let you use pipes to go back to after the most recent fortress clear, so most of the time you don’t lose a huge amount of progress. And there are a few random or “random” events in the form of toad house items, the spade card, hammer bros. movement, airship movement, etc.
I think of compulsion more as a continuum than a strict binary. Also, everyone can have different things that trigger obsessive behavior. We can talk about what’s generally addictive but there are exceptions all the time. I mention Infocom in my post, yet there are countless stories of players staying up all night to solve those games. Isn’t that addictive behavior? To me, it’s still a mostly voluntary experience. Like a good book, you are enticed by the cleverness of the writing and desire to discover what happens next.
A good RPG will have so much writing and discovery in them that I often choose to play them more for those reasons than any need to see my levels go up. Experience can just be a pacing device that sets barriers for progression. It doesn’t have to be 50 different bars that zoom to the right and explode in sparkly numbers when they hit jackpot.
I mentioned Super Mario Bros. 3 because again, I’m drawn to that game out of a desire for discovery. I like how it doesn’t have a chart telling me all the things I missed, asking me to spend more time in the game to get a better grade. I tell myself to spend more time in it because I want to know what’s over in that part of the level.
I think deliberate practice as an aspect of play is sort of the positive side of habit forming. A more autotelic self directed challenge provided by things like fighting, racing, rhythm, or ugc/creator focused games where the possibility space of the mechanics and degree of skill is large but not necessarily gamified or made palatable
I too get fed up with compulsive games (I was calling roguelites garbage back when that was an unpopular take). Whenever I realize what I am doing is a dark pattern, I can feel my gorge rising. The difference between a compelling game and a compulsive is most notable when reflecting on the experience of play. Did this game cultivate anything at all in me (even an aesthetic sensibility is enough) or was it a way to deaden my time on this earth?
I have only started a game, sat amazed by the worldbuilding, and put it off because I wasn’t ready for something that good at the time…
Reflecting on time wasted is a good way of seeing it. When Guitar Hero came out, I got deep into it. Over the next several years, I spent hundreds of hours across all these plastic instrument games and for what? For as many hangouts that they inspired, I can think of other social opportunities that were stifled because I was too busy playing with these fake instruments. It would have been so much better if I had spent that time learning to play some cheap, garage sale instrument instead. In the moment, it felt satisfying to gradually get better at a skill, but the skill is so pointless it just doesn’t add up.
i guess i feel insulated enough from clicker slot machine stuff not to really care about it despite finding it kinda creepy. if vgames are like the aesthetic residue of computers, of what “computers” means, then something like vampire survivors does invoke something of like… bitcoin proof of work stuff, dropshipping, ai comment ecologies… the sense of these intricate layered feedback systems doing their best to ringfence out the one point of failure, the intrusion of a human judgement able to go “is this good? is this worth doing? can we turn this off?”
there is a horrible thing i sometimes notice even in mostly fine indie or student games, which is the thought like… “if i hold off on doing the cool thing, it’ll make it more impactful when it finally appears”. it’s funny in vgames because so many people will be like, nobody cares about your ideas, we’e all swimming in ideas, ideas are valueless… and then they’ll be remarkably stingy about the one idea they do have. how daaare you ask me to put one thing i think is cool in the very first level when i could slowly build to it over hours. it got really comical in psx horror games which eventually got to the point of like endless chore simulation to activate a drip feed of mildly creepy content. what, did that move? well back to restocking this virtual gas station. i do feel kinda resentful towards all the deckbuilder dice whatever stuff as like providing ever more effective “craftful” technologies of padding in this way… i think a lot of people would feel kinda hacky doing Collect The 10 Gems forms of filler who are fine with “generative” stuff that’s basically as exciting. sometimes vgames feel like they’ve gone beyond milking an idea to like building elaborate contraptions to ration out the drops of milk.
increasingly i admire stuff that feels like it’s trying to be interesting right from the start and where the author has the confidence or faith that as the work continues it’ll somehow keep managing to top itself. there’s something very videogames about all the thought and effort that goes into maintaining artificial scarcity of something already abundant and cheap.
The XBLA indie rush and proliferation of game blogs fuelling the artgame movement pushed the idea of “games are too long and addictive” for a while that seemed to at least have an impact on how downloadable games were approached and somehow that mutated into every game being a roguelike set to ape Diablo’s crack cocaine dopamine algorithm.
For me the salve is arcade games which, even if they are compulsively designed, only last 20-40 minutes and the lack of metaprogression lets you hop off at any time.
whenever I see people playing balataro I think of my incredibly depressed mom playing solitaire over and over and over and over on her bed with a deck of cards. a way to shut off your brain to not have to think of how much you hate yourself
CAPE HIDEOUS IS ANOTHER GREAT DELIBERATE GAME THAT ENDS
I always got this feeling from online multiplayer games. There’s a tipping point where it’s just a perpetual habitual system and I’m not getting anything out of them. When games started to add daily challenges that really turned me off from the scene entirely
For me the easiest distinction to make is a start and end point. RE4 has random item drops, how I use what I get is fluid and dynamic from room to room based on the resources I roll, but it’s all contextualized within a finite story/campaign that has an intended end point it’s constantly driving towards
Balatro worked great for me when I needed something to do with my hands when talking with someone. Actually so did VS. I can’t touch either of them outside of that context though
It’s difficult for me to dileneate agency when it’s a voluntary space. I can look at Candy Crush and see how it’s designed to suck money out because desire, gating and structure are so deeply intertwined but when something has no incentive but your engagement, the more it gets (for me) to self-posed existential questions. I don’t necessarily see a large distinction between working through logic problems to narrativize aesthetics in Golden Idol vs. working through math problems to do the same in Slay The Spire. Besides whatever level of like, interest I have in the overall experiences they produce.
I think my current feeing is that when some level of digital encapsulation is essential to ‘video games’ it’s really just a question of articulating taste and purpose outside of the game. Why do anything ? A VN/roguelike, a tv show, familiar album etc. can addict/emotionally salve in the same manner, I’m not sure that’s bad per se. If a game is constituting my real world goals (“my life’s purpose is to get home to play Street Fighter”), I’m running into issues. But if a game is structuring novel experience or aesthetic possibility or focus on an aspect of life/capacity that I wouldn’t otherwise think on, that almost always seems good to me.
I think there’s just too little encouragement and education to treat art (‘media’) as something intertwined with life and it’s possibilities versus some sort of external abstraction and likely the majority of any medium’s commercial portion is gonna be facile tasteless and mediocre..
Damn thank you for eloquently articulating the internal struggle i feel while gaming lately..
I am on the verge of turning into Willem Dafoe’s character from Light Sleeper, maintaining a t chart with “Games that compel” on one side and “Games that compulse” on the other