i think games by people who are raised to believe colonialism is normal are gonna have a hard time taking away a lifetime of beliefs out of their game design
colonized/colonizer games
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To elaborate a little on what I was saying last night, because I actually don’t necessarily think mechanics are colonialist or not. I think narratives can be, I think presentation can be, but I think mechanics are all about framing for the most part.
Like you could have a game where some invading colonizing force is occupying and extracting resources from your home, and you say, have to sabotage and dismantle each of these occupiers bases in order to leave. The model of this game would be very much the ‘mining’ mode, but the framing would change a lot about how you reacted.
(This obviously would need to be handled very carefully so it wouldn’t be an ‘enemy at the gates’ type thing, but I feel like if the good his were say, aliens who were invaded by humans or similar, you could get your point across. This one is definitely a precarious example, though).
Or perhaps a game about a land where the local ecology has been ravaged so you need to figure out what plants interact well and grow well near each other, in a sort of simplified abstraction of permaculture, that was structured as quick puzzle game where once a system is self sustaining, it is declared ‘saved’ and you can move onto another, until you run out of patches that need saving.
(I can think of issues with this too, but they’re subtler and way easier to sidestep IMO)
Or how about a game that is about a martial arts competition. Everyone there is just there to test themselves and see if they can win, and the game makes a big show out of everyone being friends and being very gracious winners. You do go through it, attempting to beat everyone, but everybody goes home saying ‘haha, I’ll see you again next year’.
But anyway, stuff is complicated! I think my main issue with the idea presented here is I have run into way too many folks in my time who would use this kind of argument to prove their game was ‘morally superior’ to competing games and shut people out. Like the infamous ‘all tabletop RPGs with GMs are oppressive’ from my days in the indie RPG scene.
I’m not saying that was this authors intention, I think they were probably very genuine! But it’s something I get wary of with taxonomy like this. The internet can be very black and white on issues and it can get folks hurt.
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Does emphasizing framing remove any argument the pamphlet might be making? Most games attempt to frame their action in a ‘problem solving’ fashion, that the player is ‘fixing issues’ so they can move forward. It’s an appealing reduction in complexity because we like to see new things and feel like we’re satisfied with crossing things off a list. The pamphlet argues that the structure is less akin to the way people think of work satisfaction and more akin to resource extraction, or it’s closer to arguments like, ‘competitive sports should be avoided because they encourage capitalist mindsets’, which, well, yeah, I think it’s an overbroad application of systems thinking.
Is the fighting tournament concept how most fighting games work? There’s some villains but overlapping groups of friends and they get a lot of bang out of implying friendly relationships between characters.
‘all tabletop RPGs with GMs are oppressive’
Wow, I’ve never heard this one
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Oh yeah all the good guys in Street Fighter are buds who hang out and spar, and periodically shadowy organizations throw tournaments to take over the world. But still it’s treated as a friendly competition by half the folks in the cast.
And this is the plot for like, Fatal Fury and King of Fighters too, IIRC.
And Virtua Fighter.
And Tekken.
Probably more of them.
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Oh yeah the ‘GMed games are oppressive’ came out of a small group in the the Pacific Northwest, but they had a lot of influence in a small circle I was a part of for a while.
StoryGames was a wild place to be in.
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in king of fighters, even some of the villains who aren’t threats to all life on earth are more like vitriolic friends with the heroes, just because they’ve all known each other so long now
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so, like, collaborative storytelling (Baron Munchausen derivatives?) as the only true game form? That’s wild
more Fiasco derivatives which are in a way… Amber the Diceless RPG derivatives
ah
and here I was hoping it was the rock-paper-scissors renaissance built on Vampire LARPing
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thinking about how i’ve rinsed the souls games since march 09 and have 0 interest in or understanding of the lore
same with halo actually
think about streetpass and getting passes for like, soul hackers and other relatively obscure games in a satellite town of the third largest city in england
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How Anarchy Online used to have fall damage on ANY fall, which scaled by the distance.
Problem is, there was no lower bound. Any time you moved off a surface, you took damage upon contacting a surface again, provided the second surface was lower than the first one. there was no “safe” distance to fall.
and that’s the story of how I started the game for the first time, then immediately walked down some stairs and died.
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someone make an actual game like this
coming into contact with any new surface costs vitality
choose your movement carefully
this makes me think about how in system shock 2 “fall damage” is really just checking for velocity against any collision. so if you put too many points into agility and then use a speed hypo you can literally kill yourself by running into a wall
this is, imo, actually very good design
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this is what all immersive sims should strive to be like
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this would make an interesting agoraphobia game that the internet could argue is too reductive for weeks
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chronic fatigue simulator
I remember GTA: Vice City on PS2 had really fucked up fall damage. I died stepping off a curb once 
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Not only that but if you had body armor on it would take the damage from that first before lowering your health pool. You could lose all your armor from a high enough drop.
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pretty sure dark souls 2 speedrunners figured out while trying to find the quickest way down to The Gutter that the game calculates damage based on total distance fallen, not just height. so you get hurt more if you hit the ground with some forward inertia, leading runners to pull back to an ever so slight tiptoe at that section
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