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there's a certain thing that's been on my mind lately, and people talking about all kinds of stuff keeps kind of leading me to various facets of...trying to understand why i hate so many game mechanics in such specific ways

not that i don't already know. it's just hard to convey, the kind of thing that makes you feel kind of wack when you actually say it. "making the mechanics better doesn't make the game better!" especially because my current go-to example of a game that i think would be worse with different mechanics is beside the point.* this isn't some ludonarrative thing, or about themes or whatever, or as an aside, the way that i think musou games fit perfectly into the oldest traditions of human artistry. because

i think it's good when you press the button and you hit a guy.

or when you're playing a guy who's holding out his sword and you attack by running into people. when you press the button and you jump, even if it doesn't take you anywhere. i think it's good when you use some giant magic attack that wrecks a screen full of enemies. it's good when you shoot a demon and it explodes gorily, even if it was flying and you didn't have to aim up. it's good to play the game. even if you don't get good at it, don't see the end, don't understand what's going on.

people think it's fun to be good at games. they're wrong.* what's fun is to share experiences with other people, and free yourself from the burdens of expectation. it's fun to play games and love them because they're games. and while this is not universally true, it feels often like people these days have forgotten that it's fun to just play games and developers feel the need to assure players that there's fun somewhere, and here's how you can find it. here's the cool thing in the game that you can learn the timing for.

i'm especially ornery about combat. "good combat" right now feels like it tends to mean stuff like i-frame dodging, or timed attacks/counterattacks. or other methods by which you can basically totally avoid damage by "skill". obviously stuff like learning boss patterns or reacting to certain attacks has always been a thing. obviously i like fromsoft games and devil may cry. obviously trends change and this probably won't last forever. but right now, i'm sick of it. i don't want the game to tell me i perfect dodged and put the enemies in a slowdown state. i don't want the big button prompt that shows the fancy animation. (i know somebody worked hard on it. i love them. i still don't want it) i think in codifying these things games have decided they're the point, and i wish they weren't.

it's cool for games to be simple, or easy, or inscrutable. i'm not playing symphony of the night to learn complicated boss patterns and barely scrape out a win. i want to jump around the haunted castle and punch dracula after an hour or two. or slice him really fast if i got super lucky, or summon magic swords that cut across the whole screen. it's cool when a jrpg lets you get something god-busting and holds up that end of the bargain by actually letting you roll over the end of the game. it's also cool to have impossibly close calls, or to decide that you really like a game and get so good at it that you learn how to do something you would've thought was impossible

but no one thing is everything games have to offer.

except playing them. because they're games.

#footnote 1: it's final fantasy xv #footnote 2: it's not. i promise #konami's best (play it!)

Kay @Kayin2/5/2023, 10:33 AM

I feel this in my bones and I LIKE hard, complicated, sweaty games.

A lot of people like it so I'm not meaning to say it's bad, but people describing Metroid Dread to me talked about like hey the bosses are so much better they're all hard and skill based and you gotta use all your moves and --

... and like that can be cool but that 110% isn't what I want from Metroid. I remember thinking for a long time I wanted to make a metroidvania with deep combat and combos to kinda "fix" SOTN. Then I played a bunch of indie games like that and they weren't bad, but they didn't fix anything, they became something else, often at the cost of other elements, like pacing and exploration. Everything is a trade off...

Only now a lot of design is based on MAXIMIZING MECHANICS. Gotta have TIGHT GAMEPLAY LOOPS and really SLICK BOSSES and really guided level design and UPGRADE SYSTEMS and we gotta TEACH THE PLAYER and...

... and it's tiring. It's not bad. I like a lot of games like that. But sometimes something "worse" is actually better for the context of a game.

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in reply to @tinyvalor's post:

@boobs-are-progressive-and-feminist2/5/2023, 5:00 PM

This is good. It made me realize that I like when a game is confident enough to not care if you don't experience everything because the most important thing is it's your experience. And I remember coming away from The Last Of Us feeling like my role in the driver's seat was completely superfluous and it would be basically the same game no matter who played.

vivi-n @tinyvalor2/5/2023, 11:14 PM

ha, faye brought up ace attorney last night and said something about "well, i don't go into that expecting to express myself". and i like vns and adventure games and stuff like that too, so it's hard to nail down exactly where the line is that i start to feel on the wrong side. not that i've played tlou, but i've heard a lot of people talk about like the contrast between player driven violence and the kind of story the game wants to tell, which maybe clues me in a bit

like i guess part of it is a kind of tonal or situational congruence? in a game where you read a lot of course it wouldn't necessarily be appropriate to have big interactive action sequences. it would actually be really weird! and since somebody actually made Ace Attorney With Minigames a few times that's not even speculation...shooting the words with a gun or whatever really doesn't add anything in particular to the experience

though at the same time i feel like there are genres i like, especially jrpgs...where there's a lot of dissonance in tone and style, and sometimes even when those moments are obviously absurd and stupid i still laugh and enjoy them a lot. i don't know everything

Mightfo @Mightfo2/5/2023, 5:22 PM

theres definitely something in here about like "the point is to Execute The Gameplay Well" and how that ends up affecting peoples mindsets. rather than being an experience you just play. like, theres some post about "dancing and drawing are human behaviors. theyre not something you have to be good at. theyre something you do for your own sake as part of your nature, not something you have to master to avoid embarrassment for engaging with at all". with games its less extreme, but similar.

i think that some sort of mindset of objectives is part of whats in the way. not objectives like "i wanna see what happens to this character" or "i wanna beat this faction in this campaign because fuck em" or "i wanna see this campaign through to the end because i wanna have an arc" but objectives about external rewards or getting good enough or getting stronger or being able to join multiplayer groups.

obviously for a lot people that sort of thing is absolutely the way they will enjoy things the most, but it affects too many peoples baseline assumptions about how they should approach games

i remember someone played a new gw2 patch and followed a guide and then beated the whole thing in 3 hours or something, and then he complained it was too short and boring and easy. which is like...why did you use a guide? why was "do this as fast and surpriselessly as possible" inherent?

its fine for these things to be "the point" but that shouldnt be the baseline for games

also i feel like this is adjacent to this post i made before https://cohost.org/Mightfo/post/768449-full-vision-video-g

vivi-n @tinyvalor2/5/2023, 9:29 PM

yeah, those kinds of things are on my mind too, i did read your post and agreed with it a lot. i feel like so many things always come back to like this modern, heavily capitalist idea of...productiveness, and stuff, that there's gotta be a "point" to doing stuff. but how is playing not the point enough?

kind of makes me think of like, cooking, too. there's so much information about how to cook more like a professional, and i think it's cool that amateurs in the past ten years have skills and knowledge that weren't available to people in previous generations. i don't want to go back to the dire state of american food in the postwar era. but i'm still a human who has to eat every day, so i'm not out here trying to make 3-hour restaurant-quality meals 2-3 times a week. there's just so much benefit to learning how to enjoy things more simply and easily

danbo @danbo2/5/2023, 5:58 PM

interesting post. i like to understand mechanics as a means by which to bottle whatever feeling a game is trying to express (which means not playing certain notes here and there for a certain feeling is cool) -- but since level design is expensive and hard, systems/mechanics are now relied upon to provide a sense of variety and/or progression in a game, which -- at the very least -- means things get messy

vivi-n @tinyvalor2/5/2023, 7:58 PM

thanks for reading! and yeah! i've thought about this kind of thing a lot, even though i guess the result this time was kind of casual and didn't really focus on it, because i realized i didn't want to construct some detailed argument specifically about the best examples of mechanically conveyed feelings, narrative, etc.. because i don't think only the best ones are valid, cool, or worthwhile!

and that's a really good point, there's definitely a lot of reasons that the trend of stuff like "open world" has become prevalent both bc it, like, delivers the things a lot of players always say they want ("freedom", lots of stuff, "if you see it you can go there", and so on) while also making development more manageable on a logistical end bc it's more modularized and everything. but as you say, it kind of forces mechanics to carry that feeling like stuff is happening, whether it's bc you're getting better or getting loot/tiny power-ups/whatever. it's complicated and i have a lot of sympathy for talented and dedicated people whose work is endlessly scrutinized by stupid millionaires in suits.

but also, god, i wish people would just remember that it's fun to play the game, and even if there's not like "obvious" nuance the game tells you about you can always learn more and get better if you like it and keep playing. just because it's there, and it's a game

metaregress @metaregress2/5/2023, 10:17 PM

This captures a lot of my feelings on NieR Replicant/Gestalt vs Automata; I didn't play Replicant and think 'wow this needs Witch Time and a bunch of minmaxible passives,' I liked that its systems were big and dumb and let you do broken things because the point of the game wasn't to have super expressive, clean combat.

And while it aligns with the narrative (child-soldier robots engineered for war will be better at fighting and have systematized it more than Some Dude Trying To Save His Daughter/Sister), I think I still preferred the clunkiness because it let you tap into that simple fun of play. Automata makes me want to optimize; Gestalt makes me want to fuck around.

And I feel like it also was intentional that Gestalt had such a wacky set of systems; it felt in many ways like it was examining and deconstructing a lot of the stock tropes of ARPGs, and while Automata has shades of that I feel like it ended up ultimately playing it too straight for its own good and ruining that sense of fun and freedom.

There's a lot of games this stuff applies to, I just thought these two being in the same franchise really clearly demonstrated the differences.

vivi-n @tinyvalor2/5/2023, 10:41 PM

lol yeah i decided i didn't want to call out a bunch of games by name, especially the ones i would tend to complain about...but automata is definitely one of them. i've seen interesting thoughts about what it means that 2b is such a superpowered murder machine and all that, but having all these tricky mechanics that you can mostly only use to fight slow robots with 1-2 attacks and super long and complicated boss fights did not appeal to me, and i like the feel of gestalt and also drakengard 3 a lot by comparison