Animation Lead on Wanderstop! She/Her & Transgenderrific! Past: Radial Games, Gaslamp Games



so I played a LOT of games for igf this year - even more than the large amount I normally do - and I'm kind of weirded out by something I saw a few of, which is a trend of a few games I'd describe - perhaps uncharitably - as "baby's first minecraft".

That is to say, the game's art style and protagonists are clearly targeted at children, and the concept is something about gathering resources and crafting/unlocking things with them.

But with all of these games there was a major difference, which is that where minecraft is fiddly in ways that IMO encourage some degree of thought - the obtuseness of setting up gardens and irrigation, the general colossal size of the world that encourages the player to take only what they need - in place of that was a very simplistic extraction simulator. Extremely small, limited environments where the player was encouraged to repeatedly harvest infinitely-respawning resource nodes in order to feed them into a system that basically just does everything for you (building, etc) when you fulfill their list.

And you might say "that's streamlined for young kids" or "really minecraft isn't THAT different" but I think there's a really distinct tonal difference to me in how you interact with the world when the goal is not to satisfy your own goals but to harvest the environment as quickly and aggressively as possible to fulfill a production checklist.

It's the difference of enjoying the space around you vs entering a new location and instantly thinking about how quickly you can reduce it to a pile of rubble and tree stumps. An interaction with the world that's purely extractive - the world doesn't exist for any reason other than to be a thing you strip-mine. It doesn't do anything on its own. It doesn't change. There's no concept of consequences or even a basic consideration of "maybe I'll keep this tree here because I like it aesthetically". It's meaningless. The tree will return in 15 seconds or less. You should chop it because to not would be wasteful.

Not to be Moral Panic or whatever but: christ, is this really the media we want to be making for younger kids? Games that encourage them to view the world as a collection of objects for them to feed into the maw of industry? God knows plenty of games for adults do this but I'd think we'd want even the tiniest bit of examination in this space.

This is all to say that I felt really uncomfortable playing these games. It's a deeply alienating experience to exist in a purely extractive space. It feels bad to exist in a place that only exists for you to eagerly reap it, like a disney world goofy watching you with its dead eyes, knowing that if you don't go up and hug them they're going to get a strike for not meeting their quota or some shit. GIVE ME MEANING. EXTRACT WORTH FROM ME

that's probably not actually how disney world mascots work but they always creeped me out

ANYWAY


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in reply to @MOOMANiBE's post:

Extremely small, limited environments where the player was encouraged to repeatedly harvest infinitely-respawning resource nodes in order to feed them into a system that basically just does everything for you (building, etc) when you fulfill their list.

At first I read this and thought you were describing a game like factorio or the various factory Minecraft mods, but then I realized it's actually the opposite and recoiled in horror. Factory games are all about building the system that does everything for you, and you always automate resource extraction first. Instead, it sounds like these games turn you into a cog in the rigid factory the developers built for you, with the role of "resource extractor".

What a grim way to interact with a world

FWIW I think this isn't intentional? my take is that it's 'easy' to make consumption rewarding. I'd wager it's some kind of psychological thing- we consume food daily, right? with the right pops bells and whistles you can make consumption satisfying fairly quickly.

The problem being that endless consumption has obvious implications for a world with finite resources.

whereas construction, creation, is pretty challenging to make satisfying in comparison. (@MadRubicant already nailed how a game would do this imo)
Case study: It's why the spore creature creator got the hype it did- they'd managed to make creation fun and compelling.

Kinda same logic for why there's a million and one FPS'es but decidedly less surgery or doctor games- the base urge to hurt Bad People is much easier to exploit than the more enlightened ideal of healing Good People.

Not to say that you're wrong in any way- but just spitballing about why things are the way they are.

As someone who only tried Minecraft briefly, for the first time, in 2020...i was surprised how NOT simple it was!

I think that game does a good job of making the game/world mysterious and complex enough that it's not just simple mathematical extraction. Compared to games like Forager, Nova Land, Core Keeper, those sorts of top-down ones.

I agree with you, games that hone in on that very simple (dare i say "skinner box") design I feel like are uncomfortable. It really needs to combine it with something else, flesh it out, hopefully even have a consequence for over-stripping the land.

It sort of ties into this ongoing narrative that the world only exists for human plunder as well. It's difficult to make games that encourage the player to care about their virtual environment, and even moreso to cultivate a caring for the real world environment outside their window. I do think we should be encouraging developers to think outside the box with this though, just as we always have.

Resonant and forward thinking ideas and concepts won't come from just mirroring back all of the present societal assumptions. Our environment influences the way we think and the things we make, and sometimes the things we make influence us and the way we act on our environment.