Maersk-Aerospace

Maersk Aerospace

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Captain Moron

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Maersk-Aerospace
@Maersk-Aerospace
Scampir
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oriananonexistent
@oriananonexistent

new word i have come to hate: "friction"

had the displeasure of seeing some weirdo in the polygon comments claim that people can't handle friction in their fiction because they were upset about (uh spoilers for buffy the vampire slayer for anyone who still cares about buffy spoilers) the sudden, unceremonious death of tara so that willow can go on an angry rampage. like this is obvious bullshit on the face of it, if it was as simple as everyone being so 'friction'-averse they would not watch six seasons of buffy! they would have stopped at like season 2 or whatever when buffy kills angel right when he gets his soul back! they clearly can handle it! the friction isn't the problem! tara got killed for shock value, to enrage her girlfriend! she got gay fridged! and it sucks ass that in a show where buffy and angel got to come back from death tara doesn't because fuck you! if you want to argue that this take is wrong argue that, but to just toss out all that context, all that emotion, and complain that people are just too soft fucking sucks!

friction has been turned into a goal into itself, and that sucks ass. the point of friction isn't to just sit there and take it! the point is to explore it, understand it, and if possible reduce or resolve it! friction on its own cannot have any meaning. i can turn my art into endless gore pics if i wanted. what will i accomplish other than you probably blocking and reporting me? there is no meaning, no resolution, just me being an asshole. but you experience friction, right? if friction-as-an-end is good, then why should you care? the fact that you want things to get better for you must mean you're weak. git gud at being miserable.

at gdc i remember someone at lost levels giving a little talk arguing that the purpose of life is to be hard and therefore games should be hard. fuck that. first there is no purpose of life. and if anything out there is worth calling a 'purpose of life', it is making life easier. the difficulty of existence we experience is either caused by a universe so uncaring that it will not forbid us from walking on the lifeless surface of the moon, or by other humans demanding supplication. both of these things can change! it's not some preordained future! in so many ways we've worked to make life easier! we have that joke about modern conveniences killing medieval peasants! we've resolved conflicts, healed wounds, built machines and communities alike to do the things we cannot on our own! to sit in our own misery for the sake of sitting in our own misery is learned helplessness!

Maersk-Aerospace
@Maersk-Aerospace

friction is also terrifically poorly defined. i can't tell if it's supposed to be about dark souls identical-moves-with-different-timing shit, or signalis inventory slots, or elite dangerous flying-multiple-real-hours stuff, or what. i see it used in a tautological way ("of course we need friction in games, you can't just get what you want instantly or there's no game!") and i see it used in praise of obtuse pointless painfulness. really need it to mean something before i take it too seriously

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in reply to @oriananonexistent's post:

amelyssan
@amelyssan

oh, joss whedon, miserable husk of a man

and gods on that gdc note, i love my fromsoft games and some of the incredible wave of games they've inspired, but taking that premise to the conclusion of "life is suffering, therefore games must be suffering" is some pseudo-intellectual shit

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Quidam
@Quidam

So when I read your post, I thought "Why is only tension resolved that is meaningful?", then I thought well this make sense under a hedonist perspective, so I spent the entire day writing the sketch of an argument against hedonism (because I am very normal and sane) (true story: after an argument, I once spent the entire evening writing a proof that if objectivity is something anybody can have under the "normal" condition of consciousness, the I am sometimes objective. The proof only work if objectivity is real though. My god I am a parody of myself.)

EDIT: to clarify, I was thinking about that argument for a while, I didn't just bang it out immediately, your post just gave me the motivation to sketch it. And then I got possessed.

I do think there is value in living with unresolved tension, so we don't use sloppy method to solve it. It would help us deal with cognitive dissonance, and not look for quick easy solutions. That being said, when gamer say they want more friction, what they are saying is that they want game that require skill to succeed, games that will create an elite. Fuck them. I want game where you have to live with the friction, where friction becomes a friend, where failure just mean you need to carry on. Pathologic 2 is my paradigmatic example here, because yes I am the kind of asshole who will chant it's virtue.

And you are correct: misery for the sake of misery is worthless. It's a thing I often have to remind myself: just shocking people is not a goal, and I often prevent myself from doing that ("but don't they see the obvious contradiction? Don't they experience anxiety?" They see and they do; they just don't dwell on it, because no problem caused by thinking can be solved by thinking.)

But above all this, I have a superior value: friction is good if and only if the person experiencing the friction want it. Elitist will call other people cuddled, and not see the way these people actually invite friction in their lives, and make choice based on it.

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oriananonexistent
@oriananonexistent

there are certainly some frictions in life that won't be resolved, whether in our lifetimes or ever. and how we deal with our inability to fully resolve them matters. but that doesn't make that friction good in of itself, it doesn't mean that we're placed on this earth to suffer!

for me, this is why i consider my role as an artist to be a guide. i feel like just abandoning people to friction, to stress, etc isn't particularly interesting! i think shoving people into the deep end is kinda a crappy way to teach people how to swim. let's explore together! let's think about how we want to explore, what we need to do so safely, etc, and we'll see what we find.

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Quidam
@Quidam

I think my fear is that the tension get erased by it's resolution. They say an answer is the death of a question, and that's the kind of thing I'm worried about. Other, rather than solve the tension, will surround it with so much quasi-solution that it erase it, just like someone removing the bitterness of a meal by adding to much spice. At some point you stop tasting the meal and only taste the spice. Tension as to be felt, otherwise it disappear.
But there might be a middle way. What I am complaining about is not that tension should be served straight up, otherwise it's wrong, it's more that it's a delicate balancing act to keep soften the taste of tension without removing it.

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Quidam
@Quidam

Tarra's death truly is gay fridging. Tara is thrown aside for Willow's story, and Willow is assumed to be more important because she is part of the main cast. Willow's arc in Season six is rough. I understand the broad strokes of it, this is a shy woman who gained awesome powers over the universe, of course she would fall into addiction, of course she would become darker and more evil. But the execution is not organic at all: the addiction storyline last one episode. One episode, which start with her first hit and end with her spiralling out of control. It is the closest thing the show has to A Very Special Episode. At least the beer one had jokes. It make sense that Willow's corruption is not linear, that it has up and down, but the story doesn't feel like an inner struggle between good and evil, it feels like the writers put whatever obstacles in her path so that she will react appropriately. Hence, they choose to ignore Tara's storyline and kill her. When Buffy's mom died, her death and the hole she left was the focus. When Tara died, it's Willow's rage that became the focus, and Tara was forgotten. I'm not saying the story couldn't have worked, I am saying it doesn't work as it is, and the dismissal of Tara felt callous. It felt like fridging.

(Since I am here, I don't always have the opportunity to give my Buffy opinion: I like Dawn, I think people give her shit for behaving like a teenage girl, which, you know, she is, and not only that, but this is a teenage girl who has lived through stressful and traumatic event, of course she is going to lash out. I understand why she react the way she does, and I like her as a character. I also used to really like Xander, and even now I like him more than most fan, but I do see the red flag and the asshole attitude he has, after it was pointed out to me. The fact I used to relate to him say that I was the kind of person who would have ignored those red flag, and that doesn't speak high of my character frankly. Like I said, I still like him, but in hindsight he can be a real jerk. Also, in the comics, Xander and Dawn starts dating, and that is a sin, like, that's just eww.)

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oriananonexistent
@oriananonexistent

i haven't actually watched buffy since it aired! (and i never did get around to the comics.) so all my opinions are based on 20+ year old memories. but i don't think i remember hating dawn or xander that much. i think i was capable of recognizing that xander was the Guy Who Sucked and that's an important character archetype. also relating to someone doesn't mean you'd ignore that character's red flags.

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stepnix
@stepnix

Is it possible that Lost Levels talk was an attempt to rephrase Bernard Suit's work about games as challenges, and his related proposal that after all necessary challenges are resolved, humanity will keep itself occupied with games? Maybe included the phrases "unnecessary challenge" and "inefficient means?"

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oriananonexistent
@oriananonexistent

i'd say that it probably wasn't. more likely it was just another white cishet guy trying to assign meaning to struggle itself. i got the sense that he doesn't believe that 'all necessary challenges' can, or maybe even should, be resolved

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