Nire Bryce

update: the situation that inspired this rant was resolved when we remembered we had an NPC following us around.

in light of that we're not sure we actually get to complain about the game designers' failures of mimesis (the characteristic, of a fictional setting, of feeling like a real place)

Those two frames - you highlight 'character' and 'player' - could be called the central paradox of (mainstream, commercial, big-business) video games. I think in popular discourse they're roughly represented by the terms 'realism' and 'fun', but I prefer to think of 'realism', or the character frame, as 'naturalism', the idea that a game should pretend to be a complete world that was discovered rather than created. Player-centrism has been castigated brilliantly by Mattie Brice in KILL THE PLAYER.

I see these as parallel, ideological projects whose combined aim is to make the player feel as if they are, to some degree, conquering a world in the way their (presumed white, male etc.) ancestors conquered the real world, a sort of salve for the weeping of a million juvenile Alexanders. The popularity of Dark Souls can largely be explained by how perfectly it executes this trick - extremely fine-tuned to provide incremental expansion in challenge, spatially coherent and promising a vast lore if you can only put in the time to stitch it all together. Its much-vaunted 'fairness' really means there are few places where the game intrudes to prevent you doing something in a special case that you could do in all others (throwing dung to poison the Capra Demon, for example, before entering its boss room; the demon takes damage - fair, because the dung isn't magically disabled - but its AI doesn't activate - player-centric, because it allows the player to feel clever for overcoming the challenge). The fact that Dark Souls is, of course, a collection of carefully-planned rooms in which simple digital objects stand stock still until the player hits their AI triggers is hidden primarily by the effectiveness of the game's atmosphere.

It's useful to think about this historically - games started out neither realistic nor particularly player-centric. It was just a Thing You Could Make Software Do if you were a programmer with some free time. Both 'realism' and player-centering are design methodologies that grew up as games became an industry, with professional training and market research. Both are answers to common categories of complaint - player-unfriendly puzzles are 'confusing' or 'unintuitive'; arbitrary puzzles are 'unrealistic' or 'immersion-breaking'. These aren't particularly deep complaints, but they're very easy to make in a CinemaSins sort of way (I can't think off the top of my head of good examples of youtube gaming channels that did this stuff, I just remember that there were loads of them and they were all trying to sound like CinemaSins for gaming).

Games market researchers and game design schools, hungry for data on which to base their advice to the industry, ended up collecting a lot of those complaints without compensating for the positive effects of what those complaints were about. A game with unintuitive puzzles might nevertheless have provided a deep sense of satisfaction to players who mastered it (recently I played Vagrant Story, and I feel way more proud of solving the block-pushing puzzles in that than I did in any Zelda game). A game that is 'unrealistic' might use that unreality to convey emotional stakes (trying to narrow this down to just one example from Final Fantasy X is impossible - that whole game is this phenomenon, and that also explains why a certain kind of gamer hates it so much). Indeed, many of the people making those complaints may have had ultimately positive experiences of the games - the complaints may just have been blowing off steam.

But as the games industry attuned itself more and more to the surface complaints, it established a feedback loop with gamers who, naturally, pay attention to public statements coming out of the industry. This metastasized very quickly - it's 'unrealistic' for a fantasy game to have black people, it's 'player-unfriendly' for a game to prompt the player to think about institutional misogyny. When I teach game design I push very hard, very early on these fundamentals (I banned my students from using the words 'fun' and 'realistic' to describe games this semester) in the hope of getting them out of the track that eventually leads to that kind of close-mindedness.

(this ended up extremely long, sorry, I have Feelings about this topic...)

I think it can be interesting to think about this stuff, especially while designing a place, because when you come up with a backstory for a place, a reason for the place to have originally existed, a history for it, a reason for its layout to be the way it is, and a reason for its current inhabitants to be there, you can give it more character and make it more interesting than just Generic Semi-Puzzley Dungeon Whose Layout Makes No Sense Filled With Monsters That Are Challenging But Not Too Challenging And Level Appropriate Loot.

I wonder how much of that is it's hard to justify complex puzzle quests these days, because the amount of people who actually solve the problem vs give up and look it up on the inevitable wiki, is a pretty low percentage :\

and that everyone is doing cost:benefit because they have all these other games to play too

I feel like "unrealistic" easy puzzles are almost always a pure pacing decision used by a game that's very narratively focused: if the puzzle is only supposed to take N minutes of playtime (let's say 4) then there's no point making it meaningfully difficult or even particularly memorable (if it isn't at a high point in the story). But, because the game is narratively focused, that means the puzzle is likely to be heavily diegetic, which causes this perceived dissonance. In fact, the more narratively focused a game is, the more likely its challenge is reduced to the point that it no longer prima-facie "makes sense" in the world, because narrative has pacing concerns that override the danger or hostility that it itself imagines.

That being said, this makes you wonder what the point of the dungeon's puzzles are, if they aren't really to be "taken seriously". Are they simply to create the "flavour" of obstruction, invoke the idea of obstacle without actually offering it? Are they trying to create the fantasy of power and world mastery? Personally, I think they're primarily, whether they realise it or not, trying to recreate the flavour of past videogames, in much the same way that every RPG with a round slime enemy is unconsciously recreating the flavour of Dragon Quest 1. Every post-80s Zelda dungeon with a block puzzle is recreating the flavour, the sense of Zelda 1's block puzzles and Sokoban in general (although Zelda 1's block puzzles were less puzzles and more hidden object searches - future Zeldas adding more obvious blocks to the puzzle made them both look harder and solve easier).

Of course, other games, such as La-Mulana, are able to more fully explore the difficulty of a diegetic puzzle by having narratives that operate on different levels to Zelda: rather than being about things happening to Lemeza Kosugi, the narrative is about both the multi-generational mythology of the ruins' gods and the act of slowly unearthing it, such that there isn't any pressing need to advance Lemeza to the next area and thus require any particular puzzle to only take N minutes.

I think most of the tension comes from the fact, that, in order to be appealing, games usually deal with a situation that is abnormal from the character perspective.

So any function e.g. a room would have had in the other 95% of the characters life become completely meaningless when e.g. the horde has invaded. Thus designing for these “normal” situations (where e.g. you can open a door that is not relevant to furthering the story) takes away from the time the designers could be spending improving the story, or, like, the mechanics of the game.

Something like Animal Crossing might be the complete opposite, but only because playing the normal life of a character is the entire point of the game.

An example of a game I’ve played recently is God of War (2018), where you get a sense of home in like the first 5 minutes of the game, but the main baddy invades right after, making the home irrelevant to the characters for much of the rest of the game.

this is something we struggle with a lot :3
for the longest time we've only enjoyed open-world games like minecraft where we can forcefully embody the player. trying to get through.. portal 2 i think is when we figured out this design

..i suppose most brains are not this conducive to internalizing a character? we really just run off with them and (CW: vague mental health) then it gets messy if the game isn't nice to the character.

i don't think the character dies, i think they're just having a dissociative episode and forgetting their death. since this is a game, there is no reality but the story presented so this is fine from the immersed player's POV or lack thereof.