Rarden

there's a lot to be said about how video games, as an interactive medium, rely on being able to actually react to a player. like there's a lot of ways for a player to interact with the space, but games, as a facade, can only react in so many different ways. and the ways they react has to be specifically dictated by the people who are making these games.

it's an inherent thing designers need to focus on, and while my experience with game design is mostly limited to TTRPGs and the few odd board games that i helped design ages ago back in college¹ i still had to brush alongside it; games are ultimately a set of rules meant to evoke a certain fantasy. what that fantasy is will be as wildly different as the games that make them at all.

friction is actually a part of that fantasy. it's kind of why a lot of games have rules in the first place. nobody actually wants to play calvinball, and cheating quickly becomes boring for a lot of players². nobody actually wants to just say "i win". that's not interesting. what they want is a game that pushes back just enough to make winning feel meaningful.

where that line is drawn differs for everyone. it is a deeply subjective thing; i crave extremely difficult boss fights and game systems that require me to actually understand their rulesets. but i also don't want to just flick a little dagger and win; i want to win in a flashy way. i want that anime last stand, and will fight as such. i want my little fake puppet men to do a cool dramatic flourish before they push my face into the dirt, and i want to pay them back ten thousand fold for the frustration they wrought against me.

if a game feels too effortless, then that victory doesn't have meaning. if a game doesn't at least evoke a feeling of frustration, of friction, then you don't have something to contrast that win with. the rules that govern your play have only dictated a victory and little else. the fantasy breaks. the (ugh) immersion³ breaks.

it's actually something that i think gets kind of misunderstood and it kind of rubbed me the wrong way; friction and rulesets are kind of huge and crucial in game design. most games are defined by adversity and having something that players can understand and press against. it's a part of the fiction; it's the same thing that makes reading a story interesting and fun; nobody just wants to read "the hero won" they want to see how the hero won. doubly so if they're the ones doing the winning.

literally all games are going to have some point of frustration if they actually want to have an endpoint that means something. like come on. if that point of frustration comes from level design or controls or animation or boss fights doesn't really matter it has to come from somewhere.

you don't actually want the game to just hand you a victory and if you think you do then you are lying to yourself.

1. don't get too excited; none of them have seen the light of day and didn't really progress past like a few cool prototypes that eventually just got scrapped.

2. i don't care if you're an exception. trust me, i really, really don't.

3. i fucking hate "immersion" as a term. it's a meaningless fluff term that's so broad that it can be applied to anything that a player just doesn't like. it usually means someone wants to sound smart but doesn't actually have the vocabulary to talk about why a game just doesn't personally work for them.