i've been playing CRINGE! by mark klem and some other 1994 doom wads over the past few years. and it's become very clear to me over the past few years that the FPS genre (and maybe games as a whole im just woefully underread so i dont rly wanna comment) around 96ish and before just had a radically different set of values about what was good or bad. like the idea of what fits within the modern accepted overton window of game design, whether that's in fan communities or in mainstream design. i also think about the stuff in Spear of Destiny, Marathon, Memento Mori, System Shock (1994), or Serenity/Eternity/Infinity. for example, it's very clear to me that the authors just simply did not think it was an inherent Goodness to have the game be beatable always.
and i don't mean in some skill level testing type of way, even though that is one form of it. memento mori and spear both throw you into situations where your life or death is down to the will of the RNG several times, and i don't think it's an accident. CRINGE! subjects you to required secret after required secret and so forth. marathon's Colony Ship For Sale's obtuse puzzle progression is notorious but it's not some aberration, the game has a few other parts like that. system shock lets you softlock yourself in all sorts of ways, is notorious for its hitscanners, and also presents you with a button that lets you laser the earth to death and game over, if you so choose.
a lot of people like to talk the talk about how game design hasn't progressed linearly through time. like i hope i dont need to reiterate that "oh they just didn't know what they were doing back then" is nonsense? because it is absolutely nonsense. but despite wider acceptance that that's nonsense, there's still this lack of willingness to actually contend with this stuff. to actually gaze upon being trapped in a tight corridor with a baron and only a shotgun and the only thing that can save you is mostly just the luck of how much it decides to attack, and how high it rolls on its damage rolls, despite the level giving you 200/200 health/armor right before.
it's an old cliche in games discourse to say that snakes and ladders isn't "actually a game". yet it's one of the most successful of all time, in a way that makes Call of Duty seem as obscure as, say, Monstrum for the amiga. i'm not sure that "successful" is worth praising, but it appears notable. i'm not sure i can say anything new, anything worth saying, about snakes and ladders.
but there's something to be said for the emotional and storytelling impact of the idea that BJ Blazkowicz, protagonist of Spear of Destiny, might just fucking die. because he's in World War 2. it's cartoon ass world war 2, but still. it's world war 2, you just fucking die there. there's something, completely bizarre about the year-2023 attitude of an fps game compared to that. the modern attitude where you could make it through world war 2 or citadel station or whatever the hell is going on in CRINGE! without relying a lot on luck, no matter how badass you are.
i think about also just. how much we narrow the emotional palette that we have available to us as artists.
i feel like a lot of times if i try to bring up that there's other ways of making or perceiving art, i get this kind of reaction like i'm being a weird snob. and i don't really have an actual defense other than to say: idk it's weird to call me a snob for me saying "hey this can be good too".
there's elements of this kind of design in the more popular FPSes of that previous era like Quake, Duke3D, Doom, and Wolf3D as well. for example the early parts of Wolf3D episode 2. but i think like, familiarity and just how well-tread they are in the general discussion has maybe made me not really evaluate this in those cases. but i bring it up to point out that it wasn't exactly an unpopular thing. it, to me, demonstrates that this has been a shift in the allowed "overton window" of games.
the obvious implication is also that there's stuff that could be a valid "overton window" fitting completely different types of games.
and that we haven't really properly come to terms with any of that culturally. like for example we get a lot of retro-styled shooters and of course the neverending parade of doom wads, but none of them are willing to go full 1994 in terms of what they value. and to a degree it would be impossible anyway. we are who we are and we can't go home again (and other cliches). but there's a lack of conscious awareness and acceptance about any of this too.
i dont know if i have an overarching point here, it's just, been on my mind, for quite some time
now playing: Abul Mogard - Slate-coloured Storm
The manuals for the early LucasArts (then Lucasfilm Games) adventure games had this short section titled Our Game Design Philosophy towards the back. It was basically a direct response to the unstated design philosophy of competitor Sierra's adventure games, which were notorious for cheap shots and potholes: killing the player, silent / unrecoverable failure states, deliberately arbitrary puzzles, "save early and often", etc.
I remember reading this as a kid. It was almost certainly the first time I'd ever thought about the concept of a "game design philosophy".
They were too polite to state it plainly but I think partly what the Lucasfilm designers were responding to was a lack of care for craft on the part of their peers at Sierra. And I don't think they were wrong - Sierra built their whole 80s empire in a kind of "winging it" mode, and they knew that their weird sloppy dead-end-riddled designs ultimately just extended play time and sold more strategy guides (I forget if they had one of those 1-900 phone hint lines too). And so in that context the Lucasfilm philosophy felt genuinely progressive, like the higher harder road that produced better experiences - ones that hold up better historically, though that gets into the "2023's game design Overton Window is omnipresent and inescapable" point OP is making.
And much like Doom's violence went from being a shocking transgressive novelty in the early 90s to totally normalized and boring by the early 00s, I think the design values of never letting players get stuck in an unwinnable state, never killing them unexpectedly, not leaning hard on savegames as a safety net - and more generally making sure that the game is a thing you can definitely complete if you stick with it - in time became the norm, and eventually became today's sometimes oppressively narrow definition of "good game design", in which designers carefully sand down every possible rough edge for fear of getting yelled at by gamers, who have now come to expect total frictionlessness, total conformity. The revolutionary idealism of "Our Design Philosophy" (1988) has been fully digested into capitalist cultural production, and most of the creators toiling within it have neither the tools nor consciousness (in the political sense) to think about ways they might break its tenets for interesting artistic effect.
Of course, the Souls games made such an impression on everyone that it's once again acceptable to kill the player and come at them sideways, provided you act like you know what you're doing as a designer (ie meet the high standard for "tight combat", clear interesting and communicative level design, etc). And maybe something like Outer Wilds reminded everyone that the equivalent in puzzle design, ie Letting Players Wonder About Something For A Minute and not handing them everything on a platter, was also acceptable.
Game design is way too big and dispersed a field nowadays for there to feel like there's as much of a coherent Conversation going between practitioners as there was in the 80s and 90s. But if there's a lesson here I think it's that it's good to be one of the creators with a distinctive, confident enough authorial voice that you're contributing to that conversation, or perhaps exploring its boundaries, rather than simply timidly echoing it.
I fully agree that we need to interrogate modern and classic game design more, as it seems we've lost a lot in our efforts to distill game design into a product that can be perfected rather than a system of rules to understand a fantasy world.
I have a lot of thoughts on this, so I'll try to summarize my current feelings on this subject across three points:
Firstly, the reason a lot of early FPS games feature strong elements of luck and randomization is because many of the teams designing those games had an unspoken of love for D&D and tabletop games. Many tabletop campaigns have elements of randomization and secret hunting, so it made sense to incorporate that into a video game.
You can feel this strongly in Doom, where nearly everything comes down to a dice roll: most of the game behavior is tied to an RNG lookup table at game start, which determines everything from damage to monster behavior. Even things like hitscans (another modern game design no-no!) are a relic of tabletop design.
It makes sense a lot of early Doom maps would incorporate these elements, too, since the people playing that game would either be versed in tabletop games, or have grown up with video games that adopted those elements. It also explains why modern games have diverged so much from the core tenets older games adhered to by slowly removing randomized elements.
Secondly, I've been recently diving into the Amiga library thanks to an A500 Mini I purchased on discount. Anyone familiar with that system knows the reputation its games have! Rather than stick to the "best" games for the system, I've loaded the thing up with as many WHDLoad games as I could, and have been tackling the system letter by letter.
I learned two things by doing this:
- Piracy is good at preserving history, but bad at preserving meaning and context, as many games had manuals meant as primers, rulebooks, or tutorials about the game you are playing.
- The sooner you kill your inner critic telling you what a video game should be, the better off you'll be.
Instead of giving up when encountering an unfair game, I decided to look up a manual instead. Turns out, understanding the context in which a game expects to be played made being Game Over'd in five seconds part of the fun rather than something to avoid. I also suspect this is why I love modern roguelites so much, as they often carry the "merciless, but fun to play and discover" torch early PC gaming lit all those years ago.
Lastly, my only encounter with the Lucasarts Model™️ is Day of the Tentacle, an all time classic. Child me ordered it from a bookfair, and as you might imagine, was absolutely thrilled with the Saturday Morning Cartoon aesthetics married to silly puzzle design.
Much lessing thrilling was having to restart the game every six months to a year in hopes of getting slightly further in before being held up by another puzzle that went over my head. Turns out being stuck wasn't a design flaw, it was a feature of the genre! But the expected philosophy of seeking solutions outside the game didn't apply, as nobody I knew played adventure games, and I didn't know hint-files/FAQs were a thing.
As such, Day of the Tentacle almost killed adventure games for me until I rediscovered the genre with The Neverhood in the 2010s. I have come around on DOTT since, finally beating it earlier this year, but it taught me a valuable lesson at an early age: just because a game is polished and "fair", doesn't mean it's rewarding or nice to play.
Thinking on this, maybe we need to interrogate "fairness" in game design, because by implicitly making games "fair" and "nice" to players, we are suggesting the world in which these games inhabit is also fair. Which might explain why modern games dealing with hardship and oppressive subjects often miss the mark!
(I could also say more on these individual points, but that might be better served for separate posts.)
