Annie D

When the average, non-enthusiast of that category can look at it and tell one game from another on more than just window dressing, that's when a genre begins to mature beyond "X clone".

Where I struggle is I feel like there are cases lately where that just ... isn't meaningfully happening, from an outside perspective. In some cases, even, where it seems like the trend has crystalized so thoroughly that aesthetic is the only thing allowed to vary. You have to have this set of features, and that leaves no room for innovation, so just ... don't.

I've seen "Stardew Valley but" so many times, and that seems to be the punching bag of the moment so I won't dwell on that too long, because what actually inspired yesterday's vaguepost and this one was seeing yet another "survival crafting game" that was just like every other damn survival crafting game but now it's on a floating island and you can build solar panels, so we call it "solarpunk" despite it being grounded in a famously imperialist/colonialist genre.

And I feel like that might be the exception to the rule because I can't point to the X that these games are cloning, except perhaps Minecraft? But Minecraft has it's own category of even more shameless clones, so it feels unfair to deny it has at least evolved technologically beyond cubes. Maybe it's just because I'm so allergic to the format, that I'm unaware of its history, and I should just shut up.

I dunno, I have no solid conclusion for this, because I'm sleep deprived, and I was gonna leave this on drafts but another post got me thinking, and maybe someone else can point to what I'm missing.

What's a genre or subgenre of game you feel like you feel like absolutely should be your jam but most entries you've played just don't do it for you?

(for me it's Tycoon games, i fuckin love the sim genre and I adore simcity etc but for some reason I always fall off of the more-focused ones really quickly. I'm not sure why!)

... the truth is it's often incredibly difficult to push past my own ADHD to actually put up with one anymore.

It does not help that of all genres, none seem more determined to make tedium a fundamental part of the gameplay with such religious conviction.

And it's not an East vs. West thing, much as the Gamer™ discourse often tries to paint it as one. Both traditions bring their own sense of tedium to the experience, just often in different ways.

Western ones, in fact, seem to instantly exhaust me more often than Japanese ones these days. Much as I loved what I played of Disco Elysium, I also never finished it, because I just hit too many moments of realizing I was going to have to watch Harry slooooowly trundle across the map for the 5th time that hour, and just went to find something else that wouldn't waste my time.

Honestly, as someone who used to bang on about the evils of "JRPGs" for years, I've come around on them a lot more. No I don't like level grinding much, but newer games don't tend to have much of it that isn't optional. Yes they tend to be full of long unskippable cutscenes and linear narratives with no player agency ... but so do most Western games anymore, except the latter will maybe periodically interrupt me to make some meaningless dialogue choice that has no real impact on the plot except maybe which cutscene plays at the end. Japanese games are just more honest about it, and usually actually has something to say in the process.

Either one though is also going to demand a simply ludicrous time investment that I ... just don't have the patience for anymore. And the number of times that investment hasn't really panned out has started to make the genre at times feel very much like how I feel about the tabletop exercise that inspired it: something long in promise, that rarely lives up to any of it.

We have created the mute videogame, and the result is an empty and constantly shapeshifting world where nothing matters and all there is to do is look at your reflection.

there comes a point where you've tried so hard to appeal to everyone that you are no longer able to say or be about anything at all, because any actual creative decision might potentially alienate a player, and that's one player not dropping 70 bucks.

I've kind of rolled off of "triple-A" game dev of late, because so often these games have literally nothing to say, they're not about anything, because if you're about something, some people might not like that. So we just make Minecraft with the illusion of plot.

I found it very telling that even as someone who's a big fan of Noah Caldwell-Gervais' work, I genuinely struggled to get through the last half of his recent mega retrospective of the Fallout series, because there's only so much you can really say about the actual narrative content of Bethesda's games. So much of the analysis was just "and here's where Bethesda utterly failed again to create any coherent narrative, in favor of More Box Features". There's a distinct contrast of vision, or rather lack thereof, between the Bethesda's main games, and everything else in the series.

I know it's become cliche for critics to bag on sandbox games, and it always annoyed me because I tend to enjoy them, but I think this piece does finally grasp at where they're coming from. There's just nothing interesting to say about a game that isn't about anything, that can't be about anything. How do you seriously analyze a box of grey legos?