The Point Is The Point.
Dragon's Dogma 2 inspired a whole discussion about the importance of "friction" in games. Basically people discussing the growing intolerance gamers have of mechanics that force them outside of their comfort zone. Mechanics that impose themselves on the players and aggressively inconvenience them.
As an enjoyer of friction myself & believer that games have somewhat of a duty to discourage players, I appreciate this defense. But a lot of the discussion is starting to overlap & resemble the defense of shitty design. By focusing so much on defense, the frictioners repeatedly fail at drawing a clear distinction between good & bad types of friction. "The friction is the point" as a slogan epitomizes this - the friction isn't part of the point, but is itself the point.
Here's the thing - games are art. Like any art form, they are extremely open to interpretation and have subjective value that consistently defies categorization and limitations. Your engagement with a game can give you personal fulfillment in completely unintended ways, ones which run counter to any notions of good design or good taste or what have you.
Because of the artistic nature of games, it's always possible to give robust, well reasoned defenses of mechanics - its always possible to justify friction. I have, as a thought experiment, defended the crashes to desktop of STALKER because they tended to happen during emissions and gave the emissions a kind of terrifying meta element - they weren't just audiovisually tense, they were tense in a real tangible sense because not only was my comfortable gaming session at stake, so was my save file. Was it a joke? A little bit, because of how hard it clashes with common sense. But the emotion I felt was very real.
Once you start justifying friction for its own sake, there is basically no limit to what you can defend. By itself this isn't a problem and is even interesting, but when this is done in conversations it wipes away any tiny traces of shared presuppositions that were there. Talking about games prescriptively becomes impossible.
The only way out of this is pretty inconvenient - it requires people to interpret the point of any given game, its central thesis. Because there isn't truly a fact of the matter, this is a difficult process that people will have massive disagreements about, but it's a lot better to argue about whether Dragons Dogma 2's exploration is the focus of the game or not, than to focus on the friction of it. It clarifies disagreements. People complaining about a lack of quick travel don't necessarily hate friction, they often just don't think the friction serves the point of the games, whatever it may be. Whether they know it or not, they are arguing about a lack of focus.
Just like there is no easy, universal way to interpret literature, there is no easy universal way to establish the focus of games. You can rely on your interpretation of the intent of the developers - Dragon's Dogma 2 might be intended to be a big adventure. You can look at a game's mechanics or challrnge - the combat is deep and challenging while the navigation is relatively shallow and easy, therefore the combat is the focus. You can look at the aesthetic elements - clearly the artists wanted you to experience a world, they made it cool looking an interesting, so exploration is part of the focus. There is no way to come up with anything definitive, but this is the level on which disagreement should happen IMO.
Once a core thesis is established, it creates a filter through which you can judge a game's quality. This is something everyone does whether they want to or not. This is blatantly obvious if you look at something like menus. They are so far outside of what most people perceive as "the focus" that they aren't treated as gameplay mechanics, but rather a method of delivery. But why should this be the case? Certainly in many speedruns menu navigation can be a genuine and even interesting skill. So why wouldn't this defense of friction extent to menus? Why can we recognize that fighting games can benefit from very strict input buffers, but not menus?
There is no real reason. Most people simply have a different interpretation of the games. Speedrunners would not be stupid if they defended the menus because from their vantage point, that is the purpose of the game, to provide an interesting optimization challenge. In fact, what you'll often find is that people with the weirdest ideas of what the point of a work is often engage with the work extensively and deeply. There's no shortage of hardcore players who love and defend the most insane shit.
So before you defend friction please ask why the hell you're doing it. Is it a genuine defense of a mechanic for its artistic qualities, or is it a post hoc rationalization for something that didn't bother you? What is the focus of the game you're defending and does the mechanic serve it? What would a genuinely bad version of the mechanic you're defending look like and how does it differ from what you're defending? Friction is never the point.
If I hear someone defend a lack of boss room checkpoints in Souls cuz runbacks are integral to the experience and primo friction I'm gonna lose it.
