Boredom is a very common way games punish or discourage certain things, and I don't like it.
I'm not talking about the more "natural" type of boredom-as-punishment, like replaying the same stage or boss 20 times - that will be a problem for difficult games no matter how they are designed. What I'm talking about is the more obvious stuff. Farming health items if you run out, waiting around for a boss to get back into range if you missed an attack opportunity, running around a level smashing crates to collect resources you've lost, burning corpses, re-opening chests. All kinds of basic, repetitive wait times or actions.
I think the rationale for this stuff is twofold :
- It's a "soft" way to punish players. They won't feel like they are losing anything, rather they feel like they are just delaying the win
- It's effective. People are lazy and there is nothing we love more than to optimize & automate away tedious tasks as we improve. Hell, programming runs off this principle
The main problem with this is very simple - it's boring. The games are wasting your time, they think that you failing something is license to put you into timeout in order to do dull shit until you can get to play again. What's more is they do it because they are afraid of causing player frustration. They want difficulty, but they are afraid of committing to it fully because difficult games are discouraging. And I think this is lame, instead of accepting what they are the games skirt around it and end up wasting our precious time on this earth because of it.
This kinda stuff is everywhere if you really think about it, especially as games become "softer" in how they punish players - relying on psychological incentives rather than direct punishment. And other players will defend it with "if you don't want the game to be boring, simply get good". I'd rather have games just kill me outright, cause frustration, make me curse its name, and even want to quit - just be direct and ramp up emotions, instead of trying to pacify the player.
Bayonetta's Angel Slayer is a good example - if you take damage you can heal back up to full by taunting. But it's so fucking boring and repetitive that I would rather have no healing period instead of be forced to make the tradeoff between continuing without taunting and risking a run, or go through the mind numbing taunt loop.
A more ubiqutous example of this design would be boss cycles - in a lot of games bosses will exit your range or become invulnerable or too hard to hit if you let them do something. So being inefficient in how you dish out damage during their vulnerability phases often locks you out of further damage, rather than being more difficult per se.
You can even apply this to arcade games. Take 2 games, one I like and one I love - Devil Blade & Radiant Silvergun respectively. DB's highest difficulty mode forces you to score if you want to stay alive because it works off a timer that'll kill you if you let it run out. RSG forces you to score if you want your weapons to do enough damage in order to kill stuff within a reasonable timeframe. Even though I much prefer RSG as a game overall, I would definitely rather have it kill me more directly than fuck with my firepower if I play badly enough to not be able to kill enemies, ideally it'd kill me through more enemies, more bullets, etc. That said, in shmups it's a very minor issue cause "tedium" just means "I'm not doing as much damage & have to let enemies go" or "I'll have to dodge this boss' hard attack more than 2 tiems" or something like that.
This "boredom as punishment" design is also a slippery slope. It's fairly effective at getting players to stick around so games can increasingly add more tedious bs and force players to work around it. If playing a game poorly is simply tedious rather than very hard and frustrating, I think the game fucked up.
I don't have a particularly strong formal argument against this shit or anything, I just really dislike it and think devs & players should be more mindful of how willing games are becoming to waste the player's time. It's a type of "friction" that sucks, cuz there are much more direct punishments. Also I gotta add that if games use boredom as punishments for some really interesting/novel/artistic reasons, or if the whole game's about that type of thing, I can understand. But how often is that the case? Not very, IMO.
