Erica

ithink "game .design"is for Babies and Wienies . Not Needed At All ! just Make silly things that happen ! Or dont !people should stop making vidoe games me thinks !

as an aside, but not really, it's quite hard to think of a term used in games that makes me as annoyed as the phrase "quality of life"

another descriptive of infinitely outwards is outward from as many points and symmetries i feel it bouncing around like UKS, the different calibrations

yes!! it’s so boring to think about game design as a single ever upward Line Goes Up trajectory from like Spacewar to the Platonic Ideal Of Videogame

love this too:

i've always found it fruitful for inspiration to treat old games and their ideas with respect, even when i can't deal with their friction.

Frank Zappa said a similar thing about pop music - in the early days of rock and roll music, record company folks had no idea what would hit, so they signed all sorts of wild artists and a lot of surprising things got made; but by the 1980’s, a generation of record execs who started out out as fans had emerged- they thought they knew what was good and what wasn’t, and as a result (in Zappa’s opinion) music became boring and predictable. (Here’s the source: https://www.openculture.com/2016/09/frank-zappa-explains-the-decline-of-the-music-business-1987.html )

i think it's fine to say something has aged poorly or that it's archaic – but you should take special care to explain what made it popular and fun back then, and point out that those things are still in the game and you can still enjoy it!

even if it's harder for a modern gamer to get to that tasty morsel than it was back in the day, there's a lot to be learned by talking about the good stuff that's been mostly forgotten to time. Certainly a lot more educational than talking about why it's ""objectively"" crappy when seen through a modern lens, which is where most popular discussion ends up 🙁

I'm of mixed feelings about this.

On the one hand, I greatly miss the experimentation of games from the 80s and 90s, and I agree that old games don't automatically become outdated.

But on the other hand, there are many DOS and Windows games which I loved in high school, and wish I could return to, but no longer have the patience to deal with their opaque User Interfaces and lack of autosaving...

there's nothing quite comparable to the earnest and raw energy of a game that feels improvisational or like it was making up its own rules as it went along. I like games that are polished to perfection too but there's so many that I start to see patterns and sometimes I just wanna play something that tries cool stuff because it's cool!

i guess the thing for me (because i have poisoned my brain with Money Thinking) is that often games are a response to the environment they're in. the other games that are around, the expectations of players, the stuff you don't gotta explain because every other thing does it. this isn't even necessarily bad and constraining, if you lean on conventions you can go further into weird arcane design spaces - Dota is the classic example of this, it is a weird and complicated game that you couldn't start with, you could only make as the end of a long chain of making an existing game weirder. or (and not to condone the many evil parts of them) the baroque interlocking economies in a really advanced F2P game, wow, they are interesting. but when you play an old game, the context it was responding to is just Different, and so it will in turn be Different in a way that you wouldn't necessarily reach for now. and sometimes that context is apparent (why does this coin-op arcade game keep trying to kill me?) and some is less apparent (uhhh, i don't have a good example here).

anyway, none of this is to disagree, to put value judgements on this stuff is both wrong and, which is worse, boring. especially when there are so many interesting things you can find if you poke around at the things that have come before!

sometimes i experience this as just, the understanding of my own growth as a person; returning to these interfaces feels different now because in some cases ive got decades of refinement in my own personal taste between me and it. i better understand what it is i like about things, so when i was 12 and something that was then revelatory had more to do with the depth of my experience than the literal "objective" state of the art (whatever that might be supposed to mean), etc. hindsight is not ever 20/20 imo anyway

personally, i have a combination of brain problems that make focusing on the pacing of many newer games difficult or impossible; games as a service tend to be overstimulating, overwhelming, in ways that dont result in monetary extraction but nevertheless trap me in deleterious patterns of behavior. it is not a predatory interaction, like with the well known issues in mtx, but something more like a photosensitive response. the only reliable defense i have against this is just not to play, and increasingly that means i have no online games to play with people, an important part of socializing since ive been homebound before the pandemic. and, sure, its not that i think these games shouldnt exist, but they stifle options when the model becomes dominant. i love destiny 2 pvp and have stopped playing for years because i simply cannot keep myself from picking up infinite bounty tasks until i wake from the trance of "just one more thing on this objective!" ten hours later, having neglected everything else in my life.

i am also taking the opportunity to try and focus more on indie games again, since they by nature have no need for or general interest in the kind of big-centralized-experience content engine model that tends to accompany this kind of infinite task generator problem i have. its not like i entirely regret changing my habits, either. its just all very complicated and deserves to each be taken seriously in turn, in all respects. thank you for your thoughts, kind stranger

lots more resources too -- games involving guns had a great leap when wikipedia came out and they could learn all about Guns, same with plane cockpits, etc

I really hate how much game design has been obsessed with efficiency as of late. In fact, sometimes its good that a game wastes my time with long cutscenes and transitions and other shit like that. Flow and pacing are very important, and its unfortunate just how much stuff like speedrunning (as cool as it is) has made people prioritize efficiency and "boom boom boom" breakneck pacing the ideal standard. Breathing room is a forgotten art

i like to think we haven't found strictly better ways to do things, but we have had a lot of time to find more ways to do things
whether or not designers back then coulda/shoulda/woulda used these new things is not for me to say, but i like that i can use them now in tandem with all the things they used back then

my favorite thing about early game design is the Indiana Jones game on the Atari 2600.

Basically, the game has one joystick and one button. That's fine if you wnat a sprite that moves around and whips, but they wanted to make anb adventure game in a period where adventure games weren't a thing yet.

So you know what they did? The second player controller was used to select and use items in the inventory.

This is such a good idea! it's like making a twi stick shooter on the N64 using two N64 controllers (Robotron 2064) or controlling wo engines for podracing with different controllers (Star Wars Episode 1: Racer)

it doesn't matter if the game is good when you have a galaxy brain idea like that, imo. Naturally, it's harder to require one player to use two controllers now, since they have becomes both costly and stopped packing in two controllers with consoles.... But you get the spirit with the Switch JoyCons. Just look at Wario Ware Move It!

Anyway, i'm rambling, but i agree. modern game design is in a prison of its own making that is flimsy enough anyone can knock the walls down.

This kinda sounds like "if making video games wasn't about making money then people would make weirder stuff that isn't a safe bet"

I can't not think of this quote, about how the first ones there didn't have any models to work from.

I don't fully agree with many things written here, but the positions being assumed by someone who doesn't agree with these points are reduced to such a weird level of intense derision that it's hard to even want to engage with this like it's a discussion. Both of these posts seem to start from the premise that people can only make any of those points because they don't know what art is, and/or they're slaves to capitalism. I haven't met a single game developer who might argue ANY of those points about which those conclusions are remotely true.

whereas today it feels like almost every discussion is about the market

Grant, I spend as little time on social media as possible, but I don't see this in any space where I see people who sincerely care about talking about games. Discord servers, reddit threads, hell, even on game dev twitter that I'm only now looking at because I hate twitter, I just... can't even think of anything I've read in the last 3 months that takes this position.

There is such an enormous middle ground on the topics of "accessibility," "quality of life," and "user experience design" between "making slop for the money-spending herd" and "all games that don't have these features are worthless." I don't see anyone arguing for the latter point who actually is capable of having an adult conversation, so I don't really know what the point is in acting like that's the default premise to engage with? When I talk about accessibility with other developers and see the topic explored, it's by people who care PASSIONATELY about more people being able to enjoy games not because they "want more money," but because they LOVE video games and LOVE audiences who are passionate about their work.

I don't know, maybe I'm misguided in even trying to make this point, but I'm just finding it really weird how many people in creative spaces who seem to have intelligent and nuanced things to say also can't seem to find ways to say them without just absolutely dumping on other points of view with these kinds of exaggerated contrasts. These are pretty short posts, but they're touching on so many huge implications of the medium and making really broad stroke points while also making it out like things are much more black and white than they are -- maybe I'm not reading it clearly enough, idk, there are a few similarly intense comments (against "efficiency," against "QoL," etc) that feel like a really weird way to engage with these concepts.