highimpactsex

blogger and game dev

no more social media. i make text games that are poorly rated in game jams and talk about cool niche stuff.


mogwai-poet
@mogwai-poet

And that in fact the original Doom had: stumbling around a maze trying to find the way forward is a huge mood-killer no matter how cool your set pieces are.

Also, I keep reading people saying things like "I went down a MyHouse rabbit hole and now I want to read House of Leaves." I've got a take here too! You don't want to read House of Leaves. You want to read Subcutanean.


arcadeidea
@arcadeidea

The game snubs legibility — the basic mechanics of progression are not just arbitrary, but deliberately hidden. You often progress by accident and even after are unsure what you did. Some clues exist, but rather than being foregrounded they are left in easily-missed margins along with a mess of insignificances, and they're ambiguous and hard to interpret even when you look right at them. This means the player must take recourse to guesswork and brute force, or to some form of asking someone who's already figured it out.

Under most rubrics, this is the very essence of bad game design. Any point-and-click adventure that works this way is generally considered botched infuriating trash. But myhouse.wad is a sensation! People love it! Indeed, if you read back the Doomworld thread, you'll see that this very obscurity is THE thing people love, even above the horror trappings. (If anything I think its overt creepypasta-isms are the weakest part.) It's not a mood-killer, it is the mood. When you have no idea what's happening, what could happen, or why anything happens, you get a vertiginous sense that anything is possible, at any moment, for any reason. This in turn inspires a giddy excitement to explore and find out all that is possible. And there's also a whole communal aspect: the internet exists, and Doomworld and the Doom Wiki are lively. Whatever somebody finds, they write it down and share it, and with lots of explorers working together, you can be sure that eventually everything will be found, even that maze that only spawns like 1 out of 116,000 times. It's more-or-less the Tower Of Druaga model.

Does this make it a less effective horror experience? Yes. But one huge obvious instance aside, myhouse.wad is spooky more than it is scary, surprising more than unsettling. It's not aiming to induce fear and sleepless nights in the player. It is pitched as a horror ARTIFACT, a haunted cartridge the player curiously examines and thinks about from a distance, rather than a story the player is sucked up inside of.


highimpactsex
@highimpactsex

bad game design is sometimes the most soulful one. in fact, i wish myhouse.wad had more of this shit and less of the liminal stuff lol.


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in reply to @mogwai-poet's post:

I disagree with the main premise. The main problem nearly every indie horror game has is that they are nearly all unplayable to me because I can't change the controls or invert the y-axis on the mouse. By virtue of it being a doom pk3, MyHouse does not have this problem.

...That said I did have the exact same issue with myhouse. Trying to demo it to someone else, I had to stumble around for 10 minutes trying to work out what actually triggered the second house mode with the skull keys. There is a little too much "OK, I know something is supposed to happen, but I can't remember what I did last time."

It's still fantastic though.

in reply to @arcadeidea's post:

Under most rubrics, this is the very essence of bad game design. Any point-and-click adventure that works this way is generally considered botched infuriating trash. But myhouse.wad is a sensation! People love it! Indeed, if you read back the Doomworld thread, you'll see that this very obscurity is THE thing people love, even above the horror trappings.

This passage highlights how antithetical the market is to artistic expression in general. Artistic expression, like any other form of expression, is an act of communication, IE it's purposeful and takes place within a known context between well defined parties. Hence the most resonant works tend to be the ones that understand and internalize these points; the ones that make creative choices insofar as those choices accentuate whatever idea they happen to be exploring.

The catch, though, is that this dependency on context not only makes artistic expression impossible to generalize into a set of hard and fast rules, but for that very reason also makes it non-conducive to capitalism, which would very much prefer some degree of predictability on the market. So what's capitalism to do? It could try to convert the contexts themselves into discrete entities like genres or demographics and then work with those...or it could ignore the limitations I've just discussed and come up with a set of best practices that seems to operate independent of context, but really is just extrapolated from a given subset of art's performance on the market, as though this has any inherent relation to a work's artistic merit. It doesn't - much of that performance rests on factors totally outside the work itself, like control over some key aspect of the market (production, manufacturing, distribution) - but for the capitalist, pretending it is is preferable to the risks of giving oneself entirely over to the chaos of the marketplace.