a lot of jokes strung together by empathy
personal account of @LotusLovesLotus
hey folks, new games writing from yours truly over on my Patreon. it's about the way we, collectively, talk about indie games; how they are almost always reduced to a sum of the influences we impose upon them, instead of works that are discussed on their own merit. it's about why and how we do this and why I hate it so much
EDIT: this is now publicly available!! I would love to hear your thoughts below or over on the post itself!
my game often gets the "it's just like earthbound/undertale/omori" treatment and so this post hits really hard. like i understand the comparison, but i didn't set out to make a clone of any of thoses games... im just here to make my own thing...
I think that trifecta — Earthbound, Undertale, and to a lesser extent, Omori — is the one that I've heard the most in casual conversation with devs. ime this is mostly by people who also like, fundamentally misunderstand these games (Earthbound especially) and what they try to say, even on a surface level... there's probably a connection to the "made in Unity" whinging you see a lot, in the sense that a lot of gamers don't understand what game engines are, or what they do, and also can't recognize them clearly. so it really sucks!! but if it makes you feel any better I think every pixel RPG is somehow labelled "like Earthbound" lmao...
oh I KNOW mine will….. it’s a wild thing to think about because those brain worms also affect me sometimes while I’m working or even doing music. like I’ll listen to something and be like if i write it like this (how I actually want it to sound) will people accuse me of it sounding like X… and it’s like, yeah probably, and I have to gauge how much I care 🫠
lmao i got those thoughts too and then decided that who cares. better make the game i wanna make instead of stressing out about people misunderstanding it!!
[runs back inside] the hilarious part too is that literally all 3 of those games wouldn’t be what they were if not for the incredibly varied list of inspirations that are worn on their sleeves
I see it like just passing the torch, keeping it all in the conversation (of art / games / music) & it rules tbqh
YEAH I played moon: Remix RPG Adventure when it released in English last year and I was like ohhhhhhh. oh. huh! I have a lot of thoughts about genres and games' legacies and stuff that had to get cut out of this piece for clarity and length but I think I'll be building them into their own piece soon!
To say with such confidence that the developers’ inspirations are those things that you know, too, and know well, is nothing short of delusion — especially when your frame of reference is limited to the world of video games and “geek” culture, while theirs may encompass old foreign films or the local traditions of Chile or Arabic love poetry or the impressionist art of Monét or any other manner of things.
Yes yes yes holy shit! Yes!!!!!!!! Great piece. You absolutely nailed it.
thanks for the kind words!! this is probs my favorite bit of the whole thing too so I'm grateful for the appreciation <33
it is a banger bit of prose and you should be proud! I'm excited to see & read more from you. As someone who had a sometimes frustrating reception to their work by people unfamiliar with my local culture I felt very seen!
I resonate with this so much... I get the Undertale comparison a lot because of Bossgame's visuals and all I can do is say, "yea, kind of, except..."
It's hard! I feel like as a developer I really need to start building the language to describe a game without using explicit references; it's tricky and the references are easy shorthand, but they're misleading, too. So many of my influences are more like "I borrowed some vibes" too, which makes it even harder...
This was a great read, thank you!!
tysm!! I think getting that vocabulary going is really tough, just because the reference soup has been conditioned into us so hard over the past, like, 20 years of games media, and there aren't a lot of consistently good examples. I do think referencing other games can serve a purpose quite often, just that it needs to be done carefully and sparingly. but right now it's a total shotgun blast on every indie game that exists so I didn't bother going over that LOL honestly I think the vibes-based references are some of the most helpful ones in terms of base level reader interest as long as the writer is honest about it; none of that "it's like if you combined x and y" bullshit lmao
This is dead-on, I talk about this a lot with fellow devs and it's gratifying to see it expressed fully!
thanks so much!! I was really spurred on to write this after I realized I had heard some variation of it from every dev I met, on top of all the comments I got on games as a streamer. btw I've been listening to PHD a lot while I work since it came out, that's just it absolute tune
“Excellent Frostpunk-at-sea 'em up The Pale Beyond is coming this February.”
What. The fuck. Does that mean.
Very funny and solid demonstration of the point.
LMAO thank you! I read RPS regularly so getting hit with that headline on a random Wednesday morning did something to me!!
There's a bit of "Industry Wisdom" I've heard before that you will probably be most successful if you're making something that's about 20% different than something already on the market. I think that it's true in a lot of ways. Success relies so much of being able to sell your game, and if you make something that is Popular Game but X you'll have something pretty easy to sell, that will make obvious headlines easy to write, and will make sense to people that show up to your steam page. And I think it's something players really do want. Games are investment of players time and money and so keeping genre convention while adding a new focus really will get people on board and enjoying an experience faster.
It's definitely rough trying to both make something different, and sell it enough to keep making games. And I think we're all worse off with fewer innovative games that take those hugely original directions. But it's a real risk to make them, and it sucks that storefronts, media, and players are all incentivized (mostly financially) to avoid something they can't understand quickly.
I'm aware of this concept broadly but this particular version — this 20% — is really interesting to me because it has a direct line to something in fashion, funnily enough! when Virgil Abloh joined Louis Vuitton as artistic director he quickly attracted a lot of controversy for his "3% theory," his idea that a design only had to be changed 3% to become a new design. there's a lot to this that translates into video games and indie games specifically, namely that this practice was already widespread in high fashion, but no one was willing to admit it (is every AAA developer not making one of two games right now?), and that his perspective and honesty largely comes from his experience as a streetwear designer; streetwear being a style largely created by and for marginalized people, namely Black people, and one that has an extremely low barrier to entry. Virgil brought Louis Vuitton into a new era of artistry, notoriety, and most importantly for LVMH, profitability, all using this core theory. I guess what I'm trying to say with all this is that making the decision to "rip something off" to make something popular, or just to make ends meet, is totally okay! and, I think it can lead to a lot of creativity in and of itself — there are several pieces from Virgil's time at LVMH that are some of my favorite and most desired of all time, and there's more than one runway show of his that I rewatch on a regular basis because they're beautiful pieces of art. he never did anything new, nor did he try to, but he did do it differently; his way, with his voice. they say nothing is original anymore and I think I'm inclined to agree, but also to not care. like I say at the end of the piece, people and their works are so complicated that you really could make something 97% borrowed and it would still be unique to me! I can only hope that those "safe" investments give way to more weird and innovative ones down the line
Huh, never heard that about fashion. That's super interesting.
I think AAA is probably shrinking the percent down, making a lot of sequels and core genre titles for reliable returns, but I do think the stuff that makes waves still sits around the 20% mark. And the stuff that inspires but doesn't end up selling is unfortunately over that mark. It's definitely the way riskier place to be but you see a lot of cool stuff on that side of the line.
As an artist and developer more focused on the visual side of things, I find aesthetics are often dismissed in this way. It's like there's this consensus term 'Realism' that stands in for 'quality' or 'good graphics' and everything else gets thrown into the big 'stylized graphics' bucket and overlooked. If you're lucky you might get a favorable comparison to Wind Waker or Jet Set Radio.
It's inconceivable that a developer would choose to avoid certain techniques or would reference art outside of other video games. Or that images themselves can convey meaning beyond budgetary scope or technical sophistication.
Anyway, excellent piece, it really resonated with me.
yeahhh I think visuals get this the worst, mostly due to a lot of gamers' extremely low frame of reference, but also because of the lack of familiarity with game engines and just how games work, like I said in another comment. I remember when Rollerdrome came out and everyone said it "reminded them of Sable" when both of them are overtly inspired by Moebius... y'know, one of the most influential sci-fi/fantasy artists of all time, lmao. and to your latter point: the cultural damage done by that old ass tumblr post, "the curtains don't represent his depression and lack of will to carry on, they're just f*cking blue" cannot be overstated! thanks for the kind words; the positive reception to a piece about something so negative is really heartening!
I am a huge offender of references and comparisons when it comes to talking about games. It is a crutch to real critique, but can serve as a good starting point when trying to convince someone to care. If I am writing or talking about a game I like, I am always trying to convey A.) positive qualities, and B.) a sense of shared taste between whoever I'm speaking with.
I think the problem is that saying Game X feels like Game Y does not exhibit a sense of taste at all. Unless applied with a great deal of specificity, it pretty much does the opposite. The Tunic/Zelda example from the article is great because the comparison is so apt and so easy, but you could write a whole thesis on the ways Tunic reckons with the themes/aesthetics/groundwork of Zelda 1 as a text. And that would be a great thing to write! But to simply throw a couple lines in your review that say "love letter to Game X, Y, and Z" does not make for good critique.
Even as a flagrant comparison-maker, the "love letter" one irks me to no end. I can't explain why, but every time I hear it my skin crawls.
Really amazing piece! Thanks so much for making it public, glad to have come across it
this is an amazing writeup! you really outdid yourself here, I'm gonna be thinking about this one for a bit
This is really good.
I feel like there's this weird general assumption that making games (or any cultural object) is additive. That if you just take enough "good" things from enough "good" games and combine them, you'll end up with an even better game. And that if you do this enough times, things will converge upon the final culmination of video games — the ur-game. It will be a perfectly balanced AAAA masterpiece, with all the improper game design of the past streamlined away through this process of selective breeding.
