mariken

It's funny, the more old, or janky, or unpolished a game is, the more likely I am to just take it at face value. It's always the super polished AAA zero friction games where I start getting mad about the designers. And even that's not fair, they're accomplishing what they set out to do, even if I don't like it... but it's weirdly harder for me to ignore.

to me there is no thing as bad games, just malicious games that predate on the player or computer, those i score poorly, if i suffer to experience them at all

Oh I found the comment button!

So the way I tend to view "Bad Game Design" is, I think of every game design decision as making Some Sense in the context of the work that it's in. For instance, farming health in a game might be a nice change in pacing. It's been proven to me time and again that always having full supplies and going high octane from one place to another just fatigues me of the game. I LIKE it when games slow down in emergent ways based on how my exploration went, actually.
Having a penalty for failure (be that running out of lives and restarting from an earlier part of the game, or otherwise) is incredibly important, because otherwise the player's actions have no consequences. It can be proven, again, that some players just don't take a game's mechanics seriously unless there are consequences for failure, and the harshness threshold just depends on the person.

It turns out, for people with harsher opinions about video game design decisions, that game designers do play their own games, and make decisions for a good reason. No developer wants their game to be bad or frustrating or inconvenient. That's pretty much the mantra you gotta live by: "No developer wants their game to be bad, so given that fact, why is this in the game?"

Videogames don't need to be universally constantly fun and satifying to be good is something more people need to internalise in general.

thinking the game is easy, a mindset to remember for being rewarding when some way of it being easy is found. yet may need to look elsewhere if still wondering how it is possible, but the energy from a tick of pretending it is easy creates valuable experience.

pacing is feels different by executive function. if you are put in a rest zone, you may still be thinking about the previous zone for 0-10 minutes. if the new zone isnt giving feedback about the previous zone it may be considered boring or hard.
i think a lot of what i may value behavioral aesthetically is tied in doing things like 'yes a rest zone time to rest.. etc' vs taking 10 mins to see what this zone says about the previous one which is still in mind.

its less tiring to think what the creator had in mind if it is not a matter of 'solve the design mystery of the one truth' but more like materials and looking at different contexts you've gathered it could effect your attention it. it is why everyone is important because often times an answer to something impossible is waiting in someone's random situation that you haven't seen before and would miss considering like the one corridor of a maze.

there was one game i was playing recently where the final level was way harder than the rest, and i died like 20 times, and ended up quitting the game for 2 years! Then i came back and played through all the early levels again for more practice and now it's one of my favorite games that i've played so many times.

if it was meaner and just gave me a Game Over when i was dying so much, to kick me back to the earlier levels right away, then i would've skipped that 2-year gap! 😆

your perspective here is really good!!

this is how i felt reading every review complaining about the combat or platforming or stuff in Northern Journey. No, actually, i think it's all beautiful and i'm going to treat it as such, and the fact that all your weapons suck ass is good and beautiful and helps me enjoy this

This also can help you enjoy "bad" games and systems more too, as a player! :) (or at least hate them less, haha)

I try to think about things this way, and I still can't wrap my head around Active Time Battle systems. I would love someone who likes them explaining what they achieve better than real turns or real action systems, it just seems like the worst of both worlds to me.

WAIT I didn't know you wrote this! I read this a while back and liked it a lot and never made the connection, haha