In the first wave of capital-I Indie, the developer as star auteur emerged, and with it there was a strong undercurrent of game design traditionalism; that AAA had lost its way, and in bloated capitalist money-grabbing had alienated the true gamers. Many of these developers promised to deliver games that made you feel like a kid again, as good as you remembered and better. They understood Game Design as applied science and they were cutting out the corporate middleman, and also could analyze and discard the awkward, naive, and janky parts to extract that core crystal of Good Game Design. Philosophically you still see this sort of undercurrent: Early games were good by accident and coincidence, but now that we understand game design, we can craft simple, elegant experiences, iterated on lovingly and blended into a pure perfect gamer's juice we all sup upon like delectable ambrosia.
In the late 00s and early 10s, simplicity and elegance in code, art, and design felt like a sharp contrast to AAA at the time. Thinking very concretely and specifically about the nuts and bolts of game design was and is an important step in understanding how games work and what they do, but then as now there is a tendency to think that this is all games are--there is the Game, and there is the window dressing. There is platonic code and elegance in the heart of the universe, and there is bullshit. The frame data is the Real game, the math that drives creation, and the animation is pretty but deceptive flesh that will ultimately betray, in a kind of gamer's Manichaen heresy.
But Heresy is not native to the world. It is but a contrivance. All things can be conjoined. And recently I've watched as simple, elegant, mechanics-focused puzzle game have given way for games that are stranger and weirder, that don't feel the same need to make sure the mechanics are as simple and elegant and polished as possible, that being so might not be the only way to be a good game, or only way to do Good Game Design, or the only way to demonstrate you know what you're doing. If there was a tendency to think of old games as diamonds in the rough that just needed to be polished and understood to be perfected, now there is much more of a movement to go back to older games and look at everything that seemed broken and unnecessary and treating those parts as valid artistic goals and intentional design choices. Is that jank, cruft, or friction actually an unnecessary hindrance, or is it a part of the experience?
Embracing the complexity and the cruft also means appreciating the Whole Game as if every part was equally important, not just the design and code. At GDC I gave a talk about how I wanted much weirder games because I wanted games made from the heart, about ugly and unwanted feelings; this is the other half of the conversation, about ugly and wanted mechanics and art that should be studied and celebrated and used creatively.
Being abrasive or 'wrong' can be a goal. Cruely Squad embraces how much it can look and feel like a huge, cacophonous mess, and is filled with systems that build on that same bizarre mess. It's not a stripped down Deus Ex; it's an "immersive sim" that rather than take on the burden of trying to simulate a whole world, it simulates only the most abrasive and insane parts of murder capitalism, with fishing and a stock market that make the hell worse and more complicated. Why do you reload by flicking the mouse instead of anything reasonable? Because you can do anything in a video game, and abrasion is just another color of paint on your canvas.
I also really enjoy Sylvie's games for similar reasons; she's often taking absurd premises or mechanics that feel 'incorrect' very seriously and designing games around a totally different set of assumptions than a puzzle platformer following what is commonly assumed to be 'correct' design. A platformer should have jumps that behave in this particular way and there should be coyote time to smooth out their experience invisibly so the game behaves in a way that the player would expect to be physically if cartoonishly accurate. Instead, many of Sylvie's games have jumps that feel like a naive programmer's first attempt at making a jump with none of that knowledge of how a jump is 'supposed' to work in a platformer, and then building a whole game whose mechanics explore the possibilities of what it would be like to play with this 'wrong' type of jumping. In doing so, she's exploring very interesting spaces that designers typically are taught to not find worth exploring, while asking the player to play with and take seriously a way of playing they've been taught to feel is wrong.
And there are some games only exist inside of complexity, and cannot be simplified without losing something essential, like fighting games or card games or psx jrpgs. Without the complex interactions of systems, there often isn't actually a pure and naked core of game design that is inherently fun and better. Many of these game genres tend to buckle when you simplify them too much, because the systems are too deterministic and brittle and when there isn't enough room you don't get the experience of mastery and exploration that are so important. These games NEED bullshit, and the bullshit is the best part. You can reduce these games if you want, and often the result is not a perfect gamer's crystal that Solves the genre. Sometimes even from the perspective of entirely mechanics-focused design, there's just nothing that can be gained and much to lose from trying to get too simple.
As an artist, I do believe there's as much craft and skill involved in making a game that feels strange, janky, abrasive, or 'wrong' and that like any feeling and every artistic tool, it is valid and human. Every part of the game is the Real Game, even the failed and wrong parts. And are they truly failed or wrong? Can even a failed and wrong tool be useful? Maybe history didn't end in late aughts and maybe game design isn't solved.
I appreciate you engaging sincerely! I actually basically agree with what you're saying; I wanted to make it difficult to interpret what I'm saying as meaning I'm against ANY criticism of these sorts of games (though I might have not succeeded). What I'm saying is that you need to be really, really intentional about that criticism. "I understand what they're doing and I still hate it" is a completely valid response.
I would compare what I am seeing from certain games (like Sylvie's, or Cruelty Squad, or any number of others) as extremely intentional and extremely deft in their execution. I do think that's different from being wrong on accident! Sometimes that might be because the game is unavoidably abrasive in a way that it doesn't have to be. I think you can still make mistakes and make games that could be better if you just did x,y,z. I do think, like our analogous movements in fine arts, it's important to study the fundamentals and source materials in order to deconstruct them. I think Cruelty Squad and Sylvie's games clearly demonstrate this knowledge, though!
I don't think QoL is evil or will polish the soul out of your game, but I do think sometimes we don't actually know the correct answers to what will make something better. Part of me does genuinely just wanna give very small indies some slack to be weird because I work at a big studio and have to think about something with enough appeal to keep all of us employed and thus can't really do that, and I find their ideas appealing and fascinating and often find raw original games without a ton of polish much more inspiring than games without that sort of strong vision. Right now, for a variety of reasons, I think it's important to take that stand. Of course, I'm also very forgiving of a little imperfection, especially dependent on the artist and context, but I'm talking about intentional complexity most specifically, and I do think the difference is apparent when you analyze it.
Finding the line between expecting the absolute best in art and recognizing that the flaws are what makes it human will forever be difficult. Right now, I think I'm feeling very encouraged and inspired by developers embracing complexity and offputting feelings as valid design spaces to explore, partially because I'm very familiar at this point with the fundamentals, so that's why I felt it was important to take a stand on the side I did.
But if I was going to make a more polished version of the essay I wrote, here are some more explicit takeaways:
"Do I really, really know if I could "fix" that game without removing a load-bearing element from it?"
This one is actually just about pure nuts and bolts design. I've seen many attempts to "solve" fighting games, as if there were simple and obvious solutions that would solve all their issues. It turns out making everyone happy with both the accessibility and challenge is insanely hard, and if you want to both preserve complexity and introduce accessibility, you need to make very big lateral changes to design. I think this proposal is still a little controversial, and part of what inspired the essay in the first place, especially compared to some early indies who famously proposed they could solve it and asked constantly why no one else was doing the brilliant thing they thought of. I've naively thought I could simplify something complex and found out EXACTLY why Other Game Developers Don't Do This.
I've also had this experience many times with even huge, mainstream game genres that I've thought were just "not for me"; after spending a while with their communities, I understand what the appeal is even if it's not for me. My initial impressions were "this is stupid, and it could easily be solved in THIS way" and it turned out I was the naive one, and knew nothing. It happened with fighting games, and has happened with other genres too. So I want to extend some of that grace to smaller titles too.
"Would it be possible for this game to be made otherwise?"
I think we'd agree that if the only way we could get Void Stranger is the way we got it, we'd rather have it, right? We couldn't even be asking the question of what a more 'accessible' version of it would be if it didn't exist. That doesn't mean we can't ask if it could do better, or if it could do something different, or if we could make our on version that focused on the qualities we valued. It's just to recognize that the game is worth valuing and analyzing and taking serious as is. Not immediately jumping to the conclusion that it "should" be different or "needs" to be fixed. I don't think you're saying that to be clear! We should just look at the offputting parts by the feelings they create, and how they converge with or push against what the other parts of the game are saying and doing. Simply looking at the game without automatically judging parts as 'correct' or 'incorrect' but whether the game succeeds or fails on its own merits. That last point is the most crucial and important for me.
"Is what's offputting inextricable from its appeal?"
This point is maybe more about a different kind of friction, but I think it's an important one too. I think about friction a bit like content; some kinds are completely unacceptable to me, some are tolerable, and others are the only thing I want. I won't say that any content is beyond criticism, but I think there are times where someone's niche offputting fetish (for mechanics or otherwise) is the whole thing. I'm thinking about this in the context of a recent history of queer pvp over whose fetish is okay and who should be sent to the gulags which certainly crossed the line between genuine and sincere criticism, but that's part of the whole thing: how much room do you allow for something? I think there's a lot you could say that is not well executed about games that deal with extreme content, for instance; that they fumble and don't pull off what they're trying to say and leave the viewer feeling uncomfortable in a bad way. It's just that there does need to be some leeway for them to find what's right, because it's impossible to really know for sure. There is a space that has to exist there, and I'm not saying you can't be critical, but that for a while it felt like there was absolutely no breathing room whatsoever. So I think creating that space, however we do so, is also very important. To do that, I'm encouraging people to be more free with what they do. Almost certainly there will be a time when we go back to fundamentals; that's just how art moves.
