Hiragana
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Sep 18, 2017
Jake should stop whining play Dwarf Fortress.I don't think his newest tumblr post (archive) has been posted yet
I didn't read all of it but I guess one of his main points is REEEE Notch called Zoe a cunt therefore Minecraft is bad.Building Stuff as a Power Fantasy
In theory, I am a huge huge fan of survival games/sims/strategy, the general category of “games where you are continuously building stuff.” In practice though, very very few ever scratch the itch properly, and I figure it’s worth taking the time to think about why that is.
Video games, in general, are escapist power fantasies. If we’re under a lot of stress and generally feeling powerless in life, we enjoy the head space a well designed game can provide where there are challenges we know we can overcome if we are persistent enough, and we are, in some way, better prepared or more awesome at things than we are in reality.
Games where the primary emphasis is on building things and generally mastering can hold a lot of appeal if one’s environment are particularly appealing if one feels particularly powerless and is living in a state where basic day to day functioning feels like an ordeal. If I’m sitting here under a pile of blankets and scraping out the last bits of peanut butter from a jar because the wind is blowing in through a hole in the wall and I can’t afford groceries, building a giant flying fortress with an elaborate fully automated infinite cake generator right next to the comfy couch facing the picture window is pretty damn appealing. But again, not in practice.
Big problem #1- Overcoming challenges. In the majority of games, challenges are something you actively have to go seek out. In an old school RPG I can sit around town as long as I want, all well rested and safe. When I’m good and ready, I can leave town, go find whatever dungeon, and explore it, and if that gets too hairy, I can run screaming back to town to heal up and prepare for my next expedition. In a platformer, the same applies. I enter a level, or head out into a new area from my nice safe health restoring save point on my own time,
Games where you build things up absolutely can structure things in a similar fashion (requiring constant forays further afield into more dangerous places to secure new unique resources for instance), and many do. For some reason though, it’s far more common to fail to provide any challenges at all to overcome (besides maybe the busywork of gathering materials), or to set up ever-increasing antagonistic forces that will, inevitably, overwhelm the player, destroy everything they’ve created, and basically force them to start over on a fresh save. I don’t want to say that’s just unilaterally bad game design, because I do see the appeal of roguelikes, but it is distinctly not something I want when I’m looking for these sorts of games.
Minecraft is a notable example of what not to do because it manages to make every mistake at once. World generation makes exploring a joy, but there’s no mechanical incentive to ever do so besides triangulating the end portal location. After you’ve tossed around enough torches to fully light an area, no monsters will ever appear again, and the game is just a sandbox. Leave a small unlit room somewhere though, and it will spawn an unending flood of monsters, including a couple that can smash anything you’ve built apart and ruin anything you try to do unless contained. Risk can either by 0 or 100, no gradation.
Big problem #2- A smooth sense of progression and discoverability. What I really want is to constantly be making new things that trivialize existing problems, and let me do new rad things with more problems to then overcome. Pulling that off is vanishingly rare. Subnautica does an amazing job of it. Early on, maintaining a steady supply of food and water is a time consuming (but safe) obstacle to progress, tethering you to the starting location. Teching up at first lengthens that tether, then cuts it, but the vehicles that let you explore further force you to contend with power needs and effective depth limits, which are circumvented with tech you can’t access without braving generally dangerous regions and creatures. And of course when you can finally get to the hardest place to reach, there’s an actual ending.
Typically, what people do instead is, again, have a constant, mounting, active threat that will inevitably doom the player (or make for a race against the clock to some other victory condition), or simply have no end game. All the challenges you’ll ever face are there from the start, and when they’re all properly overcome or managed, the game just stagnates, and any fun to be derived has to come from self-created sandbox goals.
Again, Minecraft is an interestingly terrible case, in that there is an end game, which does involve new fresh challenges, but… it’s also completely orthogonal to the normal experience of playing the game, and really to even pursue it at all basically requires you to use a wiki, and to familiarize yourself with the game mechanics to a degree where you’re exploiting and manipulating underpinning rules to a degree where you’re basically “solving” a Rubic’s Cube by prying it apart with a knife. And speaking of that sort of opacity…
Big problem #3- Games where you build stuff tend to become very complicated, as an intrinsic part of their nature, and also tend to be released while still in development. And, weirdly enough, it’s decidedly rare for developers to maintain nor eventually implement any sort of discoverability. For instance, just today I decided to take a look at Space Engineers, having heard they had redone the tutorial, which initially I’d largely bounced off of, because there is an awful lot to the game. The old tutorial was fairly bare bones, showing you how to harvest resources and construct things, frankly just showing off the potential of the engine by building it all as an incredibly complex transforming machine. Cool, but nothing to prepare you for really playing. The new tutorial doesn’t even teach you those basics. Just, movement controls and how to fire the weapons once you have a ship. Then you jump into the actual game and it’s… a menu of a couple hundred distinct parts you can plop into the game, requiring pretty complex combinations of harvestable resources, where combinations of several dozen assembled just so give you a functional spaceship, with functions you can automate… if you’re willing to write C# code for them. I don’t see how anyone besides the developers, or someone who’s been playing with test builds since day one could ever possibly get a handle on any of that. Particularly given big problem #1.
The fix to this is… be a good game designer, really. Present all the things you can create in the game with constraints and requirements and bread crumb trails, and a general teaching structure so that players learn what they need to do in a natural gradual slowly building way. Don’t just assume players will create their own tutorials and wikis and that that’ll be fine.
Big problem #4- For some reason, most games of this nature tend to be developed by absolutely hideous woman-hating racist scumbags who directly seek out people I know to make their lives a living hell. This… really isn’t an inherent flaw of the genre or something anyone can course correct on, but it’s a big part of why I’m so dissatisfied with the genre to date, and keen on laying out goals and pitfalls for new people trying to make games like this to keep in mind.
Subnautica again is one of the better examples currently existing, because so far as I’m aware, it only had ONE nazi involved in its development, as the music composer, and he was fired within 24 hours of that coming to public light. That’s at least better than Minecraft, whose moral black hole of a lead dev retired with well over a billion dollars to meet his every need while he sits around on twitter stalking trans women to hurl slurs at, the developers of Rimworld still controlling that game in full, giving interviews exclusively to Breitbart, or any game under the Stardock umbrella, a company where by policy women aren’t allowed to be on the same floor of the building as its CEO for their own safety.
So…. yeah, someone please make more games where I can relax and build things and overcome reasonable challenges on my own time please. Thanks.
Sounds like he wants a linear and safe experience, going against the grain for most survival games.
