What VIDEO GAME(s) have you been playing?

The coop is incredible, SAN. You will love it

I'm sufficiently chastised, Eric, thanks.

I guess it just feels that way to me because I think of games I've liked in the past: Ratchet and Clank series, Castlevania SOTN, and others like that, and when I look for something similar it always seems to have "EPIC HARD BOSSES!" or "SUPER CHALLENGING GAMEPLAY" or "MASTER 8000 WEAPONS TO FIND THE PERFECT TAKEDOWN" or whatever in it. Or instead of just being something like "jump on the platforms and shoot the robots and get the gems" it's some weirdo situation-hacking thing where whatever you do is carried over into the next level so you have to do things that will then cascade into something else or some other meta stuff like that.

Like, I enjoyed that game about the little yarn golem that just had to make it across the screen. It was fun, stuff was fun to figure out, and it wasn't anything crazy complicated or hard. Hell, I liked Fez until it cralwed up its own ass (and until it gave me an impossible-for-me rising water level that I bailed out on). I don't need a new game to redefine the genre or make me re-examine everything I thought I new about shooting aliens with a laser gun. I just wanna bust and shoot stuff, that's all.

I am pro-difficulty and anti-story. Especially story in that broad, “fill in the blanks in your head” style. What a waste of my time.

That being said, I think we can finally stop making every game be Dark Souls.

The discussions that typically surround the get gud crowd and so on are generally stupid on both sides of the fence. Nobody will like all games, and anyone who expects all games to be catered to their very specific personal taste is both an idiot and mental.

If someone doesn’t like a game, I move on. If someone loves a game I can’t stand, who gives a shit? The whole point of gaming is to enjoy precious time to myself doing something I enjoy. I expect others will do the same.

If someone tells me how to drink my scotch, I’m inclined to punch them right in the balls. If that fucking guy puts pepper on my fucking eggs again I’m going to go feral on his bitch ass face. Don’t pepper my fucking eggs, Marv. Don’t need some random internet spaz to tell me if I should enjoy Dark Souls or not (I like it!)

Erik Twice wrote: I've said this before, on Twitter and elsewhere but I think the biggest obstacle to a good gaming experience today is not game design, but players. The way we approach games, the way we react to them is not conductive to great play experiences. We want to put less and less effort in, to treat games as disposable and we are quick to complain about "negative play experiences" instead of managing them and turn them into positives. We are increasingly less willing to pay the cost of fun, to our detriment.

This has a nice deconstructive allure but something about it doesn't quite work for me. When you flip the script and make player expectation a "problem" you're effectively saying that consumers don't know how to consume the products of a market they are driving. By what rules/standards does that work? This only makes sense if you take what is in fact an idiosyncratic sense of "great play experiences" and the inherent value signified by the "cost of fun" and generalize that outward into a falsely objective sense of "correct" "great" experience management. I think consumers of AAA popcorn (about 90% of that massive list you posted) know perfectly well how to enjoy those games.

The problem for me lies somewhere between that pile of AAA sh... stuff and the indie space where actual creativity is happening.

The latter is the space that I prefer to occasionally dip into when I choose to play a video game, mostly because it contains those platformers everyone else has mentioned here but also those quiet corners of self-prompted user creativity or narrative investment such as walking/exploration simulators or stuff like Stardew Valley.

Maybe I have a false sense of the place/proportion of these games in the larger indie space, but gauging from various surfacing lists on my Steam account (curations, recommendations, etc), it does feel like they are increasingly becoming blips in the miasma of "git gud" ethos games. It's become almost like a video game form of BDSM power dynamics wrapped in dopamine cycles, and it does seem to be creeping into a lot of the design space.

And like others have stated, to a certain age group this leads to the feeling that we have collectively, generationally, perceived something unique during our experience of the history & evolution of gaming that has largely been left by the wayside or lost in the current generation's own myopic and/or hyper-specifically relevant perspectives on what made these older designs so compelling.

It feels like this new audience is fetishizing older artifacts that now give them a sense of domination/mastery (as Legomancer stated, a conspicuously contemporary social drive) that has only amplified in value because of its direct contrast to the creative bankruptcy of the AAA sphere. It's effectively a backlash against the increasing popularization and dilution of the play space, ironically evangelized and memefied to hell and back by YouTube influencers.

It's off-putting to me.

Some of us just want to chill with a moderately challenging, beautiful, explorative platformer without feeling the need to demonstrate our post-millenial malaise at corporate monetization or the "dumbing down" of {insert culturally gatekept product of choice}, and gitting gud at any overdesigned difficulty wall has been thrown into the latest platformer because that's apparently just how it's done now.

The aspects that games once strove toward in spite of their technical limits (while formalizing around some of those limits) no longer seem to be sufficient. Exploration isn't enough. Beauty and contemplation aren't enough. Control fluency by design isn't enough. Anything that a player would have voluntarily pursued because the game is simply well made, engaging, and wonder-inducing isn't enough. It now has to re-impose and double down on limits but these are mostly stood up before the player rather than taken as formal or technical design restrictions. Games must now resist, gatekeep, exercise your endurance, assess your hard won ability to see through systems and manipulate them rather than simply revel in them for awhile. Otherwise, why videogame?

To me, this is beginning to feel like an imposition, like an artificial dopamine resilience test injected into something that should perhaps, maybe, not try so fucking hard.

Go play FEZ, folks. Hits all these marks. Nice platforming, beautiful game, non-hostile. As hard as you want it to be.

Frohike wrote: This has a nice deconstructive allure but something about it doesn't quite work for me. When you flip the script and make player expectation a "problem" you're effectively saying that consumers don't know how to consume the products of a market they are driving. By what rules/standards does that work? This only makes sense if you take what is in fact an idiosyncratic sense of "great play experiences" and the inherent value signified by the "cost of fun" and generalize that outward into a falsely objective sense of "correct" "great" experience management. I think consumers of AAA popcorn (about 90% of that massive list you posted) know perfectly well how to enjoy those games.

I guess it's is a bit like that on some level, but for me it's really about something simpler.

Games are an interative medium. The way players approach games and how they respond to them has a large impact on the quality of the experience. I know all art is dialectical and all that, but games are unique in how much they depend on the audience to work. They ask stuff from us in order to work, some of which is obvious and some which is not.

For example, if you want to play a boardgame you have to sit down and read the rules. Spending effort and time to learn these rules is necessary to play the game, it's part of the "cost" of playing it. If you don't pay that cost, you can't play the game and have fun. Reading the rules is part of the "cost of fun", so as to speak.

For most of their existence, games had a very high cost. They required a lot of effort and time just to know about them, they were costly and often required a bunch of arcane knowledge like managing extended memory. Little thought went into interface design or tutorials because there was little competition. Players had to put up with it or not play anything at all. But as competition grew stronger and games widened its horizons, designers worked on lowering this cost.

And this is more than fair! Like I said, games are much better now and there's far less bullshit to wade through before getting to the fun. We no longer have to play game developer to see which of the dozen variants Avalon Hill included actually works or read through terribly formated cards and poorly playtested scenarios. But as the cost of fun goes down, so does the "budget" the designer has to provide a quality experience and players are increasingly unwilling to pay even the smallest of personal costs.

Because a large part of the cost is not "learning arcane rules", but also learning to cope with defeat and things going wrong and respecting the people we play with. There's a cost to learning how to play a game, strategically, and understanding how it works. But I see players becoming less and less willing to have a learning game or play a game in which they can lose hard the first game or so on.

The result are game experiences that are inevitably lesser. You cannot have a game as thematic as The Republic of Rome without putting your emotions on the line and you can't play Netrunner without some introspection and learning. I think people are making a short-sighted and - most importantly - poorly informed choice that worsens how they experience games.

I think this opens a lot of questions and details and I haven't posted many examples but I hope my point gets across a bit better. I'm actually writting about this topic so I would love to hear your thoughts.

Legomancer wrote: I'm sufficiently chastised, Eric, thanks.

Hey, sorry man, didnt want to come across this way. I often sound far harsher in writing and in English than I do in reality.

jeb wrote: Go play FEZ, folks. Hits all these marks. Nice platforming, beautiful game, non-hostile. As hard as you want it to be.

Fez is a cool game. I know it's a bit pretentious, but I didn't mind that.

I think we should have a new thread for this. I also feel that I find it more difficult to like games. Like, substantially more difficult. I'm not sure whether it's from lack of effort (as Erik said), or simply I know better. That there are better ways to do something. That I can now pinpoint exactly what bothers me.

For example, I always play my favorite 4X (Warlock) in the easiest difficulty setting. Last weekend I bumped it up slightly (still in casual, mind you). Then my level 5 Soldier got OHKO'ed by a Greater Fire Elemental on the Portal right next to my home city. Then I remember, yeah that part really sucked (the map building that got high level neutral city or these high level critters surround you at the beginning of a game). That's why I played on wimpy mode.

I dunno, a game that kicks me out because my skill level doesn't meet the requirement is definitely a lesser experience than one that I can reduce the difficulty to meet my skill level and available time, and then see through to the end.

It's also, like, possible that people play games for different reasons, and get different things out of them. You might play for challenge, and enjoy failing repeatedly until you get enough skill to finish, and couldn't care less about environment and story. I might love interactive storytelling and exploring a well-realized environment, but because of brain chemistry, can't handle repeated failure. It's cool that yeah, not all games are for everyone. But when a game contains the stuff that I like, but restricts me because of a no-compromises approach to difficulty, that's hard. What's good difficult and what's too difficult to overcome is going to vary by person.

Think of it this way: we're both shopping for cars. You have fifty grand to spend, I'm making minimum wage. You're looking at a car that costs sixty thousand. I say I'd love to get that car, and you say "Well, just work a little more and you'll be able to afford it. That's what I'm doing." Except you only have to work a little harder, and I have to work WAY harder to afford that car, and frankly, probably never will. Same thing with difficulty. It's not a matter of I'm not willing to pay the price, it's that I legit don't think I have enough hours and mental spoons to devote, and possibly won't be able to pay it anyway.

The obvious counter is "well, just play a different game, or maybe don't play games at all." Except that implies that game worlds are interchangeable. They're not. Yes, No Man's Sky lets you explore infinite worlds, but none of them are the world of Bloodborne or Dark Souls 3 or Hollow Knight. I want to explore that world, and that world is unique to that game. And watching a movie or reading a book in a similar style isn't the same either, because the interactive exploration of games is unique.

Im in a bit of a lull and routine in video games now

Just playing Battle Ages, Prominence Poker and a little bit of Disney Infinity

I’ll probably get Red Dead Redemption 2 but im actually half considering getting back into the grind and getting Black Ops IV...

...Hmm. To a dark place this line of thought will carry us. Great care we must take...


Update: just preordered Red Dead Redemption 2. First preorder since Halo 3. First game purchase in at least six months. Rockstar can do no wrong in my books. Can’t wait!

86 gig?! Gotta make some room... goodbye Destiny 2 and good riddance

Still playing Overwatch. Mostly working on tanking now, since no one seems to want to do it.

I've picked Dragon Quest IX back up after starting a DQ XI game on the PS4. Still a sucker for JRPGs for some reason.

Chaz wrote: Think of it this way: we're both shopping for cars. You have fifty grand to spend, I'm making minimum wage. You're looking at a car that costs sixty thousand. I say I'd love to get that car, and you say "Well, just work a little more and you'll be able to afford it. That's what I'm doing." Except you only have to work a little harder, and I have to work WAY harder to afford that car, and frankly, probably never will. Same thing with difficulty. It's not a matter of I'm not willing to pay the price, it's that I legit don't think I have enough hours and mental spoons to devote, and possibly won't be able to pay it anyway.

The obvious counter is "well, just play a different game, or maybe don't play games at all." Except that implies that game worlds are interchangeable. They're not. Yes, No Man's Sky lets you explore infinite worlds, but none of them are the world of Bloodborne or Dark Souls 3 or Hollow Knight. I want to explore that world, and that world is unique to that game. And watching a movie or reading a book in a similar style isn't the same either, because the interactive exploration of games is unique.

Just let designers make the games they want to make in the way they see fit (because they will anyways lol). If you can’t play Dark Souls 3, sure it sucks. But From doesn’t owe you that game world to explore. They don’t owe anything to anyone, including the hardcore crowd. They can turn Dark Souls 4 into a rhythm game if they want out of spite. No matter what they do someone will be pissed, so they’ve likey just stopped giving a shit and balance keeping customers happy with enjoying the work they produce.

I love Mario, but I’d slowly teabag a lawn trimmer rather than play hours and hours of Mario Party. I can think of ways Nintendo could change the series that would make it great for me, but it’s their damn game to do with as they please so I skip it. There are enough games now to keep us all occupied for the next decade even if picky as hell, so who cares?

Expecting all games to be suitable for everyone will result in an industry even more filled with generic trash than it is. Nobody will be happy with that. So designers need to stop listening to gamers altogether and push the medium forward in spite of the wants of their fans.

Mario Party is the best!!

Black Barney wrote: Mario Party is the best!!

It’s certainly better with government supplied weed!