Ideally, I'd like to go a little less than four-ish weeks between updates here, but so it goes. In reality, the thing that's been blocking my writing is more or less the same as the thing I want to write about today, so permit a little bit of personal blogging:
For the last couple weeks, I decided to completely upend ~20 years of muscle memory by switching to a split ergonomic keyboard with a non-QWERTY layout[1]. What this means is that for a short while I have been relearning to type from the ground up while also steadily erasing any fallback muscle memory I had (a recent typing test puts me at ~42wpm for Colemak-DH and a ~77wpm QWERTY that is so full of typos[2] that the results are invalid). Against this skill-rebuilding backdrop, the games I have been playing, the books I have been reading and many other aspects of my life have been orbiting the same focal point: the merits of friction.
”Friction” being a very textural thing makes it feel like talking in the abstract is the harder approach, so I want to try to head into this through concrete examples of it showing up or being absent in the games I've been playing.
SIREN (Sony Computer Entertainment, 2003)
I'm really sad I had to stop streaming this game[3], as I started it as a kind of challenge, but I genuinely start getting tension headaches playing Siren for more than an hour at a time. On the other hand, it's this exact problem that makes me think it's one of the best games I've played all year, and certainly the most frictional since something like Unity of Command II[4]. The entire feeling of the game, to me, is encapsulated in the fact that all first-person viewing is controlled by absolute analogue stick position rather than relative movement. To look down at the floor, it's not enough to just tap the left stick down—you have to hold it steady at an angle, the shaking of your thumb under tension (that might be a me thing, I just have shaky hands) translating into camera unsteadiness. Every other mechanic, every mission's design, the secondary objectives and opaque progression through the entire game's overall structure[5] are all variously-scaled reflections of the fact that you have to keep your right thumb tensed just to look at something anything not right in front of you. My head starts hurting because I need to keep my brain tensed to execute the game's missions, to figure out which stage on the link navigator is the one I should be doing next. I keep it tensed, waiting for the patrol loops of the shibito to line up in a way that gives me an opening to make progress (and I've died often enough to feel that this progress is never guaranteed, even when it looks like it should be).
On the other hand, a friend of mine has described Siren as a comfort game. I didn't ask them to elaborate at the time, but I could see it: each stage is somewhat of a dollhouse, with maps that you gradually become familiar with as you play, enemy patrols that can be committed to memory, that sort of thing. I can see how it might become that with enough playthroughs, even though right now it causes the most discomfort I can remember a game causing me (which has been a very compelling thing to me so far!).
In the initial sketching out of this entry, I wanted to define friction as something that impedes smooth progress through a game & something that still remains after proficiency is reached and “difficulty” is diminished. I wonder if I'll still like that description when I'm done writing? Maybe it doesn't make sense to exclude raw difficulty from the definition: some friction is created from me not knowing where the mission objective is, some friction is created from the difficulty of executing a route to it. I can learn the layout of Hanuda, but my thumb will always feel uncomfortable holding the right stick at an angle.
I might just be overthinking it. Friction in games might also just be the same thing it is in physics: something that resists the motion of bodies sliding against one another; anything that prevents the player from just sliding from start to finish, passing whatever designed milestones along the way. It's something that fights against the player's desire to zone out into autopilot, and as such, something that is increasingly scarce in “big” games as the war for Quality of Life[6] rages on.
NEO: The World Ends With You (Square Enix, h.a.n.d., 2021)
I'm still working my way through this thing, and I don't want to turn this into a flash review of the game, so for now all I'll say is this is a deeply frictionless game, to kind of a puzzling degree. Malleable difficulty was a feature of the DS original, sure, but the dual-screen back and forth combat of that game still demanded a minimum of some kind of attention. Here all of that novelty is replaced by various combinations of tapping or holding face buttons, something literally anyone already knows how to do assuming NEO TWEWY isn't their first ever videogame, and it ends up meaning that at its most “reduced”, the hardest part of a fight might as well be just sitting through the loading screen.
It's not that I'm against variable difficulty, and I get the reason for “story mode” type options, but in this game it creates a very hollow feeling when coupled with the fact that I am getting nothing out of the base combat design at all. I know I don't have to play on easy mode, but when the hard mode doesn't feel good, where do I put myself?
Dark Souls might be one of the most prominent examples of people reintroducing friction back into a game once they've wrung it dry (Can you beat X with only Y?[7] etc.), but I think part of the appeal there is that there is a game world that reacts fruitfully to that reintroduction: the texture of enemy placement and level layout becomes tangible again if you choose to not use armour, not level stamina, etc. In NEO TWEWY every non-story fight is entirely optional, so I just feel like an idiot for playing it on Hard mode.
Recently there's been a pretty good clip floating around of a Dodgers vs. A's game where one of the commentators states that the reason time goes by faster as an adult is due to a lower amount of novel experiences that “slow down time for you”. The other commentator, paraphrasing, goes “How do I slow down time? Am I gonna feel any better?”. His question is answered by a 3-run dinger from Andy Pages.
I keep thinking about those two guys, especially the more depressed sounding one, whenever I boot up Steam, whenever I make the choice to boot up Juufuutei Raden's Guide for Pixel Museum rather than like, Decade or Roadwarden or finally trying out Unlimited Saga. There's probably nothing inherently wrong with passing some time with a little Picross, and I don't know if it's reasonable to make every single moment a novel experience (and I would probably not like videogames if I was fully committed to that anxiety), but sometimes I'm annoyed by how easy and enticing it is to pick the slip-n-slide over anything else.
Umamusume: Pretty Derby (Cygames, 2021)
In ~2019 I decided to try and grind out some postgame units in Disgaea V, an exercise that felt like smoking the whole pack of gradual character stat raising/grinding at once. I've successfully bounced off of every single gacha game I've tried since then.
When I saw people describing the gameplay of Umamusume: Pretty Derby as a roguelite mix of sports management and raising simulator, I thought “hey, what the hell, why not?”. And, I have to admit: that is technically the shape of the gameplay loop, yes! And I was pretty entertained by it for a couple days, until I hit that universal gacha transition point—getting proficient at the gameplay loop and realising it's going to be weeks of that on repeat until you're allowed into the next tier of activity. Turns out this kind of reliable proficiency completely kills my interest in a roguelite, where part of the appeal is at least the illusion that you might not be able to win every run, and with a flowchart strategy at that.
I'm daydreaming of a non-gacha Umamusume, developed by like Artdink, where you manage an entire stable, its training equipment, pairing up trainers to horses, developing your franchise in a career mode that's not designed around making you feel like you have to log in every day. A gacha game simply by virtue of its purpose can never fill the shape of the genre it's hinting at.
The friction in Umamusume, as with all gacha, ends up being how fucking annoying it is to do anything that isn't the “fun” part (the roguelite career mode). The menus are as slow as any other gacha, there's about as many trivial notifications about rewards you can get or places you can funnel your currencies into. The requisite gacha “daily gold and something else grinding” missions feel downright vestigial, having nothing to do with the fun part of the game, and yet you have to keep up with them every day, spending minutes looking at loading screens and skipping past results you've seen dozens of times before. Not all friction is the good kind, some of it is there just to make you stare at the premium currency shop a little while longer.
Friction and polish
Earlier I tried defining friction as something besides sheer difficulty, and as something counter to designer-y ideas of “quality of life”. Maybe it's even simpler than the physics comparison. Maybe friction is what's left in places that are left unpolished. Not to say it's all unintentional—as a painter, you get to pick which areas remain rough—but maybe it's hard to create “authentic” friction the same way it's hard to fake impasto? Hence why a really well designed & fine tuned roguelite can certainly be hard, but also frictionless at the same time. Hence the insurmountable gap between the inconsistent, frequently sloppy FPS games of two decades ago and so many of the steam-store-tag-“Boomer Shooter”-s of the last ~6 years.
I will always remember the path from Seyda Neen to Balmora to Arkngthand[8], the silt strider station in Ald'ruhn and the long hike up to the Urshilaku camp. I could not tell you a single thing about the world map of Skyrim aside from the colours being nicest in the southwest zone. I don't think the fact that I have like 1.5x more hours in Skyrim than in Morrowind is incongruent with the fact that I barely remember any of it. Surely memories form not just from spending time, but from feeling it too. Friction, being texture, is an aid.
It's not that I think one is objectively better than the other. I have my preferences, of course, but everyone gets to draw a line in the sand on how much friction is too much. Do you play games to pass the time, or to slow it down? How about the market? This is once again, I think, a case of the creative potential of the medium being stifled by the need to make $100000000000 on every release. How do we create systems that make another kind of game possible, played, beloved and sustainable?
For some further reading at this moment, here's 2024 Melos Han-Tani on memorable moments in older Pokémon games.
Colemak-DH specifically, in case anyone's wondering and hasn't heard me say “I use Colemak-DH btw” yet. I'm sure there might be an even more ergonomic/faster layouts, but my particular keyboard firmware came with a regular Colemak layout anyway, and I'm generally wary of going too far outside of defaults in most programs. At this point you might ask why even go for non-QWERTY in that case, to which I can only say 1. it felt like something to do[9] 2. the layout lives in my keyboard's firmware, which feels somehow more “secure”. ↩︎
Not to imply that I'm any less sloppy on Colemak-DH. You can assume that most words in this entry have something like 2-3 backspaces behind them. ↩︎
It is interesting to me how “good game” and “good stream game” are frequently entirely orthogonal. Not a fascinating idea by itself, but I think there's something to 1. the fact that watching a game being played, especially in the vaguely interactive format of a livestream, is a way for many people to experience a game without any of the friction of playing/mastering it (i.e. watching a livestream of a game is more than just seeing it happen—see how many viewers of Europa Universalis IV or other strategy games use “we” to describe the streamer's position), 2. the prominence of certain genres/intensities of games in stream content (viz. everything in the “post-Balatro” group) affecting the kinds of games that get made at all. Does anyone want to play Trickshot Simulator in solitude?) ↩︎
Since it's not a game I've been playing recently, but it still pertains to friction, I just want to note an interesting moment in Unity of Command II's save mechanics. Specifically, the fact that there are none: you start a campaign, you get one save slot. You get to save between missions, and that's it. For a game with persistent (and generally very fragile) units across a 30-something mission campaign to enforce ironman rules with no alternative seems unhinged, but I kind of like what happens around that hard rule. Being a PC game, it is relatively easy to just copy-paste save files and reload your campaign, but the added alt-tabbing and menuing creates just enough of a time/convenience task that I ended up only doing it only a handful times in total. This kind of metagaming is maybe outside of the scope of the game's design (though leaving save files unencrypted and accessible is arguably also a game design decision), but the friction it creates/alleviates is interesting to me. ↩︎
I frequently find myself thinking “thank fuck it's at least separated into stages”. Obviously some other things would have to move around to accomodate the structure, but a Siren that was a single contiguous playthrough would feel insurmountable, compared to Siren as it is, which feels just barely surmountable, enough to not give up. ↩︎
This is one of those awesome umbrella terms that unfortunately gets expanded to mean literally anything from “being able to change to a more readable font for large blocks of text” to “removing item weight because inventory management is boring”. Here I'm talking about the latter form of QoL. ↩︎
As an aside, I've watched enough of these reach a point where the author goes “well this part is impossible to do with Y so I unequipped Y to get through it” to be completely disillusioned with this genre. Wouldn't it be more interesting/honest to just end the video at that point? ↩︎
and that motherfucker Snowy Granius and his Bone Guard ↩︎
Speaking of “something to do”, this post is being written deep from the mines of neovim, which I spent a good portion of late June setting up for future coding projects. I just got done installing a wordcount/reading time plugin specifically for
TLblog posts! Look at me! I love tinkering. ↩︎