I'll use the first entry in TERMINAL_LEVY to establish what I feel like is going to be one of the long-term ideas explored by the whole project: that games[1] do not need to be fun, or, more broadly, that videogames should more often be about something other than themselves. This entry is less of an exhaustive treaty on this idea and more of an initial demarcation (partly because it's a very big idea with a lot of possible approaches, partly because I should stop writing this entry and move on to further ones).
It's a thought I keep having and re-having more often as I get exposed to the kinds of products that show up on games announcement shows, social media feeds and in the periphery of game-making software tutorials, so it's admittedly a thought borne from a certain stratum of videogames[2]. Still, for that particular set, I feel increasingly strongly that the landscape is a bunch of very talented people making a lot of incredibly bland (and self-serving) work.
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It's not necessarily a bad thing for a videogame to be a toy (it is maybe the baseline of what a videogame is), but when the vast majority of production in the medium seems not just content to make toys but also directing most of its resources towards the goal of making the toys more efficient (at being 'fun'), it kind of bums me out. There's glimpses of people grasping at very interesting ideas, people executing masterfully within one of the many fields that overlap in game production, but the end results often feel like less than the sum of the effort behind them. It doesn't take a lot of observation to come to the conclusion that the landscape of the videogame industry is not structured in a way to encourage interesting work at all. The parts of the medium that are directly beholden to public stock trading mechanics are especially a wash. I can't really begrudge any solo dev for trying to make a living doing some kind of creative work either, though. What I want to figure out is this: what sort of motivations can there be for making games that are strong enough to be a compelling alternative to the profit motive[3]? What could the design process be based on instead of data-driven (or data-chasing) ideas of user experience & product-market fit? Would it still be accurate to talk of a “design process” without those?
And, again, what I'm talking about is a little bit of a frequency illusion: “you can parry a nuke in my game now” fits into a tweet way easier than trying to describe what makes your game beautiful and true, so of course it's easy to get the impression that most game dev is actively focused on fun stuff that spreads fast. Attempts at communicating what makes a particular indie game appealing aside from its mechanics frequently just end up feeling like shorthand marketing based on aesthetic reference points too, though. The second easy observation of this piece is that it's difficult to speak & hear of worthwhile ideas in a mode of communication that is most closely related to marketing. The fact that it's a frequency illusion is also part of the problem I'm trying to chip away at here. I want the interesting stuff to come up at least as frequently as the stuff I find hollow! I want there to be more motive and structure to make and share games that aren't primarily meant to be fun, and I want there to be avenues of discussion that aren't structured around being catchy on social media websites[4].
I'm at least fortunate enough to find things like cécile richard's games, domino club, some of KIRA's work, or droqen's “kill gameplay” thought (which is decently elucidated in The End of Gameplay, but I almost like the conversations that happen in reaction to it more than the thought itself, like droqen's responses to TEoG's steam reviews (which, by the way, I love this Kinopio patform thing) or this reply-essay or sylvie's response as well) which make me feel a little calmer that at least some people are also[5] thinking about these things and are also exploring the other ~90% of what's possible with videogames. I'm just greedy and I want more, and I want it to be more in my face.
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Sort-of observing the ~500th round of “are games art?”[6] discourse on twitter led me to a pretty funny tweet saying “interactivity is obviously the issue?”[7], which I think was mainly a joke about the (intentionally simplistic) diagram that sparked off the whole thing, but it showed up in front of me with the context of “kill gameplay” somewhat fresh in my mind & got me thinking again. Is interactivity at fault in the thing I'm describing—is it always joined to fun? I don't think it is for me, at least. In a recent interview with Liz Ryerson, droqen uses the metaphor of “a little treasure chest at the bottom of a big ocean” to illustrate gameplay as being a thing that gets in the way of the 'true' thing being communicated by a game. Interactivity feels like it's often the main variable determining whether a videogame is just a toy or something else, and there's certainly a lot of merit in experimenting with reduction in a medium that's constantly pushed in the direction of total excess. On the other hand, I've also read plenty of books that don't go anywhere beyond “being fun", and I think there's a lot of potential in making someone swim for the treasure too[8].
I think playing a bunch of Suda51 games this year also helped me formulate this feeling & realize that there is something here for me other than just “wanting less gameplay". Out of the videogames I've played that were produced within standard industry modes, his works have been the most consistent in getting at this feeling. To be fair, it's a relatively small sample size (The Silver Case, Flower, Sun, and Rain, The 25th Ward and most recently No More Heroes 1), but all of those games do something really compelling at least once, if not as the basic premise of its structure—taking me out of the game while leaving me in the gameplay. For the most part this is done by creating passages where fun is taken out of the equation[9], but interactivity remains front and center.
Intentional boredom, intentional frustration, intentional denial (or suspension) of an attentive audience's desire can be very powerful tools that don't really get tapped into as much as I'd want[10]. To stretch droqen's “treasure chest at the bottom of an ocean” metaphor uncomfortably thin, it feels like being made to swim to the point where you're starting to forget that you're even swimming & then suddenly being asked “how's the water?” Industry design patterns seem kind of centered around sustaining boredom with rationing out rewards[11], but maybe there's something to the idea of the player “making their own reward” rather than making their own fun[12]? I would love to see a big budget smart brain attempt at a game that refuses internal reward structures and gameplay that just reinforces more gameplay. Not everything needs a loop[13].
Sort of paradoxically, a lot of older games, with my experience being altered by way of them turning into archaeological objects (i.e. the technological 'wow' factor of twenty years ago only exists intellectually, not in genuine reaction), end up skirting close to what I'm thinking of here without necessarily having a reductive intent at the time of making. The reward for beating Myst is being able to walk around and look at all the environments in Myst, which was mindblowing back in 1993, but now stands as just really evocative environment art. Let's Catch is confident enough in the raw power of motion controls to structure a surprisingly melancholic narrative around the repetitive action of throwing a virtual ball back and forth. There's hundreds of games out there like this. However, I don't think it's that the average big budget game from 20 years ago was made with purer intentions—it's always been a profit-seeking industry, it's just that the targeting & capturing mechanisms have gotten much more efficient since then.
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This is all just a tumble of question marks for now. Like I said at the top, TERMINAL_LEVY is where I want to figure out the shape of the thing I've been approaching with these feelings—it's a work in progress. It's going to take some mapping, it's going to take some naming, and it's certainly going to take some practical work.
I want a Control where you shoot like 3 guys tops over 15 hours and it feels awful every time[14]. I want a Receiver 2 that doesn't make people say “if only this had roguelite progression mechanics and other kinds of guns it would be good” in the steam reviews. I want a Tactics Ogre that goes further down the path indicated by Yggdra Union. I want to know how to get there!
More specifically video games, since board- and otherwise have different enough design intent and different enough relationships between the ruleset and the player(s) for my thoughts here to not “stick” as much, though I would love to see a boardgame that is (a) not about itself (b) in a way that still keeps the game actively “in play” and doesn't ju—st render it a thought experiment. ↩︎
The first two categories mostly narrow it down to what you could reasonably call “the industry", though the kinds of games being made by people who follow youtube tutorials (myself included) can kinda extend the scope. ↩︎
Of course, people have to be able to make a living from their work, but I'm no great economy guy and I don't know that I can write compelling things about grants and other income streams. However, there are some great examples of arts funding resulting in great games being made. And, of course, there's the entire potential for non-professional work being made by people who have enough free time for it[15]. I'm just not sure how you get the ball rolling on that in parts of the world where the government seemingly hates cultural output. ↩︎
I understand the apparent irony of “launching” a “website/label/imprint” while also decrying Marketing World, but you'll just have to trust me that I will try to make this be different. ↩︎
And of course, there are many more, probably thecatamites' work being an early touchstone for me, but I don't aim to make an exhaustive list here. ↩︎
I consider myself firmly in the “well, that’s an interesting question!” camp, and I really wish discussions of it ever went anywhere, but I'm kind of fascinated with the gradual polishing-down of words and categories like “art” in the rock tumbler of online ↩︎
Found here: https://x.com/no_earthquake/status/1917693696478437679. I think the original tweet was just supposed to be a joking face-value read of the way the diagram is formulated, but there’s also some interesting points being made somewhere in the replies if you can handle the expected namecalling & the surprisingly horrible bit-rot of present day twitter reply threads. ↩︎
The boundary between what's treasure and what's just swimming is, admittedly, fuzzy. ↩︎
Not necessarily removed, sometimes placed back in there. Flower, Sun, and Rain is a couple years too young for “wouldn't it be fun to flip through a book on the computer” to be a genuinely exciting premise, but that's kind of all you're going to get in terms of game mechanics there. ↩︎
Tangentially, I was thinking about Pentiment recently and whether it really needed all those character building elements etc. when this piece from Unwinnable landed in my periphery and made me decide that all of the choice-making, especially the detective work in Act I was kind of essential for landing its narrative themes effectively. ↩︎
Writing this made me remember some of the really deeply tedious achievements on the Steam versions of The Silver Case & The 25th Ward. I'm deeply curious about who called for the ones that are like “interact with this thing 51 times", but their existence is very funny either way. ↩︎
A really simple example that comes to my mind immediately is the entire end structural “bit” of ZeroRanger, which I won't detail here, and which (at a glance) got a lot of negative reactions about not respecting the player's time, despite primarily being a pretty elegant riff on the classic idea of the STG 1CC. ↩︎
To crib from DFW twice in one paragraph (sorry) and to synthesize something with the “games that don't need to make money” thing from earlier, I see some of the creative/economic crises of videogames stemming from them being made as a form of entertainment, and not as as something specific to its shape as a medium. Without this specificity it makes sense why videogames (and kind of every thing else) is losing to “social video", as it just ends up being a less efficient form of entertainment[16]. ↩︎
Concurrently with writing this entry I read aurahack's blog post about the Marathon closed alpha where, by way of comparing it to Escape from Tarkov and Apex Legends, she touches on some interesting thoughts about what happens when you design just some parts of the game to be fun. ↩︎
Winter K makes a differentiation that sounds good to me: games that don't need to make money, games that need to make money, and games that need to make shitloads of money (and also I enjoy the discussion in this thread). ↩︎
Maybe another reason why older videogames feel like they have that “spark” more often is that, while they were being established within the entertainment continuum, videogames kind of needed to answer what makes them more fun than TV/movies/whatever else, and in those early years the answers to that question seemed to line up with questions about what was possible with the medium. Again, it's not really that the intent was more artistic or genuine or whatever—it's just that efficient patterns hadn't been defined yet and there wasn't enough data to go off of. ↩︎