As a side-product of the “getting good” part of my previous entry, I've been thinking a lot about success and victory in videogames[1]. The connection point here is the section on getting people to finish more games, with my initial curiosity being this: why is it important that games be finished in the first place? Is “getting to the end” the point of a videogame?
As it's been a couple months of thinking about this across various games I've played since ~december, I've collected a bunch of variously related but somewhat distant notes on victory. This entry, in a way, is a little bit of a de-rust & drafts clear, so I feel the compulsion to apologize for a lack of a very clear throughline or conclusion. I'm an “it depends” guy to my core, but even a meandering thought can be useful to put into writing, so here I will be hemming and hawing on one of the seemingly most definitive parts of a videogame—the victory.
It's interesting that “winning” took a little bit to take shape in the medium. Obviously, early sports/board game adaptations imported the tradition in some way, but winning in something like Basketball on the Intellivision is obviously different than beating Adventure or Castle Wolfenstein, games that take their structure from interactive fiction and movies, respectively[2]. 40 years later, victory & reward in games still seems to largely appear as something resembling a traditional competition or a story locked behind tests of skill[3].
Winning is a lot more of a constructed state than playing or having fun not only because you have to create a set of rules, but also because you (usually) have to set up some kind of motivation. Kids are content playing Street Fighter just by treating the training mode as a dollhouse. As a tween, I put in hundreds of hours into GTA 3/Vice City without ever touching the story, just tooling around on somebody else's 100% save file[4]. I really needed more of a framework to start intuiting what 'beating the game' is or why it should matter. By the time San Andreas came out I had read enough forums discussion to want to see the story Rockstar made instead of just making my own. Mission by mission, getting to 100% myself somehow made the save file feel more “full", and that was that for me downloading saves off of GameFAQs forever[5].
the boundary line
In a really broad sense, videogames appeal to me as authored (and arbitrary) fields of interactivity. Authorial intent manifests in really interesting ways when expressed through something that has to be navigated by an unrelated third party. Mario Kart 8, DiRT Rally and Euro Truck Simulator 2 are all obviously games about driving cars around, but with different scopes. Things like difficulty & victory are tools for defining the boundaries of the field for the player. In ETS2, following traffic laws and delivering on time lets you make money faster than just dicking around, but you also can just dick around if you want to. Most racing games are quick to flash a “wrong way!” if you decide to not participate in the race. If you do, though, you get leaderboards to help you visualize just how well you're learning the skills designated to be important. A win is a kind of further guarantee that in the authors' mind you are playing correctly[6].
I was recently watching a video about solo journaling RPGs. There's a very passionate playerbase for what are essentially gamified writing prompts. My initial reaction was “why not just write your own short story?", to which the clear answer is there's a whole sea of effort in between “following along a journaling RPG” and “writing a whole short story". Here I wonder “well, does it have to be a whole short story? Why not just a draft or vignette?", to which the answer is probably that it's satisfying to complete something. Michael Regina, the guy in the video I watched (and author of multiple graphic novels), says about as much. Solo journaling RPGs take the pressure off of writing partially by guaranteeing there will be a finished result at the end. The fencing off of a playing field also serves as a guardrail, a vetting of a complete, self-contained experience. For all of its reputation, beating Dark Souls II is not as hard as applying for a job. In an increasingly nonsensical world it is maybe soothing to plant a turnip and know you're going to get 30 gold for it, even if it's not for real[7].
I really wish I could track down where I first read the idea of a challenge run of a game as a sort of “close reading". I think it may have been in one of Melos Han-Tani's devlogs for Angeline Era, talking about Han-Tani's Challenge, or one of his reviews on Backloggd, but I can't find the specific instance. Either way, I find it a fun comparison. The deep game knowledge & meticulous execution needed for challenge runs is something that emerges only from some form of closeness with the game being played. On the other hand, a book doesn't give you an achievement for close reading it correctly[8]. The binary foundation of the entire medium creeps up in some way to shape organic approaches into something that can fit through a logic gate.
Since my early days as a sandbox gamer, I've turned into kind of a rigorous completionist. Not necessarily in the “100%ing open world games” sense, but more in that dropping a bad book feels worse than reading it through to the end. If I only have 6 pages left in a sketchbook, I'll push harder than I do if I just cracked a new one open. I'll prefer using a pencil that needs a clutch because it's too short to be held by itself. I had to get a win in 40k Gladius with each faction before I felt like I “really” played the game. Do I like the little ding of satisfaction of finishing something? Yeah, almost certainly. Is that the main thing I'm looking for in videogames?
the carrot on a stick
One of the initial impulses for this entry was served by a now months-old bluesky post I disagree with saying all roguelikes are slot machines where instead of money you spend time. By the time I'm getting around to writing there's another article talking about the boom of indie “gambling-likes". We do currently live in gambling world, so it makes sense that videogames reflect that, but I think something like a game consciously designed around slot machine design principles is maybe more on the “insidious gambling” end of the scale than something that just takes its visual identity from poker[9]. And maybe the roll-the-bones boom-or-bust nature of indie game financial success dictated by algorithmic storefronts & advertising channels is a bigger problem than either of those.
Reward variability is something that I see come up a lot in discussions on addiction. If every youtube short is good, you end up scrolling less. A loot box that's consistently decent is less exciting than one that is most likely garbage but could be amazing. It's very easy to want to draw a line from chance-based examples to the general hunch that a videogame isn't that fun if it's too easy to beat. The obvious difference here is the presence of player skill, but even that is on a gradient. Being able to count cards in blackjack or guess what direction the crypto bar chart is going in probably feels just as good as picking the correct 1 of 3 things in a roguelite.
For games that have to worry about player retention or matching the kindergartener idea of “$1 = 1 hour of Fun", tuning the balance of just how much agency the player has over the end result of a given game is probably where all the meaningful design lives. The post-Nintendo Seal of Approval idea of a “good game” is probably something like this: a package where, with the tools and knowledge given to you by the game, you will be able to have a satisfyingly complete experience. Metaprogression is the go-to technique to make sure a roguelite lands in the sweet spot of ~12 hours of “effort", but not ~20 hours of “sweat". You can complete the game with the tools provided, but probably you'll need a couple upgrades first. It's hard to even call this kind of game a slot machine. At that point it's a slow feeder dog bowl.
wringing blood from a stone
In the age of design-by-metrics (and succeed-by-metrics, etc. etc.) it feels a little harder to find games that are doing “something” with the win-state that isn't just making sure nobody posts a negative Steam review about their time being wasted. As discussion of games is increasingly held through the numbers external to them, maybe it makes sense that the phase of deep systems-introspection is in retrograde. Maybe there's only so much you can do with “winning", and me wondering about the potential of experimentation here sounds as dumb as wondering why nobody's making colour field paintings anymore. The emergence (and sometimes too-quick calcification) of roguelites and extraction shooters makes me think there's still a lot left to figure out, it's just that gaming audiences are increasingly rigid, attention spans & enthusiasm for learning something new are at a premium, and so innovation has to be snuck in covered in familiarity.
I think back on myself having to learn that a videogame is something you complete and wonder how it is for newcomers to the medium. Before I got my hands on my first videogame, I'd spent years forming my ideas of what they might be like through breathless online fan discussions & overblown ad copy that made everything from Pokemon Yellow to Baldur's Gate sound like infinite virtual worlds. There were a lot of translation layers in this process: videogame into personal experience into text, and out of that, imagination with little in the way of awareness of what was technically possible. A 10 second video clip of direct gameplay felt like almost too much direct information[10]. Hearing the way an acquaintance's kids talk about Counter-Strike 2 confirmed to me that not only is there no lack of access to videogames anymore, there's also an overwhelming amount of direct footage that teaches kids not just what winning is, but that there are good and bad ways to do it. Tying up entertainment, advertisement and instructional example into one thing is probably fantastic for the industry, since you kind of get to shape your own audience, but man is it soul-crushing for the depth of the medium.
The play-structures we create reflect the times we're in just as well as any other form of art. Almost two decades into selling the indie dream, these structures increasingly resemble the familiar protestant shape of an individual dedicating themselves to a singular work & being rewarded for it when it's all done. The king is the only piece in chess that never actually gets captured. Trappola, one of the earliest playing card games where aces outrank kings, was invented in 16th century Venice & apparently had a popular resurgence once again in post-Peace of Westphalia Central Europe. A particularly offputting description in an otherwise very competent introduction video to Go proposes imagining it as two companies vying for market share.
It's hard to definitively close this out & try to describe what I'm wanting here. A complete restructuring of societal values just so I see more interesting videogames is a big ask. Maybe my feeling that victory is underexplored except as a manipulation technique is due to my own completionist compulsions. The existence of places like Backloggd and HowLongToBeat, the dreams of forever games & nightmares of dead games make me think I'm not the only gamer with a strange relationship to victory. Infinite growth not only in economic activity, but in leisure too. What if the Wanderer above the Sea of Fog never had to end? One way or another, games end up less as “a series of interesting decisions” and more as a series of soothing checklists, sometimes with a slot machine attached. How much fun is a lot more fun? Not much fun at all.[11]
Some of the most beautiful treatments of game completion in my recent memory have been in Suda51's works, in particular Flower, Sun and Rain. The game, largely indifferent & sometimes seemingly irritated by the idea of being played, culminates in a sequence that makes it all feel less like a story told to you & more an overhead conversation in a bus you're about to leave[12]. After the curtain falls, Edo Macalister shows up to talk it out with you:
★ Thank you for staying with us. ★ I hope you had a pleasant stay at the ‘Flower, Sun, and Rain.’ ★ I look forward to our next meeting. ★ What's that? The island blew up? ★ Yes, it did. ★ I'm sure there is nothing left of the hotel, either. ★ But, you carry the ‘Flower, Sun and Rain’ with you. ★ The hotel ‘Flower, Sun, and Rain' will live on in our heats. ★ I wish you a happy life... ★
A game built for player retention statistics cannot say goodbye this confidently because it doesn't want you to leave. A product built for soothing can't earnestly wish you a happy life because it doesn't want you to have one.
There's also a scutum fidei-like graph in my drafts notebook with the phrases “being good” “getting good” and “being the best", but I don't think I've meditated on it enough to come up with anything that isn't already present in the (very good IMO) Folding Ideas video on sucking at WoW. So for now I'm writing about victory. ↩︎
Potentially a very “ludology” purist thing to do here is to say that real victory in videogames has never been tried, since all of these examples are borrowing structures from other media. Every single strategy game ever is adapting its win conditions from chess or Go[13]. I genuinely can't imagine what a pure-to-videogames treatment of victory would look like, but I'd like to see an attempt be made. ↩︎
This is kind of muddy, I think. Maybe people complain about getting “stuck” on difficult-to-read passages, but I'm pretty sure nobody says they “won” a challenging book. Here I'm taking a very simplified interpretation of a video game cutscene or equivalent story element as a reward for successful execution of skill, and it's probably important that the skill is usually different to “reading comprehension". ↩︎
The fact that these games don't end or reset after you beat them—in fact I think some GTAs have unlocks specifically after the story is over—makes it clear that getting to just walk around and take in the scenery is also recognized as valuable. Myst does this too, which makes me wonder how much of the value of that reward is just in the technological marvel of having a simulated world to navigate. Assassin's Creed: Origins famously had that “museum mode” where you could just look at the very expensive & meticulously crafted world they made without having to worry about dogwater open world mechanics. ↩︎
There might be a desire to psychologize this as teen me finally learning the sweet taste of the fruits of his own effort but I didn't really get that until way later, if I'm being honest. At the time it was more a matter of knowing exactly what the 100% was made up of—I remember checking the statistics screen pretty often, going “oh, so that was 0.7%". It was maybe more comparable to working on a jigsaw puzzle. ↩︎
Obviously I'm skimming over the entire fields of glitches, bugs and cheats here, but it is interesting how/when designers embrace unintended mechanics in a game's structure. I don't remember rocketjumping being mandatory to progress in any part of Doom or Marathon, but there are certainly secrets (like one of the coolest terminals in Marathon 1) where emergent tricks are mandatory. Certainly there's also a lot of fun to be had in going against what was intended and still coming out on top, either by getting to the finish line or by breaking out of the enclosures completely. Speedrunning, backrooms-type games, exploring parts of open world games that clearly weren't the main focus of the level designers, etc. all point to the excitement of not doing what they told you. ↩︎
I feel like this entire angle of games as “a smaller version of work that's not for real” owes something to Bernard Suits' The Grasshopper, a book that for the most part I found smug, insipid and borderline insulting, so I can't be bothered digging up the relevant passages. ↩︎
Sure, fan-defined challenge runs don't do this either. There's no achievement for a glitchless SL1 run of Dark Souls neither is there one for a Nuzlocke or IronMon, where a significant amount of the difficulty in a run comes from just having to constantly remember all of the rules that are not mechanically enforced by the games in any way. ↩︎
Tangentially, it broke my heart a little to find out that Phelan Sykes, the lead artist for one of the most beautiful games of all time, Heroes of Might & Magic III, now works as a game designer for a mobile slot machine company. ↩︎
An extremely vivid memory of a foreign-language channel on a TV at a supermarket playing a clip from the GameCube Wario World still persists in my brain to this day purely because the idea of a TV show about videogames was extremely novel & precious to me at age 12. ↩︎
Rest in peace, big man. ↩︎
The transient & fleeting nature of video game victory is something that gets brought up a lot more in discussion multiplayer games[14] or things like arcade game 1CCs a lot more than for games with linear narratives, but this kind of transience is usually done in service of encouraging increased time investment—a win or loss by itself doesn't matter, what matters is your long-term growth, so get over that "ranked anxiety" and play 500 more. ↩︎
Broadly either “you win by destroying a critical piece” (Age of Empires, Herzog Zwei) or “you win by score” (Utopia, Civilization), but even something open-ended like Crusader Kings III has lineage in Go, where the end of the game is decided upon mutual agreement from both players. In this case the computer is always happy to oblige.
As an aside, I find this “mutual agreement” rule really beautiful in its depth. As it depends on the players evaluating whether a move will actually give them more points than it costs, beginner players like me are terrible at calling the end, and will often fight our way into bankruptcy. It's also interesting that scoring is something that is trivial for a computer to do well (unless, again, it's a beginner game and there are messy, unclaimed territories at the end), but a computer playing well is only a very recent development. ↩︎An increasingly common refrain I hear for getting over the fear of losing your gear in Marathon, my current gaming obsession (partially because it feels very bare and honest about its own structure, which plenty of people have written great articles about) is this: “It's not your gear, it's just your turn with it". Hakuin would be proud. ↩︎