A lot of complicated video games like to have bigger and more numbers. Stats that indicate minute attributes, and values so big that an increase in power becomes almost tangible. It's been like a kid in a candy store: "you like data and games? Here's a machine that can let you play games and handle all the data you could possibly want." Some might disagree, but it isn't even a bad thing. I love these games, and I think they would be absolutely tedious if I had to manage all the data myself. Consider Final Fantasy 7 Remake, which doesn't include the option to store combinations of equipment into reusable sets, or filter on the Materia items according to type, or store the loadout of Materia in sets. It’s a drag to pause this thrilling adventure every five minutes in a late stage of the game, to fiddle with an incredibly, and increasingly, long list of arcane jelly beans. I'm not sure the pieces in Chess would have had living equipment, whose own lived experience would be tracked individually, had the creators had the choice, but on the other hand, we sure didn't have digital games for a long time before Vagrant Story happened.
-I've seen an opposing line of thought in strategic and tactical games by developers less tied to the whims of popularity (so much so that that line of thought feels like it has become the zeitgeist): integers should be small. One to five, never eleven. Humans cannot comprehend such voluminous digits, they say. They’re inspired by European board games, and really, it makes sense. Thinking this way is a tool to achieve a lot of interesting choices. The argument is that choosing between ‘Attack’ and ‘Fire Spell’ is an almost superficial choice, even if the result of this choice, is built on the back of a monstrous calculation and/or algorithm (https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Damage). Rather sensically, the belief is that each choice should have interesting results and allow for new interesting choices. I seem to remember a talk by Jonathan Blow about how games that didn’t provide anything, by his definition of course, worthwhile, were akin to unethical in that they robbed players of their life. The “by his definition” has become quite important to me. I like Blow’s ideas and creations, but he and I don’t like the same games. In fact, I very much enjoy a lot of games he would find unethical in their design. By his definition, I cannot deny what he says, but that’s the thing: if you get to decide the definition of something, you can win any argument. That’s where this “smaller numbers, interesting choices, worthwhile investment” sort of breaks down. It leaves room for people to like certain games for their stories, but insists that the game design of them is something one must trudge through to enjoy the only worthwhile aspect. It denies the value of good tactility, of spectacular results, of freedom from consequence, of familiarity.
+I've seen an opposing line of thought in strategic and tactical games by developers less tied to the whims of popularity (so much so that that line of thought feels like it has become the zeitgeist): integers should be small. One to five, never eleven. Humans cannot comprehend such voluminous digits, they say. They’re inspired by European board games, and really, it makes sense. Thinking this way is a tool to achieve a lot of interesting choices. The argument is that choosing between ‘Attack’ and ‘Fire Spell’ is an almost superficial choice, even if the result of this choice, is built on the back of a monstrous calculation and/or algorithm. Rather sensically, the belief is that each choice should have interesting results and allow for new interesting choices. I seem to remember a talk by Jonathan Blow about how games that didn’t provide anything, by his definition of course, worthwhile, were akin to unethical in that they robbed players of their life. The “by his definition” has become quite important to me. I like Blow’s ideas and creations, but he and I don’t like the same games. In fact, I very much enjoy a lot of games he would find unethical in their design. By his definition, I cannot deny what he says, but that’s the thing: if you get to decide the definition of something, you can win any argument. That’s where this “smaller numbers, interesting choices, worthwhile investment” sort of breaks down. It leaves room for people to like certain games for their stories, but insists that the game design of them is something one must trudge through to enjoy the only worthwhile aspect. It denies the value of good tactility, of spectacular results, of freedom from consequence, of familiarity.
That list of, let’s call them, virtues, isn’t part of what is normally discussed when discussing game design in the English-speaking world. Maybe it isn’t anywhere. Sure, making stuff feel good to interact with is important in all interfaces and surely in the UX world as well, but it isn’t normally something that in game design, is seen as equivalent to “interesting choices”.
@@ -29,13 +29,13 @@Hopefully I don't make it sound like I'm under the impression that all non-digital games don't require a lot of data management. Many data heavy and data management heavy games exist, and it's worth remembering that Dungeons & Dragons, the genre-defining game itself, sprang from a more data-laden branch of strategy games.
-Terminology
+Terminology
-Just for those that arrived late, let's recount that early video games like Ultima and Wizardry took their inspirations from D&D, and that the original and quintessential Japanese Role-Playing Game, Dragon Quest, which spawned its own sub-genre (in our mind, I'll get to that) was specifically inspired by Ultima and its ilk. In the most sci-fi nerdy sense, we have a case of branching timelines here people! What the Japanese people call an RPG diverted from what we call an RPG, at such an early stage, that appending "Japanese" in front of it, only makes it less grokkable. I'll dig into it later, but the gist is that the two types of RPGs are so unrelated that we seem to comprehend very little of what is the design theory behind RPGs in Japan, since we always refer back to how we've formulated our own understanding of RPGs. Outside Japan, RPGs would be defined by their meticulousness to details surrounding personal character development, and by how involved the player would be allowed to be in the outcome of the narrative. Surely I've enjoyed the battles in these games, but I must admit, it's often a bit trite. Complex spells in Baldur's Gate 2, and the occasional usage of the environment in some games alleviated this. It's actually kind of curious that the genre isn't called Fantasy Simulation Games. These elements didn’t just become the defining traits, but also virtues to uphold and strive for.
+Just for those that arrived late, let's recount that early video games like Ultima and Wizardry took their inspirations from D&D, and that the original and quintessential Japanese Role-Playing Game, Dragon Quest, which spawned its own sub-genre (in our mind, I'll get to that) was specifically inspired by Ultima and its ilk. In the most sci-fi nerdy sense, we have a case of branching timelines here people! What the Japanese people call an RPG diverted from what we call an RPG, at such an early stage, that appending "Japanese" in front of it, only makes it less grokkable. I'll dig into it later, but the gist is that the two types of RPGs are so unrelated that we seem to comprehend very little of what is the design theory behind RPGs in Japan, since we always refer back to how we've formulated our own understanding of RPGs. Outside Japan, RPGs would be defined by their meticulousness to details surrounding personal character development, and by how involved the player would be allowed to be in the outcome of the narrative. Surely I've enjoyed the battles in these games, but I must admit, it's often a bit trite. Complex spells in Baldur's Gate 2, and the occasional usage of the environment in some games alleviated this. It's actually kind of curious that the genre isn't called Fantasy Simulation Games. These elements didn’t just become the defining traits, but also virtues to uphold and strive for.
Compared to this, Japanese RPGs are focused stories, where the battles continue to be abstractions of the idea of battles, and over time a focus on adding and removing interesting, but very real-world-unrelated, sub-systems to the battles, and how the player characters evolve over the course of the playtime became more important. As the player improves their understanding of the game, they not only get access to new abilities, but often reach an understanding of what is already there, so that they may tackle even greater threats. Often though, they don’t have to do this, in order to participate in the story. Put in the terms that people use outside Japan, the RPG genre in Japan is a mix of what is often called an adventure game (a linear, character-driven story, perhaps with puzzles to solve), a strategy game (in that the battles become strategically difficult if you choose to invest in this area, not that the battles are like those of the games of StarCraft or similar (although that has also happened a few times)) and to a smaller extent an RPG (in that your characters evolve over time according to your choosing, based on a subsystem that controls this).
-This detour is meant to illustrate the reason as to why I might have been looking at the reasoning for the numbers in my game incorrectly. Without realising it, I had created a game where numbers should be small, for a few good reasons. The implicit result of small numbers was that each choice had to matter, like in strategy games, like Into the Breach. The problem was that I was creating a game that was most closely related to an RPG in the Japanese sense, and they’ve created a gameplay aesthetic where choices CAN matter, depending on your level of investment, but they don’t have to.
+This detour is meant to illustrate the reason as to why I might have been looking at the reasoning for the numbers in my game incorrectly. Without realising it, I had created a game where numbers should be small, for a few good reasons. The implicit result of small numbers was that each choice had to matter, like in strategy games, like Into the Breach. The problem was that I was creating a game that was most closely related to an RPG in the Japanese sense, and they’ve created a gameplay aesthetic where choices CAN matter, depending on your level of investment, but they don’t have to.
When framing Japanese RPGs as a sub-genre, they are misconstrued, and every design choice ends up seeming like an oddity in comparison to what an RPG ought to be, and in game design these choices run counter to some (rather dogmatic) principles. Look, it's fine. Many of those that wrote down their design ideals in the last 10-20 years, did so while saying (kinda): "this is based partly on what I like, and trying to understand why I like it" (like what I'm doing now). They've become almost textbook (I guess sometimes actual textbook) definitions of what should be considered best practice in game design.