SETUP
-- 2-5 players and 1 six-sided die.
-- 6 different tokens. You need 2 * number-of-players of each type (4 for
-2 players, 6 for 3 players).
-- each side of the die matches 1 kind of token.
-- the first player to get 1 of each token, wins
ON YOUR TURN YOU MAY EITHER:
-- roll the die and take a matching token
-OR
-- discard all tokens of three different types. You then gift one of
-these tokens to another player.
You then then pass the die.
-IF YOU GET 3 OF A SINGLE TYPE OF TOKEN, YOU MUST
-EITHER:
-- discard 2 of that type of token and choose another player to receive
-the third token.
-OR
-- discard all 3 of the token AND gift 1 token of a different kind to
-another player.
-- as you can imagine, this can create a chain reaction.
Does this game already exists by a different name? The simplicity -kinda surprises me, so I have a hard time believing I invented it.
diff --git a/drafts/Politics of Arithmetic and Terminology.html b/drafts/Politics of Arithmetic and Terminology.html deleted file mode 100644 index 871d7ff..0000000 --- a/drafts/Politics of Arithmetic and Terminology.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,52 +0,0 @@ -
image is the Japanese cover for Dragon Quest 1, Painted by Akira Toriyama.
- -Prelude
- -Why are the numbers in my game what they are? They aren't refined enough for any distinguished game designer to ever even snort disapprovingly at me across the hall at GDC. Nor are they flamboyantly big enough to give anyone a mathematically swollen sense of self-worth.
- -In case I haven't yet had the chance to corner you in a dark alley and explain the intricate and quite provocatively ingenious ideas behind my game while I gut you like a fish đ , allow me: The Girl Who Kicked a Rabbit is about winning small, cutely violent battles against demonic rabbits, by manipulating them using your magics and your knowledge of the rabbits' behaviour.
- -While making the game, I started to ponder the numbers. They'd been picked without too much forethought, and it seemed like it was finally time to think about what the right numbers were for representing the Player's health, how much damage the enemies dealt, and various other, mechanically interesting but irrelevant to the story, details. From here is the processed, GMO-filled version of those thoughts.
- -Arithmetic
- -Have you heard of a perfect information game? Like Chess. You are aware of all your options, and all your opponents' options, and stats, and immediate ramifications at all times. It's very clean, beautiful even. Everything is laid bare, and the only gambling is whether one of the players falters or takes a bait.
- -It's design-by-practicality really. It's easier to make a game if all the rules can be contained inherently in the pieces. It would require a lot more resources to have each element contain additional data, like numbers to describe wellness, physical strength or, most outlandishly, personal history (lol).
- -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. Itâs 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. Theyâre 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 âAttackâ and âFire Spellâ 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 didnât provide anything, by his definition of course, worthwhile, were akin to unethical in that they robbed players of their life. The âby his definitionâ has become quite important to me. I like Blowâs ideas and creations, but he and I donât 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 thatâs the thing: if you get to decide the definition of something, you can win any argument. Thatâs where this âsmaller numbers, interesting choices, worthwhile investmentâ 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, letâs call them, virtues, isnât part of what is normally discussed when discussing game design in the English-speaking world. Maybe it isnât anywhere. Sure, making stuff feel good to interact with is important in all interfaces and surely in the UX world as well, but it isnât normally something that in game design, is seen as equivalent to âinteresting choicesâ.
- -This leads me to an odd situation, where most expressed thoughts around game design, are trying extremely hard to define, almost on an atomic scale, what is what in games, and at the same time, are arriving at conclusions that completely dismiss a great many of the games Iâve enjoyed over the years. If they arenât outright dismissed as inherently poor design, they are disregarded for anything but their stories, and in the last ten year especially, these stories too, are dismissed out of hand as either offensive in an increasingly prudish culture, or too fantastical in a subculture that is constantly trying to prove how worthwhile it is (this is an idiotâs way of saying he likes anime tits and buttholes, and Japanese game design).
- -The odd situation becomes clear when I try to design something of my own, inspired by the works that I like, and I wish to draw on the theories of my peers, but realise, my peers are vehemently opposed to the design in the works I enjoy and reflect upon. My own game, The Girl Who Kicked a Rabbit, has evolved over the years, and currently (hopefully finally) arrived at being sort of a Japanese Role-Playing Game. Except⊠it doesnât have experience points, levels, equipment (in a traditional sense) or a plethora of throwaway battles. You have a very limited number of actions, everything is defined in low integers, and all the battles (so far at least) are designed. It has a bunch of inter-connected systems, and none of your (very few) moves have similar effects. It doesnât sound very much like a Japanese RPG, when I put it like that. Yet I have no desire to create a game of hard, tactical choices. I rather like how a player who isnât very engaged with the systems, can find theyâre own enjoyment in JRPGs, while the dedicated player can show their prowess through their knowledge of (and sometimes dedication to) the systems.
- -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
- -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 didnât 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 donât 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 theyâve created a gameplay aesthetic where choices CAN matter, depending on your level of investment, but they donât 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.
- -I thought it'd be elegant if I could unify the many elements in my game design, so that mechanics were tied to each other through reasoning and likewise gave rise to the numbers. As I contemplated and tweaked the numbers, I encountered this conflict between what small, discreet numbers culturally indicated, and what my intentions for my game were. One day I made a canteen of coffee and rode my bike into the forest. In the early autumn beech forest, I climbed a small hill and found a nice spot where I could overlook both the nearby trail and even the ocean. Sipping on my coffee and a sourdough bun I'd bought a few minutes earlier, it started to dawn on me: sure, I needed to reconfigure my game. At the same time, I should start realising that I wasn't making an arcade-like version of a strategy game. At heart, my game was a miniature Japanese RPG, and thirty years of genre conflation had made it difficult to arrive at the legitimacy of this conclusion.
- -Getting Out of The Water
- -There's this fantastic conversation between Shigeru Miyamoto, Satoru Iwata, and Shigesato Itoi where they discuss why Mother 3 had to be cancelled for the Nintendo 64. Of the numerous thoughtful observations, among them is Itoi saying "An RPG is a system where symbols come together, and something happens which is portrayed in even more symbols."(here) While the point of that part of the conversation is very much about how Mario games make concretisations of what would be abstract in a Japanese RPG, the flipside is that Japanese RPGs of that era were able to represent vast and complex narrative structures and game design, within simple symbols of storytelling. It's not a concise genre definition, but I think it distinguishes this bifurcated genre quite clearly.
- -This text was initially meant to be about my ponderings on my game, in an effort to understand certain aspects of my game design. As I worked on it, and my own misunderstandings became clear to me, I feel like I achieved this understanding, that is about which genre The Girl Who Kicked a Rabbit actually tried to be part of. Unfortunately I also realised that the Japanese RPG isn't really well understood from a modern, English-language game design perspective. As I was going over whether or not this text was achieving what it was meant to, and what I needed to write to do this, it became apparent that this side-effect of understanding is bigger than I'm ready to take on right now. It'll take more observations, research, analysis, and discussions. It's as simple as "what is the Japanese RPG", but I can't settle for a banal enumeration of characteristic traits. Itoi's observation is certainly good, yet even it requires a bit of contemplation, and doesn't answer other questions I feel fit into this topic, like how Animal Crossing doesn't fit the genre of "Japanese RPG" yet it feels right calling it quintessentially Japanese and simultaneously an RPG. Genre-breaking traits like warfare simulation in Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings or action combat in Final Fantasy 7 Remake also muddle the issue. I fear to even bring up Giftpia or Bloodborne.
- -At a certain point, it almost becomes a question of what is it for a game to be Japanese, and not specifically an RPG from the Japanese game design heritage. By then, I'm right back at what I was writing about in university ten years ago.
- -These are all thoughts for the future. For now, I got the answers I was looking for, and the rest I chip away at some other day.
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Kinda feels like we've been through this before, right? Oh, I'm not trying to be clever. It just occurs to me that the very act of doing something in a loop, slowly uncovering every minute detail, and becoming an almost celestial being, not just for your repetitive nature, but because of your by the end almost omniscience, is the essence of video games. Whether it's the kill, death, repeat mantra of so many games, or it's the "trapped in a loop to uncover all the secrets'', they're essentially the same. Not only am I claiming an almost pedestrian "other games have done the time loop mechanic before". I'm ascending to absolute Zetta Emperor of Pedantics, and saying "pff, every game is a time loop". This is a fancy way of getting anybody who has played Wilds, into a frenzy before getting to my actual theory: what makes Wilds' take on time loops unique, is not exactly its combination with astro and particle physics, but rather that its devotion to using those fields playfully, and the almost template-tier first person mechanics (you move, you jump, you press interact), creates a contour of the player. And the player is not the immediate character controlled by you. The player is the universe. The player character is a cursor. It's what happens when an idea is larger than a gun. And Wilds is a drunken knife fight, with the sun. Any other game will put a boson rifle in your hand, and, really, that would have been an intergalactic carnival. Wilds gives you gravity itself, and it takes an entire game to wield this.
- -Reading about Wilds elsewhere gives me the impression that we're talking about the type of game that is intended to be played by those not versed in stock mainstream video games. The kind that are assailed after psychotic Americans pull a weekly. When made for such a person (the one who doesn't like games, not the mass murderer), the game is often made reductively easy to play and to win. Clearly Iâm getting the wrong impression. Wilds is not harsh, it just doesnât care about you. Itâs as indifferent to the player as the subjects described in all the Wikipedia articles the players will read afterwards to assimilate a modicum of knowledge about these, are. In Wilds itâs tough to walk, jump and even look around. Itâs so very driven by its physics, but also, as a consequence, by its lack of being very game-like at all. Very few elements snap, click or crack. Everything just sort of slides, floats, and flops around. This irked me to no end in the beginning. Feeling my own mastery of the player character's actions increases is how I bond (get stockholm syndrome) with a game. If Wilds was gonna play like eating pizza with a hammer, I had some concerns about finishing the thing. I'm not gonna lie, in the beginning I didn't like it, and I only stuck it out because I thought it was a 3-4 hour experience. It's definitely bigger than that, though simply by being such a designed experience, a by necessity, finite experience. As I started to realise what I was getting into, I understood this wasn't a game that had failed at achieving sharp, eloquent controls. It was striving for something else entirely and telling me would have been spoiling the surprise. Before I could afford new consoles, I spent a great deal of time playing overlooked, often fan-translated, NES, and SNES games. Once you dig into the more arcane libraries, you realise how little video games have grown and how little they need modern controllers. Many of them are still (gameplay-wise) two-dimensional. Not so with Wilds. The core of the game is continuous, not discrete. Despite how little is done by the player from their perspective, the use of not one, but TWO analog sticks absolutely makes the experience. I guess some people use a mouse and a keyboard. The point is, an SNES version of this game wouldn't even be remotely close to achieving the same reactions as Wilds does in its very reality inspired form. The more I think about it, the more I want to make this impossible SNES game. I think I see how. This isn't about that. That doesn't matter, the method of implementing my idea is taking shape as I write this. I'll keep it for myself (three days have passed since I wrote that. I was sober. Then drunk. Then hungover. It was a terribly uninspired idea. I would still play it if someone else did it, but I would know. I would IMMEDIATELY know how absolutely void of critical thought or inspirational light they were). So since itâs not very game-like, and if I get the impression that itâs not for gamers, shouldnât these two parts spoon like an appropriately proportioned couple? A buddy of mine called it a Walking Sim in a non-disparaging manner. While I'm not quite sure how he mentally juggled those two perspectives (an (in my mind) derogative descriptor, and it being admirable), it really isn't. Movement is involved, and complex. It requires an enormous amount of spatial and temporal reasoning. The puzzles are esoteric and often non-euclidean. Every task asked to perform is contingent on a wealth of game experience in order to even be navigable, though in the Venn-diagram of experienced players and Hailey "who like, once tried the Flappy Birds", neither really has the prerequisite skills to actually solve the conundrums. Admittedly, me liking Wilds oscillated immensely for each time I opened the game up. It seemed impenetrable in the beginning and certain puzzles were definitely made more troublesome than necessary by the game's inherent impression. Dropping it entirely was definitely on the table even about an hour before completing it, it was that frustrating. Then it dawned on me how the task at hand was a puzzle and not an exercise in aptitude, and I was able to reach an ending that a second buddy had described as quite good (I don't know what he said. He liked it, okay?). He was right.
- -To my first buddy I would say "you mean Gone Home without all gay stuff?". Wilds is Metroid Prime for people who roll their eyes at ice cream, though you can play it even if you like the sweet dessert. It's excellent. You get to actually discover ancient secrets not designed to combine the aesthetics of Gieger with the usability of Fisher-Price and the functionality of being a god damned fucking door. Cutting out the lawn-mowing of alien lifeforms (except your own), and the fitting of pegs into holes (ironically this is one of the few actions you perform besides Space Walking (that sounds like being a prost on the ISS (speaking of pegs and holes!))) really alleviates the dissonance apparent in most lore or story driven games not made by Kojima. This trait of letting you almost truly discover alien civilizations and puzzle out their secrets should not be forgotten. Creating it required Mobius Digital Games (their CEO is Masi Oka from Heroes, how weird is that?) to completely ignore the sensible choice of ever holding the player's hand. Yet if thatâs what it took. This praise unfortunately makes the next criticism so much more annoying. Almost all information comes from log messages left behind, and though they're covered up as alien scribbles with an interesting linguistic and technological twist, they're log messages. I hate to invoke The Return of the Obra Dinn, but it showed us all how elegantly and not-in-conflict with the in-game universe, narrative exposition could be. It hurts, it really does, that Wilds was not able to avoid conveniently left behind thoughts and commentary by those no longer among the living, at just the right time. And what an unfair criticism. Solving that problem for this game, feels like it would be an achievement every other game afterwards would copy faster than I can brew an exquisite cup of coffee for a friend, and then smugly await their praise, knowing full well that youâd have to be a social deviant to ever say anything but âmmm, sure is a good coffeeâ. Not that my coffee brewing technique, selection of beans, and manner of grinding aren't in a class of their own. It took me a long time to admit to myself, but the quality isn't imagined at all. I'm almost shaking now. I suddenly remembered someone asking for a drop of milk. That's just not right. Milk covers up the problems of bad coffee, it doesn't enhance the virtues of good coffee. Learn the difference.
- -Before starting university a second time (of three) I took a trip to the city it was located in. We visited the school of architecture, and I was consumed with jealousy for my girlfriend. That place was overflowing with creative energy, and the promise of what its students were going to achieve. Afterwards we went to the university and wandered the halls and I couldn't help but feel disappointed in myself. I had wanted to enter the animation school. Having failed in creating an enticing portfolio twice, dropping out of university once, and being unemployed in the spring of 2009 (an unfortunate time to need a job in many places), I thought I might as well try studying Japanese. There was something stuffy and old about the university. It was a feeling I've later come to reminisce about, disappointed that the Asian Studies department was moved to a more modern, almost corporate, building later on, but during that little trip to the city, I found it off-putting. Fortunately the day was much improved afterwards. We ate lunch in the university park and watched some guys play some sort of soccer-based drinking game, and then strolled down the hill into a hip cafe area, drinking fancy coffee, and going to art supply shops. This was a big, and pretty city, for hip young people like me and my girlfriend. A few years later, uni was over, and I felt like Iâd been everywhere over, and over, and over, again. Itâs obvious why I would tie a placeâs size to how much you know of it, and reciprocally, why it would seem almost unfathomably big when you know nothing of it. Naturally, games might be similar, and it is often why we move on to other games. Except, even when we move on, some things stay with us, leaving a feeling of not exactly being unexplored as much as still having stories to tell, that it will never reveal. How, and when this feeling is achieved (and it is something to achieve) I am not quite sure. It can be a bitter feeling. Sometimes I imagine a story has built itself up so that I will absolutely be told about the howâs and the whyâs, but then in the end there was just nothing. Sometimes itâs an actual problem with the story, a plothole one might say. Sometimes, I need to look at myself and realize I was missing the point. And of course, sometimes, I got the point, but it wasnât very profound, and they really should just have finished LOST like a normal story, they werenât Dostoevsky (Iâm not saying he wrote obtuse narratives, Iâm saying he was profound and if he did write something a little cryptic, it wouldnât have been forced, but to whatever point he was making). The ability to achieve a complete understanding of Wilds, is its most game-like feature. It is a book manuscript that the author printed without page numbers, and threw into the air. Eventually youâll piece the book back together and it was actually The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. Could Wilds still be a game if you got all the way to Bowserâs Castle and then went âI still have no idea how jumping works''? I kind of know what the ludological answer is, but I really donât want to say that Final Fantasy XV is the Infinite Jest of video games.
- -Wilds has no predeterminism, no sudden villain, no 'we took this form because your mind couldn't comprehend our actual form'. Hells bells, there isn't even any higher dimensionality. The last one would probably have been pretty cool in Wilds (but also outside confirmed reality). So would time dilation (which I thought would be present), and Dark Matter. That's okay. Material for a sequel that'll hopefully never manifest. You donât want a sequel to Little Miss Sunshine either, you know? Time dilation would actually solve a mechanical problem the game has, now that I think about it: Only want to try a single thing, but canât because a bunch of stuff needs to occur beforehand? Take a nap near a black hole and watch time snail by at a breakneck pace. Iâm not criticising Wilds for not having this, I just thought the idea was fun. Those initial "doesn't have"s are meant as praise. I've certainly never written a science fiction story, but assume it must feel awfully good including the time travel paradox of "you tell me to go, cause I told you to tell me, cause you told me toâŠ". Why else would it happen so often? Anyway, well done, writers, not only for writing a good story, but for performing what I assume must be delaying the purest sexual gratification a science fiction author can get?
- -I read in a book about octopi that humans are unique because they think in terms of time. At least I think it was the octopus book. Might have been the book about time. We are always thinking about cause and effect. Itâs how you solve every challenge in this game, how you formulate ideas for how to continue, and eventually itâs how you begin to see where everything is going. Itâs even, sort of, where the fun in the game is. Itâs in the in-between of not knowing and already knowing, that makes you go âoh, now I get itâ. Really, the fun is gone after you âgotâ it. Wilds also has you say âoh thatâs really coolâ, and saying that is pretty fun too. Yet about half way through it, I understood how this would end, and I knew it was how it had to be. I didnât know every second for second how it would play out, but if you were to finish Wilds and talk with me about it, youâd know what I mean. Iâm being coy about it, because saying it outright is crude. Itâs a question of scale. Of the game, and of the theme. Itâs inherent in Wildâs reluctance to be game-like. Itâs not actually specifically because of those convenient space emails. They are definitely symptoms, but even without them, this shape-like thought would still have formulated. In the very first paragraph I mentioned wine on a dress, but really, itâs a freckle. Freckles arenât ugly, theyâre just there. Occasionally theyâre very cute. In this case itâs being told of how a friendâs friend looks. Theyâre red-headed, your friend says. Later on it dawns on you that your friendâs friend probably has freckles. Not that your friendâs friend was designed and cloned in a vat, but if they were, it would have been a little daring of your friendâs friendâs designers, to omit the freckles.
- -Are you getting the sense that the problem I'm describing with Wilds lies outside a conventionally fair point to make? Or that I'm just observing the tiniest possible issue with an electron microscope? Were this a review, it's the kind of notion that gets hidden in a box of extra thoughts, almost a pet peeve. Instead it's the only thing I can think about, constantly appearing and disappearing from my mind when I consider my time with Wilds. The minimalist internal mechanics of the player character, the universal mechanics of the game's reality, and the narrative that permeates the setting, are all building upon each other, overlapping and gesturing me towards a specific somewhere. Yes, I am outside what is conventionally worthy of praise or necessitates rebuke, but it is an overarching issue that will mortify as a trope, and eventually make those that came before Wilds into involuntary self-parody. This isn't because Wilds caused it, but when such a complete and thoroughly crafted experience does this, almost (I suspect) by default, it might be worth addressing, no matter how circuitously.
- -I had brought my Nintendo 64 on a trip. It must have been somewhere around 2001. This was the last time I cared about one of those time looping games. I think it was an important birthday for one of my paternal grandparents, and we couldnât make it home on the same day, so we were gonna stay at a hotel. This was definitely exciting to me. Hotels in Denmark are ludicrously expensive, and therefore, to my 12 year old me, they were good. To this day I probably havenât stayed at a high quality hotel yet. Now that I think about it, saying something like that probably just outs me as a person who has yet to realize that a high quality hotel is an oxymoron. It seemed fancy at the time. Majoraâs Mask had been a frustrating journey, and a childishly disappointing one as well. Iâd definitely hoped for Ocarina of Time 2. This was something else. I wish Iâd been a discerning enough kid to realize that it meant something much, much better, but sadly, I wanted a big world, ten dungeons, and for that nail in the dick of a time loop to scram. The frustrating experience had been compounded because my brother and I had decided to complete it together, but there sure had been some misunderstandings about when to play, such that progression had been made in the absence of the other, and this inconsiderate behaviour had left some bitterness behind. My brother finished elementary school by doing the optional tenth grade at a sort of boarding school. This is normal in Denmark. These schools often have a specific focus, like an art curriculum. My brotherâs school was about health and exercise. It had a running team, all punishment was dealt out in push ups and they went swimming in the ocean every morning, including all through winter. Him staying at this school might have been why I had brought the Nintendo 64. He wouldnât have been able to continue playing if he was only at home once a month or every other month, but we had maybe picked him up for this birthday party. I must have reached the moon, ready to face off against Majora. The artstyle of this game, coupled with its melancholic setting, and subdued story all coalesce into an incredible ending. We didnât have all the masks. We didnât even have the Great Fairyâs Sword. This didnât matter. This game was a league above its contemporaries (and successors?). Had I already finished it before this evening, and simply wanted to show the ending to my brother? Or had I held off finishing the journey until he could join in? Whatever the case, I remember how he didnât really care. Not that anyone ever really knows what anyone is thinking, but to say that he is to me a black box with an effectively incomprehensible behaviour pattern, is apt. Maybe he felt betrayed that I had played without him. Or maybe he had just moved on from odd Japanese games towards a strict Counter-Strike 1.6-based diet. It's been twenty years since then and I haven't spoken to him for the last two. In fact it was Easter two years ago, so writing this during Easter means it's exactly two years ago. Where we are when we play things, feed into our play experience, and depending on the various factors in the game, also feed back out again. I don't know if I had had Outer Wilds on my radar before, but after completing The Return of the Obra Dinn together with my girlfriend in a one hundred percent cooperative manner, I was really hoping Wilds would provide something similar. I wish we could have repeated the success, because I eventually had a great experience, but she fell asleep on my lap after twenty minutes and I don't blame her. Wilds has no room for a co-pilot, neither in the spacecraft or in real life. We might not be able to do and redo the same events anywhere but in our mind, fermenting on our errors and constructing illusions of how else to have gone about things. Eerily similar situations happen. Not just as a dĂ©jĂ vu, but simply as everyday affairs. In order to handle life, itâs natural to construct patterns, heuristic solutions, when the same problems arise over and over. Life is not a time loop and doing this has made me cause pain to others. We change, and using the same words, thoughts, or behaviour to console or to be present, when people are sad or hurting, will make things worse. Because the loop becomes real, but only in yourself. You donât see how the problem is no longer what it used to be, and youâre just predicting behaviour. When the problem hasnât even changed, itâs even more hurtful. Acting ahead, to remedy a situation that hasnât happened yet, but will, is disallowing others to express their pain, and they see the frustration in your eyes, when they realize youâre stuck in a loop of your own expectations. I am still in those phone calls with my brother two years ago, arguing, trying to make him see my side. Later my father calls. The problem is too abstract. I waited too many years to confront the issues, because I knew the result. I still know the result, and so Iâm stuck in that memory of that evening after Easter. Iâm thinking about the regret I will feel once it is too late, and trying to find a way out. A way back. Is this the same behaviour as I scolded myself for before? Perhaps partly. There are too many indicators of future behaviour for me to think it wonât happen again. Iâm not talking about a heinous act or anything concretely abusive, but a thoroughly negligent, disregarding, and condescending behaviour, that no longer will affect just me. What a bitter, borderline spiteful choice to make out of a need to protect those I love and who depend upon me. That almost makes me sound like Iâm trying to praise myself, when Iâm actually saying Iâm defaulting to behaviour that must seem to everyone else, childish, and to me, a damned shame.
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No matter what the designers of Ragnarok intended, its many systems of character building are not interesting.
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A series of traits for a digital program converge. The program isn't meant for productivity per se, but to entertain. This is a game. A number of games sharing these traits are made. This is a genre. The traits might be called mechanics. If the mechanics of two genres meet, we might be looking at a mash-up, or one genre using aspects of another.
+ +A grappling hook in a sidescroller is a mechanic, but not from another genre. A whole levelling system of stats and acquired skills, seems to be from the RPG genre, but can be used in the sidescroller genre, like in Castlevania Symphony of the Night. If enemies drop physical experience points to pick up, and your equipped weapon levels up, but also loses levels when you are damaged, that's a system from outside the sidescroller genre.
+ +I'll just list a few systems. They might be battle systems, or meta progression, or something in between. Maybe you can pick an element and insert somewhere else, or think about how it's not often reused. They should be supplemental systems, and not core.
+ +TRANSFORMATION
+ +Touch (eat) something to transform for a while. Pac-Man did it, and it's good. It's barely a system yet, and it's a bit hard to define a genre for Pac-Man, so it's hard to say if it's outside the genre. Mario built upon it.
+ +Old mario games are generally 1 health point, instant death. But pick up an upgrade, and you transform. A mushroom turns you into the titular Big-Tall Mario. This also grants you an extra health point. The many other upgrades convey abilities and two extra health points. If you take damage you either revert to Larger-than-life Mario, or to Mario without human rights.
+ +Kirby's Adventure moves the complexity elsewhere. Now you eat the enemies to upgrade. It feels different, but is essentially the same. Honestly why haven't any shooters done this? I know it seems obvious that weapons are picked up and changed on the fly... But why not try something different?
+ +ZELDA MAGIC
+ +This is a funny one. In some of the games, Link gets a green bar of magic, which limits the usage for some of his tools. In Wind Waker, it signifies that he's becoming something of a wizard, Harry, and that only those with magical potential can use these items. It's a nice narrative twist on what are ostensibly just magic points.
+ +DYNAMIC EXPERIENCE POINTS
+ +This classic is so clever. Quote has a few varied guns available. Each is mechanically different. Enemies drop physical experience points that quickly disappear, you have to touch them to increase the level of your currently equipped weapon. Once you reach a threshold, it'll upgrade, and behave differently (most often better). But careful: taking damage makes the weapon lose experience too! Wonderful active risk/reward in this one.
+ +GUNSTAR COCKTAIL HEROES
+ +This game has 4 pretty different guns available. But pick up another, and you can either use the other, or combine them for a new kind of gun. Works with the same type as well, for a total of 14 guns! And it's all done in the heat of some pretty intense fighting.
+ +GEARS OF WAR
+ +Just a little twist: if you time a button press correctly while reloading, it finishes instantly. Time it correctly, it takes longer. Don't do anything, it takes the normal amount of time. Something to gamble, something to master.
+ +TIME ACTION MAGIC RESOURCE
+ +4 Heroes of Light, Bravely Default, and Triangle Strategy: just a little action point currency that you manipulate directly and indirectly. Simplifies the unwieldy abstraction of MP, makes the time management of actions more concrete. ... Why aren't there shooters with action points?
+ +COMBAT CRAFTING
+ +I wanna give my own The Girl Who Kicked a Rabbit a little shout out here, but clearly The Last of Us had already done it, and very well. That said, it shows how a seemingly similar system works differently in a cover-based shooter, compared to a turn-based puzzle game. The idea is that you can craft helpful upgrades during combat, from knickknacks you find before and during combat, from the environment or fallen enemies themselves. It's stressful and thrilling in The Last of Us, and strategic and surprising in The Girl Who Kicked a Rabbit.
+ +KILL TO MOVE, MOVE TO KILL
+ +Movement is everywhere, but most often it's either completely free or all about limitations. Maybe you can jump, roll, dash, double jump, triple jump, backflip, crouch-slide jump, wall kick, re-jump, ground pound, pound bounce, swing, rapel, ski dive, float, glide, fly, swim, or boost. But they're just actions you do. You can get good at them, and they might be hard to pull off.
+ +On the other side, we got grids, action points, movement points, stamina, charges, energy. Systems might occur here, but in most cases, they're not sub systems to a main gameplay, but the entire focus.
+ +Doom's (2016) system where you weaken enemies, get close, finish them off, they drop healing items, and you continue. Melee is risky, distance is death. Now that's a beautiful little sub system.
+ +I tried adding a system of limited movement actions that could be regained by killing, in Like a Pig. It's still a good idea, since it forces deliberate movement. Yet in practice, you don't connect your sudden stops with running out of leg fuel, and there's no connection between killing, and getting to move again. I haven't given up on solving it though.
+ +ANTHEM'S DELIBERATE COMBOS
+ +In Anthem, some guns have a primer effect: shoot enemies until they are affected. Once they are, shoot them with a gun with the detonator effect. Lots of effects and be combined, and it encourages experimentation.
+ +MOTHER 3 MUSIC BATTLES
+ +I don't like these, cause I suck at them. That said, I madly respect them: tap the confirm button during a normal attack. Time it with the beat of the music to make a 16 hit combo. Just because I suck, doesn't make it not brilliant.
+ +PIKMIN. JUST ALL OF IT
+ +Oh look at me, I'm just John Fucking Mario, coming to show all you idiots how to make an entire RTS on a console: You're the cursor, your units are both bullets and workers. They have easily distinguishable traits, and need constant, intuitive micro management. It's incredibly difficult to make something so complex yet so simple and intuitive. Doesn't get half the praise it deserves.
+ +PIKMIN AGAIN
+ +You know what? Let's do another: Pikmin 3 has bingo battles. You race to collect junk on your respective bingo cards. You win by getting an entire line. It transposes the simple concept from other place into this multiplayer mode, and it works wonderfully.
+ +GEEZ HOMER I THOUGHT SOMEBODY WITH TWO HEALTH BARS WOULD BE PRETTY HAPPY
+ +God of War uses the idea of a stagger-metre delightfully, though it's most often not necessary. Either you deal damage with weapons, or you stagger with your fists. Lots of Final Fantasy games use staggering as well, from a whole ecosystem of "use Assess to discover a pressure point, then pound it until they stagger " in FF7 remakes, to the chain bonus builder in FF13. There's also the staggering locks in Octopath Traveller, where you have to hit each lock type to induce a stagger state. It's very clever, but in practice makes even the simplest enemy a tedious task. Dissidia Final Fantasy does something like it, but it's too complex to even begin describing.
+ +ALTERNATIVE HEALTH
+ +What if you don't even have health? In Yoshi's Island, health is sorta the baby you drag around. Get hit, and your health-baby will float away. Catch it quick!
+ +RECHARGABLE HEALTH
+ +I don't know who invented it, but Halo popularised it. Before, if you lost health in a westernly developed game, you'd have to scrounge for health kits. Suddenly, you just find cover and wait a bit. Honestly, why hasn't anyone used this in a side-scrolling game, or a vertical shooter?
+ +REVERSE SHOT
+ +In Sin & Punishment 2, you can reverse all missiles by striking them with a melee attack. Good luck pulling it off consistently though! Very simple, satisfying, and dangerous.
+ +CHARGING
+ +Metroid, Zelda, MegaMan. Hold a button. If you hold it for a while, you get a stronger or special attack. Not quite a system yet. Cave Story has more than one stage, so there's a risk of charging and not dealing damage while charging, and possibly wasting your time. Fighting games do the same, though the mechanic feels inherent to the genre, compared to somehow charging energy in Zelda. Another World built upon it, with wildly different mechanics upon charging. Videoball based its shooting system upon Another World, but finally turned it into a system: tap to shoot, charge for continuous push, long charge for smash, which is reversible, and over charge for shield, which is a consolation for wasting your charge. It ought to exist in an actual shooter (and I take it that it was supposed to in Shadows of the Damned).
+ +TOOLS WITH SPELLS
+ +This one is so widely used that no one considers it anymore, but let's just try and separate the system from the games. The original real-time strategy games like Dune 2, had units you moved around, and they could attack. I might be misremembering, but I don't recall them having extra skills that could be used occasionally. Warcraft changed this, by adding a set of so-called spells to various units. No longer were your units just pens and marquee tools that could kill. Each unit suddenly had a repertoire of sub-tools. This system within a system continues today in many similar games like Dota 2, but also shooters, where you select a character to play as, and it is defined by a few select abilities and equipment from the outset.
+ +SHOPPING
+ +Speaking of shooters and how your character is defined, let's round this off, by looking at Counter-Strike, a game that I respect, but thoroughly loathe to play. Each round of this kill-the-other-guys-basketball-without-basketball, has you use the money you received from how well you performed in the previous round. It's a decidedly keyboard-based interface, but it doesn't have to be. It changes how each round plays, encourages friends to invent impromptu rules ("guns only, guys"), and doesn't really belong in the setting (why wouldn't these guys arrive at the situation already equipped?). Very clever, rarely copied. Kinda odd.