[article] Death to the self-playing game

creative
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Hello! I want to try and engage in more long-form critical game design discussions here; this is my first effort in starting that. Sharing a game-design article and some of the thoughts I have about it.

The article being paywalled, I will base this topic off of the freely accessible section.

This is something I feel very strongly about. This article is about the almost self-playing games, some that I have near no respect for (Ball X Pitt is offensively poorly designed), the survivors genre specifically is one thing I wish never happened. But there is nuances to this, and I want to argue about them for a bit. Following paragraphs are fragmented thoughts, they are not connected to each other necessarily.

I have no gripe with mechanically-focused games being somewhat guiding in the way you play — for I do believe that forcing the hand of someone to do something using available game mechanics is a way to make the player experience something specific; see Celeste’s or Super Meat Boy’s level design for example. The issue starts to arise for me in that type of game when the level design is set in a way where you have no way to play but to follow exactly the pattern set by the creator, and that pattern being uncreative. This is an issue with so many platformers and puzzlers I play that I won’t even try to name them.

One thing I despise heavily about games focused on meta progression; think most roguelites and MMORPGs; is the way they tend to trivialize the middle- to micro- gameplay loop and make it a chore to complete for the macro-loop. This is often done in a very intensively anti-player way, rewarding play-time rather than any form of personal achievement, and removing agency from the player (with very few exceptions, you can’t affect the pace of the macro-loop meaningfully in these games.) Those games don’t self-play per se, but they might as well with no change to the experience except removal of low-level play and grind.

Some near-self-playing games rely on meta-commentary to convey a message. This is, in my eyes, a pretty cheap and self-reflecting way to commentate on the issue. You see it once, you’ve seen it all. Recent popular example of this might be Unfair Flip, a pretty uninteresting and self-justifying game.

Most of the crap that comes out in the form of reducing gameplay complexity seems to correlates to a decrease in involvement from the players in the long term. Gameplay literacy is getting worse, and many will play crap if it occupies their hands and troubled minds. Great gameplay, with high standards for quality, is simply not a thing for most games, in the same way most young book readers don’t have standards for quality prose — notice the irony of me redacting this in my second language, resulting in poor prose.

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It’s interesting to see this take from an established games writer. The entire games press seems to view a twin-stick shooter with no fire button as a revolutionary idea, and that vexes me. I also don’t understand the appeal of idle or clicker or even “auto-chess” games at all.

That said, I try not to just put down what other people enjoy, and obviously a lot of people enjoy these games. The problem is that the glut of them is making it harder for me to find what I enjoy. I was just looking for new (Wizardry-like) dungeon crawlers the other day, and most of what I found were idle clickers, Survivor-likes, and deckbuilders*. Discoverability is usually billed as a problem for developers, but it’s also a problem for players. Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink.

Because of the paywall, I’m not sure what his conclusion is, but he argues that these types of games are accelerating a design trend away from genuine engagement and towards base psychological exploitation. I’m not sure where I stand on that. I somewhat hesitate to attribute that level of cynicism to a surprise hit indie game, since AAA and f2p games have been pushing that vector for decades. f2p in particular has it down to a science; they know exactly what mental buttons to push and how hard to push them in order to extract the maximum revenue from the player base.

If we grant the article’s assertion that self-playing games are largely dopamine dispensers, I could see the argument that this existing industry-wide trend has created a vicious cycle of supply and demand, and that self-playing games fit into and propagate that. I’m not sure, though, because it’s ultimately just one segment of the market. I see the industry as having been in decline for 25 years, so this particular (largely indie-driven, as far as I can tell) trend seems like a blip.

* It’s kind of funny that card game videogames were also a bit of a fad when M:tG was in its heyday, and now they are again, because of Slay the Spire and Balatro.

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the perfect version of this, in my head is something ive been calling an execution puzzle, though i think sylvie games do this more clearly than anything else. in the game you know you have a certain set of tools (dash, double jump, mermaid jump etc.) and what these games are best at is simply leaving you with the idea that these tools are combined in some order, but its not always laid out other than through trial and error, or certain known-useful patterns you may have learned from the game already. and in these terms a hand-holding level is a puzzle with a trivial solution

what a self-playing game seems to be infatuated with is giving you a glut of these tools, offering them as choices, but then remaining totally un-curious about what they are used for or what your choices end up being.

I actually do think it is possible to critique from within the same genre, but what seems to plague really earnest attempts to do that is that its hard to do so without making some sort of “worst version” of that genre. So when a player goes ‘ugh, why am i even playing this’ it still tends to be read as a failure of design even when that may be the message the game wants to convey. i think this is more to do with what you say about ‘gameplay literacy’ though, or at least the things players presuppose about a game before starting it

I don’t think I can fully label it cynical either. If you are an indie developer (or aspiring) and happened to spend 60+ hours playing autochess games during the pandemic, it seems pretty natural at some point you’d come up with ideas for improvements or your own spins on them. thats more or less how anyone gets into gamedev in the first place? i think there are very few who have genuine ulterior motives about this, and the gravitation towards this type of game i think has been mostly natural and the results of feeling like there is a loss of opportunity around other types of games. i also feel the later on that you began getting involved in the field, the more likely you were surrounded by developers in a ‘survival’ mode and may not be getting the best lessons from them

The dangerous thinking in this is that we still broadly assume that indie games are at the heart of the solution to big issues in the games industry. During discussions like these it often feels like we are dealing with the sense of why an indie might feel more freedom to make something ‘cynical’ than a bigger studio. And I don’t think we can safely say that there is any inherently better quality of intention behind indie games - that is still effort and introspection you have to perform, and most do to some degree, but if that work is being excused for the base assumption that indie games are ‘better’ thats where it opens up to cynicism

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There is definitely a segment of the indie scene that produces cynical work, because making a game that gets attention and sales is not necessarily the same thing as making a good game. This might be even more true with indie games than it is with AAA.