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.