Ep. 237 - Everything Everywah, with Maddy Thorson

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@yeso Definitely agree that the main consideration should be a holistic together-ness of the type of game, narrative, and difficulty. Like you said, there are many ways a game can be difficult. Personally, I am more attuned to twitch games or games about spatial awareness, and find games based on complex number-systems (like a few of the ones you mentioned) to be less intuitive and therefore more difficult. There is an interesting consideration here about mental and physical difficulty that I didn’t really think about before.

You could say that the stat-based number-crunching mechanics of JRPGS (just an example – you might not actually think this) are incongruent with the narrative style and vestigial to an older time period of video games, but put another way, they are a part of the tradition of those types of games, and clearly the connection between the two must be more than tenuous because they continue to entrance players decades later. Maybe I am being too descriptive and falling into the trap of “if it works, it works” but also, if it really didn’t work, no one would make or play JRPGs. And while visual novels might capture that Japanese-style game-y story itch for some people, they don’t have the same appeal as a JRPG, and there must be a reason for that. I think a similar argument could be made about something like Uncharted, whose incongruities have been elaborated in detail, and yet still seem to make sense to a lot of people in some weird way. Not trying to say “things are good because they are popular” or even that “things are popular because they are good”… you know what I mean. I just always feel uncomfortable speculating on what video games should be and prefer to wonder about how they could be the best version of what they are, if that makes sense.

Anyway, it’s always interesting between us because we like very different types of games and for quite different reasons! I consider Super Mario Odyssey to be something akin to a “beautiful game,” or even a masterpiece, and I have no way of justifying or explaining that through comparison to any work of art other than itself, which I think is kind of interesting. It proves to me that, however much I try to shoehorn books into every discussion, there is something about games that is very novel and exciting (even though I don’t like playing ~ 99% of them.)

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re: accessibility

would it be enough to rebalance the karmic scales by making every public bathroom fully accessible, free to use for the differently abled among us, but the able-bodied have to complete the manus fight from dark souls every time they want to pee in a train station?

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I’ve thought about this a little more, and now I’ve convinced myself that there’s actually a much stronger analogy between academic non-fiction and hard action games than my initial throwaway comparison to Foucault.

Most book-length academic writing (but not Foucault’s!) has a bunch of built in “accessibility features” to make understanding the arguments being made as easy as possible — in fact that’s more or less what writing in academia is: making the results of your hundreds or thousands of hours of research understandable to someone in the ten or twenty hours it takes to read your book. So you have structural conventions like the introduction and conclusion being standalone pieces that summarize your argument and give an outline of the rest of the book, and slightly more external conventions like including references to works that argue certain points in more detail than you have space to. A lot of these books are written specifically so that you don’t have to read every chapter in order — you can just read the introduction then the chapter relevant to your own interests, or stop the book entirely and read one of the referenced works instead.

A lot of action games are actually doing something pretty similar: they take a handful of core mechanics and explore as many interactions and applications of these mechanics as is possible, then present that to the player in a certain (often flexible) order. I think it’s generally agreed that unless they have other more idiosyncratic purposes, well designed action games should be structured in a way that makes it easy to learn the mechanics, even if (especially if) the game is wicked hard. It’s trying to teach you something (how to play it), just like a non-fiction book is. So it would make sense that there could be similarities in structure.

Thinking about this makes me curious about how “citations” could work in action games. Games are clearly a synthesis of other games, at least in part. Maybe after a level there could be a little unobtrusive note that says “If you really liked this level, well there’s a whole game that uses mechanics like this that inspired us, maybe you can check it out.” Or at the beginning of another level it might say “if you find this level hard, maybe you should play this other game first, since it uses similar mechanics, but starts at a more elementary level.”

I feel a lot of people are going to find this particular thought process ridiculous! We’re used to thinking of games as self contained experiences — or at least should be under ideal circumstances. But there’s no reason that has to be! If we think of games as “research projects in what you can do with certain mechanics” it’s clear that from developers’ perspectives they build on and reference each other. Why not make that more transparent to the player? Pretty much every old console game is for all intents and purposes free, and most indie games aren’t particularly difficult to acquire — even more so than books in some ways. If you wait long enough, many games can be obtained for under $5 in a sale or bundle. So there’s not too high a barrier to playing most games that might be referenced by, say, a 2D indie precision platformer. I don’t know if this would make the individual game that’s doing the citing easier, but it might make it easier for the player to have an all around good experience by introducing them to other games that better suit their needs.

Again though, I’m mostly just talking about action games here. Other types of games are less about “teaching,” and much more like novels or movies, where this really wouldn’t make as much sense.

(This is my way of trying to make @wickedcestus feel less alone for trying to shoehorn books into every discussion.)

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There‘s a thread now about 3D platformers (3DP) but more apropos of the particular views expressed in the episode I do find the remarks about feeling like you’re walking in a straight line while drunk and moving the camera in a 3DP interestingly incongruous with my experience: what the discussion brings to mind for me is that I do have some sense of what‘s ahead of me in a 3DP (one where the camera doesn’t suck of course), while in 2D Marios and Sonics and the DK Countries I have a hard time feeling a sense of control over my character and the space since I can only see a fixed distance in front of me. That‘s true for 3DPs as well, but the generally “looser” design—illustrated in Brandon’s comment about pixel-perfect edge-clinging platform design, or the 3DP lack of it—means the designer might not assault you with flying objects from offscreen either, because the mechanics aren‘t tight enough to support that kind of thing. I enjoy a 2DP like Celeste for the fact that it shows you everything you’re going to be dealing with per screen, although that admittedly does give even less of a sense that you‘re inhabiting a space (I’d say) compared to the traditional scrolling platformer.

This whole conversation about difficulty and games and books is the good stuff the stuff I come to Insert Credit for every day. I just played Resident Evil R3make for half an hour and quit after getting mad at enemies attacking me from offscreen. Gonna go read a book instead

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I get that there are games that are conceptually and narratively challenging in the way books are (named a couple earlier), but I‘m not seeing how button pressing agility is part of that. Doing that gaming stuff feels especially retrograde and dissonant when paired with game that tries to be cinematic or conventionally novelistic like the much maligned TLOU. Another example: MGS4 which is just constantly piling on and discarding game inputs and gameplay styles trying to keep up with the story’s aims. Which was unusually honest I thought in a way that TLOU or that new god of war is not

That's not to say that an action game can't be an effective whole. I think armored core 4 and 4A are pretty effective in blending everything together

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@saddleblasters I dig your idea about citations! How cool would it be if instead of capitalistic algorithm-driven “recommendations” for similar games, we could pull up a generative list of mechanical/narrative/conceptual links to other games? That’d be really rad! Realistically though, I think some of that connective game tissue is currently better communicated by communities like this. For example, I’m about to finish up Yakuza Like a Dragon. I really dug it. If I’m looking for games like that to play the easy answer is Dragon Quest 11, which I want to play, but getting over the repetitive (not great in my opinion) battle music is difficult for me. Because I have access to the Insert Credit community, I would ask what other games for ps4/5 and switch I could play that would scratch a similar itch.

I think there’s a rad blend to be forged between your academic paper approach to game citation and individual-to-community interaction that happens in places such as this.

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I should have said “Everything Warioware all at Once”

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I think rather than asking what button-pressing has to do with these stories, the better question would be what stories/type of stories are best suited for action games. Right now the paradigm is blockbuster movies, but I agree that it's not always a great fit. Twitch-based button pressing as a tool for unlocking Hollywood cut-scenes can be pretty jarring. In my eyes, the ideal narrative for an action game is one focused almost exclusively on doing, with the bare minimum amount of exposition. What you are doing pushes the story along by virtue of what you are doing being the story.

Unique to video gaming is the ability to inhabit the main character in a physical sense. If they are doing something physically demanding, it only makes sense that what the player is doing should be demanding as well. In which case I think button-pressing twitch-gaming is not retrograde or backwards at all; it's the whole point . No matter how hard people want it to be, TLOU is not a film -- it's not even _trying_ to be a film. It's heavily influenced by films, but the story is pushed forward by the player inhabiting the character of Joel and doing what he does. So I don't really understand the argument that the "gaming stuff" is somehow tacked on or unnecessary. Keep in mind that I haven't even played it so I'm not even arguing that it's good or anything.

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Great ep!!! Love Maddy on here

re: 3D platformers, has anyone played Sephonie? It looked interested but I’m also sorta repulsed by most platformers so idk that I’m the best judge though lol. It seems like they took some swings at making the 3D platformer something else though which looks interesting

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hat makes me think of Mad Max: Fury Road: I read that Miller was inspired by ballet to use a minimum of dialogue, especially in the first five minutes. There's a pretty essential piece of information that is only conveyed in the background of a room Max runs through in about two seconds.

In games I guess we call this environmental storytelling. But I‘ll be honest, this often hasn’t worked on me, because I‘ve been concentrating too hard on the game’s systems. But maybe the issue is with me, and the way I play. Close Reading is a thing, why not Close Playing?

On “push button to” and physical demand. - this is why I'm in the minority that actually really likes the pseudo-physicality of “hammer x as fast as you can to [throw this enemy off you / lift the pillar off your companion]”. For all I know a lot of those are cheated and you really don't have to give it your all. But I love committing to it.

(Also, I'm fine if they ARE "cheated". Physically demanding means very different things to different people, and some people find our misdesigned everyday world physically demanding enough, thanks)

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@sabertoothalex I’ve not played it yet but I just checked it out on steam and it looks great! Really love the vibe and the atmosphere, it looks to me like a more relaxed, less cluttered Sonic Adventure. Not to put you off though, I feel that Sonic Adventure 2’s Greenhill Zone and many of Sonic Generations’ levels hint that there is still a lot of potential for 3D platformers, even if they aren’t perfect.

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@Salloumi The Kaycee’s Mod bonus content for Inscryption also features a difficulty system like the heat system from Hades. As one of the weirdos who does like difficult games I hope this is a sign of that brand of hard mode taking root.

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Talking about nonfiction/academia, my read on the analog there is how - with academia there‘s good information but it’s all hidden behind a wall of exclusionary language. If you don‘t know the terminology and the trends of language within academia it just looks like a bunch of nonsense to you. You get into this problem in left-wing spaces in general too, where if you don’t know the anti-capitalist dogma it all just looks like a word spew, or like someone who's trying to keep knowledge from you rather than share it with you.

Games do this with their incredible complexity, if you're coming in from zero. I tried to get my dad to play red dead redemption during the xbox 360 era, because he likes games, and he likes westerns. But right away, he couldn't figure out how to work the character and the camera at the same time. Then it asked him to hit all these different buttons he didn't know the locations of, and he had to look at them every time, while he's getting shot at, or falling off his horse, or just jumping in place, and it makes him feel stupid and like this is designed for someone other than him. It winds up as kind of an insulting experience, which I think is what a lot of folks (coming from zero) have with academia, with discussions of capitalism or policing, etc etc. I've always felt like "academic language" was at odds with its intentions, because it walls off learning behind specified language. Like "if you don't have a PHD already you can't learn anything from my dissertation."

So to me, accessibility options in games should reduce input complexity/understanding complexity/barriers for the player, and allow them to engage with it on their accepted level. But players usually don't have the language to articulate what that level even is, which is where we get into the kinds of difficulties we have been talking about here. I don't think every game needs to be for everyone, but I think blockbusters should absolutely try to be, I mean that's what they're all about, appealing to as many people as possible. I think the Wii worked because even if you couldn't really figure out what was going on, you could wave that controller around and SOMEthing would happen, usually positive or funny or engaging, somehow or other.

In Hyper Gunsport we have one accessibility mode where you don't control the character or aim at all, you just hit the button at the right time to shoot the ball. That might solve some problems, but it doesn't solve the problem of someone looking at the game and thinking it's not for them, that hurdle is larger than I can actually deal with. It's similar to looking at a thick textbook and thinking "I am never going to start that."

I don't have a big conclusion for this but I think accessibility has a lot of vectors we can control but even more that we can't, given the complexity of the medium itself, compounded by like - how interested am I personally in making games for people that don't play them? How interested are most game developers in that? That's a whole other situation I guess, but it's a big slice of the pie here as well.

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@exodus I think I like this explanation best

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we have braille and audio books, audio narrative descriptions for films, etc. and that doesn‘t seem to

provoke any controversy, so maybe accessible versions of games is the way to think about it. How to make a fully accessible version of Truxton is a tricky question of course, but I suppose a 3rd party working on accessible versions is an ideal way to go. And that’s a different group than people who just lack the gamer ability to beat the boss or whatever, which is down to dev design choice. No one gets mad at Mark Twain for neglecting to personally write the braille version of Tom Sawyer and no one resents James Joyce for not writing Ulysses in plainer language and making it 500 pages shorter - which is how it should be, right? The authors make the thing, and if it's not for a mass audience then ciest la vie

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@yeso I really dig that bit about 3rd party accessibility development you mentioned. Like how cool would it be if there were dedicated accessibility teams that had a hand in every game going forward!?!

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@exodus I think what you’re saying makes the academia parallels even more worth thinking about. It’s not like the inaccessibility of academic writing is a uniform thing that no one has ever tried to fix before: there have been lots attempts of various scopes and degrees of success to make writing more accessible, or to simplify unnecessarily complex concepts. Crucially, writing and research are linked, so attempts at making concepts more accessible have led to new research directions and new ideas. I’ve noticed a lot prefaces of non-introductory books mention that the genesis of the research was an attempt to write a more coherent introduction than what had already existed.

On the other end of the spectrum, a lot of why Foucault wrote the way he did (at least based on my reading of him) is specifically because his philosophy is all about how institutions, including academia, are at service to power, and the style of writing he used to try to get around doing that himself was very tedious and difficult.

So maybe thinking about the effect on accessibility that these different efforts in academia with their different goals have had could be instructive for thinking about different ways for approaching accessibility in games. I had never thought about the parallels before, so I just brought them up because I found them interesting, and I’m glad you extended the analogy in a direction I hadn’t thought of.

I guess the two things I’ve been trying to get at in my last few posts are (1) accessibility isn’t just a set of options in a menu, which suffer from the problem you mentioned that players can’t necessarily articulate what they want (though sometimes that might still be the best form available given time and cost constraints or complexities in design), but can have many different forms, that might not even be recognizable as accessibility features, and (2) accessibility isn’t something that’s confined to the game itself, but is part of the culture of how we talk about games. Maybe there’s a world (not necessarily the world we want to live in, just a hypothetical example) where there are a lot more inaccessible-to-general-audiences super-hard games, but gaming as a whole is more accessible because we have mechanisms and a culture that better directs people to stuff that they’d be interested in, that they personally don’t even think of as particularly difficult — and there’s zero-shame about not playing certain popular games or genres that you’re not interested in.

I’m worried that what I said earlier about “not every game has to be for everyone” makes it sound like I’m anti-accessibility— which is the exact opposite of what I’m saying! I’ve been just trying to raise some alternative ways of thinking about accessibility (which might all be bad) that I haven’t seen talked about before, since the more tools available to game developers, the better.

I’m also thinking about this from my perspective as someone who has made a bunch of super hard and unintuitive strange games that I’ve only shared with my friends, because I know that if I put them publicly on itch no one would be able to figure them out. That perspective is of course a little different from most game developers, I think, where releasing the game to the public is the point, and not doing so would be considered a failure. It’d of course be nice to make games people who aren’t my friends could play, which is why this discussion about accessibility is so interesting for me.

And one last thing I guess I should say: I think most games should not be hard. I’m only talking about hard games because that’s specifically what the question was about.

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academic writing can, broadly speaking, be repackaged into glosses and summaries because it‘s meant to configure and communicate information. Which is distinct from literary writing which is an aesthetic object first and foremost. So it’s not possible to alter the words of a text and still present the same object. Games are also aesthetic objects, so the challenge is how to make that aesthetic object approachable while preserving the essence

of the experience. I think the task of making academic writing accessible is a lot easier.

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This is where I do not agree. Only some games are aesthetic objects first and foremost.

The particular kind of game I’m talking about is “hard games,” since that is what the question was asking about. I’ve been mainly thinking about a subset of those: 2D indie action games, which is the sort of hard game I’m most familiar with and have made myself. A lot of these, I think, function only partially as aesthetic objects. These are games that may or may not have narratives, and may hint at wider worlds through music, backgrounds and tiny story touches, but above anything else are mostly about mechanics. Mechanics aren’t specific to one game and can be adjusted into many different manifestations of the same ideas. Tim and Maddy’s talk about different double jumps and dashes are a good example of that. Lots of games have these mechanics, and lots of games reuse similar obstacles and enemies in order to force the player to use these mechanics in interesting ways.

I think a very good way to see how ideas about mechanics can be refined, repackaged and simplified just like ideas in academia is to play Mario Maker: there are hundreds of levels trying to make the player do similar things, but in different ways, some being a lot more accessible than others.

A lot of what I’m saying applies less (or not at all) to other sorts of games.

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(I’m wondering if this discussion should be moved into another thread so that it doesn’t drown out talk about the rest of the episode.)