Darkoshi

From a discussion on The Digital Antiquarian.

For some reason I felt the urge to write an essay here. Well, I can put it up on my Dreamwidth account later.

One of the biggest gulfs between the early days of both console and computer games, and their mature contemporary state, is in what it means for a game to respect its player and its player’s time.

In the early days, a respectful game was above all a generous game, one in which you could lose yourself for days or weeks in what was, at the time, an expensive investment. Think of the hours spent wandering Zork: most of those hours are not fruitful, but you’re still rewarded by its very sense of place.

For some console games, the action-oriented ones, this generosity expressed itself as gameplay whose required skills were a joy to learn, paired with escalating challenges to test those skills. For console RPGs, however, the generosity expressed itself simply by rewarding investment with progress. If this seems too obvious to credit, that’s because you’re on the far side of the gulf.

The good games paced their rewards superbly. In particular, I think of the best of the early Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest games, where merely fighting the monsters you saw while walking from destination to destination would make the boss fights challenging but surmountable. (In contrast, the bad JRPGs would require you to halt and grind repeatedly.) That mechanic, however, became a problem as technology developed. Early on, requiring you to level on numerous random encounters was the only way a console RPG could be long, generous in that regard. Data on cartridges was scarce; Dragon Warrior 4, a grand story with unmatched emotional impact (for the NES) and a tragic villain, took up 256kB. Soon enough, however, random encounters became a contrivance, and the RPGs went from long to bloated.

Personally, I still place Final Fantasy 7 on the side of being respectful, but there are factors no longer at play. One of the factors is its sheer spectacle, the game being unmatched in the quality of its animations. These no longer impress, but back then summoning one of the Bahamuts was a joy every time. (Its sequel, among its many other problems, placed too much priority on spectacle. The lengths of its summon animations were widely mocked.) However, with CDs on the scene, the technological need for random encounters as a way to lengthen a game was no longer there. It had become a trope, sometimes executed well, sometimes poorly, and its artifice would only become more apparent as time went on.

To return to the earlier point. The gulf exists because it became possible for something resembling this aforementioned generosity to be manufactured. For the larger companies, making a game long was a solved problem, a matter of effective management of large teams. Likewise, such games were full of rewards, and generous in that limited sense. But they were no longer respectful; some, like the Assassin’s Creed, were downright condescending in how little their rewards meant. Early on, you could love a game because it gave you forty hours’ worth of story and gameplay, in a time when few other games did. Now, no-one could love a game simply for being long.

What does it mean now for a game to be respectful of its players? I don’t know; I don’t have a general answer. Dark Souls is respectful, but in a profoundly different way than Super Mario Odyssey is respectful. I do, however, think that the emphasis on time remains: a respectful game is a game that respects its player’s time.

One more thing before I wrap up this silliness. Final Fantasy VII’s oft-derided huge-handed character models exist because, in the at-the-time undeveloped field of model animation, Square took inspiration from marionetting: outside of its combats, its characters are animated like puppets. This is not only an animation technique; it also becomes an explicit theme of the game. Even decades on, I don’t want to spoil you, so I’ll just say this: when you find Aeris again, take the scene very slowly. There’s something very interesting that happens before the part everyone remembers.

Matt: Interesting mini-essay Lhexa. Of course, seems to me like its worth noting that all this is also a function of not necessarily an idealized player free of context that stays the same across eras, but what we (or rather the game’s producers and planners) expect that player’s other life commitments and their alternative options to be. For a early teen child in the early era, without Youtube/TikTok, without internet, it’s perhaps different from what many of a typical player would be today. And so this changes over time, with the technological landscape, how more entertainment becomes cheaply available, and so the “opportunity cost” of playing more hours in a game (i.e. what else could you be doing instead?), and also the expected age range and lifestyle of players.

It’s quite a challenge in particular to reconcile the ideals of “openness” and “freedom”, which is that you can go anywhere you can see, do anything and make choices about everything – and which older players tend to expect more of – with managing to ensure that this time always includes something fun or exciting – naturally much easier to ensure in more linear and “directed” games. This leads to the sort of contemporary complaints about games that superficially seem large and open, but on closer inspection are found to have most of that large world simply be merely shepherding players between map markers that ask them to fetch and deliver miscellaneous items and spent a lot of time walking or using fast travel via menus. (Hideo Kojima’s ‘Death Stranding’ could be viewed as a veteran designer’s slightly sly “Well, OK guys, if this is what you really want” parody of this, as well as in earnest a modern high budget game).

Thanks for the response, Matt. Looking back on it, my essay’s historical argument is too simplistic to endorse, but it least I was able to develop my ideas of “respect” and “generosity” in gaming a bit further.

I agree that there’s no idealized player that we can appeal to, and that’s a large part of why the value of early games like Final Fantasy VII requires extra effort to perceive nowadays. One thing that intrigues me is the possibility of further paradigm shifts in gaming; in fact, we seem to be in the midst of one now, with the concept of “games as services” emerging from the domain of MMOs to cover many other genres. I’m accustomed to thinking of games as discrete experiences, like books or movies, but there’s now quite a few people for whom (individual!) games are more like lifestyles.

Openness was revolutionary when it when first appeared in the console space, but in retrospect it was more of a technological innovation than a design innovation. Kinda like how Quake’s primary innovation was technology more than design, revolutionary though it felt at the time. As for freedom, the player can only do what the designers allow them to do, so freedom is a matter of designers not turning around and constraining what abilities previously they granted (for instance by having varied movement options but then placing lots of invisible walls), rather than granting them a large number of abilities in the first place. I’m not going anywhere with this, just rambling.