Leon's Microblog – September 2019

Game content patterns – levels, worlds, checkpoints, bonus levels, map screens, battle screens – offer such affordance for subversion and surprise, but few games really notice or exploit this, or even properly recognise what kind of mood sticking to these rigid patterns produces.

which, while much more relevant to the plot than stat boosts or crafting, aren't really what the game is "about" either. The goo of RPG systems thus serves as something of an emulsifying agent, holding together disparate and brittle systems that have actual narrative flavour.

On the one hand, yes, NieR or whatever isn't expressing confidence in its plot by filling the spaces between it with loadout and inventory busywork… but I guess the silver lining is that its presence draws attention and weight away from the combat, shmup and exploration systems,

You may think level-ups and quest menus as an extra layer of authority over the game's plot and action is a tacit acknowledgment that the plot and the action, left to their own devices, kind of suck. I think that sentiment can be taken in either a negative or positive light.

People often wonder how the 2010s "AAA genre" emerged, where all of them are 3D action games with RPG stats, skill trees, etc. My take is: gamification took hold. Games, uncertain of their future as tech improvements slowed, turned away from diegesis and embraced feedback loops.

The this will see you now.

worlds where the innocent, childish quest of "helping the world" is able to seem just as plausible as the grown-up, masculine, and eminently more marketable quest of "saving the world".

The only other Zelda I recall that gives "helping people" such primacy is Majora's Mask, which, guess what, makes up my Top 2 of the series. I notice both take place in tiny, narratively closed-off, storybook-like worlds, with nebulous and near-insubstantial antagonists,

Later recontextualisations of those systems continue to grow this perception, such as emulators, where "the NES" was now a single .exe, or the commercial bundles like the Classic miniature consoles, with their fixed, handpicked libraries.

This continuity led people to start subconsciously thinking of the system in totality, of "the NES" as a game in itself, and each title as an aspect of it, giving its motley, chaotic library a massive collective weight in memory that no single modern title can compare to.

This one sorta has an odd dystopic domestic mood… like a space of tranquility in a precarious world… I'm not good at describing music, actually http://deepsid.chordian.net/?file=/MUSICIANS/D/Dr_Zoom/Feeling.sid

This one has some kind of evening adventure feel, to me, energetic (especially after 1:20) yet austere http://deepsid.chordian.net/?file=/DEMOS/M-R/Made_for_the_Machine.sid

*realises that this means people can't see the ending of Celeste chapter 9 unless they know about the secret exit in level 1-3 of Super Mario Bros. 3 for the NES* Heeuuurrruuuuaaauueeeaaa

One of my top three favourite Strong Bad Emails is "boring" http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail131.html which is in a similar space – just straightforwardly denying the viewer any of the form's expected content by gradually, increasingly contrived means.

Also whatever emulator glitch is causing the BGM to play as if by a PAL 50Hz->NTSC 60Hz speedup really gives the humour that little bit extra.

Adding these affordances is acknowledging that the "cost" of moves in old IF was always illusory, was always about denying the player progress by attrition, by resistant UI, rather than a more mature consideration of what "difficulty" in a text game could, should be.

lacking the undo command, lacking a full undo history, lacking a means to quickly save and load, all affordances we now expect of IF that make possibility-space exploration as effortless as it ought to be.

I find it interesting, then, that the design goals they were pursuing – difficulty yielding to just short of brute force possibility-space exploration – were, due to the nature of IF, mainly enforced by the sparse parser UI of the day,

That being said, it's easy to intuit what the designers were thinking – since typing parser commands has no physical skill barrier, then denying the player progress with almost cryptographic opaqueness was their only perceived means of difficulty, of making moves seem costly.

Nowadays, though, I think we all recognise that a difficult game taking the player's time can and should give back in return, that it ought to yield gracefully to a well-practiced player rather than just resisting them brusquely.

Even then it was obvious that these obnoxious designs were not good entertainment, but there wasn't a way to critique their very conception of difficulty. I feel like from 2013 on, the arrival of games-as-performance revealed what games' skill ceilings looked like, and could be.

As a result, design patterns like damage-sponge bosses, insufficient checkpoints, long auto-scroll levels and so forth tended to emerge, that offer no reward for the player to play well – a high skill floor and a very low skill ceiling.

I think this explains why a lot of indie and teen-made games attempted to make their games difficult, and only ever made them long, padded and time-wasting – they could only envision making the player play poorly.

The idea that one could play a game well – not just better than the game's challenges, but surpassing it confidently and effortlessly – was unthinkable then. It was only possible to imagine playing a videogame poorly, struggling uphill to victory, and then retiring.

With this amount of hindsight, the takeaway from all this is clear: no matter how much elegance a mechanic may hold, it isn't really astonishing unless it *looks* astonishing. Which, as always, is about what kind of story – in the game, or about the game – you can tell about it.

I consider Super Mario Odyssey, released another half-decade later, to be the antithesis of this era. Its flashy, mind-bending verb is almost entirely sidelined by the game's worldbuilding. The mechanic is not high on a pedestal but another face in the crowd, where it should be.

In many ways, the entire design philosophy of that era embodies the myths and branding of those games' creators – a single genius designer/design that everything revolves around, rising above their crude competitors by force of elegant simplicity.

that, sensing the gains in graphics technology were gradually slowing, designers sensed games' next "frontier" was mechanical technology, potentially in envy of the early-00s boom of 3D mechanics producing the 3D platformer and the FPS.

Also, I like to imagine Super Mario Galaxy to be a sort of parallel to this era – a front-and-centre focus on unusual gravity, with little worldbuilding or narrative ground – and a hint of both stemming from common mood in that decade's zeitgeist,

It's interesting that the late, forgotten third game of the Braid-Portal triad, Fez, correctly recognised that its mechanic was visually striking but mechanically limited, and heavily focused on world and environment design rather than puzzles, avoiding the trap of its own hype.

Really, neither of those two were ever phenomenons because of their puzzles' emergent complexity, but because of how visually appealing they were on mere shallow face-value. Portal's infinite tunnels, Braid letting you watch things un-fall and un-jump.

It's kind of ironic given that Portal's success wasn't because of its dryness, but because it subverted it. Don't forget it was originally bundled alongside TF2, as a tech demo akin to Half Life 2: Lost Coast, only to pull a horror-game bait-and-switch halfway through.

All these games had names like "Perspective" or "Shift" or "Tag" or something that put the central verb front and centre, and had near-zero narrative beyond puzzle progression. mimicking how Braid and Portal's press coverage focused on their verbs and puzzle progression.

Aside: many have celebrated that its ending has nods for the watchful that Madeline is trans. That's great, though the most important part may be that – regardless of authorial intent – this means the "Madeline is plural" interpretation of the plot is now 200% ultra-canon, right

As for the story… it's good if you want a pretty intimation on grief similar to To The Moon, but I felt – exactly as I did with chapter 5 – that it didn't feel fleshed-out enough as a hard journey into the psyche, the visuals and dialogue feeling too generic and insubstantial.

This is because the sections afterward require a movement technique revealed to the player only at the end of 7-B. That being said, it does make the intent of this chapter, about who its audience is and isn't, pretty stark.

Just to clarify: there is a mandatory gate somewhere in this chapter that cannot be passed unless you've beaten the first seven B-sides. Unless you've done that, you can't go any further - a hard lock to reinforce the chapter's difficulty locks.

I guess it's extremely fortunate for Celeste's sake that it has Assist Mode as a fallback – as games of this genre really should – but it does feel like some philosophical tenet of its design has been abandoned here, this long after the main game's release.

This bugs me because it breaks an invariant the game had until now, and which I'd praised it for: that the entire narrative is available in just the A worlds, whose difficulty curve is far below other precision plats like Meat Boy or the IWBTG fangames - inviting and welcoming.

Just to be clear, I don't know anything about what this "Gaster" character is, and have already forgotten that I've made both of these tweets.

*you try to say something but are too enraptured by my handsome and cute features* It's a logical extension of the Undertale blue/orange system, which itself was a logical extension of the Ikaruga white/black system. It's a dodge-roll verb implemented in basic movement verbs!

More than any other I've encountered, most of its puzzles involve "hidden paths" – the pieces obeying visually opaque, yet deterministic rules. Usually these make the puzzle simpler, greatly restricting the actual combination space, while making it initially appear much harder.

At times, it feels like a subtly twisted mockery of the expectations of a game player, jumping into a game and expecting immediate gratification and obedience from the entire game's inhabitants.

Lvl. 0 (wraparound): Control is just a modern day AU of Metroid Fusion anyway, so what does it matter

The Mario franchise is, if defined by anything, defined by juxtaposition, and Maker's increasingly divergent and disparate notions of what a "level" can be seem far closer to accepting that identity than the purely formal levels of the new Mario platformers.

It's easy to forget that classic Mario very gently toyed with the meaning of a "Mario level", in World 9, Star World 3, the "empty" World 7-Fort, etc, and Maker levels, in that light, feel less like alien design aberrations and more like an abandoned thread resumed decades later.

That being said, if Nintendo ever did a Mario platformer where level 6-5 or whatever was a "hold right" level, and level 7-2 was a music-box autoscroller, it would absolutely be the most modern Mario platformer ever created.