There is a story about games marketing and reporting that would be very easy for me to tell here. One that would say that with publishers' budgets growing like bamboo and the internet acting as the distribution network for ever-more media, the games industry has outgrown the need for a glut of summer showcases. You no longer have to gather people on the ground in one location to have eyeballs on your product, so you don't need to set up a booth or a live stage in California during the month of June. You could stream out a reel of trailers in spring, autumn, or whenever else works for you. Despite the common-sense logic of that argument, there is still an oasis of games briefings sat out here in the summer heat.
E3 is taking a bye for 2022. Yet, even during this hiatus, we still got the Microsoft conference, Sony's State of Play, the Summer Game Fest opening, the Day of the Devs, the PC Gaming Show, Devolver Direct, Netflix Geeked Week, the Tribeca Games Spotlight, Sonic Central, the Guerilla Collective, Wholesome Games Direct, the Future Games Show, the Capcom Showcase, and whatever you could find whirring away on the festival floor. People are still eagerly awaiting a deluge of new game announcements every summer, and this outpouring of demos and trailers makes sense in the context of the modern web. More distribution channels for your game news also means a more crowded field. Therefore, it becomes difficult to be heard above the din, and the best bet that many smaller developers and publishers have to be recognised is to band together, joining their voices into one booming choir. Each of the smaller showcases in this meta-E3 also serves to market the others, penetrating the public consciousness with a potency none of them could achieve alone.
However, because there's this rabble of games yelling at you from so many directions, it feels impossible to absorb them all. If I burned the midnight oil, I could describe every game at Keigh3 to you, but eventually, the part of my brain that produces meaningful observations shuts off. I go from telling you that "F1 Manager is proof that you don't always have to use the same mechanics to explore the same subject matter" to farting out "I dunno, this game has cubes in it". I never try to cover every game, but for the sake of quality, I can't try to cover every show, either. So, I've whittled my focus down to the headline acts and a few of the attractions around the edges. This time, we're going to be looking at the Summer Game Fest Opening and PC Gamer's PC Gaming Show.
The Summer Game Fest Opening
Outside of Sony and Microsoft's steams, this kickoff was easily the most blockbuster of all the briefings. Its Modern Warfare II demo was one of the most tragically unimaginative sequences at these previews. No one needed ten minutes to understand a game where you use iron sights firing and grenades to snuff out opponents. The stream ending on The Last of Us Remake also suggested a misplaced confidence from Sony. The financial downside of making one of the most graphically accomplished games of its generation is that there's not much room for visual improvement. The premise of a remaster and then a full-priced remake within the same decade as an original would be greedy for any game but carries a particular redundancy for this technical tour de force. I keep looking at those "Before and after" shots and feeling like I must be losing my mind because neither set looks better than the other to me. They're just different.
I also can't help but feel that the Rock has burnt through most of his goodwill by this point. When he first entered the cinematic arena, watching the wrestling guy tackle goofy and even slightly self-deprecating roles was pleasantly unexpected. But it doesn't have the same charm when he's in every other family film under the sun, and he's sending out pre-recorded adverts for his movie and his energy drink.
Highwater depicts a believable future on a planet of rising sea levels. The bread and butter of the post-apocalyptic genre is characters trying to jury rig together the scraps of civilisation to get by. Highwater, on the other hand, imagines a world where some people foresaw the collapse and developed some solutions to living without the comforts of the old world. Comforts like the ground.
The original Goat Simulator didn't click with me. Its novelty felt like inappropriate compensation for its jank, and we were lousy with joke "simulator" games at the time. I was also put off by it being the go-to entertainment product for a lot of those late 00s YouTube guys who made a living by shouting into the camera. But in retrospect, maybe I was a little hard on Goat Simulator. It makes sense that a game about absurd destruction might also be falling apart itself. I'd definitely grab the sequel by the horns and give it another go-around.
It wasn't the most memorable of product spots, but the Samsung TVs shown at this event make a scary amount of sense. In my Sony recap, I mentioned how companies have been dismantling hardware as a barrier to access media. In music, you no longer need a dedicated CD or MP3 player because you can subscribe to Spotify or Last.fm right on your PC or phone. Film no longer needs to be seen in theatre or even via a Blu-Ray player when you can stream Netflix or Hulu directly into your monitor. And for a while, we've been talking about Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus Game Catalog as video game equivalents to those subscription services. Yet, to make full use of those video game libraries, you still need dedicated hardware: the very thing that the other media industries have phased out. For a true equivalent of Apple TV or Spotify, the media pipeline has to come straight into the display, and that's what Samsung is working on. That's not to say that, in their current state, those computer game subscription services are full replacements for a games console, especially not for us aficionados. Still, the erasure of the console is a plausible future, and Samsung's products are another step towards it.
Metal: Hellsinger scans for me in that shooter games often have a rhythm already, just not one the player must adhere to as stringently as they do in a music game. Metal is staking much of its success on tracks made by established artists specifically for some entertainment software. That's a gamble because such donated songs aren't usually bangers. Not to say that Hellsinger couldn't break the pattern, but there are very few people who perk up at the mention of Paul McCartney's contribution to the Destiny OST or who have Skrillex's Kingdom Hearts song on repeat. Yet, I suspect that the more sizeable challenge for Metal's devs will have been ensuring that the music and shooting complement each other rather than struggling against each other. Songs and non-rhythm games often don't dance to the same beat, but then experiences like Crypt of the Necrodancer have worked out how to have the two meet in the middle.
Saint's Row showed up looking a little muddy but remained in touch with its fans by reestablishing the series' legendary character creator. One of Gat Out of Hell's biggest blunders was robbing the player of the ability to cosmetically customise their avatar. If you've got a game about spreading your wings and acting as cool and goofy as possible in the story, traversal, and combat, that agency should extend to your fashion. From a business perspective, releasing the character creator ahead of time is a devilishly clever move. It's free to make your hero, so why not jump in? However, you're probably going to be dumping a lot of time and personal investment into that model, which gives you a reason to buy the game proper.
The PC Gaming Show
While the PC Gaming Show has traditionally been home to more technical and specialist media than we've seen at other briefings, it's also the most commercial of the set. It's chock full of adverts for PC components and accessories, and that's probably because the show's organisers can't dip into the deep pockets of an affluent publisher. When a Capcom or a Nintendo are carnival barking for their games, they're happy to foot the bill because they'll make the money back when people buy those products. But at an event like the PC Gaming Show, you have many independent developers who can't pay the exhibitor costs, so hardware firms like Corsair and Razor do instead.
Guerilla Collective and the Tribeca Games Festival are also reliant on private sponsors. Wholesome Direct is classy about it, but even they need to sell some goods to stay afloat. It's just that the exhibitors are going to try and tailor the products to the audience. Where PC Gamer figures its viewers would be happier with some new sticks of RAM, Wholesome Games' speed is more t-shirts covered in gleeful little critters.
I do, however, think the PC Gaming Show is much improved for cutting out the sci-fi comedy plotlines and getting straight to the meat. A speculative thriller shell worked for Devolver Digital, but where that show felt a little more like a spoof of Terminator and Network, the PC Gaming Show resembled the ever-cringy Final Space. That's all over now, giving more time to get down to business with a title like Tactical Breach Wizards.
One effective way to get people excited about your game is to show them a move that they can immediately understand and always looks cool to perform. Anger Foot has kicking doors into gangsters, Rumbleverse has elbow-dropping wrestlers off of buildings, and Tactical Breach Wizards has shunting enemies off of the edge of the map. Floating island grids are usually assumed to be framing devices for the purposes of play. This strategy title turns them into diegetic realities where tension ramps up as units approach the precipitous edge.
The Invincible wants to draw players in with a central mystery and some restrained pacing. However, a narrative still needs some payoff for the people who stick with that mystery and sink into that pacing. For the life of me, I can't tell you what the payoff in this trailer was. Basic questions about characters like "What do they want?" or "How do they achieve their goals?" usually get answered even in a bad book or film, but it's surprising how often video games don't provide a response to them. The Invincible's demo was a prime example.
Game developers often create expansive worlds full of many different kinds of people. But how much does that mean for an interactive medium if we can only play a small subset of those people? Potion Craft imagines us not as a chosen one, taking our blade or staff to the neck of an evil villain, but as an industrious apothecary, providing patrons with any drink or draught they could need. I would like to slurp that shit down.
Picture Junji Ito drawing the art for Habbo Hotel, and that's about as close as you're going to get to Decarnation. Pixel art often impresses me because while the techniques behind painting and sculpting can seem inscrutable, it's easier to see the bones of pixel art, to understand how the creator went from a blank canvas to a rich and evocative image. Decarnation has that artistic richness in spades.
We also saw System Shock, as in, I'm System Shocked there aren't more people talking about this. While the original game's assertive coloured lighting was a deft display of the era's shaders, it's a little overbearing in a modern context. This RGB overdrive is too colourful to conjure the atmosphere of sterile hostility that SHODAN's world is meant to represent. It was also corny to hear Spector and Plott do the "the world is like SHODAN with everyone on their phones" bit. To be fair, I think narratives of isolation and threat from AI still resonate because we're all used to being trapped in impersonal systems, adversarial to us. Toxic tech in the real world often pretends to be our best friend, which gives SHODAN an almost comforting honesty.
When I discussed As Dusk Falls, I mentioned how its combination of higher and lower fidelity animation was unsettling. However, unseating the player isn't a bad approach for every game. One aspect that draws me towards the horror genre is that a lot of creative decisions that would be "against the rules" in other circumstances fly in this darker tonal context. Demonschool contrasts pointillist low framerate characters against smooth-moving high-detail monsters. It gives the abominations that Jason & the Argonauts claymation creepiness and also effectively communicates that these are creatures from a higher plane. Demonschool is not in the Lovecraft aesthetic but, nonetheless, captures one of Lovecraft's most essential themes.
You wouldn't know it from watching the Microsoft conference, but the representatives at the PC Gaming Show were clear: Scorn is not a shooter. Hearing about the cautiousness required to play and the graveyard of a setting, I'm not even sure Scorn is an action game, and that seems like something more prospective players should be aware of. A title like The Wandering Village represents the positive version of symbiosis: the comforting idea that we exist in sync with the land we live off of, and so we're nurturing each other and part of something greater than ourselves. Scorn is the disturbing side of symbiosis: the need to connect yourself to whatever world you exist in, to have its products flow in and out of you, even if that world disgusts and repels you. You become another mechanism. Another lever, another switch, and as Scorn lacks any dialogue, we shouldn't expect to be humanised by our speech either.
At a time when hulking, plodding protagonists in shooters were associated with keeping your head down and slowly moving up the battlefield, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine dropped its pod into the scene with a very different idea. Now, your bulky super soldier was expected to react aggressively, ripping and tearing a path through the battlefield. In its spot at the PC Gaming Show, Tim Willits himself implied that the foot-forward abandon of Space Marine inspired Doom (2016). Space Marine II looks to resolve its father's aching eleven-year cliffhanger and provide a wall of flesh to shoot where its predecessor was all about individual targets. The brutish morons of the Ork army are swapped out for the atavistic beasts of the Tyranids.
New Blood is a publisher with one of the most distinctive voices on the indie circuit right now. Where Devolver made their name with fast-paced synthwave action games, New Blood is forging a similar path for throwbacks to 90s FPSs. Gloomwood, just one of the titles loaded into their magazine here, looks like if Doom had taken place in a medieval village instead of moon hell.
You don't have a mature creative form until you're seeing fan art in it, so consider it a rite of passage that the PC Gaming Show closed on a mod for Half-Life: Alyx. I'm honestly surprised that Valve is letting the team behind Half-Life: Alyx: Levitation move ahead with their expansion to their 2020 industrial thriller. It is proof that if you're a video game publisher with more money than God, you don't have to snipe down every use of your IP outside of your control. Levitation captures the spirit of the existing Half-Life games by setting its action in raw, utilitarian environments, but finds some locations that have thus far gone unused or little used in the Half-Life canon. You can see a dingy building site and a yellow-garbed quarantine area, not unlike some of the apartment interiors in The Division. Even if it didn't come from inside an established studio, Levitation looks to be approaching professional grade.
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That is two more Keigh3 presentations down, but we're not done yet. Next time, I'll be tackling Wholesome Direct, Devolver's show, and a little extra surprise. Thanks for reading.
A lot of games get shown at E3 that I don't end up talking about. There's only so many times you can comment, "trailers can be misleading" or "the AAA games industry keeps making the same title", but both those observations apply to this year's Microsoft conference more than most. There was thankfully a little more gameplay in its cocktail of fast-moving sizzle reels, and sure, corporate giants always lean on games which please predictably and safely. I don't even have a bone to pick with those products. As long as I'm not oversaturating myself, big, typical action games are a blast. But Xbox and even Game Pass specifically are ripe with games that are subversive in their subject matter, presentation, and modes of interaction. Look at Townscaper, Mind Scanners, Tell Me Why, Jurassic World: Evolution 2, and Dodgeball Academia among many others.
Microsoft's briefing felt like it was opening the door only a crack on the diversity of experiences that their console can deliver. There were an absurd number of shooter games here, most of them lacking any deviation from the format's present course. See: Redfall, High on Life, Overwatch 2, Valorant, Fallout 76, Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn, and Gunfire: Reborn. Plenty of others were some form of magic sword-slashy game like Hollow Knight: Silksong, League of Legends, Teamfight Tactics, The Elder Scrolls Online, The Last Case of Benedict Fox, NARAKA: BLADEPOINT, Ereban, Diablo IV, and Ravenlok. It's not that some of these games don't look engrossing or that there's no separation in their art and play styles, but there are also plenty here that don't appear to be doing anything all that original or ascending to the top of their field. And whatever the impression these games might have left taken alone, when you lay them end to end, they start to blur together.
At least Nintendo mixes up its vibes with plenty of cutesy, all-ages projects, and Sony is more willing to take a punt on a slow burn like Death Stranding, Ghost of Tsushima, or Stray. It doesn't help that the trailer for almost anything in these Microsoft conferences gets edited as if it were a relentless action game, even if it's a survival adventure like ARK II or a provocative narrative vehicle like As Dusk Falls. They're often also backed with this generic, royalty-free "get hyped" pop. When you show enough of those previews in quick succession, your audience begins to lose a sense of contrast.
Speaking of not giving your high-impact moments room to breathe, the demo for Redfall was a constant onslaught of dialogue. The characters often didn't have much to say but wanted to remind you they were there all the same. It's also a bummer to see this studio capable of making games where you can invent infinite solutions to one problem reduced to developing American McGee's Wildlands. There's a consistent weakness that pervades the voice-over in these trailers, and to some extent, the games themselves.
Depending on the genre of experience, they'll use light-hearted patter that affects the flow and levity of comedic back and forths, but without the unlikely observations and impeccable timing that actually make for witty repartee. Others have characters voicing these virtuous declarations in this bold, full-throated tone, but they always sound too forced to have that ring of authenticity. In either case, the characters do not sound like people actually speaking to someone; they come across as if they're an actor trying to fire off the coolest line they can for a video game.
Another solid example of that artifice was High on Life, a slushie shooter backed by the name of Rick & Morty co-creator Justin Roiland. I must say, if you need some characterisation in your shooter, making your gun a person is a humorously literal way to do it, but sparking that Rick & Morty magic again is harder than it sounds. Rick & Morty is a cartoon crafty in its plotting which ultimately shows the cynicism of its mad scientist to come from deep and corrosive self-loathing. But there's also a loud contingent within the fandom that is too socially oblivious to pick up on the show's condemnation of Rick and just treats him as a smart guy doing a bunch of zany abuse. That's mostly the conception of the programme that now exists in mainstream discourse.
The Pickle Rick episode is a perfect example of this. The show makes it painfully obvious that Rick turns himself into a vegetable in a pandering attempt to elicit an "isn't he so wacky?" reaction and to get out of family therapy. When his grandson finds out he's transformed himself; he looks at Rick with pity. And not that you can't make a lot of criticisms about how this episode handles Rick's pathology, but there were a ton of people who watched it and didn't go, "Oh, Rick goes on madcap space adventures to avoid having to work on his dysfunctional family relationship". They went, "Wow, crazy ass-kicking Pickle Guy who doesn't let his stupid kids drag him to lame psychiatry", at such a volume that now people who haven't seen the episode think that's its message. Without writer Dan Harmon on board, there's the potential for this Morty-like to be the meme version of Rick & Morty the show is often misunderstood to be. That's certainly what the trailer was trying to sell it as.
When you're reading about the middle ages in Europe, the grime and disease star front and centre. One of the most defining historical events of the period was a plague. Fantasy usually buffs its armour, scrubs its drawbridges, and leaves descriptions of the filth to the historians. A Plague Tale is the rare series that leaves the rot in, depicting the disease as a wave of flea-bitten vermin cresting over the streets. That's a project well worth continuing.
It was interesting to see Microsoft sell a new Forza Motorsport on the basis of its graphical realism because these games already looked mouth-watering. With their radiant rims and reflective hoods, these cars have been scrumptiously edible for years now. Also, a lot of racing games are visually detailed. What separates Motorsport from the pack is not its technical prowess; it's how it uses unparalleled customisation options for play to cater to both the weekend racer and the simulation zealot. And to encourage the former to edge into the territory of the latter. We got no information on what those customisation options look like in the upcoming Motorsport or any other information on its play.
What I'm looking for is a return to form after the seventh entry, which wasn't shoddy by any stretch of the imagination but was caked in tasteless butt rock and greasy lootbox mechanics. Outside of the difficulty modifiers, I see Motorsport in a similar light that this conference cast Flight Simulator or the Forza Horizon 5 expansion. It's not just a toolbox of shaders and reflection models; it's a high velocity, wind-in-your-hair hobby. It's not just about the vehicles you can see; it's about what you can do with them.
Bethesda's marketing strategy for Fallout 76 continues to be ignoring that anything was ever wrong with it, and I'm not sure what The Pitt adds to the experience except more content. Fallout 3's The Pitt DLC saw you dragged into a rusting, diabolic slave camp, with your imprisonment simulated through you having all your equipment taken away and your world stopping at the walls of Pittsburgh. Because the game could carefully control your implements, it could also delicately balance its difficulty and moderate its pacing. 76's The Pitt was advertised with none of the same constraint; it was paraded about as a non-stop massacre of every mutant and robot in sight, which isn't nearly as interesting.
When video games reprint the art of H.R. Giger, it's usually by proxy, having made an homage to Aliens and receiving the art of the Swiss surrealist paperclipped to it. Scorn is pure, uncensored Giger, and it is beautiful and disgusting. As oppressive as the corporate corridors and sanitised labs of the sci-fi horror genre are, they're at least clean, sturdy, and made for something close to human habitation. The Scorn trailer showed a protagonist ripped from their cockpit and dropped into a world where every body part that should have been interior was exterior, where even incidental buildings looked like shrines to the machine gods. Scorn could be to current Doom what Quake was to 90s Doom: a shooter aping its peer's gratifying gunfeel and free-flowing viscera, but with desaturated gloom acting as a counterpoint to Doom's heart-pounding, celebratory action. It could be the industrial metal to Doom's heavy metal, disgusting with gibs where Doom delighted.
Describing As Dusk Falls as being written like a prestige television show might be an attempt at describing its style of prose, but it does bring up a lot of negative connotations. I suspect the people who worked that line into this speech were looking to resurface memories of award-winning TV pressure cookers like The Wire or The Sopranos. However, prestige TV has been as frequently associated with overpaid executives designing media by committee, producing gaudy, overblown drama. As Dusk Falls might turn out to be nothing like that and could be a serviceable and emotive tale. Although, I don't think that its photoreal 3D graphics and hand-drawn motion comic panels fit together. The incongruity in the art takes me out of the moment.
NARAKA: BLADEPOINT is playing games industry on hard mode, squaring off against titans like Fortnite and Apex Legends. There's not a whole lot of booth space left in the battle royale genre. Not just because you've got a few very well-funded developers with big footprints, but also because these are live service games which require enormous player bases. A player doesn't pick up a live service game, beat it, and then move onto the next one. They come back season on season to see the new additions, meaning once they're in, they won't be shopping around for a lot of alternatives in the same format. Simultaneously, the one hundred player requirement of most battle royale matches means the genre can't survive scattered player bases. There simply would not be the user density you'd need to get one going.
However, if an underdog can make it in the field, it's probably going to be a more inventive game like NARAKA. The MMO shooter angle is already well-covered, so melee combat and magic spells are the niches left to fill. The 60-player cap may be there to mitigate the need to build a gargantuan audience, and a smaller player base that isn't engaging itself at range potentially means smaller maps. Of course, the quality of a competitive brawler all comes down to whether it feels like you're playing a graceful boxing match in which there's always another approach available or it feels like one player is dominating by wailing on a button.
Pentiment looked like a yassified medieval tapestry which really scratched my itch for unique presentational styles. It's a similar story for Diablo IV. I don't have the most voracious appetite for dungeon crawlers, but I would love to experience its setting in all its moody, gothic blasphemy. Grounded is one of those weird titles which I don't know anyone playing, but then also apparently has 10 million users.
It's games like Ravenlok that show you can do a pixel-infused dungeon crawler without resorting to the most thoroughly exhausted art styles and tropes. When we talk about works outside of video games that have influenced the medium, we reference H.P. Lovecraft, Aliens, D&D, Lord of the Rings, and just about every war film ever made. But when I see games like Ravenlok, which houses malevolent jesters and giant cats or The Last Case of Benedict Fox with its haunted mansion and tentacle monsters, I think we underplay the contribution that Alice in Wonderland and Tim Burton have made.
Cocoon's oddly biological synthesisers set the scene for disorienting alien worlds and curious exploration. This is a game thinking a lot about movement, both how it frames settings and how a player can turn it to their advantage. The camera zooms in on objects only for us to find whole other environments inside them, we can use the delay between when we drop a robot and when it starts moving to make it through a gate, while elsewhere, the ground reveals itself as we plod along it.
As awkward as the hosts of some of these briefings can be, when we don't have one, I miss them. The absence of Phil Spencer for most of the evening left us without solid partitions between game reveals and with a lack of a host to pull the sundry previews together. Yet, when he did arrive at the party, he brought one hell of a gift. Sometimes in these conferences, you don't just see what you're seeking, you find out what you want, and it was like that with me for the Persona collection.
Persona 4 spoke some of the sharpest social commentary I've seen in a game and made room for internal complexity in every character in its roster, even those who sounded like assholes on first meeting. It also had this cozy, relaxed downtime that you might now associate with software like Animal Crossing. I've also heard high praise for Persona 5's treatment of Japanese politics, and those politics would be a whole other world for me to dive into just as much as any dream dimension.
Last but not least, it's Starfield. If there's one presentation I'd tell you to take with a grain of salt, it's this one. When Todd Howard tells me that me and my friends will be able to define ourselves and make our own story in his studio's explosive new sci-fi, it reminds me of him standing on a stage and saying the same thing about Fallout 76 four years ago. Just days before this event, a damning article released on Kotaku contextualising the state of that post-apocalyptic RPG as a failure of Bethesda management. The coordinators of the studio, even Todd Howard himself, reportedly ignored the expert opinions of their own subordinates while pushing some of most experienced talent within their walls into quitting. So, that's who's running Bethesda.
There are also a lot of top-down questions that are unanswered when it comes to Starfield. To what degree are planets procedurally generated, and how much content comes directly from the hand of a developer? What proportion of this game is an explicit campaign like Skyrim's, and what segment of it is a systemic sandbox like Fallout 76? I do hope it's more the former because open-world survival games like 76 are a dime a dozen, but nobody else makes the kind of multi-faction long-form campaigns that Bethesda does. Or at least, did. I'm also pretty burned out on sci-fi where humans find a mysterious alien artefact that causes shocking hallucinations, and there was no well-defined problem for the characters to overcome announced in the presentation. That's an issue from a storytelling perspective.
However, I am being highly critical. Starfield is taking that Fallout idea of a retro-future and pushing it in an entirely different direction with no less definition in its architecture and prop design. It exchanges the oil and steel of Fallout for the white plastic and moondust of mid-century futurist optimism. It's exactly my thing. The facility that the player battled the pirates in reminds me of the Nazi moon base from Wolfenstein: The New Order. Howard suggests this look is more than skin deep, representing a spirit of pioneering spacefarers, a la NASA. The danger for anyone working with such an anodyne world is that in presenting it, they might accidentally agree with it.
Starfield's modular ship design is breaking new ground, especially for this studio. In an increasing number of games, using our tools is becoming more satisfying because those tools are directly the product of our actions. Crafting systems are a classic example. Yet, that rule has generally not applied to vehicles. If we're welding a vessel together with our own two hands, it could. I'm also a sucker for character creators that let us modify personality and talents as much as appearance. Those personal traits emerging in the play were one of my favourite features of Fallout.
As sceptical as I am of the curiosities in Microsoft's window, I will say that the showcase generally improved as it went on, and that with Game Pass, there's reduced pressure on any one of these games to knock it out of the park. I'm sure in some of the Xbox output between now and E3 2023, we'll get some gems, but we can also look on the games at this conference knowing that if one of them is missold to us, we didn't have $60 riding on it, and that gives me a peace of mind. Thanks for reading.
It's hard to believe it was just over a year ago I was last writing one of these "times are 'a-changin'" posts, but as Jeff Gerstmann said on a recent Twitch stream, you could argue that a shake-up had been coming down the pipeline for a while. With three of the Giant Bomb old guard discharged, it was conceivable that the fourth might make their exit relatively soon after. After the departure of Brad, Alex, and Vinny, I was optimistic about the site getting stripped down to its bolts, providing an opportunity for the staff to reassemble it to a new spec. At its best, it could have been the kind of radical refresh that spawned Giant Bomb in the first place. And the site's history since then has been eventful.
In the past year, Giant Bomb has not rewritten the book on games coverage, but the faces and focuses of the outlet have changed. We got shows about Power Rangers, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, internet culture, games industry news, and god-awful music. In contributors, we were treated to Danny O'Dwyer, Tamoor Hussein, Lucy James, Jeff Grubb, Jess O'Brien, the Two Minutes to Late Night team, and everyone who dropped by for The Arcade Pit. The site veered towards a content salad approach to entertainment, and my feelings about that have been mixed.
Jess O'Brien and Giant Bomb were a match made in heaven. Back when I was in university, a friend introduced me to some of the originators of the Let's Play format and the video creators adjacent to them. Sat off to the side of that group of misfits was Voidburger, a Silent Hill obsessive with a sunny and nonchalant presentational style. I still have nostalgic memories of her 2014 Shattered Memories run. Over time, Burger grew into her skin (bun?), unfairly dwelling in YouTube obscurity even as her personality grew bigger and her editing more refined.
When Jess was picked up by the huge explosive, it was an unexpected collision of worlds for me. It was like hearing my favourite deep cut on the radio or finding a beloved actor in a film miles outside their typical genre. Jess's warm enthusiasm made her a counterweight to the more laidback members of the team, creating a temperamentally balanced panel of hosts. It also goes to show, if you're plugging away for years on work without receiving your big break, it doesn't mean that broader recognition has become unattainable.
Guilty Treasures reinforced the site's personality-driven approach but with an intimate and documentarian tone. Danny O'Dwyer did for the programme what he did for No Clip, looking at games with an inquisitive and dignified eye without losing the human voice in the semi-formality. I wish it had run for more than four episodes.
Arcade Pit elevated the site's ambitious live production to new heights, teetering atop the legacy of Steal My Sunshine and Burgle My Bananas. But rather than using the single-game format of either, it keeps alive an almost lost art, incorporating an assortment of playables, as game shows like Button Mashing, Starcade, and GamesMaster had before it. By framing its games within a game, Arcade Pit establishes a systemic guarantee of surprises, variety, and madcap fun. Yet, it was also one of the features which felt the most conflicted about who it was vicariously borrowing its personality from. While Burgle My Bananas might have endured some practical setbacks, the former Giant Bomb game shows did have a well-defined crew on deck. Arcade Pit, by design, was in a state of constant rotation, and many of its guests were well-removed from the site, meaning its voice was in flux, never quite settling on one accent.
I felt a similar way about Albummer. The premise of these streams is right up my alley: a circle of music critics rummage through the stinkiest garbage to ever slop onto record store shelves. It's just the end product isn't in that Giant Bomb dialect. Dropping right after the departure of the Nextlander founders, the podcast hit at a time when the site most needed to reaffirm who and what it was about. Yet, the show introduced six people we'd never seen before whose jokes and subject matter were divorced from the rest of what the site had been or would be. Lord knows that wasn't the Late Night crew's fault, but then they also had an improv troupe style of delivery that was never going to be to my taste.
I'm going to say something that always applies to my writing but is vital to repeat when discussing people so close to home: My criticism of these creations is not an assessment of the people behind them. Following the opening act of Jeff, Brad, Alex, and Vinny is one of the toughest jobs you could have in games coverage. When media falls down, it's usually that difficulty in producing it rather than a lack of talent that is the culprit. Even the most acclaimed film director or video game producer can disappoint fans now and then.
Continuing, the nature of Armed and Dangerous and JeffJeff's Bizarre Adventure meant they would always be for a select audience. When you cover a range of media, if someone doesn't like the topic you're currently on, they know there might be another item along in a minute that does pique their interest. When you deconstruct one piece of media for your whole podcast or video, it's a godsend for people who love it, but everyone else is locked out for good. Without a passion for Power Rangers or JoJo's, I couldn't connect with these spots. Then there was the Very Online Show, which was caringly researched by presenters that knew how to poke fun while remaining lovely hosts. However, I'm just so terminally online I didn't get that much out of these explainers of cyber-culture.
It didn't help that I've been missing the in-office streams for a while. There's something about seeing a bunch of people sitting around on a sofa shooting the shit with each other that really sells Giant Bomb's vibe of laidback camaraderie. The sets also served as colourful eye candy full of all sorts of nods to the fandom and the site's wry but absurd humour. Plus, dragging a couch into a room with tinted lighting was the only way you got Giant Bomb's legendary E3 shows: after-hours parties roping some of the industry's funniest and most fascinating into a 3 a.m. haze of bleary-eyed hilarity. That party ended back in 2019.
It's fair enough if you think these are more my problems than Giant Bomb's problems, but this is where I sat. And while some of my discomforts were specific to certain shows, there was also a throughline here: Where Giant Bomb had been fueled by a core team of well-defined personalities, it had become increasingly diffuse. Instead of strapping itself tight to a core company of familiar faces, the site's video and audio came to rely on an array of teams that only occasionally overlapped and that you would rarely see in the same room together. Everyone on these crews was hard-working, masterful, and palpably appreciative of the fans. Still, some of these teams had very different goals than others, eroding the impression of the site having an essential identity.
While the publication always had these stray hairs of energy drink reviews, wrestling discussion, Dragonball dissection, etc. They were combed back into place by Giant Bomb's status as a video game website first and foremost. Now, there was an increasing drift into other media coverage. Giant Bomb was a website about video games, but also about JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Power Rangers, internet trends, terrible music, and whatever weird curiosity showed up on the Voicemail Dumptruck that week. All before you got down to the off-topic discussions on UPF or the Bombcast.
I think a lot of the announced changes at Giant Bomb address this dilution of its identity, but there was some understandable pushback against how those changes were declared. Jeff's departure from the site was sudden and unexplained, and in the aftershock of his exodus, you had a letter many people interpreted as a hurried corporate attempt at cleanup. Keep in mind that we had already seen Jeff fired from Gamespot by faceless, profit-motivated businesspeople. The nature of the site's founding means we tend to be sensitive to corporate interference. To be clear, the letter heralding a new era of Giant Bomb came straight from the staff's desk.
I think some of us read it as marketing speak because it made plenty of broad statements about the past and future of the site, and what about it appeals to us, without stating many specifics. For example, it wasn't made clear what "entering a new era of transparency" meant, and ultimately, the priority is not on transparency; it's on privacy. Which is good. I don't think anyone at Giant Bomb has the responsibility of publicly detailing every aspect of their work, but that's not what the letter suggested. It also imparted that Giant Bomb would meaningfully change but somehow remain the same. And if Giant Bomb is "a bunch of passionate friends talking about and around video games", couldn't you say almost any games outlet is Giant Bomb? I don't want to tear down anyone who was left in a rut here, but I also want to acknowledge the fan response.
I further think it's useful to study the reaction to that article because there's an example here of how we can speculate the worst will happen and be entirely wrong. For all the doomsaying, in the end, the reception to the Giant Bomb's future plans was overwhelmingly positive. There is an aching lack of conclusion to Jeff's journey with the site. There was no dedicated event in which the community could say goodbye. However, we did get concrete and specific promises about the site's roadmap that address many of the issues I mentioned above.
Instead of a fractured team of contributors subbing in and out, we've now got an official lineup of nine crew members. One of them is Jeff Grubb, whose extensive knowledge of the industry can help fill in for Gerstmann's. Another is the chaotic evil Dan Ryckert who presses a wrinkle of the old Giant Bomb back into the fold. A renewed commitment to video games is a contract to return to what people came to the site for originally and could serve to give the publication back its focal core. And then we have the news that, for the first time in a long time, there are rumblings about filming video out of the offices. On the whole, I think the outlook is positive. I also have to thank the editors for their shoutouts to the mod team. They've been tremendously kind.
As for Jeff, I can't get into everything he's meant to the site without trying to nail a whole other article onto the end of this one. For what it's worth, Giant Bomb has been at the forefront of games coverage's move into the video format, as well as its incursion into community and personality-focused media. As a co-founder of the site and someone who was pulling so many of its levers throughout its runtime, Jeff was integral to that pioneering. I'm not sure there is someone who has as consistent a track record at successfully breaking down the enjoyability of games as Jeff, and that's a legacy that persisted through his time with us here. In an industry trying to blind everyone with marketing and PR dazzle, the Gerst was always a cool head who saw the bigger picture. His grounding in reality also gave him a sharper eye for the ridiculous, enabling him to convey his hilarious brand of humour to the site. To Jeff, the community, and everyone still working on Giant Bomb, I wish you the absolute best. Thanks for reading.
Whatever you expected E3 to look like in 2022, you probably didn't bet it would be suspended in its current limbo. The ESA says that this year's E3 is a no-op due to COVID restrictions but that the expo will return with all bells and whistles next year. Some gamers regard the association's "Brb" response as PR fluff or wishful thinking, and it's possible that after so many false prophecies, this is finally the death of the expo. Yet, people also said E3 was dead in the ground when it took a year off in 2020, and what do you know? It emerged from its hibernation the following summer.
We often talk about the games industry as if it's a closed system, subject to only its internal pressures and releases. When we do that, we forget that whole economies and societies are running through it, whittling it into shape. That these economies and societies can transfer the consequences of a global pandemic to the games industry is proof of their symbiosis. Given that that pandemic still rages, it's probably for the best that physical events like E3 are ruled out. PAX thought it would be a fine idea to fling open its doors earlier this year, which predictably led to one of its staff's needless and senseless death.
Sony's State of Play briefing technically never would have been part of E3 and wasn't planned as a boots-on-the-ground operation. Yet, given its content and proximity to official E3 conferences, it's culturally part of the festival, even if it's organisationally divorced. Most of us experience the show as a series of streams anyway. Throw it on the pile, I say.
At the base of that pile, we had a Resident Evil 4 remake. I wasn't a particular fan of the survival horror's fourth outing last time around. At least Dead Space lets you move and fire simultaneously, even if slowly and stiffly. RE4's iron sights bolt you to the ground like one of those seaside binocular sets. I understand that the design immobilises you to generate paranoia and a sense of vulnerability, but it made me feel straight jacketed all the same. It also came across as unfairly punishing to have a zombie tear at my back flesh because I couldn't stomp away from it or see much in the rear view.
But then, I didn't connect with Dead Space the first time around, and it grew on me. Plus, the REmakes thus far have been a breathtaking dive into video game visuals pushed to their limits. Painstakingly detailed lighting and texturing let you see every speck of dirt in the grungy hallways and bring to life the inhuman perfection of the Umbrella Corp labs. An RE4 upgrade can apply Capcom's technological artistry to a game that was always horridly frank about the rural setting it depicted. While RE4's theatrics were sometimes at odds with its attempts to scare the player, it was often grounded in a naked depiction of a mundane, dilapidated village. Yet, if this trailer was anything to go by, the developer is also looking to render more scenes through a thick, atmospheric fog. This revival may also represent the last time for a while that we'll see Capcom bring one of these classics back from the grave. The seventh and eighth episodes in the series are too recent to merit renovation. At the same time, 5 and 6 are generally considered low points of the franchise with their pandering lapse into unfiltered action.
REm4ke joins Resident Evil: Village, The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, No Man's Sky, and Horizon: Call of the Mountain on the maiden voyage of the PlayStation VR 2. With the Oculus Rift first launched in 2016, it's been several years now that tech optimists have been saying full-length, feature-packed VR titles are right around the corner. Instead, the large majority of virtual reality releases are still short-form toy boxes. The expectation for financial return on AAA games has ballooned sky-high, but it's a slim minority of gamers who own VR equipment. Targeting that minority means limiting the revenue for your game. So, the vast resources that flow into major non-VR releases often don't gush into the VR space. That's before you get to the pragmatic difficulties of developing processor-intensive motion control games in a nascent creative discipline.
Overall, the entertainment business has done its best to tear down hardware as a barrier to accessing media. You don't need a physical player to see films at home anymore, and most programs are a couple of clicks away on an app store. For the gaming industry's part, they've adapted console games for cross-generational compatibility and established cheap subscriptions to extensive game libraries. You also see first-party games that would have been console exclusives a couple of product cycles back getting PC ports. All these developments made themselves visible during this State of Play.
With its eye-watering price tags, imposing spatial footprint, and burdensome setup, VR is the odd piece of video game technology swimming against the tide of convenience. That doesn't make it non-viable as a business or art form, and I'm thelastguy who will beat up on the little games. However, there isn't the volume of shorter experiences for your Quest or your Vive to rival the monthly playtime PC, console, or mobile games will lend you. What's tentatively promising about Sony's display here is that they've got more polished, and in a couple of cases, lengthy experiences coming to their next iteration of VR headsets.
I'm not sure how these simulations will innoculate against the disorientation and nausea associated with tumbling around in a synthetic world. However, it's a complication VR developers are acutely aware of. I'd contend that we can't view virtual reality releases like those for the PSVR 2 as just more ports like Spider-Man's PC debut. The change of perspective VR headsets facilitate is transformative to the underlying experiences. It is being "in" the game in a far more literal and somatic way. That's why many virtual reality curiosities have to be designed from the ground up and why you don't see every conventional game translated into the format.
If you are interested in shifting your perspective, perhaps you'd like to see the world on a smaller scale. Stray is a game that holds my interest just in that you can show me a cat doing anything, and I'll clap like a seal. Cat in a bucket? Great. Cat knocking over bottles? Great. Cat just standing in an alley? Also great. And why not a kitty as a video game protagonist? Cats can do so many things that we associate with the action-adventure genre: balancing on narrow ledges, jumping great distances, climbing high walls, and stalking or sneaking past prey. Playing a small and agile animal is potentially empowering because you can get to all the places humans can't. Just ask my little guy when he leaps up on the bookcase.
A Dead Space by any other name would be just as sweet, and The Callisto Protocol is flying as close as it can to the old Ishimura without hitting a Necromorph. Visceral's dormant horror shooter is present in The Callisto Protocol's darkened industrial corridors, fleshy tentacled space zombies, and camera that breathes down the neck of the blue-collar protagonist. Even the authoritarian villain extolling zombification as transcendent immortality reminds me of The Church of Unitology. There's certainly a gap for Striking Distance to fill here, given that EA has voiced no intentions to carry Dead Space forward. However, I'm still looking for the magic ingredient that makes The Callisto Project more than another gory, professionally-produced action escape. Given that the game is slated for December, I'm surprised we didn't see some more gameplay.
All pulse-pounding shooters thrive on slick gun controls and impactful combat. A select few push the excitement further by making it exhilarating to approach or distance yourself from enemies. We have a surfeit of FPSs and TPSs where we hold down sprint and hoof it across acres of map without any particularly worthwhile sights or interactions. But look how a Vanquish or a Titanfall make an activity as practical as traversing terrain an invigorating thrill ride. With its ceaseless forward momentum, Rollerdrome is poised to join the club. The game is also integrating slow-motion for its classic purpose: giving us a non-diegetic aid to aim with so that the moves we do diegetically look superhuman. See also: SUPERHOT. You'll see cell-shading in plenty of games beyond Rollerdrome, but Rollerdrome's faux-drawn look and stark colour contrast contain everything neatly within thin but distinguished lines. That compartmentalisation is intrinsically satisfying and lets you recognise and target enemies at speed.
Trust a JRPG like Eternights to show you the date and weather even while you fight for your life against a raging demon. Heavy as the game's red and blue colour filters are, they really juice me up. Keeping a strong tint over your scene allows you to retain a recognisable and powerful visual identity, even as locations and subjects change. It is, however, my grim duty to inform you that anime dialogue is still cringe.
With the amount of gameplay at these summer showcases diminishing, it's often the graphics of games that we have the most information about. I certainly appreciate them in the new Street Fighter. The messy, thick brushstrokes of Street Fighter IV and V weren't for me. VI exchanges them for a softer cartoon style, but with splashes of coloured graffiti appropriately accenting the most dizzying punches and kicks. Between its spray can eye candy and its urban open-world, this looks to be Street Fighter leaning as far into the "street" as it ever has.
Here's a deceptively difficult question to answer: What should the Xbox LIVE rules look like in the year 2022? For that matter, how has Microsoft answered that question?
The Classic Era of Video Game Chat
When Xbox LIVE launched back in November 2002, people thought of online communication very differently. They'd continue to do so for years after. Microsoft's online multiplayer service became as synonymous with verbal harassment as it was with talking over video games in general. To be fair, LIVE also did a lot of good. For many players, the network, complete with its voice and text transmission, was how they first experienced gaming as a social activity. It delivered millions the means to engage in tactical play and was a social club in which they bonded with friends. But that doesn't mean the verbal abuse on those platforms wasn't or isn't real. And it's worth mentioning that the victims of that abuse were often targeted on the basis of gender, race, or sexuality. They still are.
For the longest time, trying to get the gaming community to take this harassment seriously was like drawing blood from a stone. At worst, victims of that treatment were told that they were the ones in the wrong for being upset or for arguing that they shouldn't be subject to public humiliation. Apologists for toxic behaviour told the most embattled users of online services that they just needed a thicker skin, that they were overreacting, or that "it was just the internet". No one ever clarified why we should ignore abuse on the internet any more than abuse off of it; it was just one of those thought-terminating cliches. Victims were also prescribed the solution of not communicating or identifying themselves. Plenty of gamers had no trouble advocating for the silencing and erasure of marginalised people in the hobby.
Right through the late 00s, the endless reserves of teens screaming slurs down headsets was seen as a comedic novelty. If you do end up in the crosshairs of one of these assholes, laughing it off can be a healthy coping mechanism. Still, there's a world of difference between being on the receiving end of awful behaviour and using jokes to deal with it, and sitting on the stands while laughing at attacks on strangers. That goes double if you're a member of a privileged group and those strangers are women or minorities.
Then there were players who wouldn't directly go after victims but would find a justification to shut down anyone complaining all the same. They'd usually do this by saying that users laying into each other was inevitable or that there were no constructive actions to take in response to it. But how people conduct themselves in a social environment tends to be a product of what's normalised there already. These fatalists weren't so much bystanders harmlessly commenting on the nastiest internet discourse as they were active participants in maintaining it. You had a group of people who were saying that there was no moderating the harassment, all the while pushing back against the objectors who were trying to do just that.
I often got the impression that the individuals who said that we couldn't weed out the harassers really meant that we shouldn't. There were and are a lot of people uncomfortable hearing about any social or political turbulence, especially demographic discrimination, and they just want not to think about it. These people usually don't perceive themselves as bigoted or facilitating abuse. Still, they always have an argument for why efforts to reduce peoples' shoddy treatment or empower vulnerable individuals can't go ahead.
Abusers sent their targets the message that they didn't matter, but the wider gaming culture always had the option to contradict those abusers and support the targeted. Instead, what often happened was that the harassment was reinforced by other community members who revicitimised the bullied, dismissed their experiences, or otherwise made it clear that it wasn't worth making changes to the culture to protect them. As usually happens, you had the people who were least affected by some societal dysfunctionality telling the ones most affected by it that it was no big deal.
The abuse and the defence of the abuse worked hand in hand to gatekeep online gaming, or at least the communication channels in and around the games. If you were not the kind of person who could tolerate hate, you were filtered out of the community. As much of that hate was directed at the marginalised, marginalised people were disproportionately repelled from gaming spaces. And for reactionary gamers, that was the point.
Sometimes abuse happens stochastically, with the attacks made for a direct emotional reward. However, various people also wield abuse as a tool to try and censor vulnerable groups when those groups find some voice and empowerment in a community. As an attempt to silence a rising feminist movement, Gamergate's hate campaign was a classic example. You can see the same application of harassment in the Twitch hate raids against black and LGBTQ+ streamers. People using abuse to make a space intolerable for women and minorities often labelled themselves as having no particular agenda and just being out to amuse themselves, confusing the matter. Plenty of furious bigots also lack the self-awareness required to realise why they act the way they do.
Traditionally, the holders of the platforms on which this harassment occurred haven't shed many tears about it. Almost never did you see companies acknowledging the spate of toxicity dominating their services. After all, what profit was there in telling people that they might be buried in insults from strangers when using your product? The awkward silence around such mistreatment only contributed to its normalisation. Microsoft certainly saw the problem coming; when they booted Xbox LIVE, they made a point of highlighting its mute button and voice mask features. The service has also had facilities for reporting troublemakers. But thwarting harassers requires more than implementing mute and flag buttons and calling it a day, as Xbox LIVE became proof of.
The Rise of Inclusivity
In the short time since 2002, the internet has become a very different place. Not that abuse isn't still a widespread problem; the ADL found that 74% who people who gamed online had experienced harassment. You can also still find forums full of people excusing that harassment with the arguments I mentioned above. However, the structure of the web as a communication medium has altered significantly, and in some tributaries, attitudes on toxicity have changed. It's an extension of the slow but real proliferation of progressive attitudes throughout the world as a whole.
Plenty of mainstream gaming publications have reporters keeping audiences informed on minority issues, up to a point, and there's a slightly louder voice for marginalised groups in the media fandom, with more individuals from privileged demographics expressing solidarity with them. Almost every big company also wants to be seen as supporting progressive politics: they email out press releases trumpeting that they are a force for good in the world, change their social media avatars during Pride Month, talkabout their commitment to marginalised employees in materials, etc. Although, rarely do their actions matchup to their flattering self-assessments.
Meanwhile, gaming discussion is now dispersed between many more venues, with a wider range of atmospheres and social values than ever. There's still a casual acceptance of, or at least, ambivalence towards harassment and hate speech in a lot of the most popular public squares. There is also a disturbingly dedicated fringe who will spend day and night trying to ruin peoples' lives over the internet. But vulnerable people have worked hard to carve out the kind of discussion spaces they'd want to inhabit. The increasingly partitioned web of Discords, subreddits, and comments sections means that if you want to find a partial refuge from the typical online hostility, it's there for you. And these safe houses are the proof that people denying a better web was possible were wrong.
Yet, being able to slot yourself into one of these social pigeonholes doesn't guarantee you'll avoid trolling and toxicity. It's not always immediately apparent what the conduct of a community is like when you join it, and it can take a while to find a circle you want to be a part of. Although, those are both issues that you can overcome in time. More pernicious is the pattern of toxic figures spilling over from one online stomping ground into the next, as we saw in the hate raids.
Users don't even have to be malicious to cause friction in spaces they're entering. The good-natured humour of one community can be the offensive mockery of another, and sometimes you see people who make the jump from A to B, unaware of how their speech is going to be received where they land. While some harassers have no shame in playing dumb when questioned on their behaviour, I've also seen people on the internet who genuinely didn't seem to be able to tell when they were overstepping a line. It's not usually an excuse, but it is a reality.
On the hyper-convenient modern web, many communities are only a click or two away from others. Services will encourage users to expand their bubble, advertising new discussion spaces in sidebars, behind usernames, or elsewhere because more social investment from the user generally means more profit for the platform holder. Yet, that accessibility of social circles is a double-edged sword. It's relatively easy for people starving for a supportive community to find one, but the doors are also open to people looking to cause harm.
We can't think of the web as completely compartmentalised. The creation of small safe havens and the liberalisation of larger ones has required the overall dial of the gaming community turning towards social consciousness. And you can't have a bunch of high-profile hateful communities simmering away without their aggression eventually boiling over into adjacent spaces. Plus, we can sometimes end up begrudgingly shoved into crowds we'd rather not be in because they're organised around something we like or need. This is a particular issue in the media space: there are games we want to play or channels we want to watch, and we can't guarantee that the community for those games or channels is going to be agreeable.
I loved Titanfall 2's freeing movement and tense competition; I did not love constantly running into people spewing hate speech into the chatbox. Over time, I've heard from a lot of people who have given up on certain games, or even multiplayer as a whole, because they didn't want to spend their leisure time being pelted with slurs. The speed with which players of DotA 2 resorted to insults put me off that game.
Xbox LIVE Today
So, now we have an idea of the heterogeneous expectations for Xbox LIVE's behavioural standards. On the one hand, we're staring headlong at the historic home of gaming trash talk. Some combination of Microsoft and their community have set the expectation that this is a platform you can use for boisterous, maybe even offensive speech. Yet, since they established that baseline, the expectation for companies to perform inclusivity has also arisen. Microsoft cares about implementing favourable policy as a PR exercise, both pressing customers to associate the company with anti-discrimination and not connect it to being bombarded with offensive messages. Arguably, it's also a strategy to ensure that governments don't step in with regulatory measures to prevent abuse of consumers.
As a service, Xbox LIVE is about as big tent as it gets, serving 100 million monthly users. Some of those users want to strap on a headset and yell racist memes down it, some of them want comforting and relaxing social engagement, and many want an experience somewhere in between. These duelling sensibilities might be why Microsoft's Community Standards appear to contradict themselves. For example, they prescribe "Win or lose, be a good sport", but they also use this as an example of acceptable speech: "Get destroyed. Can't believe you thought you were on my level". They say, "it's not cool to post something that keeps others from having positive experiences", but sentences before say you can send the message "That was some serious potato aim. Get wrecked". Often, the problem with abuse on these services has to do with volume as much as severity. Receiving those kinds of comments once might be mildly annoying or even funny; these examples are objectively hilarious. However, encountering them many times in a row can be trying, and targeted harassment often entails burying an individual in insults.
Even if Microsoft more definitely drew the bounds of acceptable behaviour, asking players to flood your service with smack talk would seem to chain a lot of users to treatment they didn't agree to. I'm not opposed to the idea of online assembly points where the discussion gets a little spicy. Unchecked hate speech has destructive consequences, but outside of that, if everyone is knowing and consenting, get rowdy all you like. But it strikes me that most people signing up to Xbox LIVE aren't actively expressing that they want to be humiliated on the internet; they're primarily asking for a network on which to play Xbox games. So, we arrive back at this headache of anyone looking for a social gaming experience having to shoulder the baggage of offensive speech.
I'm also unsure that leaving your service rife with trash talk isn't likely to invite worse behaviour. Maybe it's solely the user's responsibility to know the difference between ribbing their opponents and outright bullying them. You could argue that if you lay down the line for appropriate conduct and the player oversteps it, that's on them. But there might be an alternative way to think about it. We could return to our point about how the behaviour and attitudes normalised in a community affect how its members act going ahead. If Microsoft says disrespecting your opponents and antagonistically taunting them is part of the culture of Xbox LIVE, you could argue they're cultivating the same mindset that leads users to spew hateful garbage at others. I'm not sure what the right answer is.
What I can say is that using Xbox LIVE comes with a lot less flak than it did back in the day. In part, because far fewer people are speaking across its channels full stop. The Xbox headset is no longer as ubiquitous a piece of kit, and if you're serious about communicating with your squad, Discord is more convenient and feature-packed. But people still do interact with others over LIVE, and that interaction isn't always pleasant. I can't tell you exactly how Microsoft should moderate that space. However, it's gotten hardtobelieve most of the big tech companies are that resolute about stamping out hate speech, and Microsoft specifically has a paradoxical social policy. Thanks for reading.
If you're reading this, chances are you've spent a lot of time talking about video games on the internet. I'm not judging. But if you have spent a lot of time talking about video games on the internet, you've probably seen Nintendo compared to Disney more than a few times. Like old Walt's entertainment juggernaut, Nintendo assembles high gloss media to charm the whole family. Both Nintendo's and Disney's creations shine with upbeat icons like Mickey Mouse and Mario, liberated adventurers like Link and Peter Pan, and warm, squishy companions like Dumbo and Kirby. Both companies also set these mascots against a backdrop of western folk stories, be they existing fables, as in the cases of Frozen or The Little Mermaid, or original stories inspired by fantasy tropes, such as The Legend of Zelda or Fire Emblem. But the comparison has its limits because, for all the comforting and homey corners of Nintendo's catalogue, it's spent far more time rambling through the strange and experimental than Disney ever would.
Most games that want to exaggerate the scale of their environment drag the camera down to the protagonist's level, allowing the surroundings to tower over you. Pikmin takes the opposite tact, hoisting the camera far above the action but still rendering monsters and treasure enormous. It creates the impression that the protagonist and their cohorts are tiny compared to the player rather than everything else just being huge. Many of Nintendo's definitive masterpieces take us back to childhood memories. For Mario, it's watching classic films and cartoons and letting our minds wander. With The Legend of Zelda, it's running around the forest imagining we're heroes on an epic quest. Pikmin feels like an eight-year-old venturing into their garden with a magnifying glass and a mason jar, ready to see what discarded food containers or creepy crawlies they can dig up today. And things get weird down there.
Termite queens lay an egg every three seconds for twenty years, flatworms can regrow any part of their body, Ecballium is a plant that disperses seeds through fluid-propelled rockets. Pikmin perfectly captures this biology of the uncanny and the extreme. The Pikmin themselves are ant-like in their strength and, similar to many hive insects, organise into well-trained troupes. But more peculiar, they don't fit neatly into the boxes of either flora or fauna. These organisms are bipedal humanoids but grow in the ground with leaves and petals sprouting from their heads. There's a similar weirdness in the rest of the game's zoology. The Burrowing Snagrets combine the features of eels and long-billed birds. The Wollywogs can hover in mid-air and bodyslam their prey to death. Make no mistake; death is part of Pikmin.
There are games with menageries of cute creatures and games in which legions of characters get slaughtered, but not a lot of overlap between the two. In Pikmin, the eponymous critters can fell animals much larger than them but also run the risk of being burned, drowned, munched, or otherwise meeting with a gruesome fate. Nintendo is not squeamish about depicting predation and lethal self-defence as part of nature. Preventing us from becoming detached observers of this ecological cycle are our player characters. In the series' freshman entry, Captain Olimar wrangles the Pikmin to recover the pieces of his mangled rocket and make the ride home. In the two sequels, astronauts from Olimar's home of Hocotate return to the planet in a Pikmin-led smash and grab of Earth's valuables. Although, Hocotate's idea of valuables isn't jewels and gold, it's loose bolts and lost pencil sharpeners. The strongest implications that the Pikmin homeworld is Earth are made through branded products like Skippy peanut butter and Duracell batteries.
With our protagonists having the same size, shape, and vulnerability as the Pikmin, it's easy to feel a connection with our allies. That link becomes physical as we must pluck the creatures fresh from the ground and throw them to higher places or over hazards. Each colour of these animals is well speciated from the next, with the game giving them a distinct character and function within its systems. Blue Pikmin can breathe in water, Yellow Pikmin fly higher when you toss them, etc. The designers also capture how the physiology of an organism determines its interactions with the world, and therefore, its methods of survival. Blue Pikmin can breathe in water because of their gills, Yellow Pikmin are aerodynamic because of their wing-like ears, and so on.
Firstly, because our real body serves as the in-game avatar in this format, entries in the genre must take place at the human scale. What's more, all games in this field place a high value on moving around our environments. The base Pikmin was about stopping to smell the roses and wading into the ponds so small we might never notice them in the real world, but Bloom would seem to have us blast past those little curiosities to bump up our step counts. Secondly, Pikmin's setting was always fascinating because its nature was alien, but Bloom is trying to anchor a Pikmin game in the universe of the familiar. You're most likely using it to explore areas of the planet you already know inside and out through the perspective you know. But okay, maybe Bloom can put us in touch with larger natural phenomena in a way that its predecessors can't. Or maybe it has a very different idea about how to tap into the microscopic. To some degree, both those speculations come to pass.
Where Pikmin 1-3 frequently set us to hunting, Bloom has us doing more gathering. And where the former titles allocated us the task of clearing rubbish from the face of our world, this mobile adventure has us placing pretty things into it. In Bloom, we can send Pikmin out to retrieve seedlings and fruit. Fruit turns into nectar, while seedlings grow into new Pikmin. If we feed Pikmin nectar, they produce petals, and we can plant petals as we walk, earning coins or rushing along the growing process for new seedlings. We can further spend coins in the in-game store.
I feel like a floral superhero, walking streets and paths while leaving trails of camellias and plum blossoms in my wake. And players can see each others' horticultural handiwork on the map. It's an enchanting representation of the communal efforts of the app's audience. You cannot, as Bloom's store page advertises, "blanket the world in flowers", as any that take root disappear after a few days. Initially, I found that impermanence disappointing but grew to accept that it let me enjoy the sights in the moment. It's not sticking around forever that makes plants pleasing; it's how they strike us in the here and now. By having these organisms fade, the game can also touch on the senescence of life, which the original games didn't. Nothing dies of old age in Pikmin 1, 2, or 3.
Or take the game's attempts to make individual Pikmin into your buddies. As you feed your workforce and have them perform errands, your "friendship level" with them increases. The stronger your bond with a Pikmin, the more competent at tasks they become, and if you can max out your friendship with one, they'll decorate themselves based on where you found their seedling. A Pikmin that germinated by a bakery will make a skirt out of a baguette slice, one you collected from near a body of water will don a fishing lure. But you can't have the capacity to form a relationship with an individual unless that character appears as an individual, separated from anyone else, with their own unique attributes to love.
In addition, Pikmin Bloom is missing the extraordinary variety of animals and physical phenomena that made its console counterparts come alive. For my first week or two with the app, I was let down by the absence of any life to reach out and touch beyond the Pikmin and flowers. To my excitement, I discovered at level 15 that I could send my botanical workforce out on "Challenges", in which they'd go toe-to-toe with some prey and return with the spoils. For my first challenge, I had my Pikmin tear apart a huge, colourful mushroom, and I enjoyed seeing my army work as a unit. However, it felt a little like whaling on a lifeless dummy, and I was eager to graduate to hunting wildlife with a little more bite in it. But my second challenge was a mushroom, and the third, and fourth, and soon it dawned on me that it was going to be mushrooms all the way down.
Bloom's narrow biodiversity does a disservice to the broad extravaganza of lifeforms on Earth and means that its Pikmin species are given too little stage to act out who they are. Remember, in the console games, we discovered how each colour Pikmin was threaded into a rural tapestry by employing their unique survival mechanisms. The proof of Red Pikmins' fire resistance was in seeing them encounter fire spouts and draconian monsters and emerge from the other side uncharred. You got a graphic demonstration of the weight of the Purple Pikmin when you hucked them onto flying beasts and watched them drop like anvils.
But there are no aerial animals or geothermal disturbances in Bloom, so how different can a Purple and Red Pikmin be? Some breeds can fetch items quicker than others, but this trait is not exclusive to any one type of Pikmin. Pikmin destroy fungi the same colour as them faster than they rip apart any other colour of fungus. However, that means every one of these animals is effectively a tweak on the same skill template. This poverty of obstacles for your Pikmin to overcome further constitutes a shortage of meaningful labour to undertake. That's not just a problem in itself but also degrades the sentimental value of the remaining jobs and the resources those tasks produce.
When we care about items and currencies in games, it's because we can apply them to processes that have practical benefits. The tasks that create those resources then become enticing because they produce those items and currencies. In Maplestory, we care about defeating monsters because we earn gold from doing so. We care about collecting gold because we can use it to buy equipment, which we're invested in as it lets us more efficiently attack monsters. In Raft, we might value cutting down trees because it produces wood which we in turn value because it allows us to expand our vessel.
In Bloom, your overall level isn't tied to the strength of your Pikmin, and once you have a handsome stock of each colour, there's minimal advantage to collecting more. What could I get done with 201 minions that I can't get done with 200? If I don't need more drones, there's no good reason for me to go out of my way to collect seedlings. Petals are also easy to come by, so why would I bust my hump to scavenge fruit? Where the original Pikmin manages to make junk into treasure, Bloom turns its ostensible treasure into junk. I see my neighbourhood teeming with fruits and kernels, and instead of brimming with anticipation at the sight, they just look like noise on the map to me.
It would be tempting to describe Bloom as a Pikmin-themed fitness app, and you can certainly use it as one, but what it really is is something more problematic. It's a delightfully animated pedometer with about one-third of a computer game dragging behind it. It's neither sufficiently minimalist to be criticised as an exercise companion nor fully-featured enough to provide rich interactions with non-human life, fictional or otherwise.
In Pikmin 1-3, we see nature as a brutal colosseum where only the fittest lifeforms survive. Yet, at the same time, we can appreciate how weird and wonderful that life is and develop a kinship with the animals that aid us. Like a little kid excitedly running back into their house with a new discovery, we're also encouraged to take even incidental objects discarded in the dirt like strawberries and marbles as beguiling trinkets. Bloom agrees with those titles that nature can be cute but depicts it as a gentle and more serene domain. Maybe a bit too serene because where the original games see an Earthly paradise bursting with biological pageantry, Bloom paints our planet as somewhere thin on notable zoological activity and where meaningful interactions with life are few and far between. You can make a fleeting mark on this planet, but you're marking a barren wasteland. Thanks for reading.
The activities games have us perform are powerful determinants of their identities, but the treatment and presentation of those activities counts for a lot as well. Josh Wardle's Wordle is a hodgepodge of features from other code-cracking puzzle games, including Hangman, Mastermind, Lingo, and Jotto. Yet, its unique interpretation and implementation of its peers' ideas mean it stands out from the pack and earned it upwards of 2 million daily players. It's worth asking, how did Wordle spin standard word puzzle concepts into gold?
Mastermind
Our search for Wordle's roots starts in 1970, when Mordecai Meirowitz's board game, Mastermind, met its public for the first time. In Mastermind, one player takes the intriguing title of "codemaker", and the other becomes the Turingesque "codebreaker". At the start of a round, the maker enters a hidden code into the four slots in front of them. Each character in that code must be one of six coloured pegs. The breaker then gets a limited number of turns to guess that string. The maker responds to each of the breaker's guesses by telling them: A. Which of the colours they guessed is part of the pattern, and B. Where they have guessed both colour and slot correctly. If the breaker submits a combination identical to the maker's before all their turns elapse, they win. Otherwise, the round goes to the maker. Mastermind does not represent the first incarnation of this enigmatic competition. A similar pen and paper game called Bulls and Cows long predates it, but that's a little more complicated to explain.
A Mastermind board with the maker's code at the bottom and the breaker's guesses above.
If you play Mastermind long enough, it'll get predictable, and you'll inevitably be hungry for a greater and more varied challenge. When describing Hexic HD, I mentioned that that game boosted the difficulty of the match-three puzzler by increasing the number of colours in play and bumping up the quantity of elements the player acts on at once. We can apply the same modifications to increase Mastermind's difficulty. If you made the codes longer and gave the maker more potential items to place in each space, you'd end up with a tougher game that generates more diverse patterns. You could also make the puzzle more cryptic by reducing the number of guesses the breaker gets.
Hangman
Hangman chisels away at Mastermind's marble to implement all those changes. Or, at least, it can if you play it right. In Hangman, players do not set and guess colours; they toy with letters instead. To many players, this exchange of vivid hues for consonants and vowels would seem to place these games in two different leagues, and in some sense, they'd be right. However, we must remember that the presentation of a mechanic is not the mechanic itself. The letters in Hangman serve a function analogous to the colours in Mastermind: they are unique elements that the maker places into the slots of the code and that the breaker must discover. You could also use numbers or any other symbols for your code-cracking game. In fact, Bulls and Cows does use numbers.
Where Mastermind only supports four-character codes, Hangman players are typically free to set any code length they want. While a round of Mastermind lasts eight to twelve turns, Hangman's come in at five to six. And with the alphabet as the basis for Hangman's cryptography, it has twenty-two more symbols to construct secret phrases with than Mastermind does. Here is the variation and steepening of the difficulty we've been looking for. So, where does using letters instead of numbers make a difference?
Well, when the designer is working with only six colours, they can pick shades that their audience can uniquely identify. Yet, players would have trouble telling apart colours if handed twenty-six of them. They'd be staring at the pegs like a jeweller examining a diamond. And no colourblind person is going to get within sniffing distance of your game if its pieces blend that closely together. However, most people can distinguish letters without a second thought, even if they don't have the same aesthetic pop as colours. So, the trade of colours for letters expands the possible variables in the codes.
Of course, where Mastermind allows the maker to use any character in any slot, the "defender" in Hangman must exercise more discipline. Their code must constitute an established word. But overall, the maker in Hangman has vastly more options than their counterpart in Mastermind. There are 1,296 different sequences you can play in Meirowitz's creation, but the Oxford English Dictionary lists approximately 600,000 words.
Many games develop an internal language. For example, in Carrion, an empty hole means the chance to save and heal. In Solomon's Key, a "Devil Emblem" indicates a space in which you cannot place a block. Hangman could also speak through proprietary icons, but that would make it considerably harder to learn. Memorising twenty-six new runes isn't easy. However, letters are twenty-six shapes we all have memorised before entering the arena. Hangman provides a lesson in the advantages of basing a game on knowledge the player has from outside the hobby rather than trying to teach them something original.
Despite the volume of characters in Hangman, the breaker receives somewhat of a reprieve in that they don't have to guess the correct position of each element, just what those elements are. That's not the case in Mastermind. This demand for less specific inputs could reduce the intentionality of the attacking player's moves, diluting Hangman's depth. However, the benefits of applying real-world language can step in here. The application of English means that Hangman can test the lexicographical knowledge of both the maker and breaker instead of just being an abstract guessing game.
In Hangman, a skilled maker can find words that deviate from the usual linguistic rules or otherwise throw the breaker a word that doesn't follow the patterns they've seen before. A smart breaker can think outside the box and not get too locked into certain types of guesses. While there are more prickly languages than English, it is one of the more challenging word sets to play Hangman with. It has no shortage of elements loaned from other languages, and few rules in its construction are inviolable.
While the codes of Mastermind are generally semantically neutral, all words are charged with meaning. So, Hangman's passphrases can carry connotations that Mastermind's can't. Sequences like "cassette" or "actor" possess personalities that solutions like "Blue-Red-Purple-Red" don't. But plenty of bored schoolkids playing endless matches of Hangman have found that success in the game can be somewhat arbitrary. Firstly, while Mastermind controls the difficulty in each phase by setting the code to a length of four, Hangman players rarely institute word length limits. That lack of limits means the degree of challenge between rounds can be inconsistent.
It may seem like longer words have more letters you can guess in them, counterbalancing this issue, but that's not necessarily true. There are well-known words with eight or more letters in which none of the characters repeat, like "microwave" or "friendly". These are just objectively superior strings for the maker to play. And it's when you encounter them that the second problem with Hangman becomes apparent: That even with some very cunning strategy, it's not that unlikely that the breaker will get drawn and quartered for guessing the wrong letters. While you can sometimes logically infer details about a word in Hangman as you unlock characters, other times, there are too many possible options left open, even as you keep submitting guesses. If the maker stumbles on the right sequence of letters, you end up randomly inputting answers, and the game begins to lack a deductive component. Maybe a gambling game is what you're after, but I think a lot of people invested in word games are after a test of skill.
You can write in-house rules to solve the problem of word limits, but play becomes far more contrived if you do that for the problem of randomness. The players can agree to a maximum length for a word, but the most obvious way to stop the breaker from stumbling about in the dark would be to limit the number of different characters the maker can use in a sequence. Once you do that, it takes them longer to guess a valid word and start the game. They can also feel as though they are arbitrarily restricted from making the optimal moves. You could solve the problem with a mechanic like a hint system, but at a certain point, you're robbing Hangman of its simplicity. So, where can we turn if we want a minimalist word guessing game with controlled word length and more logical decision-making? We can turn to Lingo.
Lingo
Lingo is a TV game show that first aired in the States in 1987. The goal of Lingo is the same as the breaker's goal in Hangman: guess the hidden word. However, like the combinations in Mastermind, the mystery words of Lingo have a fixed length. Just as Mastermind gives breakers feedback on whether a colour they've guessed is in the code and whether they've placed it correctly, Lingo does the same for letters, lending it the detective work that Hangman lacks. Even better, Lingo's UI is demonstrably more efficient than Mastermind's. See, in Mastermind, the breaker has one area of the board in which they submit their guesses, and next to it, a whole other area in which the maker places feedback pegs. The breaker has to check back and forth between the feedback zone and the guess zone, comparing the two, to ascertain how close an attempt was to the real solution.
In Lingo, when a player submits a guess, the characters in that guess are backed by one of three colours, indicating something about their relationship to the answer. The colour scheme works as follows:
Default Colour: The character is not included in the answer.
Yellow: The character is included in the answer but is in the wrong position.
Green: The character is included in the answer and is in the correct position.
Now, the player does not have to carefully work out which feedback peg lines up with which guess peg. All the information they need is in one area, and the markers of their success clearly align with the elements of their code. Here's a sample Lingo board:
A sample Lingo board.
If you've played Wordle, you'll notice that its rules and wrapping are almost exactly Lingo's. Lingo is just played against a clock and may have slightly different word limits than Wordle. But there's one fundamental issue which means Lingo can never plug the holes in Mastermind and Hangman we want it to. Lingo is a game show and is played by other people instead of us. Plenty of game shows we can play along with at home. Quizzes and visual puzzle games such as Catchphrase make for convenient armchair participation. However, that interactivity is only possible because there's no causal connection between the challenges in those programmes. You may respond differently to a question or puzzle than the player on screen, but if you do, both you and the player receive the same puzzle or question next time.
Lingo's puzzles don't have you confronting tasks in which you make one input, immediately get a "success" or "fail" output, and move on. Its grids make you use multiple input strings to explore a possibility space, searching for the "success" state. In any stage of a Lingo session, the chances are that you and the contestant will guess a different word, and so, the contestant will receive different feedback than you would in their place. As that feedback affects your concurrent inputs and is how you feel your way towards a solution, if the game isn't replying to you, you can't play it. This is how most games work. You can't participate in Lingo using a recording of it any more than you can play along with a recording of Inscryption or StarTropics because those games also exist as a conversation between you and a system. So, Wordle is not just Lingo on a different platform; it's the door through which we access Lingo's otherwise unplayable puzzles.
Wordle
A solved Wordle puzzle.
Wordle has an almost scientific control of its difficulty, a deductive component, simple rules, and it puts us in the driver's seat. Yet, there are thousands of word games you could install on your phone matching that description. Wordle got catapulted to stardom when most of its competitors languished in obscurity. And it earned its reputation organically instead of through an immense marketing campaign, a recognisable brand, or any particular celebrity endorsement. That requires an explanation.
I think Wordle's popularity comes down to two factors: how it fits into your free time and how it enmeshes with social media. On the first point: a new Wordle is published at midnight every day, and at that time, the previous puzzle is removed, never to be solved again. Unlike in Hangman, Lingo, or Mastermind, the player has time to think about the solution to a Wordle because they're not playing it in a relatively short session with a tightly defined beginning and end. Its puzzles can easily bang around in your head over the course of the day, taking root in your psyche. Connections permitting, you can then load up the game and make another guess whenever and wherever you want. This accessibility is possible because Wordle is not played on a board or in a video game with a resource-intensive engine but on a low-overhead web page.
Notice that Wordles are not events scheduled for a specific time like episodes of 1 vs. 100 or Forza Horizon 4's Forzathon Live showcases. In the latter titles, the player may miss a crucial event because their lifestyle does not fit around the developer's calendar. Through such stringent timetabling, these games or features can limit their audiences. In comparison, Wordle is open to anyone, no matter how they've planned their day, as long as they can connect to the internet within each 24 hour period. On the opposite end, the limited timeframe in which you can access each puzzle keeps users coming back on a daily basis.
Daily tasks and rewards are a staple of live service products because developers want to make play a habit. However, in most titles of this genre, you can participate to your heart's content, and if there's a lock on reentry, it's generally a timer you can pay to skip. Wordle is effectively inactive between when you complete the puzzle and midnight, and you can't change that with any amount of money.
Most media platforms are built on unlimited access to their content. Sites and apps boast about the endless games, articles, or videos that litter them. But when these services are all-you-can-eat, you can lose your appetite. Wordle embraces that old entertainment adage: "always leave them wanting more". If you're enthusiastic about code-breaking, you probably won't get your fill of Wordle from one puzzle, enticing you to come back the following day.
As invested players are returning to the experience seven times a week, that's also seven chances for them to share their result to social media. That avalanche of Wordle posts has no doubt been instrumental in popularising the game. But just about every mobile game has a button that lets you copy your results to an external profile. Why is Wordle more persuasive in getting players to click theirs? And why has the title received so much social buzz? I think we often make the mistake of designating single-player games solitary experiences and multiplayer games social experiences.
Wordle is a classic example of a single-player game as a social phenomenon. There are many titles in which we cannot directly compare our experiences to those of other players. For example, suppose you and a friend each play a run of Enter the Gungeon. In that case, you're going to end up with different maps, different weapons, and other variables which make your sessions unique. If you each play one matchmade game of Killer Instinct, you're going to be up against different opponents, and the matches will quite probably involve different characters. You could take stats from different sessions of these games and compare them against each other. For example, seeing how much health you and your friend were left with at the end of your Killer Instinct bouts or how much gold you each collected in Enter the Gungeon. Yet, because the matches and the dungeons vary, you could never claim that you did better than your opponent at the specific task they did.
In Wordle, all players get the same puzzle with the same number of guesses per day, making success at each grid highly comparable. You know not just whether your friends that day got to a word in more or fewer guesses than you did; you know that they got to "ULTRA" or "TABBY" faster or slower than you. When we post the results of a competition to a video game leaderboard, they're usually quite abstract; think a time or a score. Wordle's results are able to tell more of a story about the game that was played. We don't just learn how many attempts other players took to find the code; we see a version of the game grid without the letters filled in.
A typical Wordle post. Author unknown.
A little like in a televised sport, in Wordle results, we can see strong starts, mid-game fumbles, miraculous recoveries, and much more. When we view the history of other peoples' matches, we can compare them to our own, feeling smart where we beat out opponents and cringing at our comparative blunders. Most puzzles games cannot surface this degree of detail about others' matches without spoiling their solutions. Wordle is able to do it because its interface delivers feedback that is bound to each input we give it, and yet, abstracted from those inputs. And that abstraction only tells us about the relative validity of the input, not the underlying input itself.
It's also relevant that you can represent a whole game of Wordle in just thirty characters. This brevity of the records allows both for them to fit into a single tweet and for players to scan those tweets quickly. The imprints of Wordle games are detailed and yet brief because the data we give the game is simple. This does not mean that playing the game does not make us sweat because we might flip through a small dictionary of guesses in our head before deciding what characters to jot down on the screen. However, only five characters result from those considerations. If you were to capture and report all of someone's inputs or successes and losses in most other puzzles such as a crossword or Baba is You, the post-mortem would be considerably longer.
That's all I have for you today. We've looked at how we can compare code-cracking games in terms of the nature of the elements in their codes, their control over code length, their feedback mechanisms, and much more. While the differences between titles in this crowded genre are subtle, the sheer quantity of entries in the field means that it's always going to be the little touches that put one game over the top. With its encouraging timetabling and share-friendly results, Wordle is currently that game. Thanks for reading.
In the dedicated game design community, it's common to treat tabletop game design and video game design as unified, or at least, closely intertwined disciplines. Video game design classes have students analyse board games, and plenty of studios have prototyped systems for software games using pen and paper facsimiles. But people who don't have an academic or professional connection to games often place an impassable divider between board game design and video game design. They cast them as chalk and cheese, oil and water.
Video Games vs. Tabletop Games
If you are having trouble seeing the common ground between these formats, think about the features that tabletop and computer games share. Broadly, these two media are interactive experiences in which rules and goals mediate our actions. More specifically, examples in both categories have us manage resources, adapt to economies, strategically deploy abilities, and navigate maps. Various video and tabletop games have us commanding units with unique movement patterns or powers with which we can act on an environment or other units. RPG tropes like loot drops and experience points, that have expanded to fill the whole gaming space, originated from pen and paper role-playing activities. What unites tabletop games and video games is their logic and structures; part of what distinguishes them are the interfaces through which we interact with that logic and those structures. Input devices, screens, and speakers with the one format, and cards, pieces, and boards for the other.
I think professionals and audiences disagree about the symmetry of these media because we're approaching video games from opposite ends. The software designer experiences the game systems first, creating and tuning every one of its mechanics from the ground up. They're conscious of their game's rules, incentives, and goals and can see parallels between them and the rules, incentives, and goals of tabletop experiences. The player experiences the game interface first, with much of the underlying systems obscured.
For video game developers, it's often extra labour to externalise information about their games' internal workings to players. They also don't want to overwhelm or confuse the user, have their game appear systemically cluttered, or surface information that would work against the game's aesthetics or compromise its challenges. Therefore, the typical player is only aware of the information they need to play a game and the interface for interacting with it. Data like spawn rates or AI routines go under the radar, and otherwise abstracted game design concepts are presented to players in a way that is easier to understand and often fits into the style of the game. Therefore, audiences see what video and tabletop games don't share (their interfaces) but not what they do (their systems).
Given their shared rules, when we learn about tabletop games, we can learn about video games. But why bother with tabletop specifically? Why not just study video games via video games? It all comes down to how these games do their processing. Every game changes states in reaction to player decisions and sometimes autonomously as well. Within their systems, entities change position, certain values alter, the status of units shift, etc. In video games, a computer executes these state changes. In tabletop games, they're managed by players who shuffle cards, move pieces, add and remove counters, etc.
So, tabletop games have a lower cap on their potential complexity because humans can't process the billions of variable changes per second that a computer can. The relative simplicity of tabletop games makes it easier for novices to understand them in their entireties. Additionally, because audiences have to operate tabletop games, those experiences must be systemically transparent. Manuals and cards relay their complete rules to players, leaving them open to study. Whereas, to get into the guts of a video game, we need to take them apart in an involved and highly technical manner. When we can disassemble a video game, often it's only people familiar with design and computer science that can interpret the data. Returning to our thoughts about the perspectives that people approach games from, you'll notice that the player managing the tabletop game simultaneously grasps the systems and interface, getting a view on it not unlike the video game designer on the video game.
As proof of the overlapping principles between tabletop and computer game design, I want to pick apart one of my favourite board games. Ticket to Ride is a classic in the European board game style. Don't let its colourful plumage fool you. Alan R. Moon's masterpiece is capable of producing searing tension, and through it, we're going to understand how games, in general, can leave us in a state of suspense. To save on "ifs" and "buts", this description will only talk about the rules and dynamics of Ticket to Ride for sessions of three or fewer players.
The Rules of Ticket to Ride
If you've played Ticket to Ride recently, feel free to skip ahead to the next section of this article. Otherwise, the rules are easy enough to learn. The game map is a partial cross-section of North America, with routes connecting major cities. Each of those routes has a colour and a length. Success in Ticket to Ride is measured in points, with players tracking their points using counters which move around the outside of the board. Whoever has the most points at the end of play wins.
Ticket to Ride board.
The player can score in a few different ways, but the most straightforward method is claiming routes on the map. To claim a section of track, they must discard a number of carriage cards from their hand equal to the length of the route. All cards they spend must be of the same colour, and unless that route is grey, they must also be the route's colour. So, to take a route made up of three green spaces, the player must discard three green cards from their hand. For a five carriage grey route, the player could lay down five orange cards, and so on. Players indicate that they own a route by placing some of their coloured plastic train cars on it. When a player connects two cities, no other player can take a route that makes that exact connection. So, if you travelled the path from Dallas to Houston, another player cannot snag the parallel track that connects those two cities. Different route lengths score different points, but we'll discuss the scoring scheme later.
Route from Dallas to Houston.
Players start the game with a handful of carriage cards (the cards they discard to claim routes) and a selection of tickets. Each ticket bears the name of two cities and a points value. If the player's routes connect the two destinations on the card by the end of the game, they earn the score listed on it. If they fail to connect those cities, that quantity of points is subtracted from their score. Players keep their tickets secret from each other until play is over and do not calculate how the tickets affect their scores until then. For example, if I hold a ticket for "Vancouver - Santa Fe" with the number 13 on it and I make a contiguous line of trains from Vancouver to Santa Fe before the end of the game, I win 13 points. Otherwise, I lose 13 points.
Draw area.
Each turn, a player can either claim a single route, pick up some coloured carriage cards, or draw more tickets. Say they want to nab some of those sweet carriage cards. They have some options about how they do that. There are always five face-up coloured train cards on the table, as well as a face-down deck. The player can pick up two cards on their turn, either of which can be from the face-up buffet or the draw pile. When a player grabs a face-up card, they replace it with another from the top of the deck. A player may also be able to take a "locomotive" card that can fill in for any train colour, but if they pick one from the selection of face-up cards, they do not get to take a second card.
If a player procures tickets, either at the start of the game, or voluntarily, on a turn, they receive a set number of them. There is a minimum quantity of tickets they must keep in each case, but they may also choose to retain more than the minimum. For example, if a player uses their turn to draw tickets, they pick the three from the top of the ticket deck. They must keep at least one of these cards, but they may keep two or all three.
Route from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
If this description of the game sounds a bit abstract, here's an example of what a couple of turns in Ticket to Ride might look like: Let's say I have a ticket that demands I make the journey from Duluth to Los Angeles, and I've claimed most of the routes between those two cities. I just need one more connection: San Francisco to L.A. If we look on the board, we can see that there are two possible routes I can take to make that link. One consists of three pink spaces and the other consists of three yellow. Therefore, I need to collect three pink carriage cards or three yellow carriage cards to claim the route.
In my hand, I already have one pink card but no yellow cards. So, I figure it will be easier to build towards the pink route. I declare that I will use my turn to take more carriage cards. There's one face-up pink carriage card on the table, which I collect, replacing it with a card from the top of the deck. The replacement card is white. There are now no pink cards I could take from the face-up set. I choose to draw from the deck, hoping I'll pick up a pink, and I'm lucky enough to have my prayers answered. On my next turn, I can discard those three pink cards from my hand and lay three of my train carriages on the pink route from San Francisco to Los Angeles. A three train route is worth four points, so I move my player counter up four spaces. As my "Duluth to Los Angeles" ticket is worth 12 points, I also know I'll receive 12 points at the end of the game. The game's final round is triggered when any player is left with two or fewer plastic cars.
Tension in Ticket to Ride
Every rule I've discussed contributes to the air of apprehension and anticipation that underscores the game. Firstly, look at how the route scoring scheme encourages risky play. Here is the table that shows how route length converts into points:
Trains in Route
Points Awarded
1
1
2
2
3
4
4
7
5
10
6
15
The correlation between the number of trains you place in a turn and the points you score is not linear. For example, the jump up in points between a two carriage route and a three carriage route is two, but the difference between a three carriage route and a four carriage route is three points. Here are the scores for each route length plotted on a graph:
X Axis: Route Length. Y Axis: Points Awarded.
The more carriages you add to your route, the steeper the points curve gets. Say you're in a position to construct a two train route; there's a strong incentive to hold out for a third card of the same colour because you'll get double the return. If you're in a scenario where you can lay down a five train route, it's tempting to wait for that sixth colour card because you'd get 50% more value. This is always a risk because the more of a colour you remove from the deck, the less likely it is that it will "spawn" again. Worse, the longer you wait to lay your route, the higher the chance that someone else will take it from you.
If someone else steals your route, there might not be another one of the same length and colour for you to grab in its place. For the six carriage paths, specifically, there is only one in each colour on the board. Notice that this becomes a bigger problem with an upward curving points scale rather than a linear one. Let's imagine that when we laid a route, we got the same number of points as the number of trains we placed: One point for one train, two points for two trains, and so on. In that case, if we were targeting a six train route and someone else took it from us, it wouldn't be a huge setback. We could take our six carriage cards and split them up to make a four train route and a two train route. It would take double the turns, but turns aren't that precious, and we'd still get the six points.
With the scoring scheme Ticket to Ride actually uses, we can't recover the same amount of points by dividing a long route into two shorter routes. Laying a six train combo is worth 15 points, but the combined profit from a two train route and a four train route is only 9. So, someone stealing a six train route from you is a big deal, and there's a reason to put yourself in harm's way to claim it. The disproportionate value of longer links then creates new conundrums for the player. If you were aiming for a four or five train route and then someone robs it from you, do you pursue a similar alternative route or try for another kind entirely? Both options stir tension in their own way.
It also bears mentioning that you're not usually trying to put down sticks on any route on the board. Usually, the optimal way to play is to take routes that help complete your ticket. So, if you're gearing up to connect two specific cities and somebody else does it first, there's probably not another route of the same colour and length on the way to your ticket destination. And in general, if another player blocks your passage, you're going to have to go the long way round, spending more trains and turns doing so. If it's too inefficient, you may have to abandon your ticket entirely and take the hit to your points. But when do you call it quits? At what point is a ticket "ruined"? There's always the potential you've abandoned a trip you could have rescued or wasted your resources on a journey that will give you fewer points than an alternative.
Often, players become flustered when opponents start laying carriages in the general vicinity of where they plan to place their trains. The opponent's placement suggests, but does not guarantee, that they may have a journey that overlaps with the player's. There are plenty of tickets that run through the same rough areas on the board. You could try to prevent a clash by picking tickets with shorter journeys that are less likely to conflict with others' and that won't carry a severe penalty of points or turns if left uncompleted. However, you may want your route to conflict because it will let you block other players from finishing their tickets while awarding you points. There's also no promise that when you take tickets, you'll draw shorter trips or that they won't clash with opponents'.
Plus, much like with the routes, there is not a 1:1 correlation between the length of a ticket journey and the points you receive. If the origin and destination on Ticket A are twice as far apart as the origin and destination on Ticket B, Ticket A will not be worth twice the points of Ticket B. It will be worth much more than twice the points, so there's again a risk in all choices, and that risk creates tension. There are other reasons that picking your tickets can evoke anxiety.
Ideally, when you draw tickets, many of your journies will overlap, letting you complete more tickets with fewer routes. So, each time you dive into the ticket pile, you'll have some anticipation to see that happening. But those tickets may not converge and could even demand that you make journeys far across the map from each other. This would be a trivial setback if there were no points penalty for failing tickets. You could ignore the goals that are awkward to pursue and focus your efforts on the lucrative ones. It would also be a non-issue if you could discard any tickets you picked up, but you have to keep at least two of the tickets you draw at the start of the game, and at least one when drawing tickets at any other time. So, when you draw tickets, you're always investing in the outcome of at least one, no matter how inconvenient it is to fulfil.
Taking fewer of these cards can reduce the chance you'll end up with incomplete routes and pay the fine. However, you need to make sure you're completing a healthy amount, or other players will do so instead and fly past you in the scoring. Therefore, you are pressured to draw more tickets. If you could see your opponents' stubs, you'd be more secure in choosing whether to take on longer and more journies, but you can't. You can only make educated guesses about the state of your opponents based on their behaviour.
If you are worried about opponents eating your lunch, you could always install your routes as quickly as possible, precluding them from capturing the same territory. You would place a route, take many turns to gather the cards to tick off another, and repeat. The problem here is that you're cluing your adversaries into where you intend to build and giving them plenty of time to cut you off. Therefore, the strategy of holding back placements until you can make many of them quickly becomes tenable, even if it carries the risk that someone will sweep the rug out from under you in the meantime.
Planning where and when to place is stressful, but you might think that the simple act of drawing cards is at least a more placid phase of the play. What could be tense about picking a couple of new items off the table and putting them into your hand? As it turns out, quite a bit. Drawing from the deck builds some tension because you don't know whether you'll get what you want, but also consider the face-up carriages. Sometimes there will be two cards you need just sitting in the open for you to collect. There are eight different colours in the game, plus locomotives, meaning a good chance that one of the five public cards will hold some value for you.
Searching for cards.
Yet, often, you'll find face-up cards that might help a bit but aren't ideal. Say you're trying to collect the carriages to make the trip from Salt Lake City to Denver. There are two different routes between these locations: one that requires three yellow cards and one that requires three red cards. Now, imagine you had two yellow cards in your hand but no reds. However, there's one red card face-up next to the deck, but no yellows. You could pick up the red card because that at least guarantees you progress towards the route, but it comes with the disadvantage that you'd need two more reds to complete it. If you draw from the deck, you'd only need one yellow to finish your route, but there's no guarantee of getting a required card from the deck like there is when you take the face-up carriage.
Face-up locomotives create a similar dilemma. Pick up one of these wild cards, and you'll have a resource you know you can use, regardless of the route you're tracing. Locomotives also provide insurance against other players blocking your travels. If you were going to use your handful of black cards to lay a route and a player snatched it from you, those black cards might now be useless to you; you have nowhere that advantageous to spend them. However, if you were going to use a locomotive to contribute to a route and it is stolen, you can simply transfer it to another colour route. The superpower of the wild card is its flexibility.
Yet, if you choose to pick this rainbow card from the table, now you're only getting one new carriage on your turn when you could earn two. It's common to need another card for a route but not find it face-up on the table. The locomotive is though, posing a difficult question: do you settle for taking that one card from the table or do you gamble by trying to draw two random cards from the deck? Again, the design is making you sweat a little because significant points could ride on finding those cards.
Just as it's tense watching your opponents lay routes, you often can't relax when your opponents are picking up cards. There may be face-up carriages you need on the table, and with each opponent's turn, there's the chance they'll secure those resources. Even if they don't, them picking up certain cards suggests that they may be building routes where you wish to. If you need to fill in those four orange rectangles and your opponent starts picking up oranges, you could be in trouble. And your opponent may be getting nervous because maybe you've figured out where they're placing and are thinking about getting in their way. But notice that none of these clashes is assured; there's always a chance you're still in the game.
Even working out whether to lay cards or take cards can create some friction. Hesitate, and you could lose your place, but place, and you could miss out on picking up face-up cards that are useful to you or other players. Keep in mind, the whole time that competitors are scoring points, they're moving their counters around the edge of the board. It's possible to play Ticket to Ride without performing real-time scoring; you just add everyone's points up at the end. But not only are opponents' scores valuable data for strategising; they also turn up the heat on you. You can see that a fellow competitor is seven points ahead of you or just three steps behind. Because the score is displayed in this spatial medium with a counter and a path rather than as an abstract number, it is realised in a concrete sense that has the power to elicit more emotion. Play becomes a frantic chase rather than competitive accounting.
Ticket to Ride can organically produce moments where players suddenly catch up and slowly fall behind. If a player is traversing shorter routes, they're going to move their counter up frequently. Players working on longer routes won't be scoring as often as they need time to collect cards. And so, those travellers taking the lengthier trips can feel the strain as they watch rivals inch ahead of them. But when they finally construct a set of many of the same colour, they can suddenly leap forward. They may jump over players who've been able to squeeze in front of them. If they don't, they may at least be breathing down the other player's neck. Miraculously, even when you learn how this elasticity is baked into the rules, the game only becomes more tense, not less. Because now, if you've got a clear lead on another player, you're more aware of the possibility that they'll catch up, and vice versa.
And the score counter is only a prediction of how the game will end. Not only will scores fluctuate while play continues, but tickets stay secret until the dust has settled. That confidentiality is paramount for keeping players uncertain of the game's outcome unless one player is leagues ahead of everyone else. You might have held your own when it came to direct scoring but have come up short on ticket score without knowing. Or you could have earned only pocket change when placing your routes but have a colossal lead on your ticket points, unbeknownst to you.
Vital for maintaining that uncertainty is tickets not only awarding points but also confiscating them. If you could only receive points from completing journies, then during the late game, you might add up all your tickets and find it's not possible to catch up with a player in front of you. However, if you know there's a chance they could move backwards in addition to you moving forwards, you're aware you could still beat them, raising the stakes.
Abstracting from Ticket to Ride
So, that's how Ticket to Ride creates tension. To take lessons from this design that we can apply to other games, we need to look for patterns in its play. The more abstract the patterns, the more widely applicable they are. I think the broadest lesson we can fish from this pond is that tension arises when we feel simultaneously close to winning or losing something that matters to us. As such, it is a product of our investment in a game and is a very close cousin of engagement with a game. We feel apprehension when another player might take the carriage card we want because we care about getting enough cars to build our route. We get a sinking feeling when seeing an opponent's counter gain ground on ours' because we would like to win.
If we thought we were guaranteed to lose because we'd fallen far behind or that we had a 100% chance of winning because we were so far ahead, we'd feel no suspense. It's at the point that our success or failure looks fragile that the tension begins. It may seem impossible for there to be more than a few potential turning points in a game of Ticket to Ride, and to some extent, players aren't constantly threatened. But the suspense persists because Ticket to Ride is full of non-commital hints that the player might be in danger. Someone whose score is meagre during play could be holding onto a killer hand of tickets. You probably can't count them out of the running. When an opponent picks up a colour you want, you don't know they're working towards the same route you are, but they might be. Genuine threat cannot be ever-present in the play, but its suggestion can be, pushing the player to remain vigilant and put their best foot forward.
The game can create the lingering impression of danger regardless of your exact circumstances by surfacing some, but not at all, information about your opponents' states and intentions. If we could always see our opponents' completion, goals, and resources, we would be privy to some schemes that could interfere with our own, which creates some tension in its own right. However, we'd also have a clear tip-off of their plans. Plus, if we knew that they were steamrolling us, we'd be able to resign ourselves to failure.
If the game worked on the opposite extreme and we had no information about other players, we might grow a little paranoid, but it wouldn't realise the threat of our rivals on the board or in the cards. Their enmity would feel a little unreal. However, Ticket to Ride comes down in the middle. It shows us where an opponent is building their current line but doesn't reveal where their ticket has them travelling overall. We can see what they take from the face-up cards but never their full hand. Their potential to damage us is palpable, but the damage is loosely defined, prompting us to fill in blanks in our knowledge of the game with disastrous or brilliant scenarios. The inverse pressure is present in the game in that there is no way to advance our plans without exposing actionable information to our opponents. Every route we paint and face-up card we collect is an errant transmission of our intentions that they could use against us.
Further, Ticket to Ride makes the small tasks matter through a trickle-down importance. If you care about winning the game, then you care about scoring points. If you care about scoring points, then you care about completing tickets. If you care about completing tickets, then you care about laying trains. If you care about laying trains, then you care about collecting carriage cards. If you care about collecting carriage cards, then you care about what you can pick up from the table. All tasks you can perform in the game contribute to the ultimate task, whether indirectly or directly. Crucially, the relationship between those smaller tasks and our success overall is self-evident. Through the game's simple mechanics, we can all understand how each choice we make plays a role in our chance to win.
Lastly, Ticket to Ride generates tension by keeping all players in constant competition for the same limited resources: carriage cards and spaces on the board. This tiny stash of goodies inevitably ignites micro-competitions within the larger competition. That conflict means that players do not simply feel like they are working on competing projects alongside each other but clashing directly with each other, which is a higher pressure state to be in.
This competition further antagonises us by pitting us against agents hungry to take away the resources we require within some indefinite timeframe. There is a fuse on every one of the valuables in the public pool, which can again produce leisurely stress. That tension appears in both the most minute decisions and in the bigger picture, which means that it exists both in the short-term and long-term.
Let's reiterate our key findings from Ticket to Ride:
Players experience tension when they feel there is a fair chance of either winning or losing something that matters to them.
Even when there is no direct threat to the player's success, games can create tension by selectively hiding and revealing information to suggest the player is in danger.
If the long-term macro-level tasks in a game evoke tension in players, and more immediate micro-level tasks transparently determine player success at those macro-level tasks, those micro-level tasks will also create tension.
Designers can create tension by making players compete for limited resources.
Once you start looking for a few simple ludological principles like these, you'll see them everywhere. We extracted them from a board game, but I can show you how to identify them in a card game, a video game, and a sport. In each example, feel free to skip ahead to the line break if you already know the rules.
Generalising Beyond Ticket to Ride
Example #1: Bohnanza
Bohnanza is a card game about rival bean farmers. Players have two plots of land and can plant one bean species in each, with all beans represented by a card. Any beans of the same species can be stacked atop each other in a plot, but if a player wants to plant a new species, they must "harvest" (i.e. Discard) all the cards in one bed to lay their new card. When players harvest a bean field, they gain a number of coins dependent on the quantity of produce they harvested, as indicated on the cards. E.g. If you harvest two chilli beans in one turn, you get six points, but if you can harvest three, you get eight points. However, picking a lone bean always yields nothing. The winner is the player who has the most coins at the end of play.
Each player's turn consists of three phases:
They plant the frontmost card of their hand and, if they choose, the card behind that. They may have to harvest a bean field to place the new card, even if they don't want to.
They draw two cards and place them face-up in their "trading area". They may then trade those face-up cards and any cards in their hand to opponents. All traded cards go into a player's trading area, and when the active player declares the trading session over, all players must plant the cards in their plots. Again, even if this means harvesting current crops.
The player draws cards from the deck and places them at the back of their hand. Note that players can never re-order their hand.
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So, let's take our sources of tension from earlier and see where we can find them in Bohnanza.
The possibility a player will win or lose something that matters to them.
At any one time, a player is never that far from potentially planting more of a species of bean they are already growing, winning them some coins. However, they also constantly contend with the threat of them having to plant a new species in one of their existing fields, discarding their current crop before it can grow to be highly profitable. It's not unusual for there to be one of the species of beans you want to sow further down your hand, so you're trying to eke out the turns until you can. However, you're always drawing cards you may be forced to plant, especially if you can't offload your junk cards in the trading phase, so your plots are always in jeopardy.
The game selectively hiding and revealing information to create the suggestion of danger.
We saw a basic paradigm in Ticket to Ride, which carries across many tabletop games: the table plays host to information public to all players, but players also have a hand of cards that only they can view. Participants also cannot observe cards in a deck, keeping the future uncertain, and therefore, making the present tense. Both Ticket to Ride and Bohnanza sort neatly between information known to everyone, information known only to select individuals, and information known to no one. This effect arises in Bohnanza in forms that it doesn't in Ticket to Ride due to how Bohnanza has players order hands and trade cards.
Because players can see the upcoming cards they can plant and know there will be phases in which they're forced to play cards, there is a clear impression of impending doom. Those problem cards may not ever get placed into a plot. The player might be able to trade them off and acquire cards they want from other players or the deck. However, as both the deck and everyone else's hands exist behind an impenetrable veil, the player can see much of the curse but little of the cure.
Micro-level tasks clearly feed into important macro-level tasks.
This one is usually pretty easy to detect in games because they want you to know how and when to get ahead and when you're succeeding. In Bohnanza, collecting the right cards and trading away the wrong ones can help you plant only the ideal beans. If you plant the seeds you want, you can harvest a bountiful crop of beans, earning you a fortune of coins, which is how you win.
Players competing for limited resources.
One reason a lot of games feature markets is that markets are about battling for limited resources. In Bohnanza, farmers all want certain beans from the deck. However, there are only so many of each to go around, and Bohnanza makes competition very direct through these trading windows in which players must hash out who gets which materials. Of relevance, bean cards display how many of them you'll find in the deck. So, the rarity of the resources is always disconcertingly staring you in the face.
Example #2: X-COM: Enemy Unknown
Let's be real; you probably know this one. In X-COM: Enemy Unknown, you defend the Earth against an army of malevolent alien invaders. Your war is fought across multiple turn-based strategy battles, with varying difficulty and rewards correlating to that difficulty. You don't have to fend off every attack, but you do have to make enough headway to expel the invaders eventually.
A "fog of war" hangs low over maps, keeping units hidden unless one of your agents has a line of sight to them. As your small handful of operators defeats enemies and emerges victorious from missions, they can earn upgrades. However, should any one of them die doing their duty, they're not coming back.
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The possibility a player will win or lose something that matters to them.
Because X-COM is divided into these discrete battles, there is always a win or loss coming in the mid-future. As you can lose a skirmish and still ultimately progress, X-COM can also make it so that you have a reasonable chance of being defeated in each match without ruining the game's forward momentum. Outlasting any one clash is your squad. X-COM gives you these tactical assets you can spend hours training and equipping, potentially forming a sentimental attachment with. Because you must invest ample resources to get a highly capable soldier, they are very difficult to replace if you lose one. The game then keeps your heart in your throat by dropping you into clearings and cityscapes where one bad ambush is all it takes to have them erased forever.
The game selectively hiding and revealing information to create the suggestion of danger.
Not only does X-COM employ fog of war, but it will also make you aware of roughly where in the nearby fog enemies are moving and fortifying. Aliens may even retreat into the darkness when wounded. So, we know vaguely where belligerents could lurk but not their exact location, or until we find them, their stats and weapons. That's scary. The game will also drop new extraterrestrial types into the fray with no warning. So, there's the possibility that, skulking in the shadows, is a monster you have no idea how to fight.
Micro-level tasks clearly feed into important macro-level tasks.
Upgrading and equipping your units to create a well-rounded team is essential to performing in battles. Within those frays, unit placement and actions can also be the vital ingredients that let you defend against specific enemies. Overcoming those enemies then enables you to win the battle, contributing to the war effort. Win enough fights, and you eventually complete the game.
Players competing for limited resources.
I'm using X-COM as an example here, in part, to show that you can't have players compete for resources without players, simulated or real. In Enemy Unknown, the user faces off against the computer for advantageous spaces on the map like cover and higher ground, and each party wants to preserve their units.
Example #3: Soccer
Put the ball in the net.
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The possibility a player will win or lose something that matters to them.
Your team wants to retain possession of the ball. More generally, you want to keep it in a certain area of the pitch because it's your and your opponents' tool with which to score points.
The game selectively hiding and revealing information to create the suggestion of danger.
Sports tend not to have a lot of confidential information. The explanation for that gets a little complicated, but it's generally true that the more physical the game, the less it involves tactically deploying certain assets and abilities. And it tends to be those assets and abilities that strategy games hide. Yet, uncertainty always exists: mostly uncertainty about the future state of the game. Although you don't always know what your opponent is going to do next, you can infer possible outcomes from their positions on the pitch, the location of the ball, their previous actions, and even their body language. Supporters of a team tend to get vocally nervous when the ball moves towards their goal because of what it suggests will happen.
Micro-level tasks feed into important macro-level tasks.
Dodging around players and successfully passing keeps the ball in your possession. Keeping the ball in your possession allows you to move it closer to the opposing team's goal, moving it closer to the opposing team's net makes it easier to score, scoring earns points, earning points helps you win.
Players competing for limited resources.
Specific spaces and the ball are both limited, contested resources.
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To explore all sources of tension in these three examples would take more dissecting than we have room for here. This article is already about 7,000 words. But hopefully, you can see how recognising the universality of game design concepts allows us to expand our understanding of the medium. When we see video games as only related to video games, we have a considerable knowledge base to draw from. Yet, when we can analyse video games through the lens of board games, card games, pen and paper games, or many other formats, whole new universes open up to us. Thanks for reading.
Sources
Game board image taken from Ticket to Ride page on Board Game Geek. Ticket to Ride by Days of Wonder, submitted by Fawkes, borrowed under Fair Use.
Most games that come out receive little to no coverage because they are obscure, low production titles that go unmarketed. This blog series is an attempt to open the curtains on that underserved corner of the medium. Each time, I'll look at six different pint-sized indie games and report on what they are and where they excel. So let's get into it.
Friday Night Funkin'
First off, perfect name. Second, Friday Night Funkin' is pulling from the hip hop attitude you saw in certain alternative games of the 90s; think Toejam & Earl or Jet Set Radio. In this example, you're using Beatmania gameplay to realise the rap soundtrack. Narratively, this is a quest for love. The protagonist is crushing on a girl, but that girl's stern father will only let the main character date her if he can prove his talent in a battle of rhymes. It's an unusual twist on the win-the-game-win-the-girl scheme. You're not so much defeating a boss to unite with your love as much as impressing them to do so.
Resting on the floors of each track are beats that pierce through the rest of the mix and compel you to move in your chair. This percussive motif weaves a consistent thread through the songs, even when those songs hail from many different boroughs of the music scene. Despite its assertive drums, the game's synthesised vocals are surprisingly sugary and pleasant, creating a flavourful J-pop/hip hop blend. The songs take a call and response form, allowing you to get a preview of upcoming inputs instead of jumping towards them blindly.
If you're the sort of player that laments that these free indie games don't have more meat on their bones, FNF might be right up your street. Its levels are surprisingly long, with multiple songs in each. The program tracks your score and gets difficult real fast. So, you can spend hours in this pay-what-you-want itch.io game.
If you've sampled cocaine-laced twitch action games like High Hell or Ape Out, you'll know exactly the kind of pandemonium you're letting loose when you crack open Anger Foot. You're a scraggly badass kicking and shooting your way through homes with one mission: to make it to an exit. This game is pure, unadulterated violence. Not just in the bit where fountains of blood spray out the back of gangsters' heads, but also in the breakneck speed at which the levels whizz by, in how you knock props around the environment, and in the brutality of the music.
You don't so much snake your way through Anger Foot's environments as you tear through them with your bare hands, or if you like, your mighty foot, because you have a one-hit melee kill at the end of your leg. You can even use that kick to propel doors into enemies or enemies into other enemies, killing them Bulletstorm style. Anger Foot gives you neither the pauses to be slow nor the aim correction to be inaccurate, and the settings you're pockmarking with gunfire are about as grotty as they come: slimy sewers and graffiti-daubed apartments. These are places that didn't start out nice enough to be worth keeping clean.
The whole time, the soundtrack is banging you over the head with these punchy electronic drums and grimy synths. It makes Hotline Miami sound mellow. As with Friday Night Funkin', the difficulty, scoring, and volume of Anger Foot mean that you can while away hours with it. I'm surprised this item isn't for sale for a few bucks on Steam because the game is polished and substantial enough to justify it.
If you've ever seen two pigeons fighting over a piece of bread, it's easy to believe that there's some sort of underground pigeon fighting league. And there is, here in Pigeon Ascent. Through a humble shop and upgrade system, you heighten your bird's edge at feathered fisticuffs. Then you pick your opponent, and the game crunches some numbers to see who comes out on top. Should you be on the losing side, you'll need to start coaching a new student from level one.
Pigeon Ascent is splitting the difference between the sense of ownership and productivity that comes with RPG character customisation and the ease of play and steady satisfaction generated by an idler. It also supplements the numbers flying out of avian critters with a battle log that announces the results of every clash, complete with critical hits. It's another way to objectively and overtly display the fruits of your success. Pidgeon Ascent finds the humour in what it doesn't animate: the empty-eyed characters bumping against each other like ducks in the bathtub. But don't underestimate the quality of the static art: its kitsch and clean. The game impresses in screenshots and builds to a surprising comic ending. Puff up your pigeon.
MIX UP is a match-three game in which you place coloured blocks on an empty grid. Create a vertical or horizontal line of three or more pieces of the same colour, and they'll disappear. When you clear blocks, you also pick up some points. But Match Up puts the screws on you by preventing you from choosing what colour block you're laying each turn. The game decides the colour for you and gives you a time limit to make each placement. And there's more this title is doing to subvert expectations.
In most block puzzle games, the graphics on the blocks themselves are purely part of the visual aesthetics. In MIX UP, you can overlay any coloured block on any other. Blocks of the same type stack to a maximum of four, at which they explode and take a square on the grid with them. Blocks of different colours combine into new ones: Yellow and cyan mix to make green, magenta and yellow combine to produce red, and so on. But add two secondary colours, and you'll get black, making a space unusable. As you clear pieces, new tiles open up at the edge of the board. It's game over when you run out of room.
MIX UP is design at its most elegant. Simple, additive components click into each other to engineer a wide variety of possible game states. And the game convincingly pressures you into choices that could hurt you further down the line. Overlaying colours now could buy you more room, but it will mean having to make more complicated matches on future turns. MIX UP is breaking ground in a field where it can feel like all the discoveries have already been made. It's got so much potential, and all its star qualities are so abstract, it's easy to imagine its bright ideas living their best life in a full game.
Note: This section contains major spoilers for the 2019 film The Lighthouse.
The setting of the Egger Brothers' The Lighthouse left an indelible impression on many viewers. Its far-flung New England purgatory was the site of intolerable tension between colleagues; a place that turns men mad. And Giacomo Giunti's The Lighthouse is your chance to take a one-way trip to that god-forsaken isle. There is an objective to the game, one as single-track as Winslow's mindset by the end of the film: reach the top of the lighthouse and bask in the glow of the lantern. However, the real point of The Lighthouse is to be present at the movie's time and place.
You can witness the crash of the waves against the rocks, and the shadows in the cabin stretch into grotesqueries under the lamplight. The blaring foghorn is absolutely apocalyptic, and there are even a couple of nasty surprises you won't find in the film. All of the game's sights are presented through this dithered filter which oddly enhances my perception of the rough 3D underneath. It creates a low-fidelity point of comparison for its graphics and then surpasses it, as if your Gameboy had gained the sudden ability to render models like the PS1 can. The Lighthouse isn't just rekindling a retro art style, but bridging two looks to, alchemy-like, create something original.
The found-footage format is all the rage in indie horror games, and I couldn't be happier. Under this cinematic lens, the camera is not just a window on the action but makes itself known as a device that affects the appearance of everything we see. Still, given that video games are an interactive medium, there's a lot of room for glitchy, distortive tech that we don't just peer into but also act through. Assessment Examination has us playing both viewer and participant on an old CRT computer.
The titular test is a job interview. For what, exactly, is left up to your imagination after the game has primed you with lurid suggestions of threats on your life and local disturbances that will make your hair stand on end. Like most affecting horror, Assessment Examination evokes interest and discomfort through what it does not show as much as what it does. But where most horrors playing coy do so by limiting jumpscares, or sightings of villains and viscera, Assessment Examination is concealing conceptual realities. The identity of the subjects in its photographs are unknown, and the origin of local incidents is ambiguous. The bulk of horror is garrulous when describing its universe. But Assessment Examination leaves a lot of open questions, and that's probably more interesting than any firm answer the game could give you. This is a tragedy told in the darkness.
That's the end of another list. If any of the games I mentioned sound like your type, I'd encourage you to check them out and throw a couple of bucks to the devs. Thanks for reading.
Last week, I talked about controllers and control schemes, and how the design of both determine our experiences in games. We saw that even a single input component has myriad characteristics that affect its feel and potential applications like signalling, bounding, shape, resistance, texture, clickiness, colour, size, and angle. Now, consider that it's normal for modern control peripherals to have sixteen or more of these parts, each of which bears all of those facets. Most keyboards have over 100 input components. And all these pieces can play off each other in countless different combinations.
Now, we're beginning to confront the intimidating complexity of the world of input design. In this blog, we'll look at how controller components come together to create possibilities and limitations. We'll also talk about areas of the controller that don't directly read input. Let's start by returning to an old friend:
Signals
It's essential to remember that controllers don't just define how a player talks to a game. Additionally, they determine the types and range of actions a designer can have the player perform. The actions a user can take are elements inseparable from other aspects of the game design. So, the design of a controller shapes the nature of the games you play with it. The relationship also works the other way. The controller designer must consider what actions they may have to facilitate and build a peripheral around them.
Think about the possibility space of Atari 2600 games. Many of them only let the player move and communicate one other verb. We can say that the 2600's input peripheral, with its joystick and single button, was a perfect fit for such games. Yet, we must also consider that, from the perspective of the game designer, all they could do was provide movement and then an ability like firing or jumping because of the nature of the controller.
In Hades, the 2018 game, we have two attacks, access to three menus, an aim independent of our movement, a dash, spells, summons, and much more. In 2019's Outer Wilds, we get full 3D movement and aiming, a scanner with multiple settings, a probe that can swivel its camera, a language translator, the ability to match the velocity of the planet we're on, and so on. These are typically elaborate modern titles, and it would have been impossible for the 2600 to accommodate them just from an input design perspective. They have too many actions and too few inputs to map those actions to. But seeing it from the other side again, it is through modern controllers like those for the Xbox One and PS4 that developers were empowered to weave such multi-faceted player experiences.
When considering the possibilities of a multi-input interface, we must also take into account that the player does not just use components in isolation to communicate individual actions. They also combine inputs across multiple components. Through doing so, they can express intentions that are distinct from those that the individual components would relay. Else, they can contextualise what they're communicating with other control elements.
For example, in Dangerous Driving, players can use the control stick to steer and the A button to activate "nitro", which increases their speed at the cost of their handling. Let's put this in signalling terms. If, on a frame, the signal from the control stick's X-axis is 0 and the signal from the A button is "pressed", the game infers that the player wants to move directly ahead with the nitro on. If the stick's X value is 0.7191833 and the A button is released, the player wants to turn sharply to the right without nitro activated. If we examined the signals from components in isolation, we might conclude that the driver wishes to swerve right or wants to kick their speed up a gear. Only by considering the interlocking of signals across the controller can we get a full picture of how the player intends to move.
Let's pick up a very different example: When playing Sub-Zero in Mortal Kombat 11, we can enter triangle to make him perform a palm strike. We can also press away from the direction he is facing on the D-Pad to make him back up a little. However, if we enter back and triangle, he performs a third, different action: "Rising Axe". This move damages the opponent and launches them into the air. Assuming Sub-Zero is facing right, we could look at his input signals and their consequences like this:
Move
Left
Triangle
Palm Strike
Released
Pressed
Move Back
Pressed
Released
Rising Axe
Pressed
Pressed
This act of combining inputs to transmit commands distinct from those either would send is called "chording".[1] It drastically expands the possibility spaces of input peripherals, and MK11 is a testament to that. Sub-Zero doesn't just have the three abilities above; he has over seventy of them, each of which the designers must map to an input. The controller we play the game with could have as few as sixteen input components, but through chording, we can access his complete moveset.
If we look at the fret buttons on the Guitar Hero controller, we can learn something mathematical about how more components open up more possibilities. The guitar houses five standard fret buttons, and so, pressing any one of them at a time, we can only communicate five different input states to the game. If, however, we allow ourselves to depress one to three frets at a time, as the game asks us to, we can produce twenty-three different input combinations. With chording, the range of possible controller states per frame has more than quadrupled.
Assuming that we can use all input components in enough combinations, each button the designer adds to a peripheral opens up more possible controller states than the last. Imagine that the Guitar Hero controller had only two keys. You could only press them in three different combinations. Note that we are not taking all buttons being released to be an input combination here. By adding a third button, you unlock four more input permutations for seven total. Introducing a fourth button (but keeping to the rule of only pressing up to three at a time), we get five more. And a fifth button, eleven more. It's no wonder today's controllers are packed with buttons, sticks and triggers.
No. of Buttons
No. of new Patterns Introduced
Total Possible Input Patterns
1
N/A
1
2
2
3
3
4
7
4
5
12
5
11
23
It may seem like we can find the number of possible signal combinations on an input device by multiplying the number of components together. This is incorrect for a couple of reasons, one of which we'll explore later. The other of which is that we can hold some inputs in multiple positions. We must also remember that context-sensitive inputs expand our input set. Even chorded communication can be subject to context. So, the number of possible controller states is not the same as the number of possible actions in the game overall.
In addition to chording, control devices also allow us to create strings of inputs with distinct meanings: "combos". For example, the "Rush-In" move in Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 2, which we execute by pressing Square five times and then Cross once. Or there's the Punch-Kick-Punch combo in Bayonetta. Arguably, it's the memorisation required for such actions that means most games don't contain combos. However, it may be possible to think of text strings as common, easy-entry combos facilitated by the breadth of inputs on a keyboard. Certain characters inputted in prescribed orders create semantically unique outputs. I.e. Words and sentences.
Direct Sensory Experience
When I say direct sensory experience, I mean any sensory experience we can undergo by making inputs. What I'm not talking about are outputs like haptic feedback, sound from speakers, or images on a monitor. We might change our inputs based on feedback we receive through those channels, but they're not the topic of this article. The shape, texture, resistance, clickiness, and angle of parts comes together when we use them simultaneously to create combinatory tactile sensations. Simultaneously pressing LT and A on the Series X controller gives us the feeling of "pinching" in a manner that pressing either of those buttons solitarily does not. Using the left and right stick on the DualShock at the same time imparts a freedom as you move your thumbs around independently. That same sense of liberation isn't nearly as strong when you only use one digit to manipulate one stick.
As you steer around those two sticks, you can feel that the rubber texture on your left and right thumb will match. On the other hand, if the game asks you to use the left stick and face buttons simultaneously, you will feel a rubber texture on one digit and hard plastic on the other. Consider also that when wielding a mouse and keyboard, you could end up with the feeling of a light, slightly clicky pair of buttons on your dominant hand but chunkier, potentially more clicky keys under the fingers of your off-hand. As games ask us to employ components with identical or non-identical characteristics between each of our hands or digits, they can create a tactile symmetry or asymmetry.
Having multiple and varied components on a controller increases the breadth of signal combinations a player can send to a game. Similarly, when a controller has elements with plenty of different sizes, resistances, textures, and so on, the device can project a rainbow of direct sensory experiences. Having a wide set of varied inputs can also create an aesthetic depth and richness across the controller. Plus, the set of sensory phenomena delivered by a controller gives it an overall character.
Of course, the sensory experience we have with a control device is not just created by input components. It's also defined by the controller casing and how the components are installed in that casing. Like individual input vectors, a peripheral's chassis can have many different textures, and note their optical element. Most input devices aim for a pleasing visual symmetry, and the large majority of modern ones garb themselves in unassuming, formal colours. That no-nonsense front can lull us into thinking that peripherals generally lack visual personality. However, place some of the more muted and utilitarian input devices alongside alternative designs, and you can see that all input hardware has character. Even looking like a Blu-Ray player or a piece of office equipment is a character.
The controller can't be any shape; it has to accommodate peoples' hands, but different companies have had different takes on what to put in those hands at different times. The Gameboy Color and Panic Playdate use modest button sets and colourful housings to ape the appearance of toys. They suggest vibrant play suitable for all ages. The Xbox's "Duke" and the Dreamcast controller are rounded and lack long handles. They have a blown-out central section, which is what makes them look bulky, like you could drop them from the tenth floor of a skyscraper and see them survive.
But then check out the Wii remote: a single baton of glossy white plastic. It resembles a TV handset, appears futuristic, and looks and feels light. Where the Duke is weighty in your hands: a brick of power, the Wiimote feels effortless to pick up and play with. It suggests familiarity and ease of use to provide a welcoming entry for those inexperienced in the medium. Nintendo would later carry that idea of imitating an everyday object forward to the Wii U and Switch, which look like the tablet PCs a casual audience might already be comfortable with. Generally, I've found audiences prefer some heft behind any control device they have to hold. Nintendo arguably admitted this by lending the successor to the Wii controller a more substantial weight. Even computer mice, which must be light enough to glide across a pad, usually push back against your fingers a little.
You might note a couple of interesting patterns that become apparent when we break down the characteristics of whole input devices. Firstly, we can include handheld consoles as input devices. This isn't always how players perceive it, but the idea behind a handheld is that the console is also the controller. Secondly, a basic principle from wider design shines through: the appearance of an object and the sensory feedback it imparts give us a clue as to its purpose. E.g. Grips protruding from your controller suggest that a user should hold it and how they should do so.
To explain the formality of input hardware, we can observe that it, like any media hardware (streaming boxes, TVs, etc.) is used in conjunction with pieces of media. So, there's a risk that if creators make their control device look bright and bold, and tailor it to a specific aesthetic, it may not match with the game the player is playing at any one time. After all, one platform hosts a diverse library of games. Nintendo got away with their vivid colour schemes for a long time because their consoles were most strongly associated with playful, leisurely games. Most companies did not have as cohesive an identity. We must also understand that all games hardware exists within physical spaces that bear their own decor and contain other objects. A colourful input device can clash with its surroundings. Producing inconspicuous peripherals in unassertive colours (black, white, or grey) prevents their visuals from being dissonant with the room they're stored in or the games we play on them.
There are exceptions to the modern rule of abstract visual design: you'll find most of them in limited edition consoles and specialist controllers like fight sticks. But these aren't the default: they are for players dedicated to a certain style who make a deliberate opt-in to these controllers when there are alternatives. Arcade cabinets can also feature eye-catching graphics that don't blend into surroundings, but again, this is hobbyist or commercial hardware, and it's very rare that one of these machines pops up in a person's house. Many fight sticks and rhythm game controllers, and all cabinets also match the game the user plays with them for obvious reasons.
Convenient Access to Abilities
Of course, the appearance of input components both individually and collectively aids us in interacting with them on a practical level. The human mind tends to group objects together by predictable heuristics, and the designers of input devices exploit that. The input elements on peripherals often belong to a class, e.g. Mouse buttons, keys, bumpers, face buttons, etc. There are two means through which peripheral designers have us classify those components into their classes.
Firstly, we often perceive inputs as being of the same type if they look like each other. Components in a group are usually the same shape. Else, they are the other shapes in the group rotated or mirrored. All the face buttons on the NeoGeo gamepad are circles, and on the Stadia controller, the R2 is just R1 but flipped vertically. Associated components also often bear comparable symbols and names. Every face button may have a single letter on it, e.g. A, B, X, or Y. All the shoulder buttons might have names that consist of a letter followed by a number, e.g. L1 or R2.
Secondly, we are more likely to group objects together if they hang out in close proximity. The triggers on your controller are probably placed at the same height, and both live on the back of the gamepad. Your face buttons likely exist in a cluster of two to six. You can find exceptions like control sticks inhabiting distant areas of the same surface. However, they have a highly distinctive shape and texture, reducing the need to group them any other way.
Groupings become more important as your controller gets more complex. For a player, holding sixteen different buttons in their mind at once can be a headache, especially when you consider all the relevant input combinations they could make with them. However, when some buttons share similarities with others, they can sort them into types, and the device becomes more manageable.
Once you have those discernible classes of input, designers can make the controls more intuitive by assigning different kinds of actions to different classes of inputs. For example, the original Guild Wars binds all its skills to number keys. Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart uses the upper shoulder buttons to control advanced movement options and the lower shoulder buttons for firing guns. Arguably, keyboards are weaker at communicating input groupings than many other controllers because their inputs are mostly the same shape and colour, and set at the same angle towards the user.
Whether a component is on the left or right side of the peripheral can also serve as a reminder for its name and sometimes its purpose. Many buttons starting with L live on the left side of the device, and buttons starting with R on the right. The game itself may then help us adapt to its controls by lining up certain in-game spatial actions with the spacing of those components on the control device. In Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the player presses LT to use the item in their left hand and RT for the object in their right hand. In Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere, the player uses L2 and R2 to spin their plane left and right around the Y-axis.
For the player to have the best chance at picking out inputs and discerning their functions, they need them to stand out on the controller. Manufacturers often ensure their components pop by making them a different colour and texture than the device's casing. Remember, the player is often going to be looking at the screen instead of their hands, so they need to be able to feel their way around the peripheral. Many keyboards have chunky 3D keys that lift well off of their base, and controllers often have distinctly coloured buttons that are smoother than the surrounding plastic.
Despite the consensus that has gradually evolved in controller design, an old issue that still divides console creators is whether components of the same type should be the same colour. This usually applies to face buttons only, probably because the player couldn't visually identify buttons on the rear of the controller, so their colouration doesn't matter. A player also has directional clues through which to distinguish D-Pad buttons or left/right-centric controls, so their pigment is less important.
On all versions of the NES, the controller's two face buttons were both red. However, the four face buttons on the Super Famicom controller each had their own colour. This made it much easier to set the buttons apart in your head; they were not just abstract letters but the blue input, the green input, etc. Yet, when Nintendo adapted the Super Famicom into North America's SNES, they abandoned the Japanese colour scheme. The North American SNES controller simply uses one colour for the top row of face buttons and another for the bottom. Nintendo figured that if a player is usually staring at the screen instead of the controller, the button colours shouldn't matter.[2] Yet, they reneged on that idea for the N64 and Gamecube, which again used coloured face buttons, and then changed their mind once more for the Wii onwards.
Microsoft has always presented the face buttons on their Xbox controllers in bright colours. Sony had long split the difference, using a formal background tone for their face buttons, with a coloured symbol superimposed on them. However, they changed their mind for the PS5 DualSense controllers, all of which have grey symbols adorning the face buttons. While I understand the aesthetic concerns of console manufacturers, I think distinctly coloured face buttons are easier to learn. The Wii controller and many of Sony's more recent pads also innovatively deploy colour. They use tinted lights to signal which input device belongs to which player (player one, player two, etc.).
Of course, recognising the inputs and being able to play them off of each other doesn't matter if those inputs aren't manually accessible. It might be tempting to say that we can work out how many input combinations there are on a controller by adding up how many different states the controller can exist in. However, a player probably won't be able to manipulate all inputs at the same time, and so, won't be able to trigger every theoretical input state. In other cases, it would be uncomfortable or redundant for them to use certain input combinations. E.g. They probably can't press all the buttons at once because they only have ten digits. Or, it would be awkward and pointless for them to press the control stick downwards and press down on the D-Pad if both are used for navigation.
The designer can rarely utilise all of the players' digits. In the cases of mice, gamepads, and many other controllers, the player needs their fingers or thumbs to hold onto the input tool. Even if you can use all your digits for input, coordinating ten at the same time is tough for most. However, about six digits is doable. The hardware designer should make it so that any digits the player is not using to grip the control device sit comfortably on an input component. This will allow the player to utilise more input options in the immediate, optimising the peripheral for tests of hand-eye coordination and potentially increasing the depth and richness of the controls.
To see the importance of correctly assigning fingers to buttons, compare the early controller designs from Nintendo and Sega. The pads for both Nintendo's NES and Sega's Master System consisted of a directional cross and two face buttons. There were also the Start and Select buttons, but these generally weren't used in active play, so we're not going to worry about them. We know that just a D-Pad and two buttons don't allow for a lot of simultaneous inputs. Therefore, the player is limited in what they can express to the NES or Master System.
It was clear to Sega and Nintendo that if they wanted more complex, textured games, they needed to add more buttons. Both the successor to the NES's controller and the descendent of the Master System's would feature four more buttons than their parents. But the two console manufacturers had very different plans for laying out those elements. The initial Mega Drive controller added one more button, and the later revision, three more than that. But for the SNES, Nintendo added two new face buttons and two bumpers.
So, with the SNES controller, the player can engage four digits simultaneously. They can keep one thumb on a face button, one thumb on a D-Pad section, and their two index fingers on the shoulder buttons. This allows them to activate any of those inputs within a few hundred milliseconds. Despite the Mega Drive eventually getting the same number of inputs for the player to utilise, its geography means that they can still only keep their digits on two at a time: one of the face buttons and one of the D-Pad directions. The user's index fingers are still wasted contact points.
For other examples of full utilisation of the fingers: Some mice have a button on the side on which you can rest a single digit, and some games let you map that button to a function. On the standard Xbox One gamepad, the player's middle and ring fingers only grip the controller. However, the player can modify the Xbox One Pro Controller to add four paddles to the back. They can press these switches with their middle and ring fingers. Adding four more digits to the operation of the controller might be overwhelming for most, but this is a device aimed at advanced operators.
You may have also noticed that on the SNES, whatever face button you have your right thumb on, any other face button you have to switch it to is only a short hop away. Whereas, on the Mega Drive, you might have to travel the distance of two buttons to get from the button you're resting on to the one you need. For a different example of travel times, compare the N64 controller to the PS1 Dual Analog. On the Dual Analog, the player can reach all elements of the controller while holding both paddles. On the N64, the player must uncomfortably shift their hand between a centre paddle and left paddle based on whether they need the D-Pad or control stick. Many modern games, which utilise the D-Pad and control stick in quick succession, would be impossible to play with this scheme.
Generally speaking, people designing controls or controllers should make it so that the player doesn't have to reposition their hands any more than is necessary. They want as many input elements in reach of the player as possible at one time. We can even use these lenses of finger placement and travel time to analyse the mouse and keyboard. Many mice only have two buttons on them, so the game must assign most actions to the keyboard, which causes the player to move their non-dominant hand further to reach the target keys. Whereas, the gamepad more equally distributes input methods between the left and right hand. Current controllers must strain harder to make their input components accessible because they have more of them than older controllers did.
We've mostly discussed keeping the inputs accessible from the perspective of the controller designer, but we can also look at it through the eyes of the game developer. Suppose the developer wants the player to be able to use two actions in conjunction with each other easily. In that case, they should affix those actions to inputs the player can comfortably press simultaneously. It's generally most manageable for players to use inputs in combination when they're controlling them with different digits. Sometimes the player can use the same digit to press multiple buttons, but not if those buttons are too far apart. It's also a bad idea if, by entering the desired button combination, the player risks accidentally triggering another. Using this logic, we can explain why it's common to see games ask for an input combination like R1 and A or left stick and right stick, but not X and B or D-Pad and left stick.
It's also standard that designers put the buttons players will need immediately closer to where their hands usually fall, and buttons they'll need less often, further away. In PS1 fighter Bushido Blade, all the attacks are mapped to one of the face buttons, while the "surrender" option is assigned to the Select key. The player may need to choose any one attack within a split second, so the buttons to do so are all placed close to where they rest their right thumb. However, it's unlikely that you'll want to slot a surrender in any particular window of a few hundred milliseconds, so the designers place that action on a button that's far away from the default resting point of any of your digits.
In the rhythm game, Thumper, we get razor-thin margins in which we must react to prompts. Its designers allow us to perform all actions through the left stick and a face button. Because the developers don't use a scheme where we must move our digits to other inputs, they don't have to account for that travel time in the play. It becomes reasonable for them to demand we relate the correct signals in a split-second. Thumper's controls are a prime example of how inputs are not just an interface to access systems; they go right to the heart of shaping a game's systems, defining an aspect as fundamental as pacing.
In PC strategy games such as Anno 2205 or Galactic Civilizations II, the challenge is in bending complex systems to your whim rather than speedy reaction times. Therefore, these titles can and do place inputs all over the keyboard. With so many communication options on one device, you may have to move your hand the video game equivalent of miles to get to the key you want. However, that's not a liability when the game doesn't ask for the quick reflexes that action gauntlets like Bushido Blade and Thumper do.
Health
Making a device match the shape and movements of a player's hands is not just a way to increase comfort and the accessibility of input components; it can also help reduce muscle and nerve strain. Ergonomic keyboards proliferated in office spaces as their users would be inputting signals quickly for long periods. Gamers also use keyboards in lengthy sessions, and many retain a high actions per minute (APM) rate as they do so. Despite this, most gamer keyboards are not ergonomic. This could be because there are better alternatives to take care of your hands, because gamers elevate aesthetics and in-game success above health, or because of a combination of these factors.
Challenge
I say that, generally, designers want to keep inputs in reach because sometimes, they want the inaccessibility of components to be a barrier the player overcomes. In Dance Dance Revolution, it's not difficult to hit any one of the arrows; the challenge is that you have four buttons but only two feet. Heavy Rain contains scenes in which we must hold down many different inputs at once, contorting our hands into awkward spidery messes. Fighting and hack-and-slash games often have us quickly hit buttons simultaneously or artfully enter combos as a means of challenge.
Truthfully, while "combos" are typically only found in one or two genres of games, all video games have us enter specific sequences of inputs. It's just that in a "combo", multiple inputs are required to perform one action. Whereas, in other circumstances, multiple inputs result in multiple actions. To return to a point from the last article, these fundamental input challenges can be divisive. If the player feels like the basics of operating a character are difficult, they may feel a jarring disconnect between their intentions and their avatar's actions. The illusion that they're occupying the avatar's body could be broken.
With that knowledge, we can explain why most control peripherals make most inputs easy to hit, while you have to look as far as objects like dedicated rhythm game controllers to see design that makes components generally hard to reach. Still, moving between controller components is almost always part of the challenge of video games, and the existence of games like Heavy Rain and input electronics like DDR mats are proof of an audience for a gaming difficulty situated close to the controller.
Simulation
As was the case when discussing individual design components, it seems impossible to talk about how games use control schemes to challenge us without talking about how they also use them to simulate physical activities. The schema through which DDR creates difficulty is not arbitrary; it wants to evoke the high bar of coordination that dancing requires. In Heavy Rain, the manual challenges are designed not just for their own sake, but to put you in the shoes of someone, say, squeezing through a vent. We could even say that Heavy Rain's tasks attempt a psychological simulation, having the player feel the sense of struggle and discomfort that the protagonist does.
Games typically attempt to theme their challenges around recognisable activities. Doing so makes their tasks feel more purposeful, relatable, or intuitive. So, it's natural that when we talk about a non-abstract game's challenges, we talk about its simulatory aspects and vice-versa. To put it another way, games tend not just to contain challenges and simulations but to simulate challenging activities.
When titles employ the whole controller in challenging simulations, they tend to emphasise that what's difficult about a lot of tasks is their multi-faceted nature. For example, in a typical action-adventure like Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, dodging, delivering a light attack, landing a heavy attack, or taking any other action is not taxing in itself. The game becomes challenging in depicting fighting as a discipline that demands the use of each of these actions at an ordained prompt. So, the simulatory challenge is inherently linked to using many different parts of the controller deliberately and at short notice.
You can see a similar idea at work in Cook, Serve, Delicious. The minigames in this restaurant management title require us to use only one key to perform each prepping or cooking action. They might ask us to hit the Down Arrow to pour a beer or press R to add ranch dressing to a salad. Alone, these are simple tasks. However, by demanding high-speed input and fast response, the game can simulate part of what's difficult about working in foodservice. It's not usually that any one job you need to do is arduous; it's that you have to perform those tasks with superhuman speed and keep up that pace for extended periods.
Some simulatory synchronicity is down to an agreement between where inputs are situated on the controller and the movement those inputs trigger in the game. This could be as simple as the cardinal directions on a D-Pad lining up with the direction each moves an avatar in the program. That alignment results in the illusion that you are the avatar. You can find an equivalent in how peeking around corners works in many tactical shooters, such as Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege. The standard implementation on the PC is that you lean to the left using Q and to the right using E, so there's concordance between where you're moving your hand on the keyboard and where your character moves in response.
There is another form of controller simulation that you'll understand without explanation, and that's controllers made to directly mimic the objects you're controlling or whose use leads you to physically imitate the activities you're performing in a game. For example, when you control the Ring Fit Adventure ring, you really perform physical exercises. The motorcycle in the Hang-On arcade cabinet controls a virtual bike.
Common Practices
Flight sticks and other simulatory controllers deliver good examples of convention not always being a virtue. Sometimes you don't want your control peripheral to follow common practices because your device does not serve a common function. Think of the Nintendo DS. By incorporating a touch screen into their device, Nintendo managed to open up a range of manual experiences on their console that never could have existed otherwise. It's why, even with a PC emulator, you can't experience games like Kirby: Canvas Curse or Elite Beat Agents as you did on the company's handheld. Nonetheless, the development of an agreed-upon set of controls for most video games was an essential step in the evolution of the medium and its hardware. If you look back at the games consoles released from the 70s to the early 80s, there was a lack of consensus on the form a controller should take.
The Atari 2600 had its iconic one-stick, one-button pad, and the Magnavox Odyssey 2 had the same, but the Odyssey 2 also included a full keyboard built into the console itself. The original Odyssey controller was completely alien from either: a box with a few knobs placed down the sides. The Fairchild Channel F and Bally Astrocade used handles with a joystick at the top, but the Astrocade's joystick could also rotate, and its handle included a trigger. The Intellivision, ColecoVision, and Atari 5200 controllers combined a number pad and a directional input. The Vectrex's went in a whole other direction, boasting a tiny joystick and a few face buttons.
I'm not going to tell you that this diversity represents an inferior era in controller design. This generation of input hardware was colourful, and its manufacturers open-minded about what a games console could be. However, the inconsistency of these controllers levied a couple of hefty costs on players and developers alike.
Firstly, it made it somewhere from complicated to non-viable to have cross-platform games. It should be obvious by this point that the input peripheral you use to play a game defines a lot of what that game can be. And with the peripherals for these ancient consoles having such disparate capabilities, the games themselves became trapped on their original hardware. Therefore, if you wanted to experience the full range of games and control formats possible, you needed to buy at least five of these consoles, and that's without considering the internal hardware that might set them apart.
Secondly, with about five different forms of control scheme floating around in the console space, video games as a whole were far more inscrutable. We take it for granted now that if you can play a game with one controller, you can play it on almost any other platform, but that wasn't the case in the early 80s. You needed to adapt to all these different controller setups, and for a casual player especially, that's no simple feat.
So, starting in the NES and Master System generation, you begin to see a consistent controller pattern emerge. You got a gamepad held horizontally with both hands with directional controls on the left side and face buttons on the right. This design template was so powerful that gaming would never look back. Over time, pads accumulated the set of inputs we now expect: four shoulder buttons, four main face buttons, two menu buttons, and two choices of directional input. Controller design today is far more standardised. If you can play the PlayStation, you can play the Xbox, the Steam controller, the Switch, or if you're really nasty, the Ouya. Players can transfer input knowledge freely between them, and studios that make games for one of these platforms can typically port them to others without worrying about disagreements in input.
Range
Now that we have a handle on every aspect that can define an input component or device, we can make another observation. An instrumental development in input design was console manufacturers guaranteeing that designers always have a wide bin of parts available on the controller. We touched a little on this in the input signals section, but a component does not just transmit a signal. It has simulatory capacities, a tactile feel, a shape, a colour, and so on. The manufacturers don't try to guess too much what a designer will need. They fit their controller with parts that display a lot of different characteristics and trust the developer knows what's best for their title. A higher range of available inputs results in a greater variety of games supported.
The effect of evolving input hardware on games was comparable to the impact of advancing graphics hardware. The capability of computers to render higher resolution graphics and feature more objects on screen did not directly force any developer to make games with a more realistic style or higher detail. However, that is the general direction the industry took in response. So, when more complex controllers came along, developers looked to push them to their limits. Many studios, especially mid-to-AAA outfits, want to make use of every tool in the box, and so, when you change the toolbox, you change the nature of games in turn.
More player actions do not necessarily mean better games. Plus, as the number of inputs on a controller increases, some designers may feel that they have to fill them all instead of looking to create surprisingly deep interactions with minimal inputs. However, it is also true that when you limit the number of inputs on your controller, you limit the kinds of games that creators can smith. The minimalist designer can choose to use only a few buttons on a complex controller, but the maximalist designer can't choose to use many buttons on a minimalist controller.
The importance of having a wide tent of input types can explain why phone games aren't known for richness in their surface-level interactions. That is, a mobile game may have depth because the systems or narrative meaningfully contextualise the action you're performing. However, it's rarer to feel that there's much texture in the inputs and the physical relationship you have with the game. If you look at the phone from a game designer's perspective, there are four input components: the microphone, the camera, the accelerometer, and the touch screen.
Now, the capabilities of the camera and microphone to enhance games may be under-explored, but there are all sorts of factors that compromise their viability as input devices. The accuracy of these input components is often below what's necessary for precision gameplay. People play mobile games in loud environments that mess with microphones, and cameras are notorious power hogs on a platform with limited battery. Accelerometers can be precise, but if you move the phone, you also move the screen, which can compromise the visibility of the game or the player's grip on the device. So, mobile game designers are typically boxed into making the touch screen the only input component, which leaves phones neither flexible nor particularly deep as controllers. There's no room for shoulder buttons, and while some phone games draw control sticks or face buttons on the screen, without bounding, varied textures, or pushback against the digits, the phone cannot replicate the feedback and feel of these controller elements.
With only one input method on the device, you have a restricted range of ideas you can communicate to it and a small set of tactile experiences it can lend you. If those tactile experiences are how games conjure aesthetics and simulate interacting with objects and characters, then the phone's design limits what aesthetics, objects, and characters its games can vividly recreate. It's a reason why so many critically acclaimed mobile games are mechanically austere; they pair themselves back to only the interactions for which the touch screen is optimised.
We could even turn this critical spear against the mouse and keyboard setup. Standard controllers today have at least six different types of input components on them. But the mouse and keyboard have only three: the keyboard keys, the mouse buttons, and the movement of the mouse itself. The keys and mouse buttons are also both forms of standard button, and the control setup lacks any bumpers or triggers, which have become essential to plenty of modern games. This is not to say the mouse and keyboard are strictly worse than the gamepad; as we've discussed, mice and keyboards can do a lot that gamepads can't, but range is not the basic PC setup's forte.
Disabilities
The designs of individual input components and whole control devices make various assumptions about users. Most assume that players have five digits, with three phalanges on the fingers and two on the thumbs. They assume that everyone has roughly the same range and speed of motion when it comes to moving their anatomy between different regions of the controller. They also presume the rate at which individuals can read information from the peripheral and even what they can read. But the differences between human brains, motor systems, and sensory perceptions mean that those assumptions are out of step with the realities of many players.
The rules for controllers and inputs I've described in these past two articles apply to most people playing games, but far from all. Because bodies are diverse and tactile experiences are subjective, most statements about devices that interface with bodies and produce tactile experiences are not universal, just general. You may know that Microsoft built a controller for players with atypical bodies. Notice how the company included input components that require much less manual precision to output the same signals. The device also allows users to extensively customise the input receivers, acknowledging the physiological differences between users. "Accessibility" is often perceived as a software-side issue, and even then, one to do with only a handful of software functions like subtitles or colour blind modes. Hardware is all too often left out of the accessibility conversation.
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And so, we come to the end. Some of the lessons here might sound basic, but when analysing and making games, half the fight is having the principles stored away somewhere in your head, and the other half is in being conscious of them when you meet the games. It's only through understanding design concepts abstracted from any one implementation that we can not just copy games or talk about them in terms of specific examples, but imagine new creations and discuss the medium as a medium. Thanks for reading.
Sources
Swink S. (2009). Game Feel: A Game Designer's Guide to Virtual Sensation. CRC Press (p. 133).
Nintendo Power Staff (1991). Nintendo Power: Volume 25. Nintendo of America, Inc. (p. 46).
All other sources are linked at relevant points in the article.
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