Three games that made me think about games a lot in 2020

As everyone settles in to write their GOTY lists for 2020, a nice way to look back on and digest the year that was without it just being completely on fire, I've been thinking about what mine may look like. I've played plenty of great games this year. Some that came out this year, some that are a few years old. But most of all I just did a lot of thinking about games this year. So here's three games that made me think a lot about video games as an artistic medium this year.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons

I, like many people, played a LOT of Animal Crossing right when it came out. I am one of the people who were simultaneously lucky and unlucky in that I kept my job, but I wasn't able to work from home. My job is a small crew, and we're not public facing, but still isn't ideal to be heading out into the world every day this year, though as we've all seen it could be a lot worse. As such I didn't need Animal Crossing to be the escape that a lot of people did, but I did use it as a meditative tool. It was this incredibly pleasant thing that I could fire up whenever the world got to be too much. And I was in a discord that a friend of mine started so people could share shop inventory and turnip prices and what not. I played a lot right up until the egg festival, when the larger Animal Crossing: New Horizons experience was kinda soured for me, though probably not for the reason you'd expect.

This game has made me spend a lot of time thinking about authorial intent in video games. It's talked about in almost every art form, but you don't really find it here. Which makes a decent amount of sense, video games are in their very nature a pliable art form that no two people experience the same way. But I feel like there's a subsection of Animal Crossing fans who get very angry that the game pushes back on their play style.

Don't get me wrong, there's no wrong way to play a game. And when I talk about authorial intent I mean from an artistic sense and not something like accessibility, I fully believe that games should be able to be enjoyed by all. But Animal Crossing strikes me as a series with a very clear artistic vision for the way the authors want you to play it. It is mean to be a calm, meditative experience that you check in on for an hour or two per day, and then you set it aside to visit again tomorrow. It is a game that has no interest in being min-maxed. And I feel if people want to try to min-max it that's fine, but those people shouldn't then get mad when the game pushes back against it. When the game says "no, this is what we have for you today, we will see you tomorrow" it bums me out to see players respond to it aggressively.

The egg festival in New Horizons wasn't implemented perfectly, this is the first time they'd done a real live game style event in an Animal Crossing game and there were bound to be some growing pains. And logging onto that discord server to check the wares in people's shops and seeing "These eggs fucking suck. Fuck this game. Everyone hates this" just drained it for me. This was the first Animal Crossing game that really hooked me and a lot of that was because of the social aspect and this group of people I'd found to share it with and seeing this, this vitriol spewed during the time that I was looking to relax, when I was trying to meet this game on its own terms, just bummed me the hell out. Do I think those people were wrong for being frustrated? Not entirely. But I feel like if you care that much about playing that game perfectly and filling everything out and getting everything immediately then maybe you've picked the wrong game, because that isn't the game that they had any interest in making.

The Last of Us Part II

Alright y'all at a certain point we're gonna have to sit down and accept that video games are still a pretty shit storytelling medium. I've got a lot of respect for Quantum Break to be all "Yeah we're just gonna literally show you TV shows in between levels" because that's the vibe that I've always gotten from The Last of Us games.

And, hot take, I don't think the stories are all that great. They're perfectly serviceable post apocalypse stories, but if they were just a TV show without the game attached it would be some sub-Walking Dead type shit. And now they're gonna be a prestige TV show because it was attached to this acceptable stealth game.

When I say that games aren't a good storytelling medium it's because so many of the games with the best stories don't actually use the unique aspects of video games to help tell their stories. The Last of Us is a passable stealth game with TV show episodes breaking up the gameplay and so little of what you do in the game affects the TV show. And that's a ton of video game stories, especially AAA titles. You futz around an open world for a while, read some book or listen to an audio log, and then go to the next TV show segment.

The perfect examples of games actually using their mechanics to tell the story are Florence and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. Florence so perfectly encapsulates the feeling of being in a failing relationship in its gameplay, and the moment when you realize you have to use both halves of the controller to control Naiee in Brothers after Naia died are fucking incredible and really use what makes video games so special to enhance and tell their stories.

To me the worst example of someone doing the exact opposite of that is the end of The Last of Us 1. Having Joel make the decision that he makes with zero player agency, with you or I have no control over it is, to this day, one of my least favorite moments in any video game. It is a complete failure of using video games as a storytelling medium. I've spent this entire game getting to know this character, putting myself in his shoes, trying to become him, and then telling me to sit down and shut up when he does something so fucking heinous and selfish will forever leave a bad taste in my mouth. If Naughty Dog wants to make movies they should go make movies. At least then the people who work there will be a part of a union and can't be crunched to fucking death.

Hades

Now this is, if I may do my best Jeff Gerstmann impression, A MOTHER. FUCKING. VIDEO. GAME.

Hades is by a country goddamn mile my game of the year and it helps me appreciate and understand what I love about games, and what I look for in games that I really latch onto.

It feels sooooo fucking good. It is on my good feeling video games Mount Rushmore next to Dead Cells. Also up there is probably Destiny, I know it's not for everyone but goddamn does it feel good to shoot stuff in that game, and probably Tony Hawk 1+2. Shit's a masterpiece.

Also Hades uses the medium to tell a fucking fantastic story. Yes, there is plenty of stuff in your journal to expand on characters and plot, but for the most part your interactions with those around you are directly influenced by what you do in the game. The incidental dialog in that game is fucking astounding and breadcrumbs out character details and expands the story better than any audio log or 15 minute cutscene ever has, for me at least.

It's one of the most rewarding roguelikes I've ever played. I don't bristle at the idea of the genre like others do, I adore Dead Cells, but I understand why folks steer clear of them but the design decisions that go into some of that stuff in Hades are so clever. Like the fact that in your first chamber you're almost always guaranteed to get some darkness, the currency that follows you even if you die. It's such a small decision that makes the game 10 times better because even if you have an absolute shit run and get destroyed early on it doesn't feel like a waste of time.

And, to get back to authorial intent, Supergiant Games know that there are some folks who don't want shit to do with any kind of roguelike so they added in a mode that essentially removes that aspect. It's still run based, but you progress throughout the game regardless of your success in your runs. It's so fucking clever and is a clear indication of the breadth of the audience they hope for the game to reach.

It's difficult to talk about the feel of a game because it's such an ambiguous concept but when you know you know and I knew the moment I had my first combat encounter in Hades. Something about how snappy you move, how great your dodge is, and how impactful your attacks are combines into one of the best playing games I've ever had the privilege of touching. 2020 was, for many reasons, an absolute shit year. But playing Hades was a pretty fucking fantastic bright spot among the darkness. And all of what I just said about how it feels can be applied to Tony Hawk 1+2, my second favorite game of the year.

Some other games I really enjoyed playing this year in no particular order: Crusader Kings 3, Dragon Quest 11S, Yakuza Like a Dragon, FF7 Remake, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Doom Eternal, The Forest, WoW Shadowlands, Hearthstone, PSO2, Murder by Numbers, Paper Mario The Origami King, Ghost of Tsushima.

If you're reading this it means you made it through 2020, and honestly that's all we can ask for. Here's hoping for a much better 2021.

I think it's interesting that you say video games are a shitty storytelling medium and then your list of games includes a lot of games that do a lot of storytelling. Like Paper Mario The Origami King is good in large part because of its storytelling, and much of that is done through cut scenes of one sort or another. Ghost of Tsushima does storytelling much like Last of Us Part II, though admittedly better environmental storytelling. FF7 Remake definitely has that "wants to be a movie" thing going on, which is faithful to the original and its marketing that focused on the CG cut scenes.

I don't fully disagree with you but I think that video games can tell good stories and that traditional "gameplay, cut scene, gameplay" as one part of the storytelling (because of course it's far from the only way Last of Us Part II tells stories) is popular because it works in a lot of games.

I think a lot of it depends more on how cut scenes are used rather than the nature of them. One of the big issues with The Last Of Us Part II is that a lot of the most important parts of the game take place in cut scenes. Important deaths, confrontations, etc... Often you are playing the game traveling from one location to another and then the big thing that happens is a cut scene and then you are given control again. The focus is on what's happening in the cut scene rather than the gameplay.

Compare that to Tsushima or FF VII Remake, which use cut scenes to set up or show the aftermath of player actions but are really focused on what the player is doing.

I'll push back on The Last of Us, only because you seem to be willfully ignoring all the cool things it (and Naughty Dog games more generally) do to tell story through gameplay just because the player has no influence on the actual story. The reason the giraffe moment resonates with so many players isn't just because it's giraffes, it's the whole gameplay sequence leading up to it. Throughout the game Ellie and Joel's banter has gotten more and more friendly, jovial even. But in this moment Ellie is unresponsive to Joel's jokes and hesitant to follow his instructions. Their bond is breaking if not broken due to Joel's decision to leave her with Tommy.

You're wandering around yet another abandoned building, once again helping each other open doors and climb tall structures. Ellie's bored of it, and you're bored of it, too. This is one of the most frequent actions in the game and the novelty has completely worn off by this point for everyone involved. As the player you empathize with Ellie, but as the actor embodying the character of Joel, you know the script says you're going to get Ellie up that ledge, she's going to help you get up there next, and you'll continue on towards the Fireflies.

Instead, she screams and runs off, dropping the ladder. Is she abandoning you? Is she in trouble? You and Joel both are thrown into shock - this isn't how this mechanic works, this isn't and hasn't been how Ellie behaves as long as you've known her. You and Joel are both desperate to know what's going on. All of that is story told through gameplay.

But more than that, and this is something Tim Rogers' review of The Last of Us this summer really nailed down for me, is that not every video game should be expected to offer the player any significant choices in the story. Naughty Dog games are more like plays, in which you're cast as a certain character and say their lines, but in the in-between space you get to make all kinds of small decisions. Is your Naughty Dog character timid/stealthy or brazen/guns blazing? Do you stop to talk to your pals or do you single-mindedly hunt down the objective?

If you really sink into them - and I'm not saying you have to, any more than some people probably really wouldn't want to play Bob Ewell in To Kill a Mockingbird - but if you do, you find that Naughty Dog is always telling you about this character and attempting to nudge you into playing them a certain way, just as scripts tend to imply how a character behaves in their roles. Ricky Roma isn't just boisterous because he's played by Al Pacino, he's boisterous because he's Ricky Roma, and so Joe Mantegna and Lieve Schrieber also approach him as the ultimate confidence man whether that's how they'd treat the young man looking to invest in some property under his wife's nose or not.

I have always struggled to explain why I enjoy video games over watching movies and this phrase right here is a perfect explanation for that.

In a weird way, video games allow us all to become actors/actresses. Yeah we don't lend our own specific voice to the characters, but the developers give us a way to "become" them and live a story through their eyes. I've realized that is why I always feel more connected to a video game story vs a movie story, even if it's an amazing movie.

And then with Last of Us(both of them), opinions about both games have been argued to death and at this point no one will change their view on them. But I just can't wrap my head around why people feel the need to LIKE the characters they are playing. And when I say "like" I don't mean in a way that means the character is well written or not, but from a morality standpoint.

The end of Last of Us 1 was one of my favorite gaming moments BECAUSE I was expecting it to give me some lame choice that one could see from a mile away. But as I was just sitting there waiting for a prompt to come up, and it didn't, that really blew me away. It was like, "oh...okay then, I see what you guys are doing". And it wrapped up what sort of person Joel had become throughout the entire game.

Similarly with LoU2. I'm not sure if 2020 has just made everyone extremely jaded and prone to despising literally everything, but the amount of hate(against actors/devs aside, because that's a whole nother issue.....) for Joel's story in that game as well as Abby(and to a certain extent Ellie) was insane. Yeah, the "everyone is good and bad", plot line is a little old, but they way they told it I found to be very well done.

this was a fun read, so i appreciate you taking the time to organize your thoughts. Animal Crossing: New Horizons, The Last of Us Part II, and Hades have also been THE BIG 3 for me this year (as i imagine they are for many)- so i too have been thinking about them a lot.

but funnily enough i came out on the other side of TLOU2 and Hades diametrically opposed to your positions. TLOU2 is one of the most personally meaningful games i've experienced- and to the contrary i completed one run of Hades and decided i've absorbed about as much of that as i can. i certainly don't think TLOU2 is perfect, but it had me by the throat from start until finish (and having just finished Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain- a stealth game often lauded as a pinnacle of the form- i think TLOU2 upstages it). whereas Hades- i dunno, to me it felt like a Supergiant take on a roguelike- an exceedingly well-crafted one, but i knew the size and shape of it such that it didn't have much spark for me.

and honestly that's actually kinda fucking great how different our experiences were, because it shows how diverse the field is getting and that there's space for all kinds of players. the fact that a games like Animal Crossing, TLOU2, and Hades are all part of the conversation when it comes to marquee releases in 2020 proves how much potential there is for wildly different experiences in a single medium. i think that shows healthy creative thinking, and that's awesome.

edit: @nodima@reap3r160- this is probably tangential to the spirit of this thread, but FWIW i'm on Team Player-Agency-Is-Severely-Overrated. there was a related discussion on these boards about hopes for the new Mass Effect- and for me, a former Bioware devotee, if the new Mass Effect has another blank slate character as protagonist- i think i'm out. the older i get, the more i want to empathically relate to specific complex characters- not forge my own story as hero of the galaxy.

Sorry your experience with Animal Crossing was tainted by people getting toxic. I have never played any of them but it seems strange people would get angry over a game that looks so peaceful.

Also this bit right here is some real fucking truth:

I've been way more engaged and entertained by the conversation surrounding TLOu2 than I was by the game itself. The game itself is whatever, I enjoyed it for being a really georgous murder simulator that compelled me to NG+ it, but with that enjoyment came a lot frustration that resulted from me feeling like I could've handled the combat encounters better or conserved more resources. That's just par for the course when it comes it survival horror I guess. I always feel like I fucked up and need to load the last checkpoint.

I won't bother talking about the narrative, its already been talked about and argued to death, but if you do still wanna hear people talk about it, I recommend the following:

Waypoint, NakeyJakey, Sardonicast, Giant Bomb

......Kurt Metzger

@birtrum_yonce: I think the game has built in modifiers so never really worry about amo on lower settings. Like resident evil, the better you do the more they modify the ai. So your stealthing a lot and not using any items, if you get to the door out of a location the game triggers a flag and you next encounter the vision cone will be bigger for enemies. The damage will be up. so it forces you to use more items to feel like you juuuust made it out hence the fun. Then it will increase the amount of randomly generated items in the area. Hence no game faq can tell you that their health in blank draw since it is random. Notice when your full on amo all draws are mostly empty. They want those stocking till the last boss over stockers to use their stuff and have fun. Hate to say the cliche but...yah...you may have been playing it wrong for max enjoyment lol.

I played it on the hardest difficulty, not sure if those modifiers still come into play

Thank you for reminding the internet yet again: the story in the Last of Us is not as good as you all think it is. It's a zombie story so boil plate that, by all account, not even as novel as some Resident Evil games.

What made me angry about the whole Last of Us II drama, was how the mainstream media and the publishers of the game reacted to criticism.

Any valid criticism of the game - i.e. a well-formulated, rational and comprehensive opinion - was being seen as "bigotry" by mainstream media channels like Kotaku, Polygon, RPS, IGN, and others (even GiantBomb to some degree). Not to mention the publisher. They were all closed to any degree of discussion on this matter, making it very clear that if you didn't like the game you were a racist and misogynistic person.

This sets a dangerous precedent, that only the big media channels are allowed to have valid opinions about a game, that if you disagree with them you're simply a bad person.

My reaction was unusual because I had no investment in this franchise at the onset: I did not play the first game because it did not interest me, and I had no intentions of playing the sequel. If every critic of the game was being perceived as racist and misogynistic, what does that make people like me, who had zero interest in this franchise? The critics were willing to spend their money and time on these games after all. People like me were not. So by the mainstream media's criteria, I must be some kind of anti-christ for not having the interest to play the Last of Us II, even it was offered to me for free.

What got me invested in this game's discussion was the above-mentioned phenomena. How the mainstream gaming media tried to exert control over how we criticize games, and when it is valid to criticize a game. They made it very clear that you cannot criticize a game that supports their real-world political ideals. They forced a political agenda upon the franchise, that if you didn't like the game you were just an angry Trump suporter (which I'm not by the way, I seek to replace all politicians with an artificial intelligence).

The way the mainstream media and the developers/publishers responded made people even angrier, and made more people angry. That they were being pushed into a political definition, that their opinions of the gameplay and story didn't count by default.