Image: Still from Paratopic by Arbitrary Metric
I read a good thread on Twitter a few days ago that I wanted to digest here. User @docsquiddy, the developer of the game Paratopic, writes:
“speaking purely from a “what people buy” perspective, if your goal in games is to make enough money to fund another game, you need to do TWO things:
1) make an *experience* that people need to have
2) remove as many barriers between the player and that experience as possible”
I think this idea of focusing on experience in making and specifically marketing games is really important and useful. It’s a kind of right brain / gestalt thinking about games that many of us are missing when thinking about game ideas. Because many of us put on our game designer hat when thinking about the next game we want to make we tend to think in terms of mechanically focused genres or lists of features. There are many, many unsuccessful ‘platformers with a twist’ that illustrate this. People are thinking about their games in a sort of formalist design sense “I will take genre X and add innovation Y and therefore have made a noteworthy game”. This approach, when not combined with experiential gestalt thinking has the risk of making stuff which feels fussy and sterile. It’s a kind of mechanistic working through of a game mechanic with a series of different color schemes and mechanical variations, but limited emotional and aesthetic impact. I won’t pick on any particular games as examples but you can probably think of a few.
I think part of this is the idea that the main value that indie creators have to bring to the market is a kind of ‘innovation as virtue’. The thinking goes “We indies can experiment with bold new ideas that the boring AAA mainstream cannot, therefore we are valuable and needed.” And of course in the wider ecosystem of games there is some truth to this, but it misses the point that this is generally speaking not what motivates players to buy a game. The thesis of Doc’s Twitter thread is that most consumers buy a game because the prospect of having an experience has been dangled in front of them, and they find the prospect of having that experience enticing. The experience represents a gestalt of art, mechanics and aesthetics or to use a more nebulous but evocative term the ‘vibe’ of the game.
Do you want to go to this place and have this experience? This morning I was thinking about Bloodborne, part of the Souls-like genre created by From Software. My experience of Bloodborne was made interesting due to the deployment of the ‘hard but fair’ mechanical aesthetic, but what I remember and what gives me a feeling of wanting to return was the palpable atmosphere of the world: the gothic, dream-like strange and hostile spaces I had to traverse, that unique feeling of space looping and wrapping in on itself, the elegantly connected level designs. It all sticks in my mind and makes me want to re-experience it, to be in that place and feel those feelings. The combination of the surface aesthetics, oblique narrative and challenging mechanics all hook together and resonate nicely with one another. A dark world like this should feel difficult and threatening. The mechanics reinforce the vibe.
Looking at Paratopic, Doc’s own game (which I haven’t played), we get the sense that he’s walking his talk. The game is more or less an atmosphere delivery system. The choice of abstracted Playstation One era low-polygon art, the green fog and ominous music. There is a palpable feeling transmitted, a kind of David Lynch meets Silent Hill aesthetic package which very clearly telegraphs the aesthetic experience you probably will have if you buy it. Notably the marketing material for the game does not focus on mechanics or what you will be able to do in this world, instead it just presents a taste of what the experience of being in the world will be like.
There is an ongoing discussion in the world of game makers about whether aesthetics and narrative or ‘pure’ mechanics are more important. I tend to fall a bit to the mechanic focused side as I’m almost purely uninterested in most people’s idea of story in games. That being said, thinking about this subject I am a great lover of the experience of being in a world that games offer, as distinct from a story being revealed by narrative dumps and cutscenes. I think this is why the indirect world building and lore revealing of a game like Bloodborne is so appealing. There is a feeling that there is a story that animates the world, or at least a history, but we are simply existing and interacting in it. In purely pragmatic terms if you are making a game you want to sell, I think paying close attention to the experience and feelings you want your player to experience is well worth doing, whether it is your primary concern or not.
The entire thread is here, and worth reading:
Weird observation.
I see a bunch of games get noticed for unique and clever mechanics at various shows that end up not performing well when they hit market
— doc (@docsquiddy) November 30, 2018
