this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2024
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The video is great. A shame that it's getting downvoted.
In fiction there's the concept of suspension of disbelief. Wikipedia describes it better than I could, but to keep it short - when you're reading/watching/etc. a fictional story, you avoid applying your critical thinking and logic reasoning to certain story elements, in order to enjoy it.
I feel like a similar but not identical principle operates with game mechanics. I'll call it here suspension of scepticism. That suspension of scepticism makes you willing to trust that the information provided or implied by the game about itself is factual, accurate, and relevant.
For example, if it shows you a six-sided die, you treat it as a fair die, and you treat your odds of getting a 1 the same as getting a 6, a 5, or any other number. You won't save the game, throw the die a hundred times, and see if it's actually fair or not.
Those "design lies" use that suspension of scepticism to deliver a better experience. And it works - for the reason mentioned in the video, it makes playing more enjoyable.
However just like the suspension of disbelief can be broken, so does the suspension of scepticism. It's OK if the game designer is a liar, but he must be a good liar; if you lie too often or too obviously, the player will smell the lie from afar, and the suspension of scepticism is broken. And with it, the enjoyment of the game goes down the drain.
I watched 3 minutes and he advocates multiple absolutely game breaking terrible ideas.
"We don't want players to die" is cancer. "Silently changing difficulty" when people die is cancer.
Dying is a good thing. Players learning to get past difficult segments is a good thing. A game that doesn't respect that is broken.
That's a mentality that was the norm back in 2010, and one of the reasons the og dark souls got called a "very hard game". It wasn't that hard of a game, it was just a game that let you die as many times as mistakes you made, and it's both objectively a better game for it, while also being hugely influential to the industry on this particular matter. To the point that it has been given the title and award of "ultimate game of all times". Deserved for reminding that games are supposed to be games, and failing is 100% supposed to be part of it.
It almost like, when you learn the lesson the encounter is designed to teach you, you get better at the game 🤷🏼♀️
This rubber banding bullshit is like if Mario's original 1-1, very carefully crafted to introduce you to the basic mechanics of the game, just started letting you walk through pipes if you never jumped over it. You don't have a game any more.
I wish people into niche genres with limited appeal would stop making claims like that. By all means enjoy the game but also acknowledge that this kind of play style is not for everyone, especially not for people who don't have hundreds of hours to put into a game.
It's not a claim I made though. It got that award from the voting public by the golden joystick. And souls are definitely no longer niche, Elden Ring success is an obvious clue, but the fact that most AA or AAA action games with a melee weapon from the last 5 years implements some mechanics from souls games is another huge indication of the mass appeal and impact dark souls has had on gaming culture.
Nobody is denying that it founded a new genre, doesn't mean that that genre's mechanics are now needed in every game ever made in the future or that it is the most popular genre among all players.
It's not what I'm saying either. I don't know where you found any such claims in my comment. All I said is that games are supposed to be games, and failing is supposed to be part of games. You can fail even in a chill game like Stardew Valley, and you probably will on your first playthrough if you don't look anything up. The game won't game over because of it, but you will spend your entire second year suffering and trying to fix the mistakes you made in your first year. I can't remember a single game I played where failing was not something that could happen that felt better because of it. Case in point: I was playing Jusant and was interested in the game, until I realized I couldn't truly fail in that game, and all of the mechanics in place that looked like they were game mechanics, were actually just smoke and mirrors.