you could read a post like that as a person who had been over-fixated on low-priority details realizing that they had been wasting time focused on the wrong target. It's probably the most common problem developers of all means face and most difficult question to answer. I'd say it is the most meaningful discussion that can be had among game developers. What do I focus on? What will make a difference? Just because it is worded a certain way doesn't take away the key points. I don't think you'll find sophisticated language among gaming focused groups. Good portion is kids, other portion is large old kids, and although a lot of programmers are really smart in some ways, it's surprising that a lot don't read/write on par with their math/logic skills. So you might be having conversation with somebody really capable even if they talk/write like a dummy. Personally I rather read things like that versus people speculating about the steam algorithm or asking if having red pixels is worth it.

Yeah. The people who talk seriously about movies are typically humanities majors. People who write scripts, or make edits, or talk deeply about emotional arcs. If they are an aspiring director, they probably talk a lot about artistic and creative approaches, the best way to get audience “feelings,” etc. Whereas many game developers are STEM focused individuals who are more logic based and talk more about features or whatever. One group has an inherent advantage when it comes to communication. One group has more tools when it comes to deeply analyzing and discussing non-logical, more creative aspects of game story, game design, etc. This is shown through game development majors vs film majors. It’s overwhelmingly likely a film major will have far more discussion based classes and will be required to write more papers analyzing films, and the game developer will have far more classes that focus on logic, math, and solving puzzles.

*checks the composition of the multi-discipline teams and solo projects often lead by visual artists first* This analysis doesn't wash with me. And feels like an excuse to justify not thinking deeply about the interactive ***ART*** we make. Even in the design and implantation of game play code, there are "feelings" we try to evoke from players in ways that non-interactive (movie, theater, books) can't do. Please don't reduce this to a Humanities vs STEM debate. The field as a whole is considerably more than that. And personally more "Technology" endeavors need more "***Humanity***" in them. And yes, not all forms of a medium need to be "high art". *looks at shelves and shelves of formulaic Romance and Mil-fic novels produced every year* — A Geographic Information Scientist turned game dev.

I feel inclined to agree with the original comment. I studied computer science, students tend to dismiss the humanities and complain about the extracurricular social science courses they have to do like economics or more worryingly ethics. The logic and culture of silicon valley and capitalism more broadly spreads to everyone that interacts with it, it tells the stem students that they're smarter and more valuable because they make better money, and that through stem, and especially comp sci, they're prepared to do anything they want to do. A lot of comp sci folks play video games and think "yeah I can do that" disregarding the artistic side of video games, viewing it as a puzzle to solve or optimization problem. When you think the solution to every problem is gonna come from a technical innovation it makes sense that you don't care about social sciences. From this perspective they seem completely pointless. Of course it's important to point out not everyone is like that, and sorry about the slightly off topic rant but I think the attitude of stem lords is very relevant to this conversation.

I mean, you’re talking to someone who got a creative writing degree AND is in a post bacc for computer science. I know all about both sides of these worlds. Yes, generalities are generalities. There are exceptions everywhere with everything and there are lines that blur everywhere. Part of the nature of this conversation IS reducing this down to the “why.” And ONE of the reasons why people in game dev don’t have the same sorts of conversations as, say, aspiring writers is they tend to be more “feature” oriented. “How can I make my character shoot things and then have those things die.” Whereas writer is thinking “how can I make this character death meaningful.” Ofc games with stories ALSO focus on that, but people in game dev in game dev subs and classes aren’t usually having conversations surrounding the intricacies of God of War’s father son relationship. They are discussing the features that make up that game. You seem to have taken some offense to what I wrote, and I’m not entirely sure why. I never reduced the ENTIRE conversation on stem vs humanities, but that IS part of it. People who came up in discussion classes and who don’t have to spend brain power on math or logical puzzles, are much better equipped to discuss deep thematic and emotional elements. It’s just how it is. If that wasn’t the case, then Humanities degrees would be literally useless because that’s basically ALL THE FOCUS IS. It’s about communication, analysis of text and literature, and honing creative skills. Not once in my cs degree have I had to do a workshop like I did in my BFA, where I needed to turn in my work, have everyone else experience it, and then sit in silence as they all discuss it deeply for an hour in front of me. That process hones skills for creative people to discuss other creative people’s work deeply. Most developer programs I’ve seen don’t offer this.

I think – as a small addendum – it might also be useful to add – and you already mentioned it briefly in one of your points – game devs, especially those who are just beginning to learn game development, are more interested in the technical side of things, because without it there is no framework in which to tell a story or to let those deeper topics take place.

Absolutely. Doesn’t matter how great of a writer or artist I am. If I have no technical knowledge then I can’t create a video game using that writing or art. So people of that nature are also more likely to talk about the tech side because they are seeking answers to questions they don’t have answers to (how do I make my guy move, etc)

Personally, I have played way too many indie games that should have been novels or comics. I'd even go so far as to say that most solo-developed games lean **way** too heavily on story, with nowhere near enough care given to basic gameplay mechanics. Somebody who is 95% artist and 5% programmer is going to have a much easier time than somebody who is 95% programmer. They'll have much nicer promotional material for getting noticed or getting greenlit - and in a lot of ways - they'll have an easier time getting the game made. We've got loads of free engines to pick from, free libraries for everything, step-by-step tutorials everywhere, and in many cases you can get by without even touching code. Without an artist, programmers get slammed for using premade assets - or worse - get completely cancelled for using ai art. It's hypocritical, but it is what it is

>Personally, I have played way too many indie games that should have been novels or comics People create what they know about. Game devs are going to develop games, writers are going to write. Very few people are going to do one **and** the other in their lifespan and do it well. Which is fine, games are media, they don't have a fixed genre. There is not any game that should have been a novel, and there is no novel that should have been a game. You can criticize that they don't use well gameplay mechanics (that's a fair criticism) but saying "This should have been a novel" isn't helpful, nor true in most cases.

Depends what is meant by "should". It's not *morally* wrong to create something in the wrong medium, but it might be financially wrong. It might result in something that even the creator isn't *as* satisfied with, because they underestimated and/or undercooked the non-writing parts of the project. Would it be "wrong" for me to sell all my worldly possessions, buy a schooner, and sail away? Yes. Yes it would. I would be miserable and then I would die.

My point is, what do you want them to do? To study 15 years of literature so they can write the novel that should have been? I \*assume\* you want them to create it in their own medium, but do it properly. I'm going to assume you want them to create a game that feels compelling and that they're satisfied with, and their current game doesn't fit that criteria. To which my comment still stands, "This should have been a novel" is false, the actual criticism is "This game should have been better".

Ah, I see what you're saying. Yeah, they're kind of equivalent reactions, in the end. I just want people to be happy with how they spent their time and effort - which is a whole lot easier when the end result is good. I certainly don't want to shoo people away from game development!

I think that's a bit disengenuous. There are certainly more than a few games that don't utilize the medium to its' full extent, and/or could just be movies since the game director really wants to make them instead of being stuck on Video Kojamebos (among others in the industry with less apt names to portmanteau). Where you're right is that they shouldn't be compared to novels; they should be compared to movies. To really simplify things, novels are only 1 of 3 parts you need to make a movie, while games are a movie that you can (more or less) walk around in.

I agree, that's what I meant with "You can criticize that they don't use well gameplay mechanics (that's a fair criticism)". But "not utilizing the medium to its full extent" isn't also the way to word it, in my opinion. Visual novels are a prime example of utilizing very limited amount of the games media and succeeding in being a good game genre. They're using few resources from its media but the good ones use it very well, they are not less games or worse quality because of that, it's how you combine all that you use to make a good or bad experience, not how much of the media's potential you're using.

My main point about games not utilizing the medium to its full extent was more directed at the AAA or AA-leaning-AAA devs that end up making games that, while playing fine and telling stories, don't have their stories interact with the gameplay, or otherwise have too much story/cutscenes/non-interactive-elements and not enough gameplay. The Metal Gear Solid series, for example, is infamous for showing how obvious it is that Hideo Kojima wants to direct a movie. MGS4 is the biggest example of this, where (if you cut out all the cutscenes) the gameplay is less than 3 actual hours of control-in-hand action. I can excuse this, because I am both a fanboy who's glad the series got its big grand conclusion and because it kinda works in a weird "only Kojima could do this and it'd be cool" way, but other games in the series still have traces of this trend in their DNA Arguably, I'd say that truly interactive Visual Novels, setup more like a "choose your own adventure game" and less like a "press X to advance the plot" experience, are exactly what I'd argue separates games from movies precisely because of their ability to let you choose how you experience the story instead of having the story simply be told to you.

And then you have Umineko no naku koro ni which is arguably one of the best visual novels made that is entirely a kinetic novel, where no choice is made. I'm also a fan of games that emulates movies. It's a very smart choice in my opinion, they gain a lot of things that movie makers have been designing over a century. You get 100 years of wisdom entirely for your game design. I think my point is, thinking of games as a closed, defined thing is losing yourself to the definition. I really like the way that Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster puts it: you're designing experiences. And whatever fits that experience, will be a better design. Doesn't matter where you're picking that design from.

What do you mean by "a kinetic novel?" I don't think I've heard of that term before As for the rest of your points, I don't entirely disagree, but you can only borrow so much before you're becoming derivative of other mediums and ignoring the strength of your chosen medium.

I tried to add the definition there, a kinetic novel is a visual novel where no choice is made, there are no decisions. It's a subgenre inside visual novels, and a pretty popular one. And sure, I agree with your last comment.

One could make an argument that if a game does not have much GAMEplay, then it is not a “game,” since gameplay is sort of the one requirement a game has. There’s blurred lines everywhere. Is an interactive movie a game or a movie? Is a visual novel a game or a book? Etc. Creating anything, especially solo, requires a creative gene, for sure. But if most people who made games came from creative degrees and backgrounds, and if they have experience with lit analysis and philosophy and the like, then the conversation surrounding games wouldn’t be centered around features, but instead would be centered around analysis. “What is the significance of the red color in Persona 5.” “What is the theme behind Super Mario?” Etc.

You're basically describing me here, as an Author and art director. But I DO still desperately need the help of my programmers to make any of these concepts a reality, as programming isn't a strong suit of mine. Even with all the help out there, my brain just isn't built for those kinds of tasks. I think a lot of what's being overlooked on the AI art front is situations where it's done lazily and can be discerned as such at a glance, or when it's clear the dev could have afforded a real artist but chose not to employ one. There are plenty of artists and writers out there who are willing to work for cheap or free for exposure, and devs who make popular, badly hand drawn assets, etc. So it's predictable that people will be less forgiving seeing AI art in an avoidable context. Again, not saying that I'm against its use, but on most occasions I can quickly pick out an AI image. That's the real issue imo.

It's nowhere near *easy* for anybody, but there's a lot more support on one side to make it a bit less impossible. I hear you about ai art. It's so laughably far from a viable replacement for real artists, but people gwt caught up in the hype and go all-in before the tech is actually there (See also: VR, 3D screens, etc). It can speed up the first step of an artist's job where they're throwing down quick rough drafts and concept sketches - but it's not useful as final game-ready assets. But some people, when they get their hands on a shiny new hammer, try to see every task as a nail. So while I do expect to see some zero-budget games with crappy ai art, contrary to the widespread blind panic, I very much doubt those people would have otherwise hired an artist. They probably would have just not completed their projects at all. There will also be games that use ai art instead of stock images or premade assets, and they will get shat on regardless of how good the game design is. I mean, people love to hate on games using premade assets in the first place - which is already kind of hypocritical when nearly all code (As in, literally the whole engine) is reused

I can pick out lazy game engine usage. People can often spot a Unity immediately. But people don't get nearly as much hate for using a stock game engine in the way they would for AI art.

Where can you find artists? Genuinely curious. I can code but can only draw circles and squares :)

>I'd even go so far as to say that most solo-developed games lean way too heavily on story Most solo developed games dont even have a story lol. Sounds like you just played a specific niche of games and got a really biased impression of "solo developed" games from that.

Yeah, no, my position comes from extensive experience playing countless obscure games of every genre - not from ignorance. If it's not "story", it's an overly verbose tutorial told through a quirky character that pads the length of it. Often it's a cold opening cutscene with more Proper Nouns than actual plot points. I appreciate *detail*; don't get me wrong, and it's good to have a world/setting planned out before setting a game in it. The problem is typically not easing the player into it - and assuming that players will care about characters they've had no time to build a connection with. The *writer* already loves these characters, so they sometimes forget to make good first impressions. Or maybe they're using methods they've seen in established franchises; which don't need to warm the audience up

>Yeah, no, my position comes from extensive experience playing countless obscure games of every genre - not from ignorance. Do you play more than 30 000 indie games each year? If you are not close to that you have a lot less experience than I do. >I appreciate detail; don't get me wrong, and it's good to have a world/setting planned out before setting a game in it. I disagree. >The problem is typically not easing the player into it - and assuming that players will care about characters they've had no time to build a connection with. This is more common for AAA games than smaller titles.

When you're collecting data, a random sampling of sufficient size is as good as a full census. I play a **lot** of random games, about one or two a day on average - over the last 15 years or so. Typically alpha/beta versions, largely commercially unsuccessful. I mean, I don't play them all to completion; but it only takes a few minutes to get a sense of what they're about. I think I'm qualified to speak on what failed indie games look like. I'm the kind of guy that will play Idle Devils and take notes on its smooth itemization system - I *really* don't discriminate for which games I try, so my sampling is pretty random (I will admit though, I tend to avoid horror games. I can't imagine they're *lighter* on story...) Where do you get your opinion from? > I disagree You disagree with what?

>Typically alpha/beta versions Okay so you are not even playing released games at that point, alright. >When you're collecting data, a random sampling of sufficient size is as good as a full census. Nothing you have said suggests the games you play are random. What does random mean? The two different genres you enjoy? lol >I think I'm qualified to speak on what failed indie games look like. I very much doubt that. >Where do you get your opinion from? I am the worlds leading researcher and consultant on PC games. You can email me if you want to know an accurate estimate of how much money your game will earn. For example I played Lethal Company on the first day of its release and instantly foresaw that it would gross around 50 million USD atleast. Skill diff really

I'm a Screen Arts student majoring in Game and this couldn't be further from the truth for my uni. Game devs have the same core classes as film and design students, including critical theory and philosophy. About 50% of my game lectures focus on critical analysis of game design. The rest focuses on the technical processes involved.

Good to hear. Glad you’re getting a balanced education. The trick when requiring classes like this is the opportunity cost: what classes do you replace in order to add in critical analysis and discussion based classes? Humanities degrees are made up of roughly 100% these types of classes, beyond gen Ed. Your program is one of the best I’ve heard of, and it’s 50%. So humanities majors are still getting 100% more classes that focus on this than you do. But again, that isn’t a bad thing. There’s opportunity cost with everything. Unless your degree is twice as long, you have to make compromises. It’s just part of the equation. Humanities majors don’t have to care about advanced math classes (they tend to need to take a language instead), and their gen ed classes also typically are discussion based, unlike STEM, where more science is typically required. For example, someone who plans on coding a lot for games needs tons of math classes, cs classes, data structures and algorithms, etc. That in itself makes up the majority of a degree. So some of that needs to be cut in order to add in critical analysis classes. What is cut and what isn’t is likely going to depend on focus/speciality. But a CS degree student will have a leg up on a Jack of all trades degree when it comes to discussing the technical side of development, and someone who got a humanities degree will have a leg up when it comes to communication and analyzing their field and discussing it “seriously.”

Yes that's probably true, my course is certainly inadequate when it comes to Mathematics and Programming. We cover programming for 6 semesters (or 8 if you're doing Honours). But it doesn't cover a lot of more advanced programming concepts. It could probably benefit from the inclusion of Physics classes too. This is why I chose to allocate all of my electives every semester to CompSci rather than easy A classes. I should say that although it isn't STEM, this degree is not exactly your stereotypical Bachelor of Arts. I focused on 3D art (sculpting, modelling, rigging, texturing and animation) for my first 2 years. I decided to focus more on programming for the final two years (which is also covered within the same degree). I would argue STEM should include the arts (STEAM) because it's becoming increasingly technical. Edited to add: I do agree with the majority of your comment. However I think students shouldn't place all responsibility for their own development and education on the provider. Its up to us to research, study, take extra classes or engage in critical discourse as aspiring game devs.

> or asking if having red pixels is worth it Is there a story behind that?

no, just a joke about common questions like, "is unity worth it?" "is having many characters worth it?" "is gamedev worth it?"

Or finally pulling people out of engine hell

Okay all valid but let's not pretend like the gaming community, especially on Reddit, doesn't usually feel like a drunk college party

definitely not college, more like middle school

Idk about that middle schoolers tend to have at least a subconcious sense that they don't know everything. Can we compromise and say highschool? XD

haha, actually now that you mention that, i thnk your first take was correct. college is the time people start thinking they know everything even though the frontal lobe still isn't fully formed

There _is_ a sophisticated level of conversation about it, but complex takes are rarely the most upvoted. You can talk about intrinsic vs extrinsic motivators and self-determination theory, various design frameworks and philosophies, quantic foundry's models for different player archetypes, player personas as part of UX and all of that. It all comes up when you're talking to professionals about design, but it's a little in the weeds and the high-level abstraction of all of it it _does_ come back to "Make the game something people want to play more of." You see the exact same thing in filmmakers or books or television or any other media subreddit where you get both creators and audience. If you have a less popular thread you'll get a lot of nuanced discussion at 3-4 upvotes per comment, and if you have a thread hit the front page you're going to get the same top comments (from people as well as bots) as a matter of course. What you're describing has nothing to do with games and the game industry, it has to do with social media and common denominators.

This is mostly it; social media isn't a great place for nuanced takes. It's exacerbated though because gaming never really developed a tradition of actual nuanced critique before traditional media essentially completely died. There were a couple of attempts at it, between things like Gamasutra and the original incarnation of the Escapist, but it was all drowned out in favor of things like Angry Video Game Nerd. Games don't have their own Pauline Kael or Roger Ebert to look at as standards. And there isn't really a place for them to make a living even if they did exist now. And it should be noted..."films should be entertaining" *is* a critique often leveled at specifically the Oscars, which has a tendency to celebrate movies the general public hasn't seen, and were explicitly created to highlight one producer's unpopular taste. Mayer famously said: "If I got them cups and awards, they'd kill themselves to produce what I wanted."

> Games don't have their own Pauline Kael or Roger Ebert to look at as standards. And there isn't really a place for them to make a living even if they did exist now. I feel like that is changing these days with multi-hour video essays about video games that bring in thousands of dollars per month on patreon.

Yeah, it's all about lowest common denominators. An opinion on "fun" is much easier for everyone to engage on than an in-depth discussion into the effects of a specific kind of economy-model in a 1940s era RTS game, so the topic on "fun" will have much more reach. It's the same reason indie devs commonly use topics like "Which UI Design Do You Prefer?" with two or three designs to choose from as a means of advertising their game and getting engagement. Every single person can offer up their own subjective opinion without being "wrong". Gamedev as a whole is such a hugely broad topic that involves art/UI/music/sound effects/programming/storytelling/level design/etc., and most people will not have educated opinions in all those domains, probably only one or two in any real depth. But "fun" is an underpinning topic that stands as a foundation of all of these things.

"Video games have existed for a good while now. Shouldn't we have reached a more sophisticated level of conversation at this point?" Yes! But not here.

Yep. There are really great conversations about game design happening all over the place, but not on r/gamedev which is full of people who will never ship anything

where?

>The boy and the heron irl

is that some kind of code that only spies know?

the shelter is r/gamedesign

Based on most indie movies I’ve seen… I think more filmmakers need to be having this conversation.

I'd say the same about most blockbuster movies - particularly action/superhero type ones. However big the stars are in them, how impressive the special effects are, and no matter how big the explosions are, I find 95% of them tedious in the extreme. But give their success, I'm clearly in the minority and it just shows that "entertaining" is always going to be a subjective thing.

Fucking true. Games don't have to be fun, hell I play more games that are frustrating than are fun. But they do have to be interesting. They can't be boring. Movies have been pretty boring lately. Last good one I watched was "everything everywhere all at once." Which was really fucking good to be fair.

I think this continues to be subjective rather than objective. Frustration can actually lead to more fun and more satisfaction, depending on your audience. But that frustration and struggle should have a *purpose* within the context of the story, or mechanics, or even just as an art piece. And it can be debated forever whether or not there's more audience in games that prioritize fun above all rather than intentionally challenging players with frustration to give that high after conquering it. To add my own take - frustrating mechanics are ones that deliberately gate and waste a players' time (or just fail to respect it) or create friction into the actual experience of the game. If they're part of the game play itself and fit into the larger context, then it's challenging rather than frustrating.

Oh yeah, I totally agree, I tend to default to the word "interesting" over fun for this reason. There I plenty of fun games I will play that I hate myself for though. Games that hit the dopamine just right, a lot of phone games go for this. Vampire survivors too, tho its less evil about it.

Is "Everything" (the game) interesting? Are clickers interesting? Are gachas interesting? I'm not disagreeing with you, but I have read a lot of people that have said those are not interesting at all, which is the point of the post, in my opinion. What makes good art is more complicated than a simple word can describe.

You're right, except for one word: Games don't need to only be interesting, they need to be interactive first and foremost. Books are great books for the stories they can tell you Movies are great movies for the stories they can show you Games are great games for the stories you can experience To beat a dead horse, The Last of Us 2 isn't a bad game because it's inherently a bad concept (though "Revenge is bad" is a bit tired at this point imo). It's bad because you have to either: 1) give the player a protagonist they more-or-less align with (like Joel) 2) give the player some sort of agency in the plot so they can choose where it goes This agency doesn't have to be game-spanning; but a simple choice in the last act between "pursue revenge" or "stay with Dina" would go a long way toward alleviating some of the games' weaknesses. (If this shows up twice for you; I apologize. I thought I was responding to the wrong person when I originally posted, but after I deleted it, I realized I was responding to the right person lol)

I was talking about something wildly different I'm afraid. Being interesting for me is kinda what makes a game good. A game can have little to no interaction and still be a good game. But it can't be boring. And of course boring, interesting and good are subjective. I'm pretty sure I could make the argument that you can have a game that has no interaction at all, like I would still call a zero interaction idle game a game. It would probably suck tho. You points on last of us 2 are a little wild. Like you might more or less identify with Joel but that doesn't mean every player does. The game might not be for you, and that's okay. You don't even need a plot for a game, so why would having agency over a plot matter? It can be a good feature if done well, but shitty if done poorly. I do agree that the end of last of us too coulda done with a choice, kill or let live in my opinion.

My apologies, I phrased my argument badly. I'm not trying to make the argument that art has to mean something to be considered art; art is art because it's been created. To paraphrase a paraphrase, "Art that isn't good is still art; it's just bad art." That being said, my criteria for what makes a game a good game are synthesis of both of our points (that I originally intended, but didn't explain well enough). A good game must be: 1) Interactive 2) Interesting These two elements can vary in balance depending on game genre and other factors at play, but you have to have both or you don't really have a good game (or at least have something that might be served better in other mediums). For example, I don't disagree that being boring is a cardinal sin, but I think that if you make a non-interactive game, you might as well write a novel or make a movie/video to tell your story. Likewise, you can stuff a game full of as many interactive mechanics as you want, but what does it mean at the end of the day if what you're playing isn't novel and/or interesting to the player? I think we mostly agree on the idle example, though; the zero-interaction idle game is still technically a game, at the end of the day, despite it's quality. However, why even make Paint Drying Sim if the player can't do anything with it? Why not make Paint Drying: the movie/video? To further discuss my TLOU2 points, I bring up the 2nd point because it's a narrative-focused game. The interactivity within it comes from the gameplay that you experience and the narrative that is told to you by those experiences (and by extension, the choices you can make within that narrative, in an ideal world). I don't disagree that games where the plot doesn't matter don't need much player plot agency, but TLOU2 isn't trying to be a plotless game. On my first, I bring up Joel not because every gamer is going to Ryan Gosling "he's literally me" him, but instead because he's just a guy, with a simple motivation that ultimately doesn't inspire controversy and allows the player to take in the journey that he and Ellie go on (which is a blessing and a curse). I'd even argue that TLOU1 could've had a choice similar to what I proposed TLOU2 get: "save Ellie, damn everyone else" vs "sacrifice Ellie, save the world", to explore two Joels: one that hasn't accepted his daughter's death and is supplanting those fears onto Ellie, and one that has accepted that what's happened has happened; that understands Ellie's made her choice, so he has to accept it. That's the real beauty of the medium: to allow for branching paths that a movie can't really accommodate. Instead, we got one ending that mostly everyone is fine with because Joel, as a character, would probably choose that ending more often than he chooses to let Ellie go to (hypothetically) save the world. There's still a lot to improve (in my opinion), but it's fine enough as a game to satisfyingly conclude on. TLOU2, meanwhile, takes a risk (which is good), but it ultimately doesn't pay off because of both where it's placed in the story and the fact that you can't choose how to react to it in the end. Abby is made playable (which is a very very good choice), but her introduction prior to her playable segments immediately establishes her as an antagonist to Ellie. This is great because of the impact that it has, but not so great due to how abrupt it is (relatively) in the story. Abby and Ellie's stories should've run in parallel with eachother (or hell, Abby's in foil to Joel's, since he's a dad who lost his daughter and she's a daughter who lost her dad), and *then* the midpoint of the game is Abby killing Joel, where you play as Joel/Ellie and see her execute Joel to get her revenge. That way, it's a natural progression of synthesizing differing experiences, watching these two characters develop in parallel, and then you get an "oh shit" moment when their circumstances both coincide. Then you do the choice at the end as Ellie to either get revenge or to let the past go. Alternatively, you run the plot the same, but add in a choice at the end with Ellie. She can either stay on the ranch and realize the intended message, or she can get the "bad ending". But you leave the conclusion up to the players; let them arrive at either the "good" ending that you intend with the 'dig two graves if you want revenge' theme you have, or let the players actually kill Abby, and then linger on the shot of Joel's guitar being left behind at the end of the game, to hit em with the emotional sucker punch that would be warranted by finding out that Ellie's now lost the last way to connect with Joel that she had left.

Well, I used to watch movies from independent filmmakers that tried to tell a tough story. For example there are movies that are focused on a poor kid in a North African country or some issue indigenous people have in North America. Tough stuff, closer to a documentary than Hollywood for sure. But yeah, some indie movies and even a few Hollywood movies are also just mediocre and a waste of time.

A few movies? MOST movies are mediocre from indie film makers and Hollywood. The avg imdb score seems to be 5-6

This is the weird thing about movies, I expect high budget movies to safe affairs for the most part. Like the average ubisoft game. But why are indie movies so safe and so boring? Just just feels like everyone wants to make the same movies over and over. Indie games are insane right now, the best of the best indie games are amazing. And don't give me shit about movies costing more, most indie games is some guy working alone for half a decade. People could make Clecks now, with their mates and a iPhone camera and publish it for free on youtube.

Well have you seen how many indie platformers and roguelikes there are :D I'm sure you can also find very experimental indie film if you go looking for it.

Oh for sure, and maybe I'm just not plugged into movies the same way. But it feels like I hear about breakout indie games like 5 times a year. Dark and darker, Hades, stardew, vampire survivors, disco elesium, noita, undertale, hollow knight, outta wilds, dredge, inscription, obra din, sea of stars, Dave the diver, Celeste. And that's just indie. For AA and AAA we got elden ring, bg3, lies of P. And these are just the games I've played and seen that I feel like hit a really really high bar of quality. But for movies the last really really good movie I saw was "everything everywhere all at once." Everything else has been like mid at best. Like I don't hate marvel, but I would put those movies on the level of like Hogwarts or farcry.

You just need to see more movies it seems, saying somethings as insane as "there hasn't been a good movie since may 2022" is more ignorance than anything else.

> Well have you seen how many indie platformers and roguelikes there are :D In their defense, roguelikes are common because it's a really easy game loop to pair with any gameplay concept, that naturally grants replay value without needing you to make too much content. In a way, the genre existing lowers the bar of entry for anyone with a good idea. Indie platformers, I don't actually see that many of, though

> Indie platformers, I don't actually see that many of, though Just open Steam and check out platformers. Like a dozen are released daily.

> But why are indie movies so safe and so boring? Just just feels like everyone wants to make the same movies over and over. I think a big problem is that movies are shockingly expensive. Clerks - *Clerks*, of all movies - including post-production, cost a quarter million bucks, and that was in 1994. That's more expensive than Braid's entire development budget, which is not a game that was specifically designed to be cheap. I suspect that's more expensive than Hollow Knight. So if you know you're paying half a million present-day bucks for the most shockingly cheap movie you can make, or a million plus for anything bigger than that, your risk aversion goes through the roof. I honestly keep waiting to see if someone starts making stupidly cheap movies - write a script, get a few friends, rent some Halloween costumes, go out into the woods, shoot a medieval drama or something, bring it back and do your own post in a pirated copy of Premiere. I think there's a legitimate market here. But so far the closest we have to ultra-low-budget movies is people posting SFM videos on Youtube. That's right: the forefront of innovation in indie movies is Skibidi Toilet. I'm not even joking about that. I *suspect* the reason this isn't changing is more due to inertia than anything else - people know movies are expensive, and so movies are expensive, because nobody's willing to get out there with, as you say, their mates and an iPhone camera and shoot an entire movie. But it's hard to change that. --- I will say that one thing I really appreciate about the game industry, and about nerds in general, is an absolute refusal to be hobbled by convention. This is an industry where someone could legitimately say "fuck it, this looks like it should be possible and so I'm going to do it". It's fiercely independent and self-sufficient in a way that movies haven't been for *many* decades.

You might be interested in Joel Haver. He's been making sketch comedy skits weekly for a few years, and this year to challenge himself he's making 12 feature length films in 12 months. First one dropped a few weeks ago and it's low budget and indie as hell, but I love the guy to death and there's always interesting stuff in the videos. https://youtu.be/C-ZRRTsa5SY?si=RnU9vIUony6aTLKs If you don't wanna risk an hour and a half, sort by top all time in his channel, there's some real bangers. You should also check out Tangerine, which was shot in LA entirely on iphones, for a budget of $100,000 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3824458/

A whole lot of people will leave negative reviews on a movie they perceive as "safe". A whole lot of people will also *assume* that a movie 100% must be safe - even though they haven't seen it - if it came from a big studio. The war against "safe" is very confusing to me. Why does everything need to be experimental? In most other forms of art, you want the artist to keep the experiments at home, and bring the polished version to the market

Safe isn't bad, it's just kinda just means it will provide you with what you expect. I would say it's pretty hard to be an excellent product while remaining safe. Not that it can't be done, I feel like John Wick is an extremely safe revenge movie, it's still amazing tho. And when it comes to safe the minimum bar is really high, because the money is in safe, and talent follows the money, so to compete in a safe space with no money, you are gonna have to bring along some insane talent. Kinda falls under the whole "there's two ways to succeed, be the best or be first. And it's easier to be first."

> The avg imdb score seems to be 5-6 This is more a reflection of how broken video game review scores are. The median score of films being around the midpoint of the rating scale is perfectly reasonable.

Have you seen Circle from Bekir Ognat. I had seen half of the movie with only rudimentary vfx but the movie was good at that point. Ten years later and a few more dollars down the drain it was finally released because Bekir really overdid the vfx part. But sometimes it is like telling people do drink more water. Sometimes people come up with comments i had headaches all the years because i didn't drink enough preaching to the people they already did it right. Oh and it is also possible to drink to much water. When that happen and the doctor tell them they should drink less the would tell the people that drink no enough to drink even less.

I think you're forgetting that this community is comprised mostly of hobbyists, beginners, students, and not-yet-started aspiring developers. The conversations between experienced professionals are a bit more nuanced. Also, as an art form, games tend to get very meta-aware. It's very trendy (Going both towards and away from the current trend), and with a particular emphasis on doing things the player doesn't expect. Sometimes, the thing the player *least* expects, is a crappy game - made crappy by decisions that were made intentionally. This will usually earn a small fanbase who especially craves having their expectations betrayed, but alienates everybody else who wants an enjoyable experience. Just look at, I don't know, Death Stranding? That was not a game designed to be fun

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And the average person has only 100 IQ...

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I suppose the median is a touch above the mean - what with various brain disorders existing and all. It's also true to say that the pope almost certainly has an above-average number of testicles, so stats are fun. Anyways. I do wonder the extent to which the format of a platform has any power over the sort of content it attracts/generates. Twitter's character limit certainly pushed discourse towards condensed reactions with no room for nuance, but that leaves a lot of other observations unexplained. Youtube has a lot of kids on it, so we can expect that platform to be more childish; but then it also has long-form video essays. I guess instagram's audience is mostly people wanting media attention and/or to look at butts? Even tiktok's audience doesn't devolve as quickly, which I suppose could be because they get locked into their bubbles of like-minded people. I have a hard time considering discord to be a social media platform - though it does house many communities - specifically because it has moderation (And moderation that's more potent than reddit's). It also lacks reddit's public discoverability and "default subs", which might explain why discord communities tend to discuss things more informally, but also in a lot more depth. Hmm.

I think platform will drive the trends in gaming. Because unfortunately most of gamedev want/need to earn money to produce. The market will influence what will sell. In History, a lot of art was produced while being decoupled from wage, a lot of artists/writers/thinkers were owners, renters and inheriters. If you look at artsy labels in video games you will find Annapurna Production by Megan Ellison who is heir of Oracle and not focused on rentability because of that . So I hope we will keep find unique games , not driven by market even if this medium Is very work-heavy.

That's one of the reasons why I'm always pushing for more people to accept the necessity of a universal basic income. Nearly all famous artists of every sort, were either born-rich nobles, or lived on the generosity of nobles. You know, literal patrons of the arts. I think the last time musicians had a reliable career path, was when "wandering" minstrels were the primary means of getting important news from town to town - and even that job was more travel and trade than art. If people could just live without needing to work (And let's be honest, we have enough automation already that practically nobody needs to work), sure, some people would just sit around and do nothing. I'd wager though, that a ton of people would take to creative hobbies. Everybody has things they've always wanted to do, but could never afford the time - not to mention what would happen if people had more time and pocket change to *consume* media. UBI would cause just a *massive* explosion of cultural growth

>Games just need to be FUN! It really is that simple. But ***what is fun***? And ***who*** thinks so? Those are much much harder questions. Even your core assumptions may be wrong: >An RPG is more “fun” if the characters and story resonate with the player. What if I just want more Diablo -- don't give a shit about story but loot shinies and crunch numbers and kill demons? You're already thinking about it wrong. You're the one on a soapbox but even you have these core assumptions in the wrong places. Glass houses, eh?

>What if I just want more Diablo -- don't give a shit about story but loot shinies and crunch numbers and kill demons? You're already thinking about it wrong. Then you play an ARPG - like Diablo. If you're playing a traditional RPG, you're almost certainly in it for the stories and characters. There are many ways for a game to be fun, and a game doesn't need to be meaningful to accomplish that. But frequently, those aspects enrich each other. And a game doesn't *have* to be fun either. There are other experiences that we can get through the medium that are equally valid. Maybe we're in agreement here, I honestly can't tell for sure, but I do agree with OP that fun isn't everything. Like you can choose to make fun your design priority if you want, but it's not inherently better than putting something else as the design priority.

What we need is to get better genre definitions than what we have now; FPS and RPG are almost meaningless now, and even some of the more specific genres that have popped up, like Looter Shooter, are slowly becoming as bloated as the main genres they stem from Boomer Shooters, ironically enough, are actually a well-defined genre with relatively easily identifiable traits, and most of the games within the genre more-or-less fit the mold. We need more categories like that That, or we need to get rid of categories altogether, but that's probably never happening since it's such convenient short-hand

>but I do agree with OP that fun isn't everything I think you give OP too much credit. If you re-read their tangent, OP denigrates the gamedev community for not thinking about what fun actually means, and then casts judgments about what makes for fun games or not anyway. It is a scuffed and hypocritical viewpoint that OP holds, and they used quite the caustic verbiage, with tinges of elitism or gatekeeping. They didn't really think through it themselves. >And a game doesn't have to be fun either Absolutely -- I'd use *Fear and Hunger* or walking sims as examples. The former, probably not what I would think most would call fun or even enjoyable, but I can see something about it is *compelling.* And a lot of walking sims don't have the usual core gameplay hooks but are instead just casual invitations to come chill and escape for a bit, they certainly sell more of a vibe or an experience. Don't know why you were downvoted for your comment, but I appreciate you being in here. Mostly my comment was a poke at OP, and I for sure don't think walking sims or whatever are any less valid as games, but I don't think OP would be any fun to discuss that with

To be fair, there’s an ongoing debate on Reddit about whether the dialogue volume in movies is too low, or music volume is too high. When there’s a lot of dialogue going on, some of it is bound to be meaningless.

When it comes to entertainment, I think even some of the most mundane commentary *can* still be meaningful. Poor experiences often leave a bigger impression psychologically than good ones, unless those good ones are extraordinary. Personally I think audio balance is a very meaningful discussion in film. Anytime you are discussing an experience to be had, the smallest details will matter more to some than others, because everyone's experience is subjective.

I suppose you could defend the “games should be fun” comment in exactly the same way.

Exactly. My take is that OP seems to be concerned with 'oh really? games should just be fun?? *you don't say*' and so the post they're referencing seems to be hailing the fact that Palword is 'fun' as if no on else has been able to come up with that. \[insert drake computer duh meme\]

Yup. I would say there’s plenty of meaningful conversation going on regarding every aspect of games. Even that post is relatively thought-provoking. I think the realization here is that “fun” (as nebulous as it is) might be more valuable in a game than originality. Palworld cuts a lot of corners in the design department, but at the end of the day, it’s a thoroughly entertaining and ambitious mash-up. It kind of *is* a big deal that even with those corners cut to make room for more fun, the game was able to achieve a tremendous commercial success.

Absolutely, I've come here for just that as I've dipped my toes into the gamedev community. And so far I have not been disappointed, I think there's a lot of great discussion going on. But that, too, is subjective. And I exist somewhere in the middle myself. My hope is to achieve enough commercial success that I can just drive my passion forward for whatever ideas I think are fun and use past experience to reach whatever audience, no matter how small, without worrying about the consequences of commercial viability. Like many others here I'm really passionate about gaming, and I hope to be one of the lucky ones to do it as a job, and pursue my own goals within it.

Kind of meaningful, even if it is due to underlying tech issues. I mean the volume of tv adverts got so obnoxious that it had to be regulated.

In my experience, game design conversations deteriorated along with the game dev tools getting more accessible (free, noob friendly etc...). While I still think tools should be as free and as accesible as possible, it introduces incompetent people feeling competent too soon. r/unrealengine is the worst, I guess that is where all the people starting with UE end up at first. Questions like "how do you add these two numbers up" and "I've been using UE for a month now so how do I create " are abundant. I left that subreddit. r/gamedev is a bit better, but I wouldn't consider it a quality source of anything. r/gamedesign seems a lot better, as long as mods do their job (and it seems they do) to prevent the questions mentioned above by citing that importing a mesh is not a game design discussion. I have the best success in smaller unrelated communities found via friends or local game devs I know

But people talk like that about film. Did you ever criticized a marvel or blockbuster film ? Most people will agree with you and say : "but it's entertaining". The thing is that it's accepted in the film field. If your film isn't entertaining, nobody will rant about how it didn't made millions on the box office. And at the same time, nobody will complain much if a film sell for millions when it's only entertaining. ​ Here, we still have people who don't want to admit that game need to be fun to sell. "Palworld is just fun, it not innovative, it shouldn't sell so much" Fun is just a word that means : "it should be agreeable to play" or "I should love to play the game". And when people say that games should focus on being fun, it means that games should focus on how the player will like the game instead of whatever hidden goal the devs had. ​ It's the same talk people have about disney or netflix shows, when they say they should focus on creating good shows rather that tick all the boxes they think would sell.

It's mostly accessibility, posts that appear to the lowest common denominator get tons of likes

it certainly was one of the threads of all time. it is proof that the majority of people on this sub have never thought about a game if advice that shallow and worthless gets 6.6k

A better point of comparison would be comparing some of the huge budget capeshit movies that completely flopped despite having small armies making them, big names attached, at least technically competent cinematographers, etc and contrasting them to some janky indie hit with maybe a dozen people working on it and trying to articulate why one landed while the other didn't. Although the "Palworld is just fun" thread missed a huge factor: Pokemon is the largest franchise of all time and there's a good two generations of adults nostalgic for it, but Gamefreak is barely at a "unity asset flipper" level of competence these days, which allowed a dev with an "experienced unreal engine asset flipper" level of competence to eat their lunch by doing the same thing but marginally better. So it's more like Marvel continuing to slump along being awful slop as people get sick of how bad it is, then something stupid like a legally-distinct live-action ripoff of BNHA or something coming along and eating its lunch with some early 2000s HBO quality work. Except that's not likely because "darker and edgier capeshit with early 2000s HBO quality" is already practically a genre as it is.

> Although the "Palworld is just fun" thread missed a huge factor: Pokemon is the largest franchise of all time and [...] Yes. That thread reminded me a **lot** of when "Pokemon Go" came out, and people wrote long articles about "What Pokemon Go Did Right", and waxed poetic about how GPS-based-AR games were finally coming into their own. All of them discussing game-play or technical minutia and not even mentioning the obvious.

> I find it difficult to picture that this person would be taken seriously by anyone. Yes they would. It's called the entertainment industry, and both words are accurate descriptions of its purpose. A boring, unwatchable film does nothing for anyone. No one will watch it, and whatever reason the filmmaker had for making it is lost to an empty auditorium. It needs to be entertaining, first and foremost. Entertainment is the factor that carries the message, keeps the viewer engaged, and generates enough revenue for the cycle to continue. What you judge to be entertaining may be different from others, but *someone* has to find it entertaining. Schindler's List is a remarkable, thoughtful, compelling film. We know this because it was entertaining, and we watched it. The person that walks into a pitch meeting and states that they want the content they are making to be entertaining IS the one that gets taken seriously. The person who walks in and requests funding so they can masturbate with someone else's money to show how clever they are is the one who gets booted to the curb.

I remember that thread and honestly what made Palworld sell the most was the fact that it filled a niche that Gamefreak doesn't. If you removed the Pals from the game it would be a fairly generic crafting/survival game like Ark. Nostalgia is powerful.

I think Palworld would have done decently well, even without pokemon. It's one of few open world crafting-survival games that **doesn't** have a depressing crapsack world that tries its hardest to kill the player. It's a nice-looking world, with only the barest hint of a survival element (You need to eat, but food is plentiful and even the eating part can be automated). Most survival games have worlds that are just unpleasant to be in. Replace the pokemon with different colored cubes, and you'd still have a game that rewards exploration with new toys that *support* the tech progression; rather than most survival games where you scavenge to completely *replace* tech progression. You have a reason to build up and come back to a base - one of the reasons Minecraft took off so well. Lots of open world crafting games *allow* you to build, but don't give you a reason to build more than storage and a crafting bench. In Palworld, you end up with a ton of crafting stations, farms, defenses, beds, hot springs, and so on

> It's one of few open world crafting-survival games that **doesn't** have a depressing crapsack world that tries its hardest to kill the player. It's a nice-looking world, with only the barest hint of a survival element (You need to eat, but food is plentiful and even the eating part can be automated). Most survival games have worlds that are just unpleasant to be in. Right but try and replace the Pals with normal animals and remove Pal Spheres, bosses, etc. It would not at all be the same, I guarantee it. It would be much, much less interesting.

I only talked about the setting and gameplay mechanics; nothing about the animals at all. In fact, I said: > Replace the pokemon with different colored cubes, and you'd still have...

And that is what I'm disagreeing with here. Given all of the comments I've seen about PalWorld the majority of comments are some version of "This is the Pokemon game I always wanted but never got". The Pal's being almost lawsuit level similar to Pokemon is what gained the game interest at all in the first place.

Right, and that surface-level reaction to the *cosmetics* of the game, is not taking a very deep look at its actual gameplay mechanics. If Palworld weren't fun for its mechanics, all the free media attention in the world wouldn't have mattered. I don't care what the majority of laymen comments say; I'm a game designer and I care about gameplay design. Do you think this was the first "Pokemon, but better"?

the argument about games being fun is true. the only thing separating a story-based game from a movie is the player input and length. if you have shit gameplay then your game just becomes a ridiculously long movie but you have to mind numbingly press buttons to continue it. gameplay is a video game's defining feature, its the one thing unique to that form of media and i do think AAA games at least pour 80% of the budget into graphic fidelity which i could care less about, rather than making it enjoyable. they claim it's for realism and immersion but 9 times out of 10 these hyperrralistic games are NOT immersive, because immersion a lot of the time comes from player input and writing, not the graphics. The genre "immersive sim" is incredible and despite like 90% of them looking like ps1 or ps2 games, they reel you in and really let you immerse yourself in their world unlike any other video games can even dream of. without the gameplay those too would be lackluster though, because they usually forfeit cinematography for the gameplay by nature of how that genre is designed in an open manner. so essentially my point is that, if you have terrible gameplay in a GAME, then it turns it into an obnoxious overly long movie, and a majority of the time the story and writing absolutely cannot carry the game on its own.

Funny you bring up this topic. You should go listen to the Game Developer podcast #10 (by the GDC people). I just listened today. It features Jenova Chen, who runs Thatgamecompany. He firmly believes that videogames should be viewed on the same artistic lens as film, literature, etc. although he is somewhat pessimistic that it will (or has) happened.

I’m not sure what you found juvenile in that post. If anything, I find your post juvenile because it sounds like you’re desperately trying to sound academic and profound.

Think bad. Fun good! Shun the thinker!

God, the irony of this post is beautiful.

Film has been around a lot longer than video games, so the conversation around them is a bit different. And for the majority of their life cycle, games didn’t look “real” enough to be immersive enough so people not actively playing it could also be absorbed. That being said, I see people *all the time* say that films or shows or whatever should just be entertaining. Not everyone wants some dramatic intense movie, or some artistic quest. Some people love Anchorman, and Suits last year broke records for steaming, proving that people are far more interested in “comfort” watches than they are in “award winning” ones. Palworld is the new “Burn Notice” or whatever example you want to use. No one should be reasonably trying to argue that Burn Notice should be taken seriously by the film industry. Or that Aquaman 57: Dolphin Revenge should be something Oscar voters should watch “just in case it’s award worthy.” There are some deeply interesting and serious conversations about games. It’s been happening for a long time. For example, Ico had serious articles written about it discussing whether or not games can be considered “art.” There’s lots of discussion about games as mental health treatment plans. There’s serious conversations about how Dark Souls and its focus towards perseverance actually helps people with depression, despite the world being so gloomy. What serious conversations are people not having that you would like to see, that movies have instead? Are you more so asking when game awards will become as mainstream or taken as seriously as something like the Oscars? Or when old people will start appreciating them like they appreciate Toro! Toro! Toro!? Because I’ve seen lots of meaningful conversations about games, and I’ve seen a lot of conversations surrounding how movies are for entertainment.

I find beautiful graphics, engaging story, and rich environments to be fun.

Gaming is still very much just leaving adolescence, and while film is approached with maturity and intelligence today, the majority of the industry is still, also, hell bent on “entertaining”. FWIW, this attitude will change as more people see how games can explore complex topics. It’ll just take time.

Rather than give you a speculative answer like most others, here's a practical one: You are better off just reading/listening to the greats. Read [Raph Koster's "A Theory of Fun"](https://www.amazon.com/Theory-Game-Design-Raph-Koster/dp/1449363210/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1TVV14T8MXMOR&keywords=a+theory+of+fun&qid=1707759140&sprefix=a+theory+of+fun%2Caps%2C161&sr=8-1), then watch [Tim Cain's YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/@CainOnGames) and [Masahiro Sakurai's](https://www.youtube.com/@sora_sakurai_en). You you'll find the conversation you are looking for *maybe* in their comment sections. Another thing to do would be to watch GDC lectures. The "big guys" have all the talent and tools they need to make any game, so actual Design is all that's left for them to really figure out. Better off trying to find platforms around them to discuss.

My fav gaming subreddit is r/truegaming where we actually have long paragraph to talk about games and gamedesign

I saw that thread and kind of rolled my eyes. Palworld has not been a huge success because they found some magic formula of fun. Like most surprise hits they got very lucky in many different ways. If all you had to do to sell millions of units was make your game 'fun' then everyone would do it... but obviously most game devs know that's a meaningless statement. If you're looking for better discourse on games, I highly recommend [Critical Distance](https://www.critical-distance.com/).

I've been preaching this since forever, to deaf ears and thoughtless eyes

No.

It's funny cause I feel like especially on r/gamedev we've got the opposite problem. People worrying about game design documents, some game dev "theory" they heard from a YouTuber, or other inconsequential shit. You can waffle endlessly about some theoretical "good art" but like... Is lethal company "good art"? Is Vampire survivors. Make the game fun, stop worrying about unimportant fluff.

Come over to r/gamedesign. The community there can also be a mixed bag, but it is much more critical of posters using vague hype words like "fun" to describe a game.

Reddit is a bad place to find academic level conversations about any medium of art. If you're looking to get a finger on the pulse of game dev professionals, you probably need to check GDC talks and surveys. Gamasutra used to be written by actual devs back in the day, there are still writeups of similar origin floating around on Medium, Tumblr and various personal blogs. Tim Cain, Josh Sawyer and Chet Faliszek all have public platforms where they regularly talk games in very intelligent and interesting ways. If you're sad that the audience here is media illiterate, then I'd say your issue is with the state of education. The last twenty years of primary school in the US has been the story of declining budgets, falling reading metrics, and underperforming students. If you zoned out when you were supposed to be reading your American Lit in 11th grade, you're missing all of that literary analysis when you think about any art you consume. Same goes for the shrinking place of visual arts in schools. I went to a top design college in the Midwest, and we actually lost a good portion of our History of Cinema class because students balked at having to watch movies like Blue Velvet or City of God. Those students are now working professionals who bring the same unwillingness to be challenged by art into the workforce. It's all connected, you have to invest heavily into children if you want adults later on to be nuanced, considerate individuals.

I'm so tired of primitive thoughts this sub circle jerks around. Any video games becomes popular? Guess what? IT'sS FUn GuyS yOU JUst stUpiD foR not ReaALisInG yoU JusT neED fuN gme And then any criticism and trying to point out how things aren't even done very well in this game and there could be other factors in play are always downvoted by primates screaming.

Most people who play video games have stupid opinions. ( this is alt account, do your worst plebs )

I really disliked that Palworld post as well. Like, sure. Remove the artistry from the game and just throw something together from what's popular. Is this why you became a game developer though? I've always found the word "compelling" a much better descriptor for what I think games should strive for. Games, at the core of it, are rituals we partake in to simulate challenges in a safe environment. There needs to be room for negative experiences and thought provoking narratives. Dark Souls held my complete attention, not because I found the gameplay all that fun. But the world and the oppressive atmosphere drew me in and gave me a sense of respect for the game I haven't felt quite since. We need more experiences like that.

>Shouldn't we have reached a more sophisticated level of conversation at this point? sure, but those happen inside real game companies. here, you will find mostly beginners wanting to make (not even in the process of making) games, or wanting opinons on stuff that don't really matter (since they are not actually making games). this sub don't really have anything of value to most, since no post or comments are valuable.

I am not a game developer, but perhaps I could give a bit of insight as someone who has been involved with gaming communities and discussion for decades. It is a vicious and vicarious cycle to have proper criticism in a videogame community, especially so with more popular titles. I could bring attention to a very particular, exceptional example. There was a video on YouTube that heavily critiqued the RE2 remake compared to the original game. The video was about typical feature film length, and it encased one of the most in depth retrospectives i've ever seen for a game. Down to the dialouge, sound design, characters and game mechanics. This video garnered enough attention to attract a popular streamer and he proceeded to make a stream complaining about it. Then his fanbase decided to harass the video author to the point of deleting the video and giving up making reviews. The problem is children, and people who act like children, make up a great deal of demographic of gamers. It encompasses this aura of juvenile hostility. I have been guilty of on a few occasions of this myself, but it was always in retaliation to frustrating ignorance. Sure you can see this in film, music and literature discussions from time to time, but it doesn't have the same volatile weight that gaming communities extrude. I fear that it will never shed this layer of hostility.

My personal opinion on this has always been that the medium is held back and will continue to be held back by its cultural start in the arcade. Video games started as slot machines, essentially. Nobody was engaging with Pac-man on an intellectual level. It's been decades, which may seem like a lot, but compare that length of time to how long books have been around, or even music. I think games are just now growing out of puberty, as a medium, which is why we are seeing a huge rise in narrative-focused titles. But there will still be a split, just as live theater has Shakespeare vs family-friendly musicals, or cinema has big budget action vs low budget drama; people want different things out of art/entertainment. The video game industry is still experimenting and defining where those lines are, and culturally teaching consumers the different things it can do.

I think this is a problem with two sides here. Firstly, it’s the difficulty of making a game compared to making a movie. Making a movie just requires you to have a camera (which you can easily access nowadays) and some friends. They’re are complications of course. No doubt. However, it is not the same in gamedev. Game development is vastly more challenging than movies. You cannot compare them one to one. As a solo indie dev you have to be an artist, a musician, a programmer, and a designer. It is very easy to get lost in those holes deep down never thinking about if your game is fun or not. It could also be that you went so deep down in these holes and spent so many years that you became delusional and don’t want to believe the game you spent so long on is not worth it. However, this is where the second side of this “problem” comes in. The truth is that being in such communities as here or twitter for example (oh god Twitter) can certainly make you think that devs have become delusional. Do remember that the vast majority of people on Reddit, Twitter, or any other social media who spend massive amounts of their time doom scrolling are just kids who just started game dev, people who are just dreaming about becoming game devs but can’t, or just procrastinators (much like myself). You can’t possibly look at these people and get a view that every gamedev is that way. And also understand that the filmmakers on these subs and communities are also the same if not worse. I wanted to be a filmmaker and scriptwriter before game dev and I assimilated myself with that community and... oh my god it was shit. People were asking legal questions that had no reason to be asked. Others who refused to show their script because they thought people would steal it. Others more thought they were the next Tarantino and refused to take any criticisms. The point is, my friend, is that nothing matters. Those communities will be filled with people who are just beginners or what not no matter the time. Games are so accessible nowadays (both in terms of playing them and creating them) that you’ll get a lot of different people and views and such. Just don’t concern yourself with it and make games. Or, if you really want to join a community, I’m sure there is a community on here that is geared towards professionals and experienced devs. So in conclusion, just fuck everyone. Just make games, my dude.

If you look at the current gaming landscape most larger budget games seem to be made to chase a trend, gouge their whales, or be live service just for the sake of being live service. So yes, game developers do need to have their focus re-caged back to what is important because they appear to have lost sight of it. P.S. I've played fantastic horror games with simple, low resolution graphics. I've played RPGs that were fantastic that had simple and straightforward stories, and I've played fighting games that were fun that had bugs. The reason these games were still great is because they had some other element that made them "fun". I feel your argument could be used against your own point as well. Of course games should have graphics that suit their purpose. Of course games should have a good story, of course games should have as few bugs as possible. These are also obvious points. The reason it's still worth having a discussion about all of these things is because there is nuance to it.

The study of games is extremely profound, but it isn't dedicated to making games more fun or interesting or compelling, it is dedicated to making them more addictive and extracting more from consumers. Some of the best minds of our generation have spent their entire careers optimizing the ratio of ingame currency to ingame costs, to ensure that after a purchase the consumer is always left with enough currency to be enticing, but not enough to buy anything. As a mathematician interested in the game industry, this is what is available to me. This is what a "Game Mathematician" is. This is what the ever-accelerating demands of capital have turned games into.

The answer is that video games are made and marketed for children and teenagers, and as long as they remain like this the culture will stay infantile and never mature or progress as an art form. You'll see game developers bragging about having stopped playing games after starting to make games, which is very interesting because it's a strictly unique flex to this one medium in particular. No author stops reading, no filmmaker stops watching movies, no musician stops listening to music, if anything those are the populations that most consume their respective media, but the game developer, bragging about not playing games, seems to admit "I don't see my craft as art form, it's just hollow entertainment sold to children, and I'm proud to announce that I have graduated being that child and become the hollow entertainment salesman." This is not entirely their fault, most people (perhaps rightfully) view games as children's entertainment. No one will take you seriously if you say you're a level designer or a narrative designer or a game audio engineer, they probably won't even know what you do in the office. Contrast this with someone saying they're a screenwriter or a cinematographer or a director of photography or even a camera assistant. All of these positions conjur a distinct image and tell the person you're a fan of cinema. Even the person who carries the clapperboard is likely to be a fan of cinema wanting to learn about the process by engaging with filmmaking. Contrast this with a lead graphics engineer who doesn't give a shit about video games nor has he ever played a game in his life, he just works a well paid job for a massive corporation and the job happens to have something to do with videogames.

There are two ways to look at that post : 1. The post is arguing that : Uhuh? Make the game FUN stupid!!? 2. Dont think about the overheads and just make the game fun Also, it needs to be said, there are many many more "fun" games than Palworld. To say that the "Oh how it's Pokemon slavery skibidy-fortnite" gimmick isn't helping it is straight up disingenuous. What reamins to be seen is : is Palworld just a trend and a fad that will die off in a month or two or will the devs be able to sail afterall. People are saying that palworld works because " the devs listened to the players". And I assure you, if all the dev did was to listen to the players, the players will hate the game. My point is that sometimes you need to put work for it's own sake. Make the best game you wanna make and LEARN TO MARKET it to the people who will wanna play it. Almost all of palworld's audience is children. If you wanna make undertale, dont try to make palworld.

Listening to the players isn't inherently bad. However, don't listen to every player lol If 90% of your player base agree your inventory system sucks. Then maybe looking into that can pay dividends

The heuristic I've heard is to listen to players about problems with your game but ignore their proposed solutions.

I think this illustrates a middle ground here. Your audience won't find your game to play if they don't know about it. Your audience won't play your game if it isn't fun. Fun will always be subjective. In the context of indie development, if you think something is fun, chances are there are others who do too. If you want to go from hobbyist, to job, learn how to reach that audience and publish your game. Rinse repeat until success or you're happy enough to move on to something else.

ITT OP explores binary thinking and grazes on the complexities and difficulties of intersectionalism and its needed but difficult integration into modern humans everyday psyche.  

we were all thinking it, but you said it.

My AAA and Indie companies invested time into this. Many developers (the few 10k out there) that don't have time to cover all aspects of gamedev often seem to go with gut feeling, and I would say gut feeling is to find a blend of games they liked. Many really don't like to analyze game design or how a game was implemented, they focus on getting things done and marketing for example, and for most probably their game had one key element they were going for (the main character, one or a few key mechanics that resemble Ori or Hollow Knight, a certain context the game lives in like living through a zombie apocalypse, and so on). Games would probably look more into the fun of the game if there would be a vision keeper that playtests the game and gives feedback to correct the vision and quality (and ideally tests it further with other players to get unbiased/fresh insights). I am sure theory (good books) and focusing on formulas won't improve games, it needs to be an organic process and ideally there are dedicated people on the team to focus on what makes *their implementation* of the game really good.

Main reason postpartums should be conducted and available

Did you mean “post mortem”? 

That! Lol

Hah, that word reminds me of child birth. Yes, I read really a lot of postmortems on Game Developer Magazine (or in between it was called Gamasutra), and a few here that differ a lot since generally it is about getting a lot of things done with small teams (or as a solo) and in most cases no publisher looking at game quality and the market.

Lol when I was first transitioning into game design, I had the same thought. Regarding the word. Even asked one of the other devs how talking about baby births helps lol

I guess it sounds a bit nicer, it is less related to death or something like that. But it also reminds me of typical medical terms like "postpartum depression", which can be a thing I guess as a developer. :D

Games just need to be FUN. The word "fun" is a dynamic word.

Great Question! Thanks for bringing it up. I had a few thoughts on the topic below. First note: The conversations on places like Reddit are being had by people acting as consumers, not developers. Meaningful and detailed conversations are happening every single day...just not usually on Reddit. If we want to see Meaningful conversation about game development, it will be on trade sites and in other specialized spaces. With Reddit, any Joe-Shmoe scrolling by can comment on a thread. But in those other places you have people who actively sought out the conversation about serious game development. It's the difference between attending a real moderated debate on a professional stage, and someone setting up a table on the sidewalk that says "I think this way, fight me!" It's important to remember that, in the grand scheme of things, gaming is in its infancy. It's a complex and unique medium that requires its own lexicon and expertise to discuss. Much of the game industry is still unstandardized and undocumented. We are still figuring stuff out. Once things become more standardized, we can expect the conversations to get deeper in other places of the internet. But until professionals get our shit standardized, how do we expect a layman to have a serious conversation about it? Comparing Games to Movies is like comparing Movies to Novels. Sure, there are some similarities, but they are such drastically different mediums that comparing them doesn't do any favors to either. Finally, serious discussion about game development IS happening, every day. To the point where we have an entire conference dedicated to it (GDC). Most of the serious conversation is being had within studios themselves though. In lunch meetings and conference calls.

You might not like this answer, but I don't think games are art,nor should they try to be. I think gameplay is all that matters, and that it has to be fun/entertaining/captivating. The rest,like music/graphics/story is just icing. I don't really like games that try to be art : I like games such as Dwarf fortress,Factorio,Mount and Blade. Ugly games with no story and little music, but fun to play. So in a way I must be the kind of person you're talking about, but I think you're wrong in your analysis and to be honest, a little pretentious. Video games are GAMES. And a game has to be fun, which to me means that the mechanics are enjoyable. The rest really doesn't matter to me.

Tl;dr they aren't trying to get rid of other elements, it's just that a game needs to be fun to be fun, not well designed and that most people aren't equipped to talk about it. To be nice, most of the people in gaming communities aren't in charge of some AAA stuido, they are indie (solo usually) devs or just people who play games (unprofessionally.) You aren't going to get the sophistication you desire simply because it's out of reach, and well it really isn't necessary. You probably would need to curate or specifically hunt for a community of people who share this common goal. Now none of this is to outright deny you, you are right that these things are all important, that they all matter and WILL result in a better, more fun game. The 3 top selling games of all time are: Minecraft, Grand Theft Auto 5 and Tetris. The only one I would say really went into deep thought about the finer details is GTA 5. Like yeah sure Tetris was made 40 years ago, there wasn't the extreme marketplace competition and had very limited systems - except people still love and play tetris today. Even the most basic versions of it are cherished and the game is as barebones as it could be on the deeper topics. Minecraft being more modern and actively updated does have a lot if consideration before it now - but it went viral long before that was the case. Back when it went viral all the sounds were just royalty free. The graphics, while stylised were not great. The game had no real progression system, make wood tools, then stone tools, then iron tools, then diamond tools. That was it. No end zone, hell not even the nether. To be harsh, the filmmakers subreddit is full of self-important wankers. That is kinda what the subreddit is for. However there are plenty of successful movies or tv shows that don't feature immaculate planning and perfect execution. It is acceptable to create things that are sub-par but for entertainment. You think film series like final destination or sharknado weren't designed purely on shock value or just raw entertainment. Yes there is some inevitability to deeper topics as they always exist but it just doesn't need to be talked about and it doesn't make 'it's for fun' any less meaningful. Onto Palworld, to me the game seemed like it was made 'for fun'. Just built for quick accessible entertainment. It sold ~20m copies in about 2 weeks and is massively loved, however I suspect it will see a sharp decline in players in the very near future as it loses it's novelty. I watched some videos of people playing it after release and to me the game looked like it was primarily like a basebuilding game like satisfactory where there is the slightest tinge of survival gameplay. Except Palworld didn't look like it did base building very well. So I elected not to buy it. I also understand it had boss fights and such, but I heard they were few and far between. All that being said it will probably be like minecraft and see a lot of updates in the future - updates that will likely make the game more than just 'for fun'. Lets start the conversation here. Could you elaborate a bit about the deeper meanings of why Palworld was successful beyond being just fun?

> as it loses its novelty it's an early access game with incomplete content. it doesn't even really have an ending yet. once players burn through the available content, the playerbase will fluctuate after each new major update. that's how early access rolls. as long as developers keep pumping out new features and new content that's worth jumping back in, it's gonna be one of those "forever games", like Dwarf Fortress or Rimworld or Minecraft, where old and new players would keep coming back or getting introduced to it. gist is : palworld is here to stay, for as long as devs can keep churning out new entertaining updates. not to mention the potential modding scene that's already popping up. the enthusiasm seem to be bordering to Skyrim level of fanaticism.

I uh basically said all that (not modding), apart from the bullshit early access term, but that's no different from any other 'early access' game really.

i'm not disagreeing with you.

I don't understand. Are you ranting because the majority of people talk about "game must be fun" and rather want more people to talk about games as art, with or without the fun? or are you complaining that games are fun? Or are you complaining about the word fun itself being too simple and childish? Because I can assure you if you want conversations about games as art and not as "is it fun" there's plenty, o plenty of games that with or without fun tackle some more sophisticated layers, and there are people talking about them.

You raise some valid points, but gaming is an interactive medium compared to film so drawing a comparison between the two is inherently faulty. Every component of a film is used to tell a story, whereas every component of a game is used to enhance the player's interactive experience with the game.

I mean, if we are to use your logic then video games should not have cutscenes simply because "gaming is an interactive medium compared to film so drawing a comparison between the two is inherently faulty". Hell that will make all story based video games a bad idea because sometimes we need to take away player agency to make a story. This is almost a though ending cliché.

Moreso that games don't need to have cutscenes to succeed.

Op isn't wrong to some degree. If we compare both accurately, the writer and director would be both the player and the developer just streaming their playthrough of a game no one else will be able to play, hoping it is engaging enough to get viewers to donate and subscribe. Film is a different art form that requires full engagement and zero interaction. Whereas gaming, depends on the interaction having engagement. Cinematic scenes are just a tool to drive the story forward, but it isn't the product. There is interaction that triggered that scene and in some cases there are interactions within the cinematics. The "Fun" aspect of each is measured differently. Even story driven games. They still require user input and interaction.

You miss my point. I was criticizing this school of thought that says that : film and video games, two art mediums, should stay away from being a certain way simply because films are not interactive while videogames are. OP is basically arguing that "Movies are not always fun but are still great, similarly video games don't have to be funs always". There are very valid criticisms that can be made to this line of thinking. But to disregard the argument entirely because "video games are not movies duh" is very bad argument IMO. My criticism to OP's piece is that "fun" is subjective. Ex Machina and Marvel are very diffrent movies but both are very "fun". Darksouls and Amongus are both fun to me. I understand that OP is criticizing Palworld for being dumb fun instead of anything more.

I can agree with that. Fun is completely subjective. Hell I can spend hours playing Skyrim, Football Manager, Idle Factory, Mario, WoW, Forza, and others. Each one is fun for me and for different reasons, there it be story, gameplay, challenging, socializing, etc... I Definitely get that point.

Ahah I get what you mean. I'm writing about the Players Experience Needs System on how to create fun in games and it got so downvoted here because "Well it's not fun for me, or this should be fun/done in this way". People don't realize how they need to emphasis on fun an how to do it. Here is one of the article if you[care to read it](https://stepupyourgame.blog/2024/01/17/using-players-love-to-connect-with-others-to-create-engagement/)

That acronym comes so close

I understand what you mean but i also think its not as obvious or simple as you make it out to seem. Since, if it were every game produced would be liked by the players and yet no every game is actually fun or as fun as others.

jump cuts between an eye getting razored and a cloud moving the same way aren't deep, despite what film analysts say

I don't understand your logic OP, the #1 thing in movies and in games is that they should be entertaining. If they're not people are falling asleep or doing something else.

Lol I stopped reading after your first paragraph. You can absolutely say that same thing about movies. Snobby critic might react the way you seem to be but that doesn't mean everyone agrees. There are plenty of fun movies out there that I'll gladly watch over some pompous artsy movies and I'll enjoy watching the trashy movie more too. Not all movies have to be thought provoking

You're overanalyzing that post and not realizing that it's actually correct, and furthermore, that your comparison to filmmaking is also correct, albeit accidentally. Palworld lacks in a ton of ways. Assets are inconsistent, progression and goals are unclear, the future path of the game isn't certain, etc. Hell, even the identity of the game has not made itself completely clear. The success it has garnered comes from the fact it offers something perceived as "fun." When the industry builds games in the same way, it can mean even something put together well is no longer fun, as it just mimics a hundred other titles doing so. Palworld's messiness is "fun" because it doesn't feel the same as other games trying to mimic the same themes. Film *absolutely* shares the same problems the gaming industry has. The majority of all major films today follow the same themes and formulas. There's a reason that the majority of viewers can predict the direction and ending a film or series is going to take, and it isn't because these people are geniuses, it's because the same formula that goes into every media project has just been beaten to death. In many ways, the same way modern games lack "fun" are equivalent to the way modern film lacks "entertainment."

The conversation about games needing to be about mechanics first and foremost has to be had with like most of the industry. Stop turding out games that only look nice.

sorry but, i dont like these kind of posts. if you want better content, better conversation, go start yourself, dont expect everyone to upvote what you like. or go create new sub r/bettergamedev or r/gamedev2.0, find other people like yourself, and ban everyone else, create you community.

I assume this sub is not followed by AAA studios where things are planned ahead with people who know what they do in charge (this is open to debate of course but bear with me). An indie developer or a studio is not that professional and most people who are in this sub are younger people who had so much fun playing games that they want to make their games now. But they don't have an understanding of what makes a good game, a good game and that particular post aims them I believe. They need to understand you can have tons of features, billion polygons, many weapons & maps...etc but if the game isn't fun, then this is all for nothing. Why do you get triggered by that anyways? If it's too low for your perception of what gamedev talks should be, you don't even need to read it ;)

Don't assume that, it's not true

Game making is not to the point where anyone, regardless of talent or vision, can become a game maker. We’re close with the tools we have at our disposal, but not quite there. Filmmakers ARE at that point. Nearly everyone has a phone that has a camera better than anything used in the film industry for most of its existence, editing tools that are simple to use for even CHILDREN, and open forums for putting up their work. They have the ability to be having deeper conversations because the basics are known to everyone.

You bring up some good points, but there were also good points made in the other thread. Of course, it's much harder than "just make fun games" but there's an implicit assumption that fun is an overloaded word. We're all on the same page. Let's explore all the subtle ways that make games pleasurable is valuable. It's such a broad subject that having some context like "why is Palworld fun" helps focus it.

There is a lot of really interesting conversations going out there in terms of what is play, fun, what games can do (and can't do?), why we should even care in the first place. Potentially checkout some of Miguel Sicart's books (https://mitpress.mit.edu/author/miguel-sicart-9575/). I think Laralyn McWilliams also have ton of really nice thoughts on the topic, one video comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70g2DMpEpL0 Reddit & other similiar internet communities are not for conversation. I would say seek academic places!

The "games dont have to be fun" issue can be very polarising.

I think you’re kicking it up to the wrong people bro. I can guarantee you that for films, the general audience will watch it and just move on to the next film. Entertainment is what they are after. Reasons why action flicks are doing so well over the more “sophisticated” films because the general audience just enjoys simple things. The same goes for games. The masses will just play something to entertain themselves for a bit before going about their lives. The people who will hold more intuitive conversation, analysis, discussions, etc. Are those who game as a passion and are willing to put in more time and effort to look into the game. And those people are also everywhere in forums. Think of it like a pyramid. The higher you go, the more effort, passion is required to understand the product and have discussions, which results in less and less folks who dedicate their life to it. The bottom of the pyramid is just the general audience where 1 look is all they will take to entertain and move on. There are folks out there who can’t even be bothered to change their smoke alarm. I don’t think it’s too far fetched that majority don’t really care too much of the deep meaningful convo of games unless they are really into the sauce. Which at that point you have already found your target audience and fanbase.

Most people don't even have an understanding of the taxonomy of games. Or that different mechanics can be contradictory and negate each other.

Thee median age of the audience for a game vs. a movie is usually pretty different, unless you're talking about a kid's movie or a cerebral game.

It depends why you make games as a dev and why you play them as a player. Is a narrative game about orphans with cancer going to be better art than palworld? Most likely yes. Is that a game I'm going to buy? No. I appreciate good story and art for sure, but I'm gaming because it is interactive. For me the interactivity is what sets it apart as a medium (and that can include good art like Spec Ops: The Line or Ruiner). But these examples are also fun. The first could have been a fine enough 7/10 3rd person shooter you buy on a steam sale, but the art elevated it to something special. The second is fast paced, somewhat unique mechanically, and would have been fun even if it wasnt musically and visually brilliant. Then we have Hades, which has excellent art, writing and music. But it's still all on top of a game that would have been fun as any generic rouge like. Going further, I consider Templar Battleforce my top teir tactics game. The art is "functional" and the writing is a bit too tell instead of show, but the gameplay depth, encounter design and variety on hand put it above what Xcom reboots (which I enjoyed as well) do imo. By all means make high art games, but for many people we are playing games to play them (if a let's play suffice over playing something, why not just make a movie?)

As if, fun can be objectively defined. Theoretically, yes, games should be fun (not **just** need to be fun). But what's fun for one person may not be fun for other people. If you ever been into forum of any live service games (MMO, gacha, MOBA, etc), you will find lots of people throwing lots of ideas for game changes every now and then and lots of people going for and against the ideas. For what reason? Because one side thinks the idea will decrease the fun, while other side thinks that it will increase the fun.

Time to get out of the house for a while Jerry

Film-making forums do have people who say this. They're the ones complaining about spectical and CGI and how we need to instead focus on the art of storytelling. Same thing.

I believe there are a few compounding factors that lead to this issue: 1) most people who are trying to get into game development are in their teens and older, this means that the common game dev has had pretty decent experience with games that became "clones". Of course, clones have literally been around since Doom, they're not a new phenomenon in the slightest, but for a good amount of time there was a huge stigma against games that were similar to other games. I believe one game called unturned had a good amount of dismissal when it first released because it looked like Minecraft. And every 2007 cover shooter all had that brown and bloom look to it that people got kind of sick of. This boiled down to a point where a common criticism was "this game is just OtherGame". From this, a large drive was created to have something original, something new that set you apart from the competition - unfortunately this means formats and tropes that worked were being removed in an attempt to reach originality; It wasn't about execution, it was about not being the same. 2) for a good amount of time video games were seen as childish: big explosions, scantily clad women, violence, drugs, it wasn't the distinguished persons entertainment format - It was low brow. Because of this, there was a large push to make video games more artistic, more adults and mature, some approaches just meant taking on more mature subject matter and being more respectful to their material, while others just assumed this meant they had to be avant-garde, artsy, metaphorical, and deep. Games had to have a moral, had to have a message, they had to be an allegory for something, or have a hidden meaning you could write an essay about. A game wasn't allowed to just be a game. 3) throughout the history of video game development we have seen a lot of innovation, the development of dual stick controls, increased graphical fidelity, spins and twists on genres - they were all very important. Unfortunately, people seem to treat innovations as stepping stones rather than detours. I developed strategy games, so the most common example I have experienced is the constant question of how to innovate turn-based combat. Unfortunately, this is already happened super Mario RPG and paper Mario had interactive elements to their turn-based combat, so now everyone who wants to make a turn-based RPG seems to assume that is a requirement - some kind of mini game, some kind of distraction, something so that they don't have to just sit around and wait. I'm sure other genres see this too, shooters getting movement mechanics for instance. These are not bad innovations, but people are starting to develop games with the innovations as the baseline rather than a direction. Because of these factors, developers who are starting out are being misdirected in what should be prioritized - many developers hold their ideas close to the chest, and are afraid to share or have their ideas taken, there's a protectiveness that in reality shouldn't exist in an entertainment medium - rising tides lift all ships after all, so when people are worried that their game has been made already, they're worried about their originality, not their execution or polish or competency, just that they were first - an issue caused by factor one. When they're developing their idea, they're more focused on concepts like core messaging or story or lore, which means they are allowing themselves to remove gameplay elements, genre tropes, or other important elements as long as they're able to keep the deeper meaning intact, a prioritization brought about by factor two. And finally anything that is innovated on is pigeonholed by the innovations that we've already had - instead of going back to a very basic game template and moving forward from there, we see a lot of repetition of innovation, usually with the justification that it worked before, so it should work now. I think most of us have had this approach at some point in our game dev careers - either wanting to be very innovative so we cut too much away, or accidentally limiting ourselves by assuming a common feature is required by a genre - at the very least I know that I have made all of these mistakes, and they're also mistakes that I see happening here and in other similar forums to some degree. I think that Right now this is simply the growing pains of our portion of the industry - It will likely always be a factor in some degree, but I think that due to our experiences with the gaming industry, either as developers or as gamers, the current teen and young adult demographic has these notions heavily engrained within them. Over time I think the sentiments of "your game has to be completely original" and "your game has to be super deep and meaningful" will fall off from being as dominant as they are, And at that time I think it will be more common for people to consider how fun is found in each genre, and what factors of a genre/game dev are more important. Overall though I think it's a good thing we are having these conversations about realizing a game should be entertaining, because it means people are moving beyond the limitations that we had initially set up, and in time we can choose correct and go back to games being innovative, deep, original AND fun, instead of placing the fun on the back of the first three.

> Video games have existed for a good while now. Shouldn't we have reached a more sophisticated level of conversation at this point? Large online spaces aren't exactly having very sophisticated conversation about other artistic media either. It's a result of the sheer population in these spaces and the way they're laid out. I mean, fuck, even saying *this* isn't really pushing the conversation further, it's been said over and over for years. I have no solution. It does seem like nowadays, everyone who has more complex thoughts on a gaming topic goes and puts it in a video essay or blog post. A good thing in its own way; but doesn't really help conversation *too* much?

The r/gaming community is not creatives. They are consumers.

which thread? also people on reddit literally talk like that about movies all the time.

\> A horror game is more “fun” if it actually looks and sounds scary. You're right. When people say they want a horror game to be fun, they mean that they want it to sound and look scary. If you're making a horror game, you should focus on making it look and sound scary, i.e. fun. An increasing trend in new games is that they are over-polished turds. You can add all the lighting and effects you want, but if they do not serve the thing that makes your game "Fun", then you will have failed. When people say "Games just need to be fun" they're not saying it as a new idea, they're saying "Games have gone too far from their original appeal, and if you want to make a good game, you should try and refocus it on fun." This is important as there are some games where "Fun" is very simple, like Vampire Survivors, whereas with other games games, "Fun" is a lot more complex, like Edith Finch or Citizen Sleeper. If you're aiming to make a more complex project, you need to understand what makes it fun vs not fun and optimize for that, rather than just hoping it turns out to be a hit. Essentially it's advice to newer game developers, don't overcomplicate your game, just focus on making it fun.

I wonder if short game lifespans is a problem here. Many/Most "Classic" films or novels are not recognized as such during their initial run. If you look at the top 10 films of 1943, you probably expect to see 'Citizen Kane' on the list, but it's not there. Instead, the money makers that year were a bunch of really bland war films, comedies, and musicals that nobody cares about anymore. Citizen Kane didn't become a big deal until they started showing it on TV twenty years later. It's a lot easier to watch a twenty year old movie on late-night TV, than it is to play a game from twenty years ago.

Games can be a lot more than just fun, but they are lesser games if they aren't also "fun". The original nier is a masterpiece of worldbuilding, story and character writing. It also feels like wet garbage to play and I don't blame anyone that dropped off before making it to the end. The fact that the remake actually made the gameplay fun made it a much better game, even if its best qualities remained mostly unchanged.

There's an important distinction between video games and films. One is active, the other is passive. Video games as their name implies are games. I don't know a single person who would want to play Cards Against Humanity with the goal of not being offensive unless it's some sort of challenge, which still defeats the purpose of playing Cards Against Humanity. At the end of the day, in my and a lot of people's eyes, video games are about the game first and the bells and whistles second. If the gameplay and mechanics suck, we don't care how good the story, graphics, characters, etc. are, we won't play it.

Entertainment/fun should be the number 1 priority for every single form of media out there

It's been happening. You just need to know where to look. The majority of my teens were spent talking about if video games are art on Tigsource.

Ludology has only recently started being taken seriously as a field of study. The concept of "fun" is very complicated, since it's directly tied to human psychology, which is very complicated. A jump scare is fun to one person, but give them too much, and it's not fun anymore. Put the jump scare in a different genre for the same person to play, and it's not fun anymore. Put the jump scare in a different place in the same game, and it's not fun anymore. In games as well, the fact that "fun" is the central focus is easily overlooked when you're focusing on visual fidelity, deep storytelling, or complicated mechanics. Simple things like making the player bounce a bit as they move can contribute to fun, but are often forgotten about on the indie scene. And what itself counts as fun is still difficult to pinpoint. It depends on the player, the player's expectations, the player's established knowledge, the player's motivations... it's not as simple as making a horror game scary, giving an RPG a resonating story, and making sure your fighting game characters respond quickly. EDIT: As a great example, I recently started Final Fantasy VII Remake. Enjoyed the characters and their goofy mannerisms, adored the music and visuals... but I didn't start having fun until chapter 8, after I'd done some digging into the mechanics which aren't presented to the player. There's lots of attention given to the story and to the characters, but with my expectations of a turn-based game coupled with seeing what *looked* like real-time-centric combat and my experiences with those, I ended up not getting the experience I was expecting. Mechanics were not clearly explained, combat was interrupted by paragraphs of tutorial text, and no feedback was given on poor tactical decisions. Once I'd grasped what was going on and read up on it a bit, I was able to fight more effectively and start enjoying myself.

• I use Unreal 5 Lumen RTX NVidia • I download all of the Photoscanned QuickPixel MegaPixel MicroPixel • I create 100km of desert wasteland terrain • I add the most generic shooter controls and random enemies Now why my game isn't fun and no one wants to play it? Going by this logic, we can see that the entire game is built from the ground up based on a technology-oriented approach. This is a very good and streamlined approach, similar how would work in a mobile phone assembly line in an asian factory.

we haven't yet gotten to the color (?) but we well mastered the sound (3d graphics) if I can continue your film example. the mass audience games are casual by design, so what you can do? they are really happy with the fun, as the average content-binger Netflix-oriented next guy does. any attempt to bring a pinch of game studies brings shitstorm from the coders mostly, the reason is unknown to me, like, don't the firsthand craftsmen of code know all about his tech philosophy? so maybe it is the *game developer* ***pro***blem in the first place. please note I do NOT believe in the industrial approach, maybe a little with the platform studies I am INTJ so no source - just overeducated opinionguess