Architect Address August 2020 (Patreon)

Shh! Don't tell anyone! It's a new Architect Address!

 

Hello and welcome to the architect address, a weirdly named occasional segment that I release to keep people abreast of what’s going on, talk about the videos that have come out and show some gameplay footage I thought you might want to see.

This month-ish has seen two very interesting videos which are both noteworthy for entirely different reasons.

The first one is Is It Possible To Fix Videogame Toxicity? A pretty straightforward, inoffensive concept for a video that… well… had more or less the expected effect. It turns out that gamers tend to respond with insults, rudeness and general vitriol whenever their behaviour is so much as questioned, obstinately because they’re so well behaved. Yeaaah, I knew the video was going to upset some people but in a weird way I’m glad it did because that means it struck an emotional chord. I think a lot of the time gaming toxicity is discussed purely in moralistic terms and not so much from the perspective of systems. I think a large part of determining which games end up full of arseholes comes down to how their communication systems enable that sort of behaviour. 

By making being nice easier than being mean, whilst giving players flexible communications systems that allow them to express a variety of ideas, games can create if not nicer spaces, then spaces that are much more comfortable to just exist in. There’s a lot of different ways to do this but ultimately that rule holds true I think, give players the most efficient possible tools to express themselves whilst also staying on topic. Whether that’s apexes pings, journeys little chirps or just some well-executed emotes, it all works so long as players are communicating in the right way.

A lot of people mentioned that I need to play thatcamecompany’s new game sky children of light, apparently it’s got a lot of similarities to journey but is also more of a multiplayer thing? Who knows, seems cool though. Anyway.

The other video released was Why The Longing Takes 9600 hours to play. Hooooooo boooyyy did this one do unexpectedly well! At time of writing it’s sitting on about 400k views which is significantly better than anything released this year. I don’t actually know why that is, the video topic is pretty niche and the game is too, but I guess it’s just a matter of luck at the end of the day, right?

The longing is one of those really interesting games that I love to bits but hesitate to universally recommend. It is… really boring and has a couple of really unfair, punitive mechanics that are just cruel. Anyone who’s gotten a certain ending knows exactly what I’m on about. In spite of that, though, if the game caught your interest or if my rambing bit at the end of the video struck a chord with you I highly recommend at least giving The Longing a look because there is absolutely nothing like it out there and I think it’s an experience well worth having.

In other parts of the video, I mostly talked about the effect of time based mechanics and I think it’s pretty interesting, I particularly liked working out how all these different systems motivate us in different ways.

over the years people have come up with a lot of catchy ways to categorise these kinds of games and they’ve never really worked for me. Mark Brown, for example, came up with the term clockwork games, and that doesn’t sit right with me, clocks are rigid and orderly, and go in one direction, but in so many games with time loopy or time centric gameplay you’re actively altering events or the way chronology works, i dunno - I get the whole clocks equals time thing it’s just not a good comparison.

I also played a fair few idle clickery games for this video and whilst they’re 100% not for me I do think that they tend to get a bad rap. They’re certainly not the deepest or most tactically sophisticated games out there and they use the simplest possible reward mechanisms but so does pretty much every big multiplayer game so whatever, right? Particularly with stuff like universal paperclips, there’s a lot of potential to do interesting narrative work within the idle game context and the simple pleasure of watching things get bigger can be a really nice way to unwind or relax for some people, provided that isn’t leveraged into selling microtrnsactions like fuckin adventure capitalist, took me off guard when I saw that pop up. 

Before I go on another tirade about manipulative f2p games I’ve got to get back to disabling all the midroll ads youtube dumped on my videos like the bastards they are, that’s going to be fun. Seeya!