In Defense of the Dumb

Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin is apparently a thing.  A joint effort between Square Enix and Koei Tecmo’s Team Ninja that’s apparently remaking the OG Final Fantasy as a gritty action game.  E3 had a trailer for it, and the game… doesn’t really look all that good.  But it does look incredibly dumb, which actually makes it pretty endearing to me.  Let’s talk about that instinct for a bit.

If you’ve been around this space for a while, you know I like plenty of dumb things.  Godzilla.  Platinum’s action games.  Your girlfriend.  Like Final Fantasy Origin, there’s a certain quality to their particular implementation of simplicity and lack of complexity that makes them hit me so much better.  And I’m struggling to place what that quality is.  I believe there’s a certain amount of intention involved.  I’ve said before, that I like dumb things, but I don’t like stupid ones.  As for what makes the distinction between dumb and stupid, well, it’s really subjective.  But I think with me, intention plays a lot into it.  The media I classify as dumb aren’t necessarily trying to be dumb, but they aren’t trying to be super complex or deep.  They’ve set a low bar for certain aspects of their stories, themes, or atmosphere, and they hit that.  Things I think of as stupid tend to feel like they’re aiming way higher than they’re hitting.  Like they’re trying to tell some great complex story, but they really don’t have the chops for it, or they’ve established a certain logic to the plot but don’t end up following its internal rules, or they really didn’t think things through as much as they acted like they do.  But it’s mostly a feel thing, in between there.  

The big thing about dumb media are that they seem to hit on a subconscious level, where you can get a visceral, instinctual enjoyment of the content at the expense of the higher thoughts or deeper meanings there.  It works best when there’s some primary focus to the content that taps into the base emotions; often times pulse-pounding action, but it works just as well with horror, sexuality and plenty of other things that bypass the active conscious to connect directly one of those unthinkingly satisfying feelings.  And as a result, this sense works exactly because its dumb, if they demanded more thought to it, they’d change the nature of the experience entirely.  Watching Godzilla’s giant monster fights destroy half of a city wouldn’t be nearly as enjoyable if you were getting a full-minded about it, rather, it’d be either tragic or terrifying, as you’re putting thoughts to all the lives lost or impacted by that devastation.  Similarly, there’s a lot of video games that work because they tap into this for their action.  Bayonetta would be horrifying, slaying angels by the hundreds as you summon torture devices out of nowhere and unleash gruesome acts on all of them, if it were higher minded, and that’d make it a lot harder to enjoy its well-developed action gameplay.

And frankly, there’s an element of relaxation to dumb things as well. I don’t know about you, but I spend all the freaking time thinking. My work requires a lot of mental labor, then I come home and friends and family are constantly demanding my thoughts and my attention, and even in my off time, most of my day-to-day pursuits require a fair bit of intellectual involvement. Which is not to say I don’t enjoy it, thinking is an awesome thing in all. Especially when you’re as genius as I am. And I am an ironman, but even so, I can’t be on all the time. It’s really valuable, sometimes, to get a quiet moment, get into something that just turns the brain off and bypasses the suspension of disbelief for a while, and connects without requiring any more of that Mind Work from me. It’s refreshing, leaves me more prepared to do all those things that do require more thought.

Even otherwise serious works tap into this phenomenon, too.  The comic relief characters to provide those moments of levity, those jokes and one liners in the middle of firefights, the humor that would be ill-placed in real life but just seem to work in the context of the story?  That all counts under this, too.  It takes the mind away from an intellectual exploration of what’s going on and down into an instinctual sense of safety and levity.  It distracts your mind, at least for a moment, and draws it from just processing into outright feeling.   And, doing so, they manage the impact of their more cerebral moments, keep them from seeming too serious, too dangerous, etc.

So, let’s hear it for the dumb things.  The things that bypass the conscious thought to deliver a feeling straight to the emotional level.  And so doing, hit us in our hearts without bypassing our heads.

Snap Judgments: Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, and measures of fun in general I guess

Years ago, I was listening to a podcast, and the casters were asked something along the lines of “What’s the worst thing a game designer can do?”  They came to the conclusion that the worst thing was to make a game that’s not fun.  I took issue with that.  I’ve mentioned this before, but there’s a lot of ways to get value out of an experience.  With video games, fun is the most common thing, but a game that’s not fun can still be worthwhile.  Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy is a perfect example to that.

Bennett Foddy is the guy who made QWOP.  Do you know QWOP?  Good, that will give you good standing for the rest of this post.  Getting Over It is an homage to what Foddy calls B games (amateur releases made from public domain or ripped assets generally created more for the experience of creating than to actually make a good game) in general and Sexy Hiking in particular.  In this game, you control a man stuck in a cauldron, or more accurately, that head of that man’s yosimite hammer, dragging, throwing, and pushing him up a mountain.  It is brutal.  It controls very differently from nearly anything you’ve played before, the physics are nonintuitive and feel a bit random, the obstacles are design to take advantage of the limits of your abilities, and at any point, it’s possible to fall off the mountain, setting yourself back possibly to the very beginning of the game.  All the while you have Bennett Foddy himself narrating about this game or game design in general, and offering encouragement when you have some particularly bad falls.

It is not a fun game.  It is deliberately not a fun game.  In fact, whereas other of Foddy’s past games, QWOP as an excellent example, also had very nonintuitive and painful control schemes, you could pull some fun out of learning to utilize them.  I don’t think you can with Getting Over It.  It is designed to not be fun.  And yet, you go on the internet, you can find lots of people who are loving it.  It’s even been put up for awards.

That’s because the game is designed around one particular thing: frustration.  Every part of it is built to deliver that frustration.  And then it goes even further.  It examines frustration.  It makes you feel a feeling, than holds the mirror up to you and talks about it.  It navel-gazes at it.  It is clear that a lot of thought and intent in this game went into dealing and dealing with that frustration.

This would be the type of game that, much like with environmental narratives and the typical ‘art game’ is going to cause a lot of division when people are discussing it.  You’d pretty much have to appreciate both a game that derives its delivered fulfillment from something very atypical and a game that is way navel-gazey about it’s subject matter.  I think it does help a lot that the creator is really clear and up front that this game is not for everyone, rather than what’s expected from a whole lot of creators.  In all the advertising for the game, he says that this is made for a certain type of person, and even in the opening narrative he says you have to be in a certain type of mood to enjoy it.

I wasn’t in that mood when I played it.  In fact, I only gave it twenty minutes before deciding it wasn’t for me right now and sending it back to the abyss of my Steam list.  I do appreciate that it’s out there.  And it did get me thinking about the nature of games once again, which I guess was it’s intended purpose.  It wasn’t fun for me in the least.  But it did deliver a worthwhile experience, for what I gave to it.

Looking for a Good Time?

Maya at Very Very Gaming made a post about Braid recently.  But let’s forget about Braid for a second.  I certainly do.  In it, Maya points out the mentality some take that for a game to take the form of High Art and deliver all the EMOTIONS! and ATMOSPHERE! and FEELINGS! that so many developers, players, and supersexy games bloggers are looking for, they shouldn’t be fun.  The games as art discussion has been around the interbutts for a good long while, and this is not a new idea.  I’ve seen it said plenty of times by plenty of people who don’t know what they’re talking about, that a game’s nature as a game precludes it from delivering all the things art is supposed to.

There are good arguments against the ‘games as art’ idea.  This one isn’t one of them.  The thought that something should be an ‘interactive experience’ rather than a ‘video game’ to deliver the artsy stuff is just as much complete bullhonky as all the ‘art is not interactive!’ arguments out there.  Maya hit it right on the head that ‘games can be both enjoyable AND deep and meaningful.’

That’s like two paragraphs to get me to the actual point of this post, but that phrase there got me thinking.  Nearly all video games out there are intended to be fun.  Some aren’t.  Like Braid.  And a few other games I’ll be talking about here.  So, does a video game have to be fun to be worth playing?

I know, I know, it’s tempting to get into the traditional definition of ‘game’ here, but honestly, the medium of video games has grown beyond that.  Video games as we have them know have grown to include as much a variety of styles and experiences as most any other medium.  Yeah, it’s plenty immature compared to most other types of creative works, but that doesn’t really mean anything as it pertains to the medium’s potential.

And yeah, the vast majority of games are meant to be fun.  And that’s a good thing.  Even for the lofty, complicated, and plot-based game.  Red Metal had made a very good point recently that Papers, Please and Undertale were big, deep, thoughtful experiences, but they did a lot better at delivering the lofty ideals behind them because they are fun.  And there’s good reason for that.  Being entertained by something drives engagement, and through that, makes you more open to exploring the more conceptual aspects the game’s trying to deliver, and, even just working on a subconscious level, opens the door for the more intangible aspects of a game to get ingrained in you.  People have been using games as learning experiences for at least as long as I’ve been alive, and it runs off of the same concept.  Entertainment leads us to internalize things, and that’s where a lot of these game stories really thrive.

I’ve had plenty of these ‘deep’ experiences that never gained root with me because I just never enjoyed the experience enough to really get into it.  Braid’s a great example of that.  The developer put a lot of thought into the story, but I didn’t have a good time with the gameplay, so I just didn’t bother with that.  The Path is another strong example there.  That’s one of the earliest ‘art games’ I came across.  And it’s clear the developers wanted it to be a deep, thoughtful experience.  Basically, to illustrate that game, you’re one of six versions of Little Red Riding Hood, set to go to Grandma’s house.  If you just follow the path there, you get there safely and uneventfully, and the game ends without anything happening.  If you leave the path, you actually explore the forest, come across your metaphorical wolf, have a bad time, then make it to grandma’s house with your life a little more ruined.  It’s all wrapped up in themes of childhood, and growing up, and moving through bad life experiences, and is the kind of thing that’s really interesting on paper.  In practice, though, it’s a really weak experience, and that’s largely because the gameplay aspects of it are absolutely worthless, only there as filler for the few brief moments of the game where they are delivering something, bringing you neither fun nor any real experience in the interim.  And that it the weakness that absolutely ruins The Path.  If the gameplay parts of it had some actual gameplay, you may have been able to use that to bring more experience and reinforce the themes and moments they were actually going for there.

Fun is important.  Even when a game is more about the plot than the fun factor, having that entertainment there goes a long way towards carrying the rest of it through.

And yet.  And yet.  Always an and yet. Let’s think back to the games that were all the rage before I started realizing how much I love the sound of my own voice and stopped listening to everyone else.  You remember how big everyone was going on about Spec Ops: The Line?  That game was a big emotional tour de force, that I didn’t really like, but that was more due to the content itself rather than its delivery.  Plenty of people loved it.  And its message wasn’t really harmed by its lame gameplay.  In fact, many said it was enhanced by the poor shootbanging.

You remember before the Telltale formula became the Telltale formula, before all the best writers bailed off the ship, and the Walking Dead, Season 1 came out and blew everybody’s minds?  There is not a single part of that game that is actually ‘fun’.  Yet it was still the storytelling experience of the year in games.

For that matter, think back to any horror game you particularly liked.  Not action horror, because that’s going for a completely different feel, but good old classic survival horror, or spook horror, or just plain scary scary game.  Chances are, if it left that impression on you, it was never fun.  Video games do horror very, very well, possibly better than any other medium, but horror games are very rarely fun.  And that’s deliberate.  Horror video games are geared towards delivering a very specific feeling and experience.  And fun would interfere with that.  Scary video games don’t deliver the rollercoaster type scariness where you can mix that with the fun, video games, and most other spooky artistic mediums, reach into your brain and twist the mental fear out of it.  They get your mind working against itself.  If your mind is having fun, it won’t be able to settle on the fear.  Fun would be a complete distraction, a big mood killer, in this experience.

For that matter, I brought up exactly this point when I was talking about my adventures with Zelda II.  I played the game.  I beat the game.  I was so fulfilled by that.  Yet I never, ever had fun with it.  I had some similar experiences with Dark Souls.  You all watched me repeatedly wear my well-built rear end as a hat in fighting against the likes of Manus, Artorias, Ornstein and Smough, et al.  Overall, I did have fun with Dark Souls, but that fun didn’t come from running up against the same challenges and failing over and over again.  And even so, I still felt fulfilled by overcoming the challenge, although the time I spent doing that was not traditionally ‘fun’.

So where does the line fall?  What makes the Walking Dead, Season 1 a good experience, and the Path not?

I think it’s a pretty simple dichotomy.  The games that aren’t fun, but still make it work replace the fun with something else.  The likes of the Path and, as Maya pointed out, Braid, do not.  Dark Souls fills the unfun parts of it with a lot of opportunity for that oh-so-satisfying personal skill growth.  Walking Dead used the unfun gameplay bits to keep the plot moving forward.  They get use out of the gameplay.  Games that screw up the fun and end up the worse for it don’t gain from their gameplay sections, by and large.  They end up as mostly movies making you wonder why they were even released at all.  Games that aren’t fun but are still good experiences are those that still use the interactivity to deliver something to the player in service of whatever experience they’re going for.

Does this make these games worthwhile experiences, however?  To be honest, as wise and charming and always right as I am, that is completely up to you.  You’re the one charged with making the most of your time, and if what you’re looking for is something fun, nobody can hold that against you.  Usually, when I pull out the controller, that’s what I’m looking for.  But I’ve had plenty of great times, and have grown my sphere a bit, playing through games that aren’t traditionally fun.