I saw a Tweet some time back in which someone realized that they enjoyed reading, writing, and thinking about video games more than actually playing them. At the time I balked, but as I continue my forays into research I’m starting to see their point. Playing a video game just takes so much time! And so does researching anything. So something’s gotta give and for the time being I’m letting my academic side go nuts.
I think BCS is really speaking to me because there are so many scenes with lawyers reviewing documents and making cases on behalf of their clients. I’m no lawyer, but so much work in the entertainment industry is exactly this. You navigate bureaucratic systems, read a lot, parse and summarize, negotiate the best/cheapest/most efficient path forward toward the goal. You deal in exorbitant sums of money traded between giant entities in exchange for the relatively minuscule piece that is your daily salary. It feels overwhelmingly insane and unnecessary to anyone not used to it, but once they get their hooks in your brain it’s all just part of the game.
So the fantasy is in being like Jimmy and flouting convention to do things faster and with more personally beneficial results.
When people look at us, they see our games and they see the game content, but there’s this whole machine, lurking behind the scenes, that makes games that exist at our company and at every company. That’s a huge part of the day-to-day experience for us. We spend a year grinding in that machine and then we output a game and people just see the output. They don’t see the process.
This is a mushy sort of question that maybe gets too into the game design weeds, but what comes to mind when you think of a game with the tension of loss or failure always looming?
Like you’re playing, but you’re always checking health and stats and inventory because you’re barely getting by, just on the edge, and every successful battle or encounter feels like it’s a hard-fought victory?
Because to me, it feels like a very difficult thing for a game to achieve that kind of tension. Tension is the key feeling, not like a discouraging sort of friction, but just this sense that you’ve threaded the needle as the game intended. You’re always on the edge of your seat, thinking you’ve prepared but barely coming out of the next sequence alive.
I know perma-death games really lean into this, the scenarios where you can permanently lose a comrade or skill during the course of the encounter. The games that come to mind for me are Hogs of War and Valkyria Chronicles, both turn-based combat games which do involve losing soldiers along the way, resulting in some tense battles and narrowly won (sometimes pyrrhic) victories.
Well anyway, that’s a lot to say there’s a certain kind of game I’d like to play, and I’m hoping others know that feeling of tension I’m chasing down.
