When I spoke to droqen earlier this year, we discussed the phenomenon of conflating definitions with taste. In a broader historical and art historical context, dividing lines for “real games” (or “real art” or “real music,” or for that matter, “real” members of a social group) will often turn out, under a little scrutiny, to be pretty useless as a tool for defining the real from the not-real—specifically because the definer is actually talking about what they want from games, or art, or punks, or whatever.
This distinction can be remarkably clarifying! Definitional questions (what a game is, what art is, and whether games are or can be art) honestly tend to lead nowhere, and to take a long-ass time to do so. You can establish a definition that’s useful for your own project, as Richard Terrell has often done. Or you can playfully propose a definition knowing that you plan to pick it apart for its insufficiency, as droqen has done lately. But what you categorically cannot do is arrive at a stable, objectively correct definition of a word that humans made up to describe actives that humans also made up. It’s subjectivity the whole way down, which is precisely why it’s interesting.
An odd comparison, but: The journalistic “view from nowhere,” wherein a reporter pretends to have no biases, opinions, preferences, ideology, or ethics (other than the “ethics” of pretending not to have those other things) has proven to be a pretty bad way to do reporting, actually. Reporters do in fact stand somewhere, and better reporting will result from a useful and acknowledged “view from somewhere.”
Questions of taste (what kinds of games you like and want to see more of, and why you like them, and conversely, what kinds of games you dislike and perhaps want to see less of) tend to be more helpful than sweeping definitional statements. This is because they’re frankly a bit more honest, acknowledging that we’re talking about what we want rather than, like, what must inevitably be, just so, from first principles. More than that, discussions of taste can sort of double the information on offer, by privileging the “view from somewhere.” We can acknowledge that we’re learning about both the object and the subject—that is, both the games and the person writing about them, both the system being devised and the person devising it.
Or as Ezra Szanton recently said, in game design,
every choice is context dependent. We need to create our own specific goals and measure our games against them. The best way to do that is to develop idiosyncratic aesthetic taste. To say “I like this and don’t like that” while refraining from saying “this is good and that is bad.” Write your taste manifesto!
In the spirit of putting my money where my mouth is, then: Don’t mind if I do!
Ezra himself starts out by saying “I like games that encourage me to master the systems of a game rather than its content,” and I’d more or less cosign that preference. It’s tough for me to get into the bespoke boss mechanics in MMOs, for example. If the best way to beat a boss fight is to watch a video of other people beating it and then do what they do, then I’m not that interested, because my satisfaction comes from understanding why that strategy works, and then (this is key) fiddling with it.
I recently played Q-Up, a deeply silly (and sillily deep!) incremental game about the future of esports: namely, coin-flipping. The main unit of action really is the flipping of a coin, and unlike in Heather Flowers’ spiritually similar Unfair Flips, you genuinely have no ability whatsoever to affect the coin’s behavior. But you do have a series of intricate, flexible skill trees that trigger as a result of the coin’s behavior. You chain these escalating concatenations of skills together, and can thereby (thankfully, endlessly) make number go up. Understanding these skill trees is satisfying. And so is playing with other people’s absurdly optimized builds (which the game eventually lets you easily import). And critically for me, so too is it satisfying to squeak by or get lucky with my own improvized, unoptimized builds.
To push that a little further, I like games that reward skilled but non-optimal play. I adore the fearless oddness of the Hunting Horn and the Insect Glaive in Monster Hunter, but I usually drop off of that series’ unforgiving endgame challenges. I love Rhythm Heaven, but trying to beat the levels Perfectly, without any mistakes at all, can feel like a bit of chore. Better when things can stay a little loose: I love completing a heist in Monaco after being seen, and in general, any initially stealth-based immersive sim that lets me recover from failing at stealth, from Metal Gear Solid V, to The Blackout Club, to Skin Deep. (Another reason I struggle to enjoy MMO-ass-MMOs, come to think of it, is their emphasis on straight-up party-wide wipes after a handful of mistakes).
This is partially because I’m a total Johnny, in Magic: The Gathering terms. Once I’ve learned a game’s systems, I want to poke at the systems’ weirder implications. Winning feels good, sure, but it only feels great to me if I get the win by being both creative and stubborn. As the Magic player taxonomy would have it, “Johnnies are happiest when their decks work and they win their way; for them, one in many leaves them happy, if that win is on their own terms.”
One (expressive) win out in many really is fine with me, because I like games that let me learn how to play them by failing at them. I get impatient with being patiently taught things. I much prefer when the game lets me try something, and then shows me why what I’ve tried won’t work, or why there’s something else I need to know. The opening moments of Baby Steps come to mind as a recent, elegant example. Portal is an all-timer in this respect, being one long tutorial with a strong narrative reason for being one long tutorial.
To lift an old formulation of droqen’s, I like games that whyproof their gamier aspects.
A brief aside to explain whyproofing: Most recognizable game genres are full of non-naturalistic contrivances, like the player-character coming back to life after death, or saving and loading. These are not bad things, nor is it bad that they’ve become conventions, but when they’re present only because of convention and convenience, they can collectively mean that, when the player asks “why?” the answer is invariably “because it’s a game, stupid.”
And on the one hand, fair enough! It is a game!
But on the other hand, as the great food critic Jonathan Gold said, “the only question is why.” I find it impossible to care about a game (or a book, or a taco) without wanting to understand why it is the way it is. So at least for the bits of a game that are especially gamey and especially prominent, such as the assumed impermanence of death, I do want a more thoughtful answer than “because it’s a game, stupid.” Whyproofing is one of those aspect of game design that, to me, feels like a conversation between the designer and the player (both of whom are, compatibly and with affection, here presumed to be sickos).
As a game design practice, to whyproof is simply to
ask yourself why, constantly, and don’t accept “because that’s the way it is, for a game to be like this”, not even from yourself. Maybe all you do to explain your save points is make them cute frogs that remember the story of your adventures; or maybe the idea of nothing dying for real, not really, fits perfectly into your universe.
And I want to emphasize that this is a matter of taste. Lots of people don’t care about these sorts of in-text explanations. Some people find them more distracting than simply leaving things unexplained. But I, a sicko, love clever whyproofing. (And of course I do, as someone who likes to write about this stuff and talk to other people about it). Provide an in-text reason for the player-character to be functionally immortal, or for saving and loading to work the way they do, and for my money, you’re well on your way to crafting a “staggeringly coherent” little cosmology.
As droqen points out, no text is truly whyproof, just as no watch is truly, fully waterproof. The goal is not to ask why forever, but “until your answers satisfy you.” And I’ve realized this is key to my personal taste, because it radically alters how I approach, especially, the repetitive or abrasive aspects of games. The Nier series gives me reasonably whyproof justifications for doing multiple playthroughs, upgrading all of my weapons, and then deleting my saves, and I find doing those things compelling and satisfying—but frame those same material asks (play again from the beginning, grind for drops and upgrades, trash your progress) as seasonality, or as some equally straightforward and undisguised pretext for playing the game more, and I recoil.
The Stanley Parable, The Beginner’s Guide, and Wanderstop are all quite whyproof in beautiful (and different!) ways. Ice-Pick Lodge is incredible at whyproofing, even and especially when the pursuit of compelling “whys” makes their games (at least arguably) worse. Baby Steps uses whyproofing to turn a setting that’s merely strange an arbitrary into a comprehensive system of dream-logic. Pentiment whyproofs its genre conventions (both in the game genre of the CRPG and in the literary genres of murder mysteries and historical fiction) down to the studs and then builds up something that, to me, feels fresh.
Speaking of Pentiment, I like games with a strong sense of place. For a long time this made me tend toward games where you move a little guy around—and I do love moving a little guy around, especially somewhere that’s weird and/or tactile, as in Judero, I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, almost everything by GoödFeël, and absolutely everything by Analgesic). But moving around little guys isn’t mandatory. For a sense of place, it’s tough to beat Fallen London or EXTREME MEATPUNKS FOREVER—and why yes, we do seem to be veering closer to TTRPGs, wherein conjuring a sense of place is a key aspect of the play itself as well as design. (Notably, TTRPGs also have loads of tricks, difficult to replicate in digital games, for using failure to move play forward. Johnnies of the world, rejoice).
I’ll also say that the Zachtronics/Coincidence folks consistently nail basically all of the points above: Their games achieve vivid senses of place, mostly by baking in lots of primary research; they’re thoughtful about how their specific modes of play relate to the stories they’re telling; and they’re welcoming to quirky, sideways solutions in a way that makes optimization largely optional. I work with the current Coincidence team sometimes, and so while no part of this manifesto claims to be objective, this part especially doesn’t.
But that’s the whole deal with talking about taste, and admitting thats what we’re talking about! It’s no longer a question of definitions, or even of what’s good or bad exactly, but simply a question of what you want there to see more of in the world, so that you can go find, and discuss, and make, and share, more of it.