On Unfriendly Games
It's ok to be a little prickly
This is not about difficulty.
I don’t read anything about difficulty anymore. Whether it’s a tweet or a blog or an editorial, regardless of author, the moment I see that topic I press back on my browser and go do something else.
Game difficulty discussions - at least those that take place in public - are now almost purely an excuse for the usual suspects to engage in culture warring. Which is why I’m grateful for the Mashable Metroid Dread review Metroid Dread' is a thrilling twist on a classic, but it made me miserable
The review is mostly about difficulty but it, perhaps unintentionally, uses different framing in the conclusion:
It's not one particular thing that broke Metroid Dread's spell for me. The real issue is how fundamentally unfriendly it is as an overall experience.
This is a blog about game friendliness - and a defense of games that are unfriendly by design.
What is Game Friendliness?
A friendly loot game gives you items in line with your character level and class - if you’re a level 13 Barbarian a chest gives you a level 13 spiked club. An unfriendly loot game gives you random or fixed content - a level 7 wizard staff that you can’t equip.
A character-action game (Batman, Devil May Cry, etc) with friendly combat subtly (or often not-so-subtly) rotates your character to face enemies. If you use an attack from slightly too far away it slides you forward so that your attack lands. An unfriendly game is more “what you do is what you get” - if you swing from too far away and slightly misaligned you miss.
“Just Defense” - pressing block right before you get hit to absorb an attack - is a friendly combat mechanic. If you Just Defend too early the fail state is you block. Parrying, in a game like Dark Souls or Street Fighter 3, leaves you open if you mistime it - the fail state is you get hit.
Moving into tall grass twenty hours into a friendly stealth game will prompt your character to say “I can use this to hide from enemies.” In an unfriendly game your character doesn’t constantly talk to themselves - they don’t serve as their own Navi.
The designers of friendly games are helicopter parents. They show their love and affection by constantly intervening on your behalf. They are benevolent gods, and while they aren’t standing over your shoulder they help you through their angels of algorithms and floating arrows.
The designer of an unfriendly game is a Deist god - they set the world in motion then go drink a margarita. They show their love and affection by saying “I have faith that you can do it on your own little buddy.”
All (well, almost all) game designers want players to have fun. But they can have very different ideas of what “fun” is, and very different assumptions about target audience.
This is a lot of examples in lieu of a definition. My definition of friendlessness isn’t fully formed, but it’s roughly that a friendly game is one that avoids even momentarily frustrating the player. If you swing your axe in God of War and miss you aren’t having fun in that 0.2 second interval, so the game has systems in place to help you not miss. An unfriendly game allows or imposes momentary unfun, assuming that overcoming hurdles, learning systems, and progressing in mastery is its own sort of enjoyment.
Are You Sure We’re Not Talking About Difficulty?
I’m sure.
A character-action game with generous auto-facing and auto-spacing can still be very hard. Monster Hunter could be made very easy by tweaking the numbers. DOTA2 is a “harder” game than Heroes of the Storm or League of Legends, but in all three games you matchmake against people of similar skill levels and all are equally difficult to win at - in some sense every matchmade game is exactly the same level of difficulty.
I’ll end this section with a quote I found on a gaming forum, from someone playing Super Mario 64 for the first time.
Didn't really expect to get hooked this much with SM64, but it's crazy how this game gets me to try the same level again and again, without end. The controls feel incredibly unfair initially, with[out] a lot of the niceties that modern games have, gone and replaced with nothing but cold, uncaring precision. You press that stick a bit too hard when making that jump? Too bad, you get catapulted way over your target and thrown out of the level. You thought you had a chance to fix that way to strong jump when landing? No chance.
This is the unfriendly design - the game gives the players the tools to succeed and the room to fail. It does little to interpret player intent or allow for post-facto correction of mistakes. It’s video game tough love.
“Mechanics Define the Meaning of the Game”
Variations on the above used to be common among video game literati. The meaning of a book derives from the story, but the meaning of a game derives from the mechanics, not the cutscenes. I don’t see this too often these days, and I don’t think it’s true exactly, but there is truth to it: in some games mechanics are the meaning, and in many more mechanics can at least bolster or undermine meaning.
Let’s imagine we’re designing a third-person combat game starring Batman. Batman probably wouldn’t mistime a parry against a normal thug and get punched in the face 5 times in a row. He probably wouldn’t try to do a cool spin kick against a stunned enemy but get the range wrong and awkwardly miss. He wouldn’t accidentally bonk his head on a ledge while trying to grapple over it.
It’s a cliché that the Batman games “make you feel like Batman”, and while I roll my eyes at that as much as anyone it’s not wrong. The mechanics of the game are designed to make you move and fight like Batman. He’s a smooth operator and his games beg for a friendly design.
It’s hard to whiff attacks in the Batman games, and once you’re in the flow state it’s nearly impossible - the game steers you towards and sticks you to enemies. The stealth takedowns don’t require much skill to perform, and the traversal doesn’t involve precise platforming. Gliding onto a ledge as Batman is easier than gliding onto a ledge as Mario using the cape in Super Mario World.
If we accept that there are games like Batman, where the character and theme call for friendly design, we should accept that there are games that call for an unfriendly one. Maybe a game where the character is a normal Joe thrust into a situation that leaves them overmatched - a Silent Hill or Mr. Magoo.
Here’s a quote I’d like to discuss. (I will not identify the author, as they’ve taken a lot of grief for this already)
I hate when From Software’s games are cited in arguments against making games accessible or even easier. I think using Souls, Bloodborne, or Sekiro to that end is insulting to the games and the people that made them and just shows a lack of understanding of what makes them special. It limits the way people can appreciate the games as a whole, and an aspect of them. What part of being moved by the ambience of Firelink Shrine depends on it being difficult to the point where it’s inaccessible for some to play?
My answer: what ambience?
I’ll skirt talking about difficulty and reframe with this question: what is the ambience of Firelink Shrine and what is that derived from?
This is Firelink Shrine. It’s a fire and some rocks and some dirt.
Firelink Shrine is a place where a weary traveler can take brief respite from an oppressive world. It’s quiet, it’s safe. It’s nice - but only in comparison to what surrounds it. In The Legend of Zelda Firelink would be depressing.
The idea behind the quoted statement is that you can, I don’t know, wander around Firelink Shrine and minus any context appreciate it on surface aesthetics. But Firelink Shrine isn’t a striking painting or a rousing overture. If I handed a controller to my non-game-playing sister and had her walk around she’d get nothing out of it. If you handed that controller to an avid gamer who had never played a Souls game I still don’t think they’d get much out of it.
To whatever degree Firelink Shrine feels safe and cozy it’s because the surrounding world is not. The fire is comforting because it’s tied to gameplay mechanics like levelling and refilling your flask. The world of Dark Souls is stifling and oppressive, with denizens that range from indifferent to murderous. It’s difficult, yes, but it’s also unfriendly in nearly every respect - aesthetically, architecturally, narratively and mechanically. The UI and item descriptions are obtuse. There are areas players can easily miss, as if the game designers are indifferent to players enjoying themselves or getting maximum value per dollar. Firelink is one of the few places in the game where the designer’s care for the player is evident.
To revisit that quote above, slightly altered:
“What part of being moved by the ambience of Firelink Shrine depends on the surrounding game being unfriendly?”
Every part.
Metroid
Metroid is a game about a lone bounty hunter visiting desolate, hostile worlds, perhaps after heeding a distress-call from now-dead senders. Most native creatures are aggressive and those that aren’t are still deadly - a blithe critter that walks in a fixed pattern is probably poisonous or electrified, and menaces simply by nature of existing. Physical features of the world itself are hostile: sharp cliffs, frozen wastelands, boiling lava.
The worlds of Metroid are not friendly places. Not in terms of narrative, atmosphere, flora, fauna, or geometry.
It makes sense that the mechanics are similarly unfriendly. You might expect a new game like Metroid: Dread, which was positioned as a mainstream breakout-hit, to be “modernized” or AAA-ized. That’s not unreasonable, but that’s also on you.
The tense platforming moments in games like Uncharted are illusory - they’re almost impossible to fail. Nathan Drake might say “whew that was close” as he “barely” grabs a ledge after a higher one collapses, but that’s a lie. The game is so friendly that if you stand on a narrow beam and randomly wiggle the controller the designers won’t let you fall off.
At the end of Metroid and Super Metroid you have to escape an exploding planet by jumping your way up a series of narrow ledges. If you miss them you fall, and if you fall too often you lose. This is a fundamentally different design philosophy that has existed in Metroid games from the outset.
Metroid has always featured labyrinthine levels - you can find that word littered across reviews. In a labyrinth people get turned around, lost and confused - that’s a feature, the feature, of labyrinths. Modern game designers might be tempted to make a game that looks labyrinthine but that has carefully placed lights and color-coding to subconsciously guide players to the correct spots. But that’s not a lost-in-a-desolate-and-maze-like-alien-world scenario, that’s a maze-solving power fantasy.
Samus is competent but her success is often against odds or a testament to her perseverance. She’s not Batman easily dispatching thugs and I don’t think the designers want game journalists to proclaim “I really felt like Metroid!”
The worlds of Metroid should have some tooth and induce a little pain. That’s part and parcel with the premise.
Skill Expression, Ceiling and Floors
In the reaction to Metroid: Dread I sense a clear pattern: the people who like it the most are mastery-focused. The kind who enjoy a challenge or who might play on hard mode, yes, but independent of difficulty appreciate that the game allows them to grow from a low skill floor to a high skill ceiling, and rewards observation and experimentation.
Going back to that Uncharted clip - it’s hard to be particularly skilled at that style of platforming. You press the stick in vaguely the right direction and your character plays a series of well-authored animations that get you to the goal.
Friendly games tend to compress the skill range, raising the floor by way of designer safeguards, and often lowering the ceiling via simpler controls and mechanics or by removing precise control and expressiveness from the player - doing more to interpret player intent rather than honoring their input.
There are certainly people who like Metroid: Dread for the atmosphere, the characterization, the diverse biomes, the more cinematic qualities - maybe even the mechanics - without being mastery-focused. But the majority of people who like it the most are people who like that they can get an out-of-the-way missile tank with some elaborate combination of wall-jumps, running, shine sparks, slides, etc. Not even that they need to do that to get that missile tank, but that they can.
And Now, The Conclusion
Jason de Heras, a senior / lead combat designer, has a number of good blogs (that collect twitter threads) on combat design, using “forgiving” the way I’ve used “friendly” here. (“Forgiving” is perhaps the better term, though it’s a little narrower philosophically)
To quote from THE ART OF MELEE COMBAT DESIGN
In God of War, the attack targeting (or “soft targeting”) is EXTREMELY forgiving. Without touching the Left Stick (aka “Neutral” stick test), Kratos automatically turns to his target on the initial frame the attack input is registered.
In Sekiro, performing the same Neutral test, Wolf doesn’t rotate towards the enemy but instead attacks based on his previous player facing. Sekiro gives the player full control whereas God of War wants to ensure everyone feels like a god. Design for your intended audience!
I would add that not only is the intended audience different, but the intended atmosphere is just as different. The term is overused but God of War is a “power fantasy.” Some games are the opposite, casting the player as wretched and pitiable.
I’m currently playing Shin Megami Tensei 5 - this is a series that screams for unforgiving design. Just the term “unforgiving” sounds at home in the SMT series.
Most of the games involve an impending inevitable catastrophe or take place after that catastrophe, placing you in a demon-infested hellscape. You can meet an enemy for the first time, have no idea what they do, attack them with a fire spell that inadvertently heals them while cutting your turn short, then on their turn they kill you by targeting your weakness, using an ability you didn’t know they had. And that gives you a hard game over and a significant loss of progress.
That sounds rough - but in a post-apocalyptic demonic nightmare-world shit happens. Those mechanics are in line with a game that begins with people waiting for the subway one second only to be gobbled up by a monster the next.
If you read that Mashable review you might be thinking “this is all well and good, but really when the author said ‘unfriendly’ they just meant ‘difficult’, not ‘game designer as deist God-concept’ or whatever.”
That’s probably true. But also I don’t care. That’s the more interesting topic, even if they stumbled upon it by accident or not at all.
One of the problems with the difficulty discourse is that it’s a blob that formlessly encapsulates and obscures more interesting discussions. Why is skipping combat to view the story subsumed by difficulty discourse, as if the only possible reason anyone would skip combat is that it’s too hard? (Games media, as opposed to game developers, are particularly guilty of this sort of inappropriate flattening of concepts)
I’m guilty of some level of flattening myself. My loose definition of “unfriendly” includes everything from honoring player inputs and allowing them to walk off of ledges to giving them a wizard’s staff from a chest even when they’re an archer. But in my experience the type of developer who won’t let a player walk off a ledge and die is also the developer who rigs loot tables in the player’s favor.
And that’s fine. But the alternative is also fine, in the right context. Metroid was a survival game before survival games were a thing. Planets Zebes and ZDR are not Club Med and Risa. Some games are unfriendly in concept, and it’s appropriate for mechanics to follow suit.