This is Alto’s Adventure. It’s an endless runner in which you snowboard down a mountain to rescue your runaway llamas, doing tricks and avoiding obstacles along the way.
I love this game. It plays well, but what sets it apart is how lovely and chill it is. So much polish has gone into the atmosphere and it pays off. There’s the obvious stuff, like a beautiful art style and a soothing soundtrack, but on top of that are so many little touches. The sun moves across the sky, setting and rising as you play, changing not just brightness but color warmth and really selling the feeling that you’ve been snowboarding all night and a new day has dawned around you. Rainstorms come and go, with no effect on gameplay but helping the setting feel more like a living world. The sounds your board makes on the snow or when grinding on bunting lines or rooftops are rich and vivid - for me, they’re borderline ASMR-inducing when I play with headphones. And I love the way that the llamas slide down slopes instead of running once the incline is steep enough.
It all comes together to create a profound sense of joyful speed and solitude, coasting down this starkly beautiful yet somehow cozy mountainside. You’re one with the wind and the snow, and all there is is the descent in front of you. Obstacles and opportunities keep coming and you need to react to them just in time - once you learn and internalize how to respond to each situation that can arise, you do so without conscious thought, faster than conscious thought, the experience flowing through you as you flow down the mountain.
Endless runners are a lot like rhythm games in this way - they create flow by presenting you with a series of rapid-fire cues you have to respond to without taking time to think. But in runners, the cues are procedurally generated, so you can’t memorize them and they can last forever. It’s like a song that never ends but keeps growing and changing. A theme with endless variation.
I’ve played a lot of endless runners that tweak the formula in various ways. But somehow, Alto’s Adventure is the one that most reminds me of where the genre got its start. It’s the one that feels the most like a pure descendant of the game that first popularized endless runners, the first one I ever played: Canabalt.
Players who are new to this specific game, but familiar with other similar games or the conventions of the genre.
Players who are new to this game’s genre and conventions, but familiar with gaming in general.
Players who are completely new to gaming.
Players who have played this specific game, but have put it down for an extended period and are returning - especially if it is a live-service game which may have changed considerably in the meantime.
All of these players need some amount of guidance (or at least reminders) to understand how to play the game, but the amount and nature of guidance needed varies considerably between them. One might expect games to thus present a few different levels of optional guidance to cater to each group, but it’s typical for games to design their tutorials and onboarding for only the first group, providing little help for the “new” players of other kinds.
When we play games for fun, we often need a goal system to shepherd us along. This is what makes it a “game” instead of a “toy” - the goals direct the player toward particular experiences. In most cases, the game designer tries to make the experience of achieving those goals enjoyable (though there are deliberate subversions of this as well). But since games are an interactive medium, the designer can only give the player a set of tools and suggest how to use them in ways that will be fun. It’s up to the player to decide what to actually do.
This presents a problem - the player may choose to use those tools in a different and less-fun way if it seems to be a more effective way to reach the game’s goals. As Greg McClanahan put it in his fantastic post Achievement Design 101, “What game designers in general often seem to ignore is that when players are presented a goal, their first inclination is to devise the most efficient (not necessarily the most fun) means of reaching that goal. . . . Show the player the end point, and that player will take the quickest and easiest route, regardless of whatever path the game intended for him to take.”
I don’t speak for everyone, but based on the comments I could find online, I think a lot of people share my reason: Rhythm games let us lose ourselves in music, and that feels good.
Musicians will tell you: when things are going well, making music puts you in a euphoric state of complete absorption. You are no longer aware of your own self as a separate entity; you’re one with the music. An anonymous composer put it this way:
“You are in an ecstatic state to such a point that you feel as though you almost don’t exist. I have experienced this time and again. My hand seems devoid of myself, and I have nothing to do with what is happening. I just sit there watching it in a state of awe and wonderment. And [the music] just flows out of itself.”
This quote was provided by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his TED talk on “flow”. Flow is a popular term in games analysis, but in case you haven’t come across it before, here’s a brief summary: “flow” is a term coined and popularized by Csikszentmihalyi to refer to a particular mental and emotional state of being “in the zone”. It’s a form of focus that allows for continual high-level performance without conscious thought. Researchers studying this state in musicians have described it as “effortless attention.”
Good games are those which successfully guide their players to worthwhile experiences, so the designer’s intent is key to a game’s quality. This leads some of us to conclude that designer intent should be elevated above player freedom - that players should be prevented from altering a game’s experience lest they ruin it for themselves.
“Decisions like [Dark Souls’s difficulty level, Dead Rising’s time limit, and Far Cry 2’s jamming weapons] might be controversial, but if they’re an integral part of the experience that the developer is trying to create, then the player shouldn’t feel like they’re entitled to be able to mess with this stuff through options, modes, and toggles. Because that would screw with the developer’s intentions and could end up ruining the game in the long run."
—Mark Brown, What Makes Celeste’s Assist Mode Special | Game Maker’s Toolkit (at 22 seconds) (to be fair, the rest of the video adds a lot of nuance to this position)
I strongly disagree with this. To me, the designer’s intent is the starting point and not the finish line. If we cling to it and discourage players from exploring any further, we rob it of most of its value. Here’s why.
Oh no! You just found out that somebody likes a thing you don’t like. What do you do?
If your answer is “keep my mouth shut so they can keep enjoying the thing even though I know it’s trash,” then I congratulate you for at least mastering the first step of basic civility. But there’s another step beyond that one: open-mindedness. It’s recognizing that you almost certainly don’t know that the thing is trash. It’s genuinely seeking to understand what it is that people enjoy about the thing. And if you master this step too, your life can be much richer.
I’m going to explain why this is the case, but first I need to talk about kitsch for a minute - after all, “kitsch” is practically shorthand for “art only liked by people with worse taste than me.”
Imagine you’re a kid at a new school deciding where to sit for lunch. Another kid sees you and offers you some candy, saying they have some extra they don’t want. You eagerly accept the candy and sit with the kid. The next day, you run into the same kid and they offer you candy again, explaining that their parents keep packing their lunch with this candy they don’t like. This keeps happening every day - when you sit with this kid at lunch, they give you candy.
Then one day you go to the candy store and see that same kid buying lots of the candy they supposedly don’t like. You realize they are deliberately getting this candy to give to other kids to try to make friends.
What might you say to this kid if you confronted them? Would you explain that their actions are not only clearly manipulative but also counterproductive in the long run - that they may have an easier time making new friends right now, but these people are likely to be put off when they realize what’s going on, even if they had actually enjoyed spending time together? Might you suggest that the kid should focus instead on being genuinely enjoyable to spend time with and seek out people with compatible personalities and shared interests who actually like spending time with them?
This is basically how I feel about games with log-in bonuses.
Long ago, I wrote a post about the different roles of challenge and punishment in skill-based games and how they relate to flow and learning. My argument was that challenge should vary with player skill to maximize opportunities for flow while punishment should be flat-out minimized to prevent disruptions to learning. Doing things like kicking the player back to a distant checkpoint when they die inserts delays and distractions between attempts, making it much harder to learn. But there’s a significant difference between first learning a skill and mastering that skill, and this absolutely affects what kind of punishment is appropriate. I’ll explain, borrowing an example from commenters on that old post.
Imagine you are playing a new racing game. The tutorial teaches acceleration, braking, steering, and drifting, requiring you to perform each operation before advancing to the next. You hold the accelerate button, then the brake button, steer around some turns, and then try the drift but your timing is off and you fail to execute it. In this case, it would be counterproductive for the game to force you to start all the way over and pass the accelerate, brake, and steer tests again before giving you another chance to drift. The game is teaching the skill, not testing it. Failing to execute this skill should result in an immediate opportunity to try again. Additional punishment would just make it harder to learn, which is the exact opposite of the tutorial’s goal. A punishing tutorial is a bad tutorial.
But once you’re out of the tutorial and you start racing, the scenario is different. The game is done teaching new skills and starts testing them. You are no longer learning skills; you are practicing them. Your goals are larger in scope - not just “perform a drift” but “win this three-lap race.” And because the scope of punishment defines the scope of challenge, a challenge of this scope is not possible without real punishment. If losing the race results in just restarting, say, the final lap, the challenge becomes “win this lap” rather than “win this race.” In order to challenge you to perform well consistently enough to win an entire race, loss must cost you the entire race.
Many games are tests of skill. Players succeed or fail at the game’s goals based on their physical dexterity and reaction time, general knowledge and reasoning ability, understanding and internalization of the game’s own mechanics - anything a game can test. But much of that skill is applied before the moment of success or failure.
Victory in a chess match may come from physically moving your piece into a position that checkmates your opponent, but that isn’t the hard part. And the hard part of beating Doom isn’t the button press that fires the last shot on the final boss - it’s everything you did to enable that shot. These goals, and indeed most interesting goals in games, actually have multiple stages of challenge that funnel into each other.
Here’s my conception of the phases of challenge. This is a fairly abstract framework, since it’s intended to be generalizable to every skill-based game. To help pin it down a bit, let’s take a closer look at each phase and then discuss how they interrelate. Once that’s done, I’ll go into some implications these ideas have for game design.
It’s worth reading in its entirety, but here’s my summary: Deciding which games can be sold on Steam is a hard problem that Steam has struggled with for years. There’s a long list of controversial topics and kinds of content - and for each one, many people in Valve’s huge multinational audience feel strongly that it should be allowed on the store and many people feel strongly that it shouldn’t. Many of these topics are also controversial among Valve’s own employees. So rather than continue to struggle with the increasingly impossible goal of consistent curation, Valve is scaling back to block only games that are illegal or “straight up trolling” (later clarified somewhat to mean “designed to do nothing but generate outrage and cause conflict"). Valve’s efforts will instead go toward creating tools to allow people to control what content they see - customers will be able to block specific kinds of games from their own slice of Steam and creators will be able to avoid harassment if they release something controversial.
We’ll have to wait and see the filtering and anti-harassment tools to know whether this plan will succeed, but the reasoning and intent seem solid and likely to lead to a vast improvement over the current unpredictable mess. So I was shocked to see that the reaction from the game journalism community featured widespread rage and contempt.
