I know hoarding restorative items is a joke, but it still rubs me the wrong way when games have an auto-revive item that gets used automatically when you die just because it was in your inventory. Like, those things are usually expensive or rare; let me save it for a tough boss fight instead of burning it one screen after a save point because my finger slipped.

A long time ago, I wrote about how games can present fake achievement which can be abused by players in unhealthy ways. Someday I’d like to revisit this topic and discuss how fake achievement can be used in healthy ways.

For example, here’s an article about experiments showing that “meaningless rituals” can improve feelings of self-discipline and thereby improve actual self-control. Sometimes, going through defined steps and completing goals - even empty ones that accomplish nothing - make us feel like we can do things and we can then bring that motivation to our actual real-life goals.

I’ve had motivational rough patches where, say, completing quests in Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning was a vital part of my writing process. And plenty of people have suggested that, say, Stardew Valley could be helpful for players with depression, or Minecraft for players with ADHD, due to the way their goals are structured.

Fake achievement in games can be a stepping stone and not just a crutch. I think that’s worth a closer look.

In many games, enemies drop money, items, or other resources. Sometimes this is figurative - you just receive those resources when you defeat the enemy - but other times it’s literal, with the resources appearing as pickups where the enemy was defeated and not being received until you go collect them.

I think the pickup approach is almost always a bad idea.

To illustrate why, I’ll start with an example of a game that does it well: Super Stardust HD.. An Asteroids-like shooter where you navigate a crowded level avoiding and destroying hazards, safely collecting the pickups dropped by enemies and rocks is part of the always-be-moving-always-be-shooting challenge. But it’s more interesting than that, since some pickups change over time and you might want to let them change before you nab them - plus, boosting through a large number of point pickups in one go rewards a significant bonus, so there’s a risk/reward trade-off. The point is - collecting the pickups is just as interesting a part of the gameplay as destroying the enemies in the first place. It challenges the same skills and presents similar interesting decisions.

This isn’t the case in most games. Usually, collecting the pickups isn’t interesting at all; it’s just another thing you have to do. Defeating the enemy is usually the interesting and challenging part, and going over to collect the pickup is usually an extra rote step you are obligated to take for no clear reason and with no interesting challenge or decision involved.

As a player, your instinct might be to minimize the time the interesting action is interrupted by uninteresting action and just collect all the pickups at once after defeating all the enemies. But obnoxiously often, games punish or prevent this - pickups fade away after a few seconds, or the action continually leads you away from where pickups have already dropped, or defeating the last enemy immediately ejects you from the area without letting you collect anything. So your attempt to maximize the enjoyability of the game is punished by the game robbing you of the rewards you’ve already earned in combat.

It is fun seeing the resources drop, but there’s no reason to force the player to collect them. (Oddly, Hyrule Warriors recognizes this with rupees which shower colorfully out of enemies and pots before being collected automatically but still obliges the player to pick up dropped materials and weapons which are much easier to miss and much more valuable.) Some games - I think Kingdom Hearts did this, I’m not sure if the sequels all do - include optional upgrades that increase your pickup collection radius, allowing you to mostly forget about the tedious collection and just enjoy the game as it should have been all along.

I really loved the degree of customization in Animal Crossing: New Leaf. Here’s my Docprof mayor and my Pixel Poppers town flag and pattern.

I think my ironically-favorite part of the discourse around difficulty and easy modes in Sekiro and Soulsborne games is that anti-easy folks make both of these claims:

1. Adding an easy mode to a Soulsborne game would ruin the intended experience of overcoming challenge through persistence and learning.
2. Soulsborne games already have an easy mode since you can summon a friend.

I don’t know if I’ve heard any individual person say both these things together - the kettle logic might be a little too obvious if you’re actually saying “Easy mode would be bad, and anyway they already have it and that’s good!” But I also don’t think I’ve seen anyone really address the contradiction here.

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While I was doing the reading for the spreadsheet moment post, I had some trouble finding the Extra Credits video I wanted to reference. I watched it over eight years ago and I couldn’t remember who had said it or where - I just had this memory of someone drawing a distinction between “calculations” and “incomparables” in game design and claiming it was bad to pass off the former as the latter.

I had the terms and the framing right, and it was still very difficult to search the video up - because there’s no transcript online. Basically I got lucky and someone used the terms in the comments of a tangentally-related blog post and I was able to follow the thread.

THIS IS WHY IT SUCKS HOW MUCH OF GAME ANALYSIS AND CRITICISM HAS MOVED TO VIDEO. Even though I was using exactly the right search terms, I was getting basically nothing.

This is terrible for preservation, terrible for discoverability, terrible for research. This isn’t the only time I’ve failed to find something I’m sure I read some years back - and I’m sure some of those times it was because it was actually in a video and now impossible to find. And how many times have I searched for existing thought on a particular topic and just not found the great videos that exist on it because I’m not already following those creators - when that should have been my introduction to those creators?

I don’t understand this because there’s such an easy fix: just publish your transcript along with your video. You had to write the script anyway; just put it online so people can actually find your work and you can grow your audience and your influence. I do this for my videos - why does almost nobody else do it?