One of my pet peeves is when games require attention without providing true engagement. Usually this is through rote actions that require no skill or decision-making and might be entertaining or novel once but must be completed over and over again. It’s a very clear way for a game to show that it doesn’t respect the player’s time, which is one of the fastest ways for a game to lose my interest.

Some games seem to be built around these kinds of interactions. Pokémon Go turned out not to be a good game to play while walking the dog because the Pokémon encounters and PokéStop visits required too much attention despite having no real depth to them. Similarly, Pokémon Quest requires you to sit through its expeditions without providing much control over them.

I assume that what’s going on here is that difference audience segments have different complexity thresholds for gameplay to be engaging. For a kid, maybe the semi-interactive Pokémon Quest expeditions are entertaining. For people who want to take frequent breaks while walking, maybe Pokémon Go makes more sense. These games might not be bad, they might just be not for me, and that’s fine.

What puzzles me more is when this shows up in a game where most of the gameplay is more engaging. It feels similar to the endgame polish problem where testing just doesn’t uncover how tedious a particular repeated action becomes over extended play. Interface friction often falls into this - for example, buying fortune cookies or updating your Dream Town in Animal Crossing: New Leaf are things you’re encouraged to do on a daily basis but have several slow and unecessary steps that get really old when you’re doing them every day. I feel like when designing repeatable interactions in games, it’s important to ask, “How will the player feel about this after doing it a hundred times?”

I checked out Harmonix’s recent Amplitude remake. There’s a Campaign mode that’s apparently fifteen songs long, which is more than I wanted to commit to, so I went to Quick Play instead. I played a song, enjoyed it, played another song, kept enjoying it, and kept playing. There was a pleasantly smooth difficulty curve and I had a good time getting slightly better with each song and then moving on to the next slightly harder one. I kept thinking, “Okay, just one more song,” playing it, and then thinking that again.

And then I hit a wall. There weren’t any songs anymore. Or rather, there were, but I wasn’t allowed to play them. They were locked, and I’d have to either play Campaign mode or repeatedly replay the few songs I had access to in Quick Play in order to unlock them.

I would have thought that Harmonix would have learned by now after so many iterations of Guitar Hero and Rock Band not to lock songs in a rhythm game, but here we are. And just… why? Why do this? Why slam down a roadblock and prevent me from enjoying the game? If I felt like I needed to practice the easier songs before moving on to the hard ones, I’d do so. And if I felt like committing to a fifteen-song campaign, I’d do so. In the meantime, why stop me from trying out the songs individually and progressively, when I was having fun doing that?

My response wasn’t to switch over to Campaign mode or grind on the songs I’d already unlocked. My reaction was to put the game down. It’s been a few weeks and I haven’t come back to it. I don’t know whether I ever will.

As glad as I am to see big-name game designers say that accessibility doesn’t compromise their vision (God of War’s Cory Barlog and VVVVVV’s Terry Cavanagh are the ones I’ve seen so far), and as much as it makes me respect them as creators, as a player I kind of… don’t care?

Like, if a couple movie directors came out and said they didn’t mind when people watching their movies at home pause them, that’s all well and good - but if they said the opposite, I’m still gonna hit pause when I have to go to the bathroom. I don’t really care if I’m breaking with their vision.

It’s great that they have a vision and all, but I’m the one having the experience and I’m going to use my own judgment and my own self-knowledge to improve it whether they want me to or not.

I don’t play a lot of Zelda-likes or Metroidvanias so maybe this is a dumb question, but I’ve picked up Blossom Tales: The Sleeping King (which is basically A Link to the Past) and, like, I think it’s a Metroidvania?

Wikipedia explains Metroidvanias this way:

Metroidvania games generally feature a large interconnected world map the player can explore, though access to parts of the world is often limited by doors or other obstacles that can only be passed once the player has acquired special items, tools, weapons or abilities within the game. Acquiring such improvements can also aid the player in defeating more difficult enemies and locating shortcuts and secret areas, and often includes retracing one’s steps across the map. Through this, Metroidvania games include tighter integration of story and level design, careful design of levels and character controls to encourage exploration and experimentation, and a means for the player to become more invested in their player character. Metroidvania games typically are sidescrolling platformers, but can also include other genre types.

Until that very last sentence, I feel like pre-Breath of the Wild Zelda fits this description perfectly. Wikipedia even notes that Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (which is the source of the “-vania” in the name) was inspired in large part by Zelda! Is the difference really just top-down versus side-view?