aoanla

I have the same kind of experience, mostly, except that this applies mostly to playing the games - depressingly, there's increasingly many games that I'm interested in watching someone much better than me play, than actually playing myself.

The Punch-Out/Super Punch-Out run is great. I have to admit, I tend to avoid the multiple-hour "speed" runs, like the Breath of the Wild run (I dipped into it a little, but anything over an hour or so is usually a speedrun I'm not going to sit all the way through). I know there's no skill difference - and in fact, endurance in continuing to hit all the right tricks, and sequences probably makes them harder - but 4 hours, guys... I'm probably just spoiled by the Prey speedrun being about 10 minutes long though...

As always, there's a Deus Ex quote apposite to this: "The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement same functionality with data-mining algorithms." In fact, this is precisely the same "social normalisation via fear-of-observation" which most religions incorporate - which is also why "Santa Claus is Coming To Town" is the most disturbing of all Christmas songs.

To some extent, sure: but there's plenty of PC/Amiga/C64 games which weren't arcade games which are also stupidly hard. You could argue that they were part of the same cultural zeitgeist, and were just hard because the people who wrote them expected games to be hard, because arcade games, I guess. But there was also just a tendency to make hard games in genres which were never in arcades - there's tons of early FPSen which are incredibly hard, for example.

Got bored of Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy (and I'd rather be spending my time on finishing Opus Magnum, or other interesting games), for reasons I've talked about enough in the actual thread for it.

Spelunky's way too hard for me to see the end - but it's still fun to play if you can't complete it. (It's actually an excellent example of a game which is both "hard" and also enjoyable for people who aren't good at games.)

Well, lets clarify that to: bringing back games which are "solely hard" just punishes people who are bad at games. I've nothing against high difficulty modes - Bayonetta, for example, does this well in both directions, because it has "very easy" modes which automate some of the harder stuff for you, a spectrum of "normal" modes, and then "very hard" modes which basically make things ridiculously unfair. Now everyone is happy. Fetishising "how you could have games, once, which you couldn't ever complete, ever" kinda misses the point.

I mean: sure. But buried in my complaint is a set of more nuanced points. Firstly, that Bennett also doesn't really understand the frustration of "hard games" because he's never been bad enough at them. (See his misrepresentation of why Spelunky is good, for example). Secondly, that Getting Over It probably still doesn't hit its target: surely the people who most need to learn about the value of set-backs in making progress feel more awesome are the very people who are also completing his game in less than 3 hours. I don't think it's possible to make a game which will teach the "left-hand side" of the bell curve this lesson, without making it utterly impossible for anyone else. [See also: why we have difficulty settings.] Thirdly, that, as @jennegatron notes, this is part of the fetishisation of "hard games", which I would really like to fight, because, again: the 80s and 90s were great for hard games only if you were good at games. Bringing back hard games just punishes the people who are bad at games.

I mean: I'm also not against people being awesome at playing games - I love speedruns (and I'm dipping into AGDQ as it runs this year, as every year), and I think discovering exploits in games is impressive and painstaking work. (I watched a bunch of Getting Over It speedrun practice, too, and the high skill bar is really impressive, too.) But unlockable cheat codes really did miss the cultural point of cheat codes.

I mean: yes, if you count the Commodore Amiga as a "PC". There have definitely been games which don't have cheat codes on non-console platforms - and I've definitely failed to complete them. Hired Guns, IIRC, didn't have any cheat codes, as the first example which springs to mind. I don't recall Cannon Fodder having any, either, nor Frontier (Elite II). (But also: just because cheat codes exist doesn't mean you know about them - I grew up before the WWW, where you only heard about cheat codes in magazines, and if you never knew the cheat codes, then you'd never manage to complete them. So, yes: another lesson I learned, moving from the late 80s to the mid 90s, is that the only way to complete a game was to cheat at it. But I think that's a side effect of the general experience In my previous posts, not a solution to the "problem".)

Yeah, I've read it - everything in it indicates he has no idea what it's like to be bad at games For a start: Getting Over It isn't as frustrating as restarting most games - because the only thing you lose is a (variable) amount of one-axis progress. Restarting most games, especially games of the era that Bennett remembers (and that I remember too) would lose you tons more than that. And, architecturally, you don't even lose much time - one of the frustrations of losing and restarting in 8-bit and 16-bit era games is the sheer time lost to loading (especially in the era of multi-floppy-disk games, where reloading from some points might involve multiple disk swaps and reads, only to fail again within minutes) - Getting Over It gives you back control within seconds, and you can usually recover to where you lost progress faster than the time it took you to get there the first time. For a second: Spelunky is less frustrating than Getting Over It, for bad players, not because "you can blame your failures on randomness", but because you get something new and different each time you play it. Or, to rephrase it in terms of my prior post: Spelunky's random generation makes restarting endlessly less boring by introducing more variety. [In fact, this is true for all Roguelikes, and Roguelikelikes.] For a third: Bennett's two completions of Getting Over It are less than 5 hours (4 and a half hours the first time, and 30 minutes the second). That's comfortably within the median time to complete Getting Over It (and from Bennett's comments, vastly less than the mean), and much less than the time investment that, say, I've put in managing to get barely 25% of the way into my first climb. And yet, I feel none of the "frustration" that Bennett thinks I should - I just feel bored. [To use Bennett's own lexicon of "flavours of frustration" (http://www.foddy.net/2017/01/eleven-flavors-of-frustration/ ) - Bennett seems to think Getting Over It should be evoking #2 (Starting Over), but anyone who's actually bad at games is inured to #2 by now. What Getting Over It comes closer to evoking is #5 (Getting Nowhere) and #8 (Others Can Get There, But I Can't), and possibly #11 (We've Been Here Before) - although, again, anyone who's bad at games has experienced all three of those in every single game they've played, ever, and is basically inured to them. All that is left is boredom - which is why making games hard for their own sake is kinda missing the point.]

I've not gotten that far yet (I still can't do the Devil's Chimney at all consistently, and the two times I managed it I fell down after getting stuck in , so my last 3 and a bit hours have mostly been repeatedly failing to do the Devil's Chimney, which is getting boring, tbh). However, I know enough about the game to know that there's a trigger for getting a present dropped where you mention it. As an aside, the thing that confuses me about Bennett's espoused philosophy of design of Getting Over It is that he clearly hasn't met anyone who's bad at games. I'm bad at games, and I don't find Getting Over It frustrating at all - you never lose anything but pure progress, and you need to repeat things to practice them anyway [games which actually take collectables away from you are super frustrating, sure - eg Shovel Knight is awful for this - as are games which steal other things, like time (I'm looking at you, games with unskippable cutscenes before boss battles)]... but I'm bad enough at it that repeating the same section for hours on end is just boring. From audio that I've heard, Bennett seems to be concerned about not making "throwaway" content, and the way in which modern games are constructed in such a way that any challenge you encounter you know you will be able to solve it [presumably eventually]. But this is only true for people with a certain base level of skill within a "reasonable time" - there's plenty of games which I've never completed (in fact, I don't think I completed any games of my youth - except maybe Lemmings) - and this this also true of plenty of modern games. Whilst, sure, sometimes this is due to what Bennett wants to call "bitterness" - frustration with lost progress - I think Bennett also underestimates precisely how much "failure" someone poor at games experiences, and how, at this low skill level, boredom becomes more of a factor than "bitterness" over time. I'm not losing progress much any more with Getting Over It - I'm just repeating the same 10 or so seconds of activity over and over again, for hours on end. What I'm learning isn't that "overcoming loss makes success sweeter", it's "learned helplessness". That's not to say that we shouldn't have challenging games - or that every game has to be completable by everyone. What it is to say is that Bennett fails to understand why people don't complete challenging games. It's not "aversion to bitterness"; it's "wanting variety". It's not "fear of losing progress"; it's "inability to make progress/running out of content". (The most depressing thing about Getting Over It is that Bennett runs out of "inspirational quotes about failure" very quickly for low skill players, as he plays stuff on every major progress loss. Those quotes are the only new content we get to experience for most of the game, so they actually made the game less boring - losing progress is something we just expect as low-skill players, so getting additional content that way is nice, not nasty. With them gone, there's even less reason for us to keep repeating the same actions endlessly). (He also fails to really make his point universally with Getting Over It anyway, as "high skill" people will fail less, and learn less of a lesson about "overcoming bitterness" and the way in which success is sweeter after adversity than low-skill people (who already know this - we've been overcoming adversity in every damn game we've played in our lives). Compare the "2 and a bit hour" run length of someone who "gets" Getting Over It with the "25 hour+" runs of us over in the low-skill corner.)

VA-11 HALL-A is probably worth giving another shout to, just for the mechanics being interesting - but I did find that it didn't go as deep as I would have liked it to (late in development, they removed a timer which would have measured how long you took to make cocktails - which makes it a more pleasant, chilled, experience to play, but makes a mockery of most of the "tests" people set you, because you have all the time in the world to leaf through the in-game cocktail recipe book...).

And who doesn't have a fantasy about being a hammer jar man, deep down inside them?

I'm using a trackpad anyway, so trackpad mode is turned on by default