I’m at the tail end of a Christmas vacation in Denver, Colorado which has mostly consisted of me lazing about and catching up on side projects after a burnout-inducing semester of work, but the one thing I really wanted to do was go to Convergence Station, the warehouse-sized, immersive, interactive exhibition by Meow Wolf.

Convergence Station is an experience that is presented almost entirely diagetically (that is, in-fiction): from the front doors everything in the building that does not require real-world signage for safety or fire code’s sake is presented as being a part of an interdimensional transit hub put together by the Quantum Department of Transportation, a sort of ominous, maybe malicious technology company that handles transit after “Convergence” brought together a collection of worlds, including Earth, into a sort of quantum overlap.

Non-diagetically speaking, it’s a freeform, open-ended set of rooms, each of which is from one of several of the Converged “worlds” and connected to each other in strange, fun ways. These rooms contain art, mostly either dioramas built into the room or tactile sculptures the crowd is encouraged to touch, and also contain a certain amount of interactables: buttons and knobs and other more complicated contraptions you’re meant to play with, as well as a certain amount of screen-based installations (we’ll get back to those).

Ultimately, the angle I was most interested in experiencing Convergence Station from was that of interactive storytelling: as a part of buying your ticket to the facility, you can optionally buy a “QPASS” (read: a card with an RFID chip in it), The pitch on the QPASS, directly from Meow Wolf’s website, is as follows:

So, to me, the understanding is that buying a QPASS is “opting in” to the narrative elements of Convergence Station, and very early on it becomes clear that there is an arching narrative surrounding four missing women tied to the Convergence, and culminating in QDOT’s construction of “The Last Stop”, an ominous engineering project that will bring the inhabitants of Convergence Station back home.

Ultimately, after about two hours and change spent walking around Convergence Station with my mom, I found the experience just shy of great in a way I found deeply frustrating, and I think a lot of that comes down to surprisingly universal game design issues, the same kinds of issues that plague exploration-based video games.

I think my problems can largely be summarized into three big lessons, which if anything were great examples in-person (literally) of how to guide a player through a game world.

I Did Not Traverse A Quantum Rift To Check Emails

The absolute killer problem with Convergence Station is one of information being presented in absolutely the wrong way for the use case, in a way that gave me the admittedly unique experience of having to read sit through an arduous video game tutorial in real life.

So, as mentioned, buying Convergence Station’s QPASS opts you into the central narrative of the installation, about four missing women with close ties to the eponymous Convergence event, but it’s probably worth noting how the experience actually begins, which is that you take an elevator ride (sorry, “quantum train”) up into the experience and are dumped into C-Street, a sort of Lower East Side-by-way-of-Rick and Morty, with a dozen-or-so page travel guide that mostly contains very high-level setting information and not a ton of direction.

One of the first things you will see in your sightline, with a big glowing interaction point you’ve been told to keep an eye on so you can “boop” your QPASS (that is, rub your card against the RFID sensor), is one of many “Memory ATMs”. Memories are currency in the world of Convergence Station, and you will be accumulating memories throughout your adventure via your QPASS, and thus, you will be accumulating little chunks of story as you progress.

But when you reach your first Memory ATM, you will have zero memories and a shitload of emails. Your ATM begins pre-loaded with about a dozen or so page-long emails written to you by in-universe characters. This operates as the closest thing Convergence Station has to a quest log: attempting to guide the player to things of interest around the installation, but it’s presented with no hierarchy of importance nor context, so when you’re all of five minutes into your journey, it’s a bunch of “Glup Shitto wants you to go collect the Scungo down in Peebus Row”.

I’m relatively familiar with this sort of proper-noun laden clumsy worldbuilding, so I just sort of picked the one that was the most straightforward-sounding to focus on, because there was no way in hell I was going to retain more than about 3 made-up words in my head at once. My mom read through the same emails and looked at me with a look of genuine concern that I assume she also would have given me if I dragged her to a four hour long bunraku performance presented only in historically-accurate Japanese.

The obvious problem here is I don’t want to be in a fully immersive installation art exhibition to read a bunch of emails on a wall kiosk, but I also kinda have to do that because there is no other direction presented at the beginning. The only other worldbuilding I’ve been given at the outside is the travel guide, but guess what? I also don’t want to be in a fully immersive installation art exhibition in a corner wherever the light is good enough to read Rick Steves’ Guide to Peebus Row. I want to start fiddling with shit and wandering around and exploring.

This fundamental contradiction, of having to derail my exploration in order to get context for what I’m exploring in the most annoying way possible, largely permeates through the exhibition. As you accumulate memories with your QPASS, always via small kiosks with screens around the building (I have no idea what these are called in-universe, we almost immediately just started calling them “boops”), collecting enough of them triggers a short animated movie of a “memory”.

Psychotically, these movies will play on the boop and run about four minutes each, which would be fine if this was a video game and I triggered a cutscene, but I am stuck watching this video on a tiny screen on a physical object, which is unpleasant, but it’s a physical object that other visitors need so they can progress their storylines.

More than once, I found myself cringing and wishing a memory would finish faster as a physical line of people formed behind me waiting for their chance to boop the boop. Conversely, sometimes I was stuck behind someone else watching a memory, and in all of those cases, on top of the obnoxia of having to wait, there was also the awkward element that the video they were watching was one I was about to get, so I was kinda half-watching it from a distance from a cockeyed angle and then functionally rewatching a clip I’d already sorta seen when it was my turn to boop.

This delivery mechanism also totally falls apart when it comes to multiple people in the same group. My mom and I both had QPASSes, and as a result we got into a rhythm of one of us booping, getting some information, and the other having so sort of sheepishly boop afterwards and skip through all of the same stuff they just watched. Even more annoying, at some point I got one boop, and thus one memory, behind my mom, and I wasn’t going to go back through other rooms to hunt for the boop I was missing, so my QPASS became functionally useless. Since players seem to mostly be given their memories in a linear-ish order regardless of their location in the installation, my QPASS would never yield information or a memory that my mom’s didn’t already get.

Other information delivery mechanisms were similarly sharing-unfriendly. The space had quite a few physical books you could flip through, which, I’m not blocking traffic in a major thoroughfare of the exhibit so that I can read a fake book, I’m sorry, and a computer terminal had a similar issue.

In all instances, the problems and the takeaways were thus:

• Vital context required to understand both the explicit plot as well as the broader setting “story” of Convergence Station required me to pause my exploration of the environment to get basically a big info dump of text/video. Information about the world should be in the world, not next to it.

• Locking that context behind physical objects designed to be interacted with by only a single person lead to major information redundancy issues as well as literal queuing problems.

• In an installation environment, people are going to be in groups, and there are going to be a lot of people who all want to interact with any given element at once. Bottlenecking should be minimized, and the base user experience should assume a group as the fundamental unit, not an individual.

Which Of These Ballsacks Do I Touch To Make The Story Progress

The previous section might imply that there’s no worldbuilding information placed into the exhibition itself, and that’s not entirely true. It would be more accurate, however, to say that what information exists in the rooms of Convergence Station are islands of context in a sea of nonsense.

This isn’t entirely a fair reading: Convergence Station is primarily an art exhibit, so the primary purpose of the space is to present interesting pieces of installation art, not all of which is meant to directly tie into the metaplot of Convergence Station, but with the exhibition focusing entirely on strange, otherworldly settings and fantastical things, there is no easy way to distinguish which of the dozens, maybe hundreds of points of interest in a given room contain useful information or an interactive element, and which are just Neat.

So, an aside here that I promise is relevant. In classic first-person shooters, especially the classic-est first-person shooter Doom, the levels often were riddled with secret rooms and stashes for careful players to find. However, maybe as an intentional design decision, maybe due to the limited graphics options available at the time, usually there was very little visual indication where those secrets actually were. As a result, players would just basically thrust their character against every wall in the game, mashing the interact key in the hopes of accidentally finding a secret switch or fake wall. This activity, of attempting to brute-force find environmental interactables by thrusting against every available surface, is commonly nicknamed “wall-humping”, and I found myself doing a lot of wall-humping in Convergence Station.

My mom and I walked around the exhibition kinda just touching everything: pushing against walls, fidgeting with sculptures and things mounted on the walls, rubbing our QPASS against basically anything with a light, just because in this incredible, fantastical world of wonders and creativity it was profoundly unclear what category any given object fell into:

• Is this just a pretty piece of art/Instagram bait?

• Is this some sort of simple interactive toy?

• Is this a puzzle, and I need to learn how to solve it?

• Am I missing something, some knowledge or some memory, that is needed to complete this element that I need to go hunt down and come back later?

Without clarity as to what parts of Convergence Station are which, I found myself aimlessly stumbling around its rooms, never sure if I’d missed something important or if I needed to come back, or if I should be remembering the text on a poster or the contents of a diorama or if it’s just for show.

I’m not necessarily saying I should be spoon-fed the plot of Convergence Station, I think the broad appeal of this sort of thing is the mystery and the thrill of the investigation. However, with such an absolutely wack signal to noise ratio it felt less like I was investigating anything or exerting my exploration skills and more like I was just stumbling against every wall waiting for something obviously important to jump out at me, and if I miss something, then fuck it, because there was kinda no way I was gonna find it.

This culminated in a large, naturalistic environment which dominates a single, multi-floor room, where the walls were frequently punctuated by plastic glowing… objects.

They were ballsacks, they looked like balls. But they were clearly important balls, lit and textured different from the wall around them and clearly exhibiting tactile sensors. But I had no fucking clue what they did. In one room, another guest mentioned that if everyone touched each ballsack in the room simultaneously, something should happen, but nothing did when we attempted it, and none of them did anything outside of that room either. But I was so desperate for any sort of interaction, for context, for a puzzle that every time I encountered a ballsack, I gave it a sort of dejected rub in the hopes of triggering some sort of event. But, as often happens when you rub a mysterious ballsack, all I was met with was disappointment.

I suspect this is a problem that might happen less in Omega Mart, Meow Wolf’s installation in Las Vegas which depicts a sort of surrealist grocery store, because that environment sets a baseline that guests are more immediately familiar with traversing, thus allowing the important elements to be easily identified. I know what sort of objects don’t belong in a grocery store, I know what the objects in a grocery store are and do, I do not have similar baseline knowledge of the Forest of Ballsacks.

Video games actually have a very similar problem nowadays. As video game graphics have gotten better and better and everything in a digital environment is rendered in extreme detail, which implies importance, it’s become increasingly difficult for players to identify what parts of the game world matter to them, what parts are interactive.

Spawned from this problem is the great “yellow paint” debate: to direct the player’s eye and diagetically note that some part of the game world is important to the players, some designers will put eye-catching UI elements, oftentimes a coat of yellow paint, on objects of interest. Some players consider this demeaning or a dumbing down of games, but without the yellow paint players often do not have the necessary information to identify objects of importance in a rendered world. In an environment of near-total visual verisimilitude but extremely restricted dimensions of interactivity, something beyond the realistic is required to identify what is inherently important, because the real world does not possess a concept of inherent importance. Convergence Station is direly in need of yellow paint.

Also very much not helping the fuzzy distinction between signal and noise was the fact that multiple interactive elements of Convergence Station seemed to just not work. A wall of pachinko machines clearly tied to some sort of locker combination puzzle just simply did not work, and the aforementioned Room of Ballsacks did not do anything when my group tried to activate it. Fan sites for Convergence Station note that several elements of the exhibition are notoriously glitchy or often broken.

This is a self-compounding problem: not only are, you know, some of the interactive elements of Convergence Station broken, which is inherently bad, but when you’re at an element that is working oddly, you can never be sure if you’re missing something or if the thing in front of you just flat doesn’t work.

At the core of Convergence Station are these big problems, which are very hard to solve:

• In a completely unfamiliar environment that is specifically peddling in strangeness, how do you identify to players what aspects warrant further attention? How do you communicate the rules of how the interactive elements should work?

• How do you balance keeping the world mysterious with rewarding player investigation?

• How do you properly signal to a player what is a dead-end, versus what they should keep prodding at?

I’d Love To Help You Save Convergence Station, Quick Question First, Who The Fuck Are You?

Ultimately, some of the above problems I may have been able to push through with dedication and focus, but ultimately my desire to crack the secrets of Convergence Station were undercut by the simple fact that what plot I did get just… wasn’t very good.

Spoilers for Convergence Station follow.

Early into your time exploring Convergence Station, you start receiving messages from “Whistleblower”, who warns you that QDOT is up to no good, that you need to collect memories, that you need to stop the Last Stop project. The consequences are told to you plainly: if the Last Stop is activated, it will erase all memories people have of the Convergence.

Oh. Uh, okay. I’ve only been here for like fifteen minutes, so I’ll be honest, I don’t really have much stake in this world or anyone in it, and hitting everyone here with a bad bout of amnesia isn’t great, but when your apocalyptic stakes are equivalent in effect to the CTE suffered by your average NFL quarterback it’s not exactly inspiring strong motivation.

But, whatever, I suppose as we explore this space we’ll learn more about these people and this world and I’ll grow fond of Convergence Station and want to save my memories of its wonder and whimsy.

This does not happen. Here is a summation of the major character events I experience in Convergence Station.

My mom and I walk into a room close to the entrance to Convergence Station and watch a short animated movie featuring characters we don’t know doing things we don’t understand. I realize, just now, writing this, that we walked into the ending of the story, approximately 40 feet from the entrance, about fifteen minutes in to our time there. In the moment, I have no idea what’s going on here, and mostly just ignore this, moving on to a room full of alien gophers. Why the fuck would you place the ending of the story in a room 40 feet from the entrance.

Wandering around C-Street, I find an apartment directory, which is dialable! I punch in a few numbers from the directory at random, and am greeted with short, contextless movies of characters I don’t know. One of them doesn’t even turn to look at the camera. Another one talks for a bit, but they’re not subtitled and the room is loud, so I have no idea what they’re saying. I abandon the directory.

We collect the first of the four main memories, the story of a Denver bus driver who finds a portal to another dimension and drives her bus into the Convergence. She has a cat. I don’t really know what her whole deal is other than “is a bus driver, finds portal”. The cat has more personality.

We see an informational video from the head of QDOT. He is comically evil. He literally has horns.

We collect the second memory. There’s some murmuring priests and something about a big organ. I explored the space we found this memory in, I have no fucking clue what this priesthood or this organ is about.

The whistleblower reveals their identity. I do not know who this person is, but it’s framed like it’s supposed to be important. I think I recognize her from the ending.

My mom and I get no more character moments at all for forty minutes. We look at each other when we realize we’ve looped back to the entrance, and decide to hit the gift shop and go.

Convergence Station is ultimately sold as an interactive exhibition depicting a place, and for better or worse and unlike something like an Omega Mart, it has elected to specifically depict an inhabited place, in parts a city. This is supposed to be a place people live and form memories, I’m supposed to care that the inhabitants of Convergence Station are at risk of losing their memories. They run fake news programs on the TVs showing the current events of this world and talk about upcoming fake sports games between rival teams across the Convergence. But I do not give a shit about any of this because there’s no characters here.

To be clear here, this is not necessarily a plea for Disney-style character actors to walk around going “Good morrow fair space traveler, I am Dunko Chuggins, welcome to my Space Restaurant!”, but I do think there’s a reason that other attempts at creating fully immersive installation spaces (such as Disney’s Galaxy’s Edge) does have them. I think the thing that really elevates the verisimilitude of these sorts of installations is the weaving of character plots into the world, giving you something human and emotional to latch onto as you explore.

There are a lot of ways to implement this, as many ways as there are ways to see the traces of real people in the real world. The spaces people live in grow to resemble them, decor speaks to the personality of the decorator. One’s actions in a space naturally create ephemera, like the groove of your ass left in your favorite chair. There was none of that in Convergence Station, no characters, no performers of action, nothing to elevate “this room full of a bunch of random shit” into a place where stories take place.

I explored all of the worlds of Convergence Station, and all of them made vague gestures of containing cultures or peoples or civilizations, but none of them were there. I couldn’t name a single character that lives in Convergence Station, I have no idea what their goals are, what they like, what they dislike.

Instead, all of the worldbuilding to find mostly came in the form of stagnant, stale facts. There is living slime on the walls. This forest is from the fifth dimension. Here’s some art. Whatever, dude.

Because of this, I really didn’t care about the plot being woven in the memories, because I didn’t care about the characters, and I didn’t really care about the world, because by all accounts it wanted to be an inhabited world, but it wasn’t inhabited, plain and simple. There were no fingerprints of character scattered throughout, and because there were no characters in the space, there were no stories in the space either.

It was just, ultimately, a bunch of rooms full of random shit.

Wow this way of doing it is so much easier lol.

Mental Blocks

So, at the end of the last iterative cycle of mapgen, I came to the conclusion that using a singular space of the map as the atomic unit during procedural map generation was, to use the technical terms, stinky and bad. For any playable-size map, the runtime complexity of my mapgen algorithms led to the whole thing chugging like Thomas with a hangover, and it also led to really bizarrely shaped maps that didn’t really feel like a city.

This iteration, I decided the first step I should take is to reconsider the fundamental unit used in generation from the space to a block. Programmatically, a block is an NxN collection of spaces, and the objects contained therein, which can be gridded together to former a larger space. Design-wise, a block is a simulacra of a city block: a unit of space defined by the four streets which encapsulate it which contains streets, buildings, people, landmarks, etc.

The move to blocks naturally leads itself to dramatic gains in algorithmic performance. Since they serve as abstractions of large sections of the game map, random map generation can be performed with a proportionally much smaller number of blocks than spaces, meaning that algorithmic inefficiencies which proved fatal in the old logic are now easily swept under the rug. If you want a 1000 space by 1000 space game map, processing it space-by-space required the handling of one million spaces, enough to potentially turn into a slog in iterative algorithms. However, if you divide that map up into 100 space by 100 space blocks, suddenly we have a 10 block by 10 block game map, and retooling those old algorithms to work on a basis of blocks means they only have a total of 100 blocks to deal with, a reduction of the problem space by a factor of 10,000, which is pretty fuckin’ good if I do say so myself.

The use of blocks will also help down the line (implementation outside the scope of this post, but definitely coming) with map streaming, a commonplace practice of conserving memory-usage in open world games like this one.

In a naiive approach, one might simply load the entirety of a game’s open world at once as soon as the game is launched (this is technically impossible for high-fidelity 3D open world games like your modern Rockstar or Bethesda game, but hypothetically doable for something as small as Ascetic, so let’s humor the idea). However, on top of this requiring a massive consumption of space, in a simulation-heavy game such as Ascetic, having all of the map loaded at once means you’ll be running those simulation tasks, such as evaluating NPC AI actions based on their environment, for literally everything in the game, hogging valuable processor cycles.

Instead, most games opt to stream their maps in based on proximity to the player, essentially freezing all of the game world except that which the player is either currently interacting with, or within their near range. Consider the below diagram:

In this example, the hastily-drawn-with-a-laptop-trackpad pink dot is the player. Only the 3x3 grid of game map, centered upon them and shaded in green, is loaded, with the various “living” systems of the game being tracked and simulated. Everything in white is essentially in cold-storage, not being tracked at all as it is currently irrelevant to the current game-state. As the player moves into the block north of them, the spaces they are moving away from are de-loaded and put back into cold-storage (drawn in red), while the spaces they are moving towards get loaded in to replace them (drawn in yellow). For a AAA example, check out this GIF of a similar concept called frustum culling (which is the same idea, but instead loads or unloads based on if something would be in view of the player) in Horizon: Zero Dawn.

Anyways, yeah, dividing the world map into blocks will help me implement something akin to this down the line. Let’s dive into some code and I can show how much easier this is then that old bullshit I was doing.

Generating The Blocks

world_size = game_constants.size_world
initial_block_size = game_constants.initial_block_size

if initial_block_size > world_size:
    raise ValueError("Size of initial starting landmass cannot be larger than size of initial map")

world_fill_percentage = game_constants.world_size_percentage

filled_spaces = []

#1. Instantiate an empty grid of blocks, then fill with the initial blob
world_map = [[0 for x in range(world_size)] for y in range(world_size)]
center_fill_count = world_size - initial_block_size
for n in range(floor(center_fill_count/2), len(world_map) - ceil(center_fill_count/2)):
    for m in range(floor(center_fill_count/2), len(world_map) -    ceil(center_fill_count/2)):
        world_map[n][m] = 1
        filled_spaces.append((n, m))

So, our logic starts somewhat similarly to how it did previously, by first reading in parameters from our game config on the total size of the game world world_size and the percentage of the world we want filled world_fill_percentage. Remember, these now represent blocks, not spaces, so a world_size of N represents a game world of NxN blocks, or (N*M)x(N*M) spaces, where M is the edge length in spaces of a single block.

We also have an extra bit here, initial_block_size. This ties into another logical change I made in this implementation: instead of filling the world and whittling it down to the desired size like I did last time, we’re instead going to start with a really small initial landmass in the center and build out. This means I get to skip all of the island detection stuff that I had to mess with in the last implementation. initial_block_size is the size of the square of blocks in the middle of the map that will be initialized to filled, and we have a quick check there to make sure it doesn’t exceed the size of the whole map.

We then instantiate the map, again starting off just by using an integer value to represent the state of a given block (0 being “nothing’s here”). We then do a little bit of math to determine where our initial blob of filled blocks should go given the size of the map and the initial_block_size, and toggle all of those blocks to a value of 1 (the value for “city block”).

You’ll also note that when I fill a block, I’m appending its coordinate to a filled_spaces list. A couple operations down the line only need to be done to blocks that have something in them, so by maintaining this (relatively memory light) list as we generate the map, I save myself the work of having to identify if blocks are filled or not later.

#2. Append new blocks randomly onto the edges of the playable game space
goal_world_size = ceil((world_size ** 2) * world_fill_percentage)

while len(filled_spaces) < goal_world_size:
    space_to_build_upon = choice(filled_spaces)
    direction_to_build = randrange(0, 4)

    if direction_to_build == 0:
        new_space = (space_to_build_upon[0], space_to_build_upon[1] + 1)

    elif direction_to_build == 1:
        new_space = (space_to_build_upon[0], space_to_build_upon[1] - 1)

    elif direction_to_build == 2:
        new_space = (space_to_build_upon[0] + 1, space_to_build_upon[1])

    elif direction_to_build == 3:
        new_space = (space_to_build_upon[0] - 1, space_to_build_upon[1])

    if new_space not in filled_spaces and new_space[0] in range(0, world_size) and new_space[1] in range(0, world_size):
        world_map[new_space[0]][new_space[1]] = 1
        filled_spaces.append(new_space)

Now, from our initial blob of blocks, we build outwards. We do a quick calculation to figure out how many blocks we should fill by the end of mapgen (which also means we can compare that number to the length of filled_spaces to make a really simple loop terminator).

Then, until we have the number of blocks we need, we simply randomly select a block from filled_spaces, randomly select one of the cardinal directions from that block, and if that adjacent block isn’t filled and is in the map, we fill it!

Is this efficient? Hell no, there’s gonna be a lot of loops wasted on attempting to fill blocks which cannot be filled or don’t exist and failing, but also, I don’t care! The newly shrunk size of our problem space means I really don’t care about those inefficiencies, and don’t think they’ll meaningfully impact our runtime (but if I do need to shave milliseconds down the line, here’s a perfectly acceptable place to do so).

Edging For Fun And Profit

This next step requires a little bit of preamble (although it isn’t actually that complicated).

Conceptually, in order to make sure all of the game map fits together the way I want it to, I’ll be designing all of the city blocks in such a way that their edges double as roads. That way, when I fill the grid of them together, they will naturally generate a gridded road system which spans the entire city and helps stitch the entire thing together, making it look a little more cohesive. I can even fill in some extra roads within a single block to vary the cityscape a little bit, as so long as I maintain the edge roads, it should all connect together.

However, framing all of my blocks in these sort of half-streets doesn’t work if that block is on the edge of the city, adjacent to an empty space. Doing so leaves that outward-facing edge this weird sort of half-street, split down the middle. As a result, I need to define a sort of “in-between” sort of block, one which isn’t a full city block, but needs to essentially stitch together the city block on one or more of its sides with the empty blocks on the other. Moreover, multiple versions of this edge-stitcher block are needed, depending on the exact shape of edge it is adjacent to. Luckily, we can use the fact that we are currently storing all of our blocks as integers to our advantage here.

#3. Identify spaces on the boundaries of the created land-mass, identifying what kind of edge they are for later population
for x in range(world_size):
    for y in range(world_size):
        if (x, y) not in filled_spaces:
            bit_flags = 0

            # Check each neighbor and, if it exists, flip the corresponding flag bit
            if (x+1, y) in filled_spaces: # Below
                bit_flags += 2
            if (x-1, y) in filled_spaces: # Above
                bit_flags += 4
            if (x, y+1) in filled_spaces: # Right
                bit_flags += 8
            if (x, y-1) in filled_spaces: # Left
                bit_flags += 16
                                   
            world_map[x][y] = bit_flags

Ah, shit, I need to explain to you how binary works.

How Binary Works

The number system you are most used to is what we call a decimal numbering system: that is, it increments a digit whenever exceed a power of 10. So, for example, 0 through 9 are all one-digit numbers, but when you increment 9 to 10, you’ve reached a power of 10 (that is, 10 to the first), and thus your value spills over into the next digit column and you reset the last one to 0. More generally, a number of digits ABCD is equivalent to a value of A times 10 to the third plus B times 10 to the second plus C times 10 to the first plus D times 10 to the zeroeth. So, if you have 9341, that number is equal to:

(9 * (10^3)) + (3 * (10^2)) + (4 * (10 ^1)) + (1 * (10^1))
(9 * 1000) + (3 * 100) + (4 * 10) + (1 * 1)
9000 + 300 + 40 + 1
9341

This is self-evident to the point of ludicrousness when dealing with decimal numbers, but sometimes we want to use a counting system with a base other than 10. For instance, in the realm of computers, the funamental unit of memory is a bit, which can only be in a state of “on” or “off”, and thus if we want to represent numbers in such a system we use a base of 2 instead of 10, which is what binary is.

So, take the binary number 1001. We can determine its value the same way we did 9341, just by swapping out the base of 10 for a 2.

(1 * (2^3)) + (0 * (2^2)) + (0 * (2^1)) + (1 * (2^0))
(1 * 8) + (0 * 4) + (0 * 2) + (1 * 1)
8 + 0 + 0 + 1
9

So, binary 1001 is equal to decimal (or, if you prefer, regular) 9. We could increment this number by 1 to 1010, which is 10, and then again to 1011, which is 11, and so on, eventually maxing out the fourth digit and needing a new column, leading to 10000, which is 16.

Why Did I Just Teach You Binary

So, back to the code block.

#3. Identify spaces on the boundaries of the created land-mass, identifying what kind of edge they are for later population
for x in range(world_size):
    for y in range(world_size):
        if (x, y) not in filled_spaces:
            bit_flags = 0

            # Check each neighbor and, if it exists, flip the corresponding flag bit
            if (x+1, y) in filled_spaces: # Below
                bit_flags += 2
            if (x-1, y) in filled_spaces: # Above
                bit_flags += 4
            if (x, y+1) in filled_spaces: # Right
                bit_flags += 8
            if (x, y-1) in filled_spaces: # Left
                bit_flags += 16
                                   
            world_map[x][y] = bit_flags

One of the nice things about binary is that, if you want to manage a variety of two-state conditions (that is, things that can only be one way or another), a simple, compact way you can represent all of those conditions at once is by using a binary number and associating each column (or bit, if you will) of the number with one of those conditions.

That’s precisely what I’m doing here. So, what I’m trying to do is identify which of those blocks not currently filled are adjacent to one or more edges of the filled blocks, and note specifically where the adjacencies lie, so that I may fill the block with content so as to better mesh with the city as generated.

Towards this goal, I give each of these blocks a five digit binary number, and toggle each column between 1 and 0 based on if the block is adjacent to a filled block in that direction. The lower edge is given the second column or bit (2^1, or 2), the top edge is given the third (2^2, or 4), the right edge the fourth (8), and the left edge the fifth (16).

You might notice that I’m not using that far-right first column, the ones place. That’s because I’m reserving the numbers 0 and 1 in the map for totally empty blocks and filled city blocks, respectively, so I don’t want to also use those values to represent one of these edge blocks, so that bit is off-limits.

So, if you want an example, imagine an empty block has a filled city block to its north and east, like so:

When I check that empty space, using the logic above, its value will be equal to 12, as the above and right edges are adjacent to filled city spaces. 12 in binary is 01100, which means that, down the line, if I want to see if this particular space has a northern neighbor, all I need to do is check to see if that third column has a 1 in it, the rest of the number is totally irrelevant. 5 unique states of data are all able to be stored, without interfering with each other, in a single number with up to 32 different states of configuration. If I need more, all I’d need to do is add a single extra column to the number, and I’ll double the number of states I can assume.

Once we generate this state-storing number for a given space, it gets reinserted as its value in the world_map.

The Space Between Us

I’ve been throwing around the words “blank” or “empty” to refer to spaces that aren’t being filled with city blocks, but the more I think of it, the more I think that verbage shouldn’t necessarily be correct. A city is not literally an island, and I think it instead would lead to some far more interesting design space if instead of filling those “empty” spaces with a literal, untraversable nothing, if instead I filled them more with the poetic nothing: the sticks, the boonies, more of the road trip-vernacular version of nothing.

This opens up some extremely interesting design space for me. I can have these city outskirts serve as a sort of staging area for player’s runs, being a low-difficulty external area in which the player starts and can prepare to enter the city proper, filled with hostiles and dangers as it is, once they’ve collected some resources (and, in early runs, some game sense). It also literally allows the player to tackle the city from multiple angles, as they may circumnavigate the city through the outskirts until they find the exact spot they wish to enter and begin their would-be assault.

It also just gives me a little bit more possibility space in the world and narrative design. When the Big City is filled with eldritch gods and their worshippers and dark magic and monsters and all sorts of crazy shit like that, what is driven out towards its outskirts? The surroundings of a city are a lot of things: it contains the less-than-glamorous infrastructure the city needs to survive but doesn’t want within its borders, it frequently contains a city’s working class, irrevocably bound to the city but unable to afford it, and with big enough cities it frequently contains its opposite, driven out and calcified against the city’s prevailing ideology (my lovely home of Seattle, bastion of liberalism and leftism as it is, is surrounded by towns which are, to use the political jargon, chockablock with racists). What do all of those things look like for a city filled with literal monsters. Is it a bastion of sanity and normalcy, or is it full of the people so crazy that even the crazy people don’t want to associate with them? Maybe both?

Next Steps

With where we’re at now, we have a layout of the entire game map in terms of blocks, and we know, at least vaguely, what should be in those blocks. The immediate next step is to take that map of blocks and translate it into actual traversable game world: take each block, generate what that block should actually contain, on an individual-space scale, and save that generation in such a place that it can be streamed in on the fly during gameplay.

As a part of that, we should once again rebuild the Neighborhood generation: determine where the 5 Gods our player hopes to kill are, and extend their influence over the map, using that to determine precisely what kinds of things to spawn where.

We’re also going to need to define those things that can actually be spawned: characters, items, buildings, geographic features, and the like. This, frankly, is going to be a massive proportion of the design work, as games such as these live and die on the variety they can produce from the individual atoms of their game content, each enemy and item a sort of Lego brick that the procedural generation algorithms tear down and rebuild every run to generate something hopefully novel enough to keep the player’s attention.

On top of that, as we start thinking through all of these things that we generate, we want to start thinking about what I like to call systemic dimensions of interaction, or more plainly, the various traits of all of the things in the game world that I want to track for the purpose of systems-driven gameplay. The greater fidelity I render all of these things in, not graphical fidelity but their systemic properties, the (hypothetically) more complex systemic interactions can emerge naturally through gameplay.

For example, one dimension of interaction I definitely want to include is flammability. Fire’s fun, it does a lot of crazy shit, and if properly implemented, can result in a lot of very interesting game moments. Wooden barrier in your way? Burn it down! Need to deal with a large group of low-health enemies? Start a big ol’ fire! Imagine the reaction a player will have when they approach a boss battle and see him flinging fireballs, and remember an off-handed comment that some shopkeeper made an hour ago that their healing potions, the ones the player bought 30 of before this fight, are super flammable. Do you huck them all in a corner? Do you just try not to get hit? Do you start hurling them like molotov cocktails? Hell, maybe you’re feeling a little lucky, and hurl yourself at the boss like a human powder keg, hoping you make it out of the blast better than he does.

I find this sort of systemic design the most interesting part of the entire field of game development, the place where game design and player ingeneuity form a feedback loop with each other to produce increasingly interesting situations, like if you set up an ant farm and then came back to see that the ants accidentally simulated a mass pandemic event, or started a religion, or had somehow built another, smaller ant farm inside of the ant farm.

In Fact It’s So Compelling I’m Putting This Project On Ice And Coming Back To It Later LMAO

It’s the new year, commonly a time when people reevaluate their goals and set a guiding philosophy for themselves for the next 12 months. I don’t really do New Year’s Resolutions (I find that creating such a large timebox for lofty goals often results in a sense usually around April or May that I’ve “fallen behind” on my goals in such a way that I need to “catch up”, usually an effort so large due to the size of the goal that I just absolutely give up on the whole thing, take the L, and accomplish nothing resembling the goals I set. I might actually write a post soon about my new habit-tracking, er, habit), but what I do instead is pretty frequently do a bit of self-reflecting and thing about what I want to get done, and what I want to do for the near future is work on developing my ability to finish.

I tweeted about this in response to Much Better Game Developer Than Me Rami Ismail (also, go check out Rami’s stuff, all of his and his co-developers’ games are incredible, he’s given dozens of super fascinating talks, is a fantastic advocate for Muslim and Middle Eastern representation in video games including the absolutely deplorable state of the use of Arabic in games, and has a wonderful substack of his own), and he gave me this extremely good piece of advice.

Anyone who has made the absolute mistake of talking with me about the stuff I’m working on knows I suck absolute ass at finishing a project. I’ll change projects again and again and again, but I’ll never finish them, just lose interest and move on from one to another to another, slowly building a sort of Island of Misfit Toys in my wake, things I spent a month on and tossed aside.

And yes I’m aware that I am doing that again, right now with Ascetic, but with good reason. That last section about cool systems and procgen and emergent gameplay, all of that is scope, all of that is time I need to spend, skills I need to develop, knowledge I need to learn, and as it stands right now, I can do all of that. I do all of that a lot. What I am absolutely awful at doing is finishing a project, and that’s the skill I want and need to develop right now, and Ascetic is not a project that’s going to let me practice that skill as much as I want.

So, Ascetic is, hopefully, the last new arrival to my Island of Misfit Toys. I’ll come back for it, I find this idea too compelling, but to do it justice, there’s one skill in my skillset that is absolutely not up to snuff, and that’s my ability to cross that finish line. So, I’m developing that now.

Up Next

I’m going to continue to post regular devlogs, but they’re going to be for the new set of projects I have for myself, and projects plural is key there. If I want to develop my Finishing Stuff Muscle, I have to do that through repeated use, and that means taking on small projects, being mindful of pacing and scope, and releasing them.

This also means a bit more learning on my end: I’ve historically stuck to fairly powerful but also high-investment game development architectures, either programming games entirely from scratch (such as Ascetic) or using the extremely beefy but also extremely fiddly Unity.

No more of that, that’s standing in the way of me being Done. This year, I’ll be embracing tools which help me to iterate and release games faster. I’ll be working in Godot, a game engine and development tool which is generally less powerful than Unity in exchange for a far greater ease of use, and I’ll be embracing highly specialized development tools like GB Studio, PICO-8 and, fuck it, maybe even RPG Maker, tools which abstract away a lot of the underlying coding of game development, trading away control and the possibility space of development in exchange for ease of use.

With these together, I’m gonna make games, a lot of games, a lot of small games. Honestly, probably a lot of weird, shitty, broken little games, because I’ve realized recently that I really, really love little, weird, shitty, broken games, and that I should make some too. Maybe I’ll write on here about some of my favorite little weird shitty broken games, too.

When this exercise is done, or perhaps more accurately once I’ve been doing it for a while, because ideally this is a kind of development I want to keep doing in perpetuity, I’ll have a great sense of scope control, a greater ability to call something done, a greater ability to call something good-enough and move on, and most importantly of all, a greater rigor and regularity in how I work on games which will allow me to make constant progress on my projects towards a visible end, a rigor and regularity I will be happy to bring back to projects like this.

A High Level Primer

So, the premise of Ascetic is sort of a strange one, a kind of riff on Lovecraftian-style cosmic horror, just dragged a little bit more into the spotlight in a way a bit more aligned with something like a Dishonored.

Ascetic takes place in a sort of alternate-1920sish? America, one where the United States was built on a North American continent that was awash with unknowable, eldritch gods, beings of incomprehensible power and indecypherable motivation which peppered the landscape. Instead of defeating these gods or hiding from them, America was built in partnership with them, with cities canonizing these beings as their patron gods, offering them favor and worship in exchange for their power and protection. Thus, a modern America has been built with these strange beings always in the wings, skyscrapers erected over shrines to Great Old Ones.

The problem is that there wasn’t enough worship to go around when the initial terms of this deal were struck, so some of these gods, the less savory ones, now referred to collectively as The Cabal, got left out to dry: no shrines, no canonization, no state-mandated worship, diddly squat. These gods reside in the shadows, spiteful towards their brethren which got the sweet end of this deal, and their small, devoted, illegal gathering of followers, constantly set out on holy quests to strike down the City Gods as punishment for their betrayal.

This is the general premise of Ascetic of the Cabal. You are one of the followers of this Cabal of forsaken gods, and your mission is to go into a great City, home to 5 City Gods, and in a single life strike them all down, clearing the way for the Cabal to take over. In video game terms, in a single life, you must find and defeat 5 bosses in a procedurally-generated open city, and on death you lose all of your items and progress (generally, more on that another time), the City gets scrambled up and repopulated, and you try again ‘til you do it.

So, that’s the premise, now let’s talk about building that there City.

Disclaimer

The process I am about to describe is, at least I think for the goals of this development, wrong. This was my first pass at these mechanics and I think they were the wrong one. However, I think chronicling what I did, why it’s wrong, and what I have learned and what to do instead, I think is interesting. Where a particular thing I did is particularly wrong in some way, I’ll leave a footnote.

The Goals of Map Development

So, my goal with map generation (henceforth I’m gonna refer to all of the playable game-space as the “map”) was to create something suitably approximating a mid-sized American city, populated with a street grid, buildings, residents, and the other ephemera of a city (like, I dunno, fountains and benches and stuff).

Rather than just generating a single colossal map that the entire game takes place in, it seemed beneficial to chunk the map into subsections I’ve taken to referring to as Neighborhoods. I figure this division has benefits in multiple dimensions of the design:

1. It serves as a solid logical division of the game space. I can assign a single God to a single Neighborhood, and have that be its “domain”. In doing so, I can seed the random generation of that Neighborhood in such a way that it feels of the associated God (as an example, if a God of Drunken Revelry is based out of a certain Neighborhood, I can tip the scales on the procedural generation to populate that neighborhood with more bars, drug dealers, drunk people, and booze)

2. It makes things more convenient from a programmatic sense. I only need to have a single Neighborhood loaded at a time, and thus only needed to keep track of the contents of one part of the city at a time, rather than the entire city. This means I only have to keep track of 1/Nth of AI-controlled characters, only need to render 1/Nth of the map, etc, where N is the number of Neighborhoods (assuming approximately equal distribution of game elements across the Neighborhood).

As far as the division of the game world goes, it’d look something like this:

Each Neighborhood is a separate space in the game, connected to each other by loads. The net sum of them logically forms the “overworld” of the game, although such a space does not exist independent of the constituent Neighborhoods. Each Neighborhood also contains an arbitrary number of buildings which are also independent spaces from the Neighborhood in which they exist, connected by a load.

So, that was the goal, so here was the methodology I set out it with filling out:

1. Generate a single, “overworld” land mass randomly. This mass needed to be a single, contiguous piece of game map (2D, luckily) that I could split up for later

2. Divide this single chunk of landmass into Neighborhoods

3. Earmark points between these Neighborhoods as “gates”, transition points through which the player can move from one Neighborhood to another

Generating The Overworld Mass

The first step was just to create a big-ol blob of land that I could then get to hacking and slashing. Here’s the Python code block. If you can’t read code, or you just don’t want to waste a bunch of time reading a big block of spaghetti, just scroll past it, I’ll walk through it right afterwards.

world_size = game_constants.size_world
ws_percentage = game_constants.world_size_percentage

#1. Instantiate a square world of N x N, where n=size_world
world_map = [[True for x in range(world_size)] for y in range(world_size)]

#2. Create a deletion candidates list of tuples, featuring every edge space (and corners twice)
deletion_candidates = []
for n in range(world_size):
    deletion_candidates.append((n,0))
    deletion_candidates.append((0, n))
    deletion_candidates.append((world_size-1, world_size-1-n))
    deletion_candidates.append((world_size-1-n, world_size-1))
        
#3. Delete spaces by randomly selecting candidates out of deletion_candidates, then enqueuing their neighbors
spaces_to_delete = ceil((world_size * world_size) * (1 - ws_percentage))
for x in range(spaces_to_delete):
    space_selected = choice(deletion_candidates)
    world_map[space_selected[0]][space_selected[1]] = False
    deletion_candidates.remove(space_selected)

    if space_selected[0] > 0 and world_map[space_selected[0]-1][space_selected[1]]:
        deletion_candidates.append((space_selected[0]-1, space_selected[1]))

    if space_selected[0] < world_size-1 and world_map[space_selected[0]+1][space_selected[1]]:
        deletion_candidates.append((space_selected[0]+1, space_selected[1]))

    if space_selected[1] > 0 and world_map[space_selected[0]][space_selected[1]-1]:
        deletion_candidates.append((space_selected[0], space_selected[1]-1))

     if space_selected[1] < world_size-1 and world_map[space_selected[0]][space_selected[1]+1]:
        deletion_candidates.append((space_selected[0], space_selected[1]+1))

Alright, so let’s step through this step by step. First bit’s pretty simple:

world_size = game_constants.size_world
ws_percentage = game_constants.world_size_percentage

#1. Instantiate a square world of N x N, where n=size_world
world_map = [[True for x in range(world_size)] for y in range(world_size)]

game_constants is an external file of random game config data that I’m importing in. world_size is an integer N, such that I want a game map to be generated starting from an NxN square of grid spaces. world_size_percentage is a decimal between 0 and 1 representing how much of that NxN grid I want to survive the approaching roughing-up of this map. It’ll come back into play later.

For now, I start by instantiating world_map, a 2-dimensional matrix of boolean values of size NxN. I just set all of them equal to True, indicating that there is playable game space there.

(As an aside, if you’re unfamiliar with this weird fuckery notation I have going on there, may I introduce you to Python List Comprehensions, an absolutely sexy language feature of Python which lets you generate long lists (or even objects!) of data from simple logical relations. This basically reads as [make a list of world_size [make a list of world_size “True”s]s])

Basically, for a world_size of 20, it generates this, where every O represents a space that currently exists in the game world:

Next up is this bit:

#2. Create a deletion candidates list of tuples, featuring every edge space (and corners twice)
deletion_candidates = []
for n in range(world_size):
    deletion_candidates.append((n,0))
    deletion_candidates.append((0, n))
    deletion_candidates.append((world_size-1, world_size-1-n))
    deletion_candidates.append((world_size-1-n, world_size-1))

So, what I’m doing here is creating a list of deletion candidates, spaces from this big NxN blog of spaces that I want to remove from the shape, thus sort of carving this big square away into, hopefully, a more organic looking shape. I create a list, and using this for-loop, I insert into it every single space on the edge of this square as a starting set.

Eagle-eyed readers (or just those who read the comment), will notice that I’m using a list, which can include the same item multiple times, and not a set, in which every element must be unique from one another, and, as a result of the way I’m initializing this list of candidates, the corners will be included twice. I did this on purpose! I wanted to favor generating a sort of rounded shape and try to reduce the number of bits that spike or jut out of the main blob, so I figured I’d have every single deletion candidate represented S times in the list, where is the number of “exposed” edges it has. As the map gets whittled away at, spaces that get sort of carved around will be more likely to be removed themselves.1

#3. Delete spaces by randomly selecting candidates out of deletion_candidates, then enqueuing their neighbors
spaces_to_delete = ceil((world_size * world_size) * (1 - ws_percentage))
for x in range(spaces_to_delete):
    space_selected = choice(deletion_candidates)
    world_map[space_selected[0]][space_selected[1]] = False
    deletion_candidates.remove(space_selected)

Now we get chopping! Note that we generate the number of spaces we want to shave off of our square here by just taking the inversion of the world_size_percentage from earlier and multiplying it by the total number of spaces in the grid. If your world_size is 10, you have a 10x10 grid of 100 spaces, then if your world_size_percentage is 0.6, then you want to remove 40% of the spaces, or 40 spaces.

So, spaces_to_delete number of times, we use python’s choice function to randomly select a space from our deletion candidates, mark it as False (indicating that it is no longer playable game space), and removing it from deletion candidates.2 Thanks to Python's implementation of choice, this is O(XlogN), where X is the number of deletions we make and N is the size of world_size, so it could be a lot worse, but also not great tbh.

A Brief Lil’ Aside About Big(O)

If you aren’t a programmer, or if you are a programmer but didn’t receive a formal university Comp Sci education (smart!), you might not be familiar with the concept of Big(O) notation.

Basically, in particular when it comes to building algorithms, as I am doing here, building an algorithm of random game map generation, we as programmers have a lot of possible ways of doing things, and the main criterion we generally evaluate these methods with, although far from the only, is how fast our algorithm does the thing we want it to, or more accurately how the speed of our algorithm scales to the size of the problem we give it.

If you’re writing an algorithm to, say, sort a list of numbers, pretty much any solution you come up with will sort a list of 10 numbers nigh-instantly; modern computers are pretty fast, after all. However, when you reach a list of a million numbers, suddenly certain algorithms that scale poorly will take forever, whereas optimized algorithms will only take the absolute minimum amount of time it needs to.

While you can run exact tests of speed and take precise measurements, a lot of it has to do with fiddly bits unrelated to the algorithm itself, like the hardware we’re running on, so as a convention we usually describe an algorithm’s speed scaling factor in a sort of scribbled-on-bar-napkin sort of approximation called big-O, which represents a worst-case runtime.

To wrap your head around it, here some example operations you might do to a list of numbers, and their big-O speeds.

• Grabbing the first number out of a list is O(1), or a constant time operation. No matter how long a list of numbers is, the time it takes to grab the very first one is exactly the same every single time.3

• Finding a given item out of an unsorted list is O(n), or linear time. Worst case scenario, it’s the very last item you check, or it’s not even in the list, and so you have to check every other item in the list once to make sure it’s not the one you are looking for. 100 numbers in the list, worst-case, you gotta check all 100 of them to verify that the item you’re looking for isn’t there

• A lot of really shitty algorithms you could use to sort a list of numbers are O(n^2), or quadratic runtime, or absolute dogass. For instance, many people’s first intuitive idea on how to sort a list is to find the lowest item in the list, move it to the front, then find the second lowest item, move it next, and so on. This algorithm is called “bubble sort”, as the lower items “bubble” up to the top of the list, and it sucks shit on a computer. Consider the worst-case, in which the list is sorted in the exact opposite order you want it sorted (so, high-to-low, in this example). In this case, you need to traverse the entire list to find the next lowest number of the unsorted numbers at the very end of the list, every time. Traversing the entire list of length N for every single placement, for N placements, is N x N or N^2 operations4

• Some algorithms run in worst-case O(n!) runtime, or factorial runtime. These algorithms are mostly created by computer scientists as jokes, because we don’t get out a lot. For instance, you have bogosort, a joke sorting algorithm which attempts to sort a list by just randomly shuffling it and seeing if it accidentally sorted it, the programming equivalent of throwing a deck of cards at a wall, picking all of the cards off of the floor, checking to see if you accidentally sorted the deck, and repeating until you have

• Actually, that’s technically not 100% true. Bogosort is only O(n!) if you can’t repeat permutations, as that’s the number of permutations that exist of n elements. If you can repeat permutations, as you hypothetically could if you were truly randomizing them, you might just never sort the thing, no matter how short the list is.

Anyways, yeah, I add all of this just to say that my algorithm’s O(XlogN) runtime is, actually, pretty bad. We’ll get back to that later.

Anyways Back To The Algorithms

 if space_selected[0] > 0 and world_map[space_selected[0]-1][space_selected[1]]:
        deletion_candidates.append((space_selected[0]-1, space_selected[1]))

    if space_selected[0] < world_size-1 and world_map[space_selected[0]+1][space_selected[1]]:
        deletion_candidates.append((space_selected[0]+1, space_selected[1]))

    if space_selected[1] > 0 and world_map[space_selected[0]][space_selected[1]-1]:
        deletion_candidates.append((space_selected[0], space_selected[1]-1))

     if space_selected[1] < world_size-1 and world_map[space_selected[0]][space_selected[1]+1]:
        deletion_candidates.append((space_selected[0], space_selected[1]+1))

Oh god where was I. Right, this last bit of the square-trimming algorithm. Basically, after we have randomly selected a space for removal and removed it, we check all four of that space’s neighboring spaces to see if they A) exist (as they wouldn’t in the case of, say, the top-edge’s northern neighbor) and B) haven’t themselves been deleted yet. For each of those spaces that fits those criterion, they are now definitionally edges themselves and are added to deletion_candidates, potential victims of the following random selections.

So, we make so many random deletions from the edges of the shape until we have reduced the total landmass by the proportion we want. So, for our 20x20 world up there, when I give it a world_size_percentage of 0.6 (that is, I want 40% of it lopped off), it might leave me with something like this:

You can see we sliced up a fair bit of the landmass. The corners have, generally, been rounded away, and it even got in a bit deep there and gouged out some decent little inlets in the top middle and bottom right there. But, we have a couple problems!

Those two little zones there are islands: they’re not connected to the primary landmass, and I don’t want that, I want one big ol’ block of land I can divide later, so we need to get rid of them. This is one of those things that’s really easy for a human being to spot, but kind of a pain in the ass to tell a computer to do, so lemme explain what I do. I’m not going to post the whole code block, but the pseudocode looks like this.

put every space remaining into a big ol' set called unexplored_land
create an empty list of islands, each comprised of size 0 and an empty list of constituent spaces
instantiate largest_island to an empty island of size 0

while there are still spaces in unexplored_land:
    instatiate a new island of size 0 and an empty list of constituent spaces
    instantiate an empty queue of spaces to check
    pick a random-ass point from unexplored_land, put it in the queue
    while there are points in the queue:
        remove a point from the queue
        add it to the new island's consituent spaces
        increment the new island's size by 1
        add all of that point's neighbors that exist and are still in unexplored_land to the queue
    if new island is bigger than largest_island:
        delete all of the spaces in largest_island from the map
        set new island to be the new largest_island
    otherwise:
        delete all of the spaces from the new island from the map

Alright, so what’s going on here. I am essentially identifying islands using an algorithm called breadth-first search on random spaces of land in the map. I pick a random point on the map, then I essentially mark it as “belonging” to a given island, then I take every neighboring space to that one space that I haven’t checked yet and put it into a queue, a sort of “to explore” list. I then repeat the process with every single point in that “to explore” list until I have no more adjacent spaces to explore, having therefore explored all of the spaces contiguous to that first space I grabbed.

I then continue doing this as long as there is any land in the map I haven’t yet explored, keeping track of the largest of these islands I’ve explored. Whenever I finish exploring an island, if it’s the biggest one I’ve found so far, I keep it and destroy the last biggest one. If it isn’t, I destroy this one I just found, and keep looking. At the end, only the biggest island remains on the map. Here’s what that 20x20 looks like after doing this:

See? Those two little islands in the corners have gone the way of Bikini Atoll, having been blasted to shit straight off the map. Now we’re left with one big ol’ continuous landmass, and landmass generation is done.

This whole process isn’t actually that bad, runtime wise. In the worst-case (and in fact in the best-case too), we explore every space on the island precisely once to attribute it to one island or another. O(n), where n is the number of spaces in the map, and I don’t think there’s a way to do it where you don’t have to check every space, so I’m calling that a W.

There Goes The Neighborhood

So that’s a third of the work done, we have a big landmass, now we want to split it into Neighborhoods: discrete, continuous subsections of the map. How the hell do we do that?

Welp, here’s what I wrote. As before, lemme give you the whole code block, then I’ll walk through it step-by-step.

#1. Generate N random "home" points for N neighborhoods
num_neighborhoods = game_constants.number_of_neighborhoods
world_size = game_constants.size_world
neighborhood_cores = []

while len(neighborhood_cores) < num_neighborhoods:
    candidate = (randrange(0, world_size),randrange(0, world_size))
    if world_map[candidate[0]][candidate[1]]:
        conflicting_cores = [core for core in neighborhood_cores if dist(core, candidate) <= 4]
        if not conflicting_cores:
            neighborhood_cores.append(candidate)

#2. Create N sets which will contain the points located in each neighborhood
neighborhoods = [{"core": core, "points": [], "gates": []} for core in neighborhood_cores]

#3. Calculate the closest core to each space on the world map, and assign that point to the neighborhood associated with that point
for x in range(world_size):
    for y in range(world_size):
        if world_map[x][y]:
            closest_core = -1
            closest_core_distance = 100000000
            for n in range(num_neighborhoods):
                core_distance = dist((x,y), neighborhoods[n]["core"])
                if core_distance < closest_core_distance:
                    closest_core = n
                    closest_core_distance = core_distance
                    neighborhoods[closest_core]["points"].append((x,y))

Alright, so, what the fuck is this doing? Let’s find out.

#1. Generate N random "home" points for N neighborhoods
num_neighborhoods = game_constants.number_of_neighborhoods
world_size = game_constants.size_world
neighborhood_cores = []

This is some easy-peasy instantiation. We’re grabbing the number of neighborhoods we want to make from the game config, as well as the size N of the world (this code lives in a different function than the previous block, so we need to either do this, or save this value in the parent class, which, eh, feels redundant). We’re also instantiating a list called neighborhood_cores, what this is eventually going to do is hold a series of coordinates which will serve as the anchoring points for each of our neighborhoods.

while len(neighborhood_cores) < num_neighborhoods:
    candidate = (randrange(0, world_size),randrange(0, world_size))
    if world_map[candidate[0]][candidate[1]]:
        conflicting_cores = [core for core in neighborhood_cores if dist(core, candidate) <= 4]
        if not conflicting_cores:
            neighborhood_cores.append(candidate)

Now, this block of code is responsible for creating those anchoring points, and it definitely needs some work, but let’s take a look at what it does do.

So, the while loop basically ensures this process will repeat until we have a core for every single neighborhood. The process itself constitutes taking a random point from somewhere in the world map, and then checking if that point is usable game space (checking if it’s an “O” on one of the printouts I’ve been showing you, essentially). Then, it compares that point to all of the other points it’s already canonized as neighborhood cores, making sure it isn’t too close to any of them.

In this case, I’m using a hard-coded value of 4 for comparison. What I should do instead is use a value set in the config like all of the other values I’ve been pulling, like world_size, or even better, it should probably be cleverly derived from the world size in order to always be appropriately scaled to the world size, whatever it may be, but that requires tweaking to figure out the secret sauce for what that proportion should be and I’m too lazy to do that right now while I’m still prototyping, so hardcoded value it is.

Anyways, yeah, if the point we’ve sampled exists in the game map and is suitably far from every other core we’ve chosen, then the point is chosen as a core, and we repeat, until every neighborhood has a point to serve as its core.

#2. Create N sets which will contain the points located in each neighborhood
neighborhoods = [{"core": core, "points": [], "gates": []} for core in neighborhood_cores]

This is the instantiation of a data structure which will represent every neighborhood we create. It’s a list of neighborhood objects, each containing a core tuple, one of the points we just sampled above, a list of all of the points comprising the neighborhood (this will eventually also include the core, but doesn’t at init, we’ll get to that in a sec), and gates, which we’ll get back to in a sec.

#3. Calculate the closest core to each space on the world map, and assign that point to the neighborhood associated with that point
for x in range(world_size):
    for y in range(world_size):
        if world_map[x][y]:
            closest_core = -1
            closest_core_distance = 100000000
            for n in range(num_neighborhoods):
                core_distance = dist((x,y), neighborhoods[n]["core"])
                if core_distance < closest_core_distance:
                    closest_core = n
                    closest_core_distance = core_distance
                    neighborhoods[closest_core]["points"].append((x,y))

This code sucks lmao. The joys of prototyping! Sometimes you want to just get something working, so you build it the most absolutely smoothbrained way possible, knowing that the big-O of it is garbage, because you’re not even sure if you’re going to need it in a week, and leave optimizing ‘til later.

For all of this code, all this five-indent monstrosity is doing is iterating over every point in the map and, if it exists, checking which of the neighborhood cores it’s closest to and assigning that point to that neighborhood. That’s it! This is an absolutely hideous block of code to do that.56

With that, every single space in the map is assigned to a neighborhood, and the map is properly divided. Here’s what that looks like on our example map.

With a count of three neighborhoods, we see our neighborhood 0 has set up a little enclave in the top right there, whereas neighborhoods 1 and 2 have split the rest of the island more of less straight down the middle. Neat!

What I Would Do Next If This Was A Workable Solution

So, with neighborhoods drawn out, the next step would be to split this map up and take advantage of the chunked nature we just created.

Probably what that looks like is the following steps:

1. Before we pull all of these neighborhoods apart from each other, make notes on where we want to draw transition points in them to move from one neighborhood to another (this is where that gates field on the neighborhoods object comes into play, you’d find points along the edge of each neighborhood to act as doorways, and mark them there, as well as noting what neighborhood was on the other side)

2. Create a single parent object called overworld or something to hold references to all of the maps

3. Create new map objects representing each of the neighborhoods in isolation, with the coordinates of each space relocalized to a new (0,0) placed at the top left of each neighborhood, rather than the entire map

4. Randomly populate each neighborhood with game stuff

5. Build the rest of the game to only load and display whatever neighborhood you’re currently in at a time

Why I’m Not Doing Any Of That And Actually Most Of This Codebase Is Going Into That Warehouse The Ark of The Covenant Gets Put In At The End of Raiders of the Lost Ark

Having rapidly built all of this stuff out in the course of two days in a beachside coffee shop in Port Townsend, I ultimately came to the conclusion that this is definitely not how I should be building my worldmap. Three main reasons:

1. This is admittedly a problem that could be aided with some algorithm reevaluation, but a lot of my approaches here scale like shit to a larger game world. I’ve been showing a 20x20 game map in my examples, and even on a 100x100 map it generates relatively quickly, but on anything large enough for the game I’m envisioning (like, 10,000x10,000), it starts to chug, which, like, of course it does, it has to process a hundred million spaces for some of these steps. Again, some optimization for things like sampling random edge spaces for deletion, or for calculating neighborhood membership, could remedy that, but I’m not gonna because..

2. This map doesn’t really look like a city does it? Not really. It’s always kind of a weird spindly blob thing that looks more like an island than a city, which is interesting, but not really what I’m going for. In fact, if we think about how cities are formed in real life, we might start to realize another sort of shape makes far more sense, because…

3. Neighborhoods in real American cities aren’t really centered on focal points that radiate outwards, they are instead usually defined as an assemblage of blocks: buildings or collections of buildings contrained by the four-ish streets that form their edges. The road network, not distance from an arbitrary point, creates the layout of neighborhoods.

A Revelation, and Next Steps

These thoughts in concert happened to lead to my next hypothesis for map generation. Note that game design doesn’t necessarily have to be strictly subservient to the nature of the real world: my city doesn’t necessarily have to be built in the same way that a real city is, because at the end of the day it isn’t built like a real city, it’s built by a nerd on a computer. However, adopting a process reminiscent of the way real cities and neighborhoods form could, I hypothesize, solve some of my problems.

Here’s the idea for the new revision: instead of chipping the world away from one big block, assemble it out of a bunch of tiny blocks, which are, in this case, literal city blocks: squareish chunks of world map bordered with road on all four sides which can be arranged in a 2-dimensional grid to assemble both a world map and a grid-system road network.

Instead of randomly chipping away at the edges, we can build ourselves a library of shapes for edge blocks, allowing our procedural generation to randomly select one of these templates based on where in the larger grid this particular edge lies (if it’s a corner, a middle edge, kind of a peninsula, stuff like that).

Neighborhood calculation becomes much easier, as we can now assign neighborhood membership to entire blocks rather than to individual spaces, meaning instead of having to calculate membership for NxN spaces, we only have to do it for MxM blocks, where M is the world size of the map N divided by the edge size of a block B (and likely to be in the 10s or 100s rather than the, you know, millions).

We also no longer have big walls dividing all of our neighborhoods, which is good for verisimilitude, because few cities after ‘91 have weird big walls with gated checkpoints dividing their neighborhoods. One big open world!

And then, looking even further beyond, we can engage with the block as the atomic unit of map design. We can draw roads within a single block, knowing that we always have a grid over the entire map to fall back on. We can then assign buildings to these roads and populate the world and the city by block, rather than just randomly scattering shit across blob-shaped neighborhoods.

So, I’m gonna go back to the lab and write this up. I’ll keep you posted with the results!

Because I'm broken and my brain is wrong, I have a hard time getting myself to relax and enjoy the things I do unless I can mentally categorize it as some kind of trackable metric (although travel tends to avoid this fate, not that I was doing much traveling in 2020). As a result, every year I set myself goals for a certain number of games, movies, and books to finish before New Year's Eve, and this year I accomplished a first of actually meeting one of those goals: seeing credits roll on 30 video games new and old. I managed to just barely make this one, seeing the credits roll on Helltaker (a game that does not make this list, but is delightful, takes about an hour, and is free, so there's the shout out for that) and, in celebration, I'd like to take a bit of time to talk about the best stuff I played and the really interesting design that I was able to see.

Death Stranding

I included Death Stranding in my Best Games of the Decade list last year, but I technically didn't reach the game's incredible ending until January of this year, and my opinion, as I predicted, still hasn't changed: Death Stranding is one of the best video games ever made.

There are a lot of amazing things about Death Stranding, but for me the thing I find myself thinking about the most recently is the way Death Stranding really presents a new conceptualization of an open world as a design. In so many games, an open world is just a receptacle of stuff to do, a buffet that players must slog through in order to get to the content they want, hoping that players will find the act of wandering enjoyable enough unto itself that the game is justified in not simply just letting players launch any particular activity they want from a menu instead. Even games which might be thought to buck this trend don't really, they just spend a bit more care trying to make that wandering a bit more enjoyable, like the swinging in Marvel's Spider-Man, which an enjoyable enough process to make the traversal in that game interesting. Fundamentally, though, Spider-Man and Breath of the Wild and many of these other games still think about open worlds in fundamentally the same way: it's still a buffet of content that players engage with primarily for the content that lies within.

Death Stranding completely bucks that trend. There is no content or secrets or items or anything to be discovered in the post-Death Stranding America presented by this game, no treasure chests or secret bosses to uncover. Instead, Death Stranding's mechanical weight is focused on two completely distinct sources of fun: the fun of learning to navigate and traverse a fundamentally hostile landscape, and the fun of slowly engineering and building upon this landscape to make it less fundamentally hostile. The destination in Death Stranding is de-emphasized nearly to the point of irrelevance, it is the act of journeying that is the complete focus, and I hope we see more games with this mindset pick up the baton where Kojima and his team left it.

BoxBoxBoy

Why don't more people talk about BoxBoxBoy?! This series is so goddamn good it boggles my mind how infrequently it's spoken of.

The BoxBoy games are about the eponymous little square with eyes traversing a variety of puzzles using his ability to generate boxes out of his body, a setup that is so blisteringly simple but gives the games so much room to create fun and interesting puzzles.

There is seriously so much creative space that BoxBoxBoy! explores. You'll be creating your own platforms to traverse dangerous spike pits, building a box shield out of your own body to protect you from lasers, creating hooks and snakes of boxes to latch onto distant ledges or slide through narrow passages. BoxBoxBoy! is pure fun, and an excellent reminder of a fundamental of puzzle game design: when you start with a simple core to your game and build from it, you can easily find yourself creating a varied and interesting set of puzzles to fill a game (or 3!) with while still ensuring your player is easily ramped up into the difficulty.

Sunset Overdrive

A buddy of mine has been trying to get me to play Sunset Overdrive for quite a while now, and this year I finally broke down and downloaded it after getting Xbox Game Pass and finding it sitting there, tantalizingly free. Christian, you were right, this game is fucking phenomenal in all regards.

Sunset Overdrive is an open world game in the way that I mentioned above, a big open buffet of stuff to do all crammed into a big open world, but the thing that makes it so pleasant is how absolutely wonderful the movement is. Dubbed "bump and grind" by the developers, the unique movement systems in this game require you to use jumps timed perfectly after landing (bumps) and sliding around the many rails available in the world (grinds) to maintain your momentum lest you be pretty rapidly overwhelmed by the game's hordes of enemies, a system that manages to require a lot of active thought and planning moment-to-moment while also maintaining such a breakneck speed that my nearest point of comparison is probably Titanfall of all things. Like Titanfall, when you're really in that zen, where the perfect next move to make is just natural, Sunset Overdrive has this exhilarating sense of pace and movement that weaves through every aspect of the game, a feat that not even Insomniac's later Spider-Man games can match.

That part about "weaving through every aspect" is really the clincher there, and why I mention this game as being fantastic despite having just ragged on this style of open world game, like, 800 words ago. So many open world games view traversal and encounters as two separate things, oil and water, and never the twain shall mix. Marvel's Spider-Man is especially egregious in this regard, with the high-flying web-slinging that makes traversal so fun being almost entirely absent from the actual encounters and missions in the game, which are instead a sort of bootleg-Arkham Asylum. In Sunset Overdrive, you are always moving. That bump and grind system is integral to every moment of the game, and thus the game manages to maintain that sense of momentum through exploration and encounter design alike.

Ape Out

Maybe my biggest surprise this year as far as games go is how absolutely incredible Ape Out is. In a year where I moved across the country, in part to be in a city that actually had a living jazz scene, only for said scene to screech to a halt due to the Current Unpleasantness, Ape Out is as close as I could come to the distilled feeling of live jazz.

The single word that defines every aspect of Ape Out is "improvisation". The game is constant and frantic, the massive walls which extend out into the sky block your view of everything but the immediate future, and a constantly-changing campaign constantly throws new things into the mix for you to figure out. Many games, notably the entire roguelike genre, ask the player to improvise on the fly, but I think the key distinction is that those games still ask you to make a plan with incomplete information, to think about things like upgrade choices and progression paths and what choices you should make down the line with the random sequence of events that have led you to that point.

Ape Out doesn't want you to do any of that shit. You're not picking a build or choosing whether or not you want to go for the secret level or not, you're a goddamn gorilla. Your only inputs in the game, other than moving, are to punch, or to grab and throw things, both things you do very hard because you are a fucking gorilla, and sitting around to strategize for too long gets you riddled with bullets because you are an orange gorilla and there isn't much room for nuance. Every aspect of the game, including the incredible procedural jazz drum soundtrack which I have criminally failed to mention up to this point despite being the best thing in the game, screams at you with a single, beautiful thought: "DON'T THINK, APE OUT".

Earthbound

The legacy of Mother 2, known as Earthbound here in Freedomland, stretches pretty far, serving as a core source of inspiration for what one might call the sort of modern new-wave of indie RPGs, including off!, Lisa: The Painful, and Undertale. It's one of those games that game developers love, and frankly, it completely deserves it, it's one of the best RPGs ever made.

Earthbound is wonderful in a combination of its mundanity, its weirdness, and a certain amount of childlike simplicity. Earthbound feels like an adventure actual kids would have, not in the way kids in movies and TV shows have adventures where they end up going on some grand quest and gain magical powers and go to a fantasy world or whatever, but almost, like, Stand By Me, almost? A series of mundane events which, through the lens of a kid, take on near-mythical significance simply due to the novelty the world has to you at the time. Every abandoned or half-finished house is filled with ghosts in the mind of a kid, every woods contains some sort of secret to be discovered, every corner hiding some fantastic other world if you just know the right way to step around it.

The game perfectly captures that feeling even in me as an adult by imagining a world that is as full of wonder as kids might imagine, and acknowledges that sometimes the imaginary world of kids is weird and doesn't make a lot of sense. Maybe behind that waterfall really is a secret lab run by a big puddle of puke. Maybe finding the right bit of the wall in this diner will let you enter a weird opposite world, one where you'll be assaulted by modern art. Maybe if you figure out just the right way to run really fast down the street, you can teleport.

The whole game works on this sort of rule, that kid logic is real and triumphs over all. Sometimes, there's a big pencil eraser blocking your path, but it's okay, because you have an Eraser Eraser to get rid of it, an idea that taps directly into the same vein of surrealist kid logic that "shield-proof bullet-proof shields" came from on the schoolyard. And it utilizes that logic, that weird surreal energy imbued into a fairly mundane world, to create a game that manages to make a regular suburban pastiche more fantastic and incredible than any fantasy world in any game.

Also, this has nothing to do with anything, but I wanna mention it anyways: the creator of the series, Shigesato Itoi, now runs a lifestyle company called Hobonichi that, among other things, makes these really nice day planners called the Hobonichi Techo. I've been using the Techo as my day planner for 4 or 5 years now and it's really, really good, I highly recommend picking one up for the new year.

Tetris Effect Connected & Tetris Battle Gaiden

Can I tell you a secret? I fucking love Tetris.

Every few months or so, I'll absentmindedly pick up Tetris in one of its various forms throughout the years, needing a way to fill 20 minutes or whatever, and inevitably sink multiple hours into Tetris, which eventually mutates into a sort of Tetris fugue state in which I'm playing the game constantly, in every gap of free time in the day I have, until when I see my eyes, this isn't an exaggeration, I reflexively imagine Tetris.

I did that this year too, as it turns out. Two times, corresponding with the two different flavors of Tetris that captured me this year. Each game its own fun little twist on the formula.

Tetris Effect Connected is the Xbox Series....es release of 2019's Tetris Effect, featuring, as the title might imply, multiplayer, and it's addictive. The twist compared to normal Tetris is the addition of Tetris Effect's Zone Meter, a bar that's filled by clearing lines. When you trigger Zone, the meter slowly empties, and as it does so, lines sent by your enemy are paused, and all lines you clear are queued up into one colossal batch, which is sent flying all at once when the Zone runs out.

This ends up really easily encouraging players towards a strategy that's common among high-level Tetris players, which is filling up your board with a massive, 15+ line setup, before raining it down upon your opponent with a righteous fury. Zone makes that strategy a bit more accessible to worse players (like me), allowing them to pause any incoming attacks and take the time they need to land their combo. Thanks to the game's excellent sound design, you can always tell when your opponent enters Zone, and despite not being able to hear or see the other player, it's incredible how well you can see a sense of panic overtake someone just from the way they move their Tetris pieces when they hear you Zone, look over, and see the board-sized combo you're about to rain down upon them.

Tetris Battle Gaiden is the oldest and probably most obscure of the Tetrises I indulged in this year, mostly because it never formally came out in the west. Luckily, I was able to play it through completely legal means I definitely didn't download a ROM and play it on a Raspberry Pi no sir.

Battle Gaiden has a few really interesting additions that make it maybe one of the most competitive Tetris variants I've ever played. The biggest is the introduction of Magic, a resource you get for clearing a line on your board with a specific special tile in it. You can stock up to 4 levels of Magic, and when you trigger it, you do one of 4 special effects depending on the levels of Magic you spent and the character you're playing, and let me be the latest to say, some of the effects are fucked up. Copying your opponent's board, swapping boards with your opponent, making it so your opponent can't rotate pieces, randomizing your opponent's controls, all of this garbage and more is possible in Tetris Battle Gaiden.

These powers are fun, obviously, and what character you choose and what spells are available to you will drastically change how you play (it's always fun to purposefully fill your board with total garbage, and in the last, beautiful moment before you lose, swap boards), but a simpler change is what gives the game its competitive edge: both players get new pieces from the same queue. As a result, a lot of the play in Tetris Battle Gaiden is this surprisingly offensive knife fight to place pieces fast (or slow) enough to ensure that the coveted Magic pieces make it your way instead of your opponent's, which requires a surprising amount of sense of the entire game versus just your board, and in some cases, frantic, senseless rushing that you don't see in a lot of other variants of Tetris.

Outer Wilds

Outer Wilds is one of the best video games ever made. I realize that's the second time I've thrown that superlative around in this very article, but it's goddamn incredible. It is so unlike anything else ever made before it, at least anything I've ever played, and what it does as it forges its new path is so enrapturing that I had a hard time putting it down when I started playing it.

Outer Wilds lacks any sort of mechanical progression system whatsoever: there is no gear, there are no stats, no new moves to learn, no new abilities, nothing. Progression in Outer Wilds is obtained purely through knowledge. You explore the beautiful solar system before you to figure out how this universe works, to learn the elegantly simple physical laws which govern this world. There is such a sense of wonder to this game, because you know that lying in the deepest caves, in long lost ruins, in the void of space, isn't a sword that hits slightly better or something, it's understanding, it's figuring out one more part of this puzzle that's completely laid bare before you, just waiting for you to know what to do with it.

There are two moments in my life that Outer Wilds reminded me of. The first was being a kid in an elementary school science class, watching my teachers pull off one of those simple-but-spectacular demonstrations like a baking soda volcano or whatever, sitting there staring with wonder that apparently sometimes science just lets you do magic. The second time was later on in high school, as I was taking physics and calculus simultaneously, and I started to become overwhelmed with the sense that I was peeking behind the curtains of the world, just a little bit, and looking at the fundamental rules and laws which interacted with each other infinite times at infinite complexities to produce the world as I knew it.

I realize those are both very grandiose things to compare a video game to, but that's genuinely how I felt playing Outer Wilds, this sense of being in this strange, beautiful, scary world, and being able to slowly learn it, feel comfortable in it, even slowly start to see how it ticked, like looking at the gears of an antique watch until I finally saw how they all moved as a part of a whole.

There are a lot of incredible moments in this game, moments that I won't spoil for anyone else, but one of the ones that most stuck out to me was actually a somewhat common one. As you explore the universe of Outer Wilds, you rapidly find that you are, for reasons you don't yet know, stuck in a 22 minute time loop, which ends each time with the sun going supernova, destroying everything you've ever known.

As a cue to the player of "hey, better wrap this shit up, you're about to die", as the sun nears its final destination, a musical cue plays, specifically the hauntingly beautiful End Times by Andrew Prahlow. Sometimes, as the song began, I was at a good stopping point, ready to reset the loop and set off on a new journey (sometimes, hilariously, I'd just hop in my ship and hurl myself into the sun to speed up the process).

But sometimes, 22 minutes was just enough time for me to stumble onto the doorstep of something incredible, something that would change my understanding of the entire game, and I would hear that first humming note of End Times, and be consumed by a sort of longing and regret that I don't think any game has since managed to successfully strike in me, as I'd sit there, looking at my new discovery, whimpering "Just two more minutes, please" as the sun consumed it all.

The, Like, 20% of Cyberpunk 2077 That's Really Good

This game is a goddamn mess, and once CD Projekt Red fixes the insane amount of bugs, crashes, and performance issues, it will still be a goddamn mess. Mess is core to the DNA of this game, to the point where there are very few things in this game that I have a single opinion about.

A lot of this game, like a lot of it, varies from the hideously mediocre to the straight up bad. Act 1 of this game is it at its worst: boring, obvious, derivative, and, ironically, so clearly created with a sense of ambition that it completely fails to meet. You can see where the incredible intro sequence to the game would be, but isn't. You can see the way the developers want a quest to change and vary and have a million options, but doesn't. It is a game desperate to be Deus Ex, to be Fallout: New Vegas, to be Reservoir Dogs, hell, to be The Witcher 3, and it isn't any of them.

Even once the world opens up after Act 1, you quickly realize how little point there is to any of it. Bad driving controls carry you from map icon to map icon, and after two or three you wonder "wait, are literally all of these just this, over and over again" and yes, literally every icon of the maybe 100 quest markers on the map will inevitably take you to some featureless warehouse or garage with 6-10 dudes in it, which you will have to incapacitate. Sometimes you'll have to lead a person out of the garage. Sometimes you'll have to hit square on a computer. It never really changes anything. Sometimes the warehouse you break into is making child and/or snuff porn. A few times, actually, enough times that I said, out loud, to nobody "I fucking get it".

The ending of the game, which I won't spoil, is also an absolute mess, a non-sequitur of the game's themes that feels completely detached from the rest of the game I just played and leaves multiple plot threads completely unanswered (although it leaves different plot threads completely unanswered depending on which of the arbitrary ending choices you choose). It is a failure in terms of narrative completeness, thematic completeness, or mechanical interest.

But goddamn when this game works it's incredible. Once you put a frankly unconscionable amount of hours into this game's slog of an opening, a theme really starts to emerge that the game actually starts to explore in interesting ways: "who do you want to be, and how much control do you really have over that?" This theme is explored through a suite of incredible characters, most of whom the game completely conceals until the second Act, all of whom struggle with their own identities, with trying to assert who they are in a world that changes them, either literally through cybernetics, or by making them struggle with the world they live in, the legacies they have left, or the perceptions other people have of them, things that define who they are that they are powerless to change. Blessedly, the game gives you time at the end to really explore these characters' journeys, to let them struggle and succeed and fail at trying, desperately, to reclaim control of themselves.

I think part of this success is that the game, for a time at least, just abandons linear storytelling. The main story thread as you've been following it kind of runs completely dry, and you are left to your own devices and, eventually start to meet a cast of a dozen or so characters around Night City who are going through some shit, man. Panam, Judy, River, Kerry, Brendan, Joshua, Johnny, Rogue, Delamain, Jefferson, Lizzie, all of these characters are so interesting to get to know, and being able to weave in and out of each of their lives creates both a unified view of this world and the struggles of the people in it, and a thematic world in which all of these people are aspects of the same core struggle for identity that V, the protagonist, feels, and its amazing.

Hades

As of time of writing, I have cleared Hades five of the ten times required to see the game's true ending, and even writing these words I'm having trouble actually sticking to my laptop and continuing to write this post instead of just shutting the lid and going to go play more Hades //Author's note: I totally did this, I am now at 7 clears. Easily the best game I played that came out in 2020, Hades is a masterpiece in every way. There is, and I mean this, not a single thing I would change about this video game.

Actually that's a lie I want to wipe the stupid smirk off of Theseus's goddamn chiseled face. I've killed you eight times in a row Theseus, don't look so smug.

There are, like, a billion pieces of writing far better than mine out there in the world about all of the things Hades does really well: the writing is excellent and deeply responsive to the actions you make as a player, it manages to naturally inject story into a genre normally derivative of it, the gameplay is tight, fun, and fair, the art direction is sublime, literally every single character is so hot I mean what the fuck.

I think the thing Hades really lands that's really interesting is the way that the game includes failure and death as integral elements of the game rather than weird, sort of "alternate timeline" endings to the "real" story like so many games do. For many games, death is a fail state, one which is wiped away from the story as the state of the game resets to a previous point, as though the game says "oh no no no, that's not what happened, what actually happened is this". Notably, the Souls games integrate death more meaningfully into the core loop of the game, but thanks to that game's baroque narrative, it does feel like they get off a little easy on integrating that into the story of the world: the story of Dark Souls is mostly just you wandering around stabbing things; you dying and coming back to life a few hundred times doesn't really have any meaningful implications to it.

But Hades is a game dripping with story, a game whose script is longer than the first Song of Ice and Fire book, and it takes the player's repeated, varied, constant deaths and makes them an integral part of the story. Hades is not the story of Prince Zagreus triumphantly escaping his father's realm, a story which every death is a non-canonical deviation from, Hades is the story of Prince Zagreus dying constantly: dying at the hands of childhood friends, dying at the hands of his own father, dying at the hands of Theseus I swear to god you will catch these hands. Thanks to the game's incredible reactive script, the plot of the game knows when you die, and how you died, and how far you made it before you died, and at every respawn the story will move forward in a way that seamlessly integrates the story of that death with the narrative of the game. Your deaths, which are inevitable and an inexorable part of your experience with the game, are treated as a "real" part of the game, which seems obvious in hindsight because... well, yeah, of course they are, they happened.

Looking Onwards

2021 is a real question mark as far as the rest of the world is concerned. Will I be able to go outside? Will I be able to set foot on a plane? Who knows! But as far as video games are concerned, 2021 seems rad as hell. This is my reward for a 2020 full of AAA video games that I did not care about: a year full of AAA games I extremely care about.

I've already dug deep into Hitman 3, my favorite Hitman yet (not that the distinction matters, all of 1 and 2 are contained within 3), and am currently eagerly anticipating the release of the Final Cut of Disco Elysium, at which point I will finally sink my teeth all of the way in to that game and finish it. Deathloop seems to take some of the most interesting lessons of Prey: Mooncrash and turn them into a full game which I am unreasonably excited for. I still kind of don't know what Ghostwire: Tokyo is and I'm very excited to find out, a sentiment shared by my excitement for Little Devil Inside. I'm excited to play a version of NieR: Replicant that doesn't play like complete ass.

And, yes, I too would like to be stepped on by the 8 foot tall Resident Evil vampire lady.

Boy this is an interesting game to read in 2020.

Durance is a one of many tabletop RPGs designed by Jason Morningstar, a prolific figure in the indie RPG space known for experimental, often GM-less games. Morningstar's most famous work by far is Fiasco, the game of Coen Brothers-style misadventure and failure which is very possibly the single most well-known indie RPG, and is often considered an excellent entry point into the hobby and into indie RPGs. People deeper in the space will probably also know Night Witches, his Powered by the Apocalypse game about the famous battalion of Soviet airwomen, or The Shab Al-Hiri Roach, the black comedy about conspiratorial, backstabbing academics who may or not be possessed by a malevolent roach god. A game from Morningstar's library I hear a lot less talk about is Durance.

Durance, like Fiasco, is a rules-light GM-less game with a heavy emphasis on collaborative storytelling with scant actual dice mechanics. The game is about playing out the stories of a sci-fi penal colony, a sort of Space Australia. This colony was a cynical silver bullet for the galactic Authority that rules the universe: they can solve their burgeoning prison populations by just shipping them to the ends of space, they gain additional colonies out at their fringes, and, as the convict population labors and eventually earns their freedom to become emancipated citizens (and hopefully become more productive in the meanwhile), the colonies are also substantial financial investments.

However, the planetary surveys used to determine where these colonies will go were half-assed by greedy corporations hoping to rush into free money on the backs of what is essentially chattel slavery with the serial numbers filed off. As a result, these colonies ended up being established on barely-habitable hellholes which couldn't sustain the food production needed to fully support the colonies. This food insecurity leads to a desperation from the colonists, which in turn led to increased authoritarianism from the Authority government in the colony in an attempt to curb the ensuing lawlessness, as well as the creation of a fairly robust outlaw presence in these colonies, as colonists would rather gamble their lives to feast as criminals than starve to death under the Authority's yoke.

The society of your penal colony is described by two parallel ladders of hierarchy, one representing the Authority's social structure which is controlled by the colonial Governor on top, and the other representing the structure of the outlaws with a Dimber Damber (an old timey British term for the leader of a group of thieves) in control. Players each create two characters, with the stipulation that the two characters must belong to different social orders (Authority or Outlaw), and be at different positions on the social ladder. Perhaps you might control the Governor, but also a mere lowly cutpurse.

I love this setup for the simple fact that Durance is a game that is fundamentally about class, being explicitly about the history of Australia as a penal colony but also functioning pretty well as an implicit allegory about the American prison system. Stories about class conflict thrive on drawing comparison between the haves and the have-nots, and forcing players to adopt the mantle of two characters on different tiers of an explicit social hierarchy solves a problem RPGs about class can occasionally run into, where a party has narrative pressure to all belong to a similar caste, and thus the story doesn't have the same flexibility to explore the hierarchical structure from all angles. After all, it can be hard to justify why a noble is spending all their time hanging out with some guttersnipe, and having a party where elites and common folk go gallivanting around the setting together in harmony does make the class hierarchy feel less rigid, which isn't necessarily bad, but does have an effect on the tone of the story.

Your characters are mechanically defined by very little, namely, well, their name, the side of society they belong to, their rank, and an Oath: some sort of moral boundary that the character will never cross for any reason. "I will never return to the bonds of servitude", "I will never kill a man", "I will never put others before myself", that sort of thing. Of course, Oaths are definitionally a bit of reverse psychology: by declaring one, you are indicating to the table that you want scenes with this character that will test their Oath and create conflict because of it. If your character has an Oath never to kill, you're inviting the table to create situations in which not killing someone is extremely inconvenient for the goals of the characters.

Whenever a character breaks their Oath (because, inevitably, they will break their Oath), it is treated as a catastrophic shift of the status quo. The breaking of an Oath immediately triggers two effects: it forces some character (not necessarily the one who broke the Oath) to be moved to somewhere new on the hierarchical ladder of the colony, and it renders the oathbreaking character immediately unplayable. The breaking of an Oath is a mechanized, canonized character arc end, one which is guaranteed to have massive, reverberating impact on the story by forcing a change on its most fundamental system.

I gotta be honest, though, Durance has made me come to terms with something about myself, something that means Durance isn't staying in my collection: I really like rules, man. Not, like, laws and stuff, those are for nerds, but game mechanics. The problem I found myself running into with Durance is that it's just too freeform, and I wasn't able to conceptualize the moments in stories I would tell in this game because there just weren't any mechanics.

I haven't mentioned Durance's resolution mechanic yet, and that's mostly because it's relatively scant. The explicit guidance of the book is that if you're sure how a scene should end, it should just end that way, with no mechanical intervention. The only time you are to invoke the resolution mechanic, according to the text, is when the outcome of a scene is extremely unclear. Resolution involves a triangular set of traits including "Servility", "Savagery", and a third trait determined by the table, where dice are rolled for each of the three traits, and any trait with a higher dice result that the one clockwise to it is a valid choice to be invoked to the resolution of the scene. So, if you roll a 6 on Savagery but a 4 on Servility (clockwise to Savagery), and a 5 on Status (your table-selected trait clockwise to Servility), the scene will be resolved with Savagery triumphant. What that means is completely up to the table, and the book itself notes that this system is loose enough to produce basically any result with any successful trait. Ultimately, this system is simply a guide for the narration when it might otherwise hit a roadblock.

That's... basically all of the rules right there, and it's just not enough for me. The thing I love about game systems, the thing that makes me look at 400 page RPG rulebooks and 80 hour computer RPGs the way an expert horologist looks at the inside of a clockwork watch, is the way that rules come together to guide, influence, and change the narrative of the game. The rules of a game define what a character can do, they define what aspects of a character and the world matter, they describe when success comes to the characters and the nature of the success they find, and that mechanical scaffolding guides the way stories are told in the way a trellis guides a vine. Without that trellis, the vine of the story can go anywhere, and you're just telling freeform stories, which I do enjoy, but isn't necessarily what I come to games for.

Ultimately, Durance is just not the kind of game I'm ever going to really latch on to. The systems as presented are interesting, but insufficient for me to really cling to and grow around. I do like the idea of an RPG designed to handle class struggles, and I might end up bolting something like Durance's class hierarchy onto another game, but I find myself wanting to explore these themes more, not just narratively, but systematically.

Shadowrun is a weird beast. It is arguably the most well-known cyberpunk tabletop RPG (at least, until Cyberpunk 2077 made a bunch of video game nerds well aware of Cyberpunk, but I have gripes with Cyberpunk), but it's also weird: eschewing a traditional cyberpunk setting, Shadowrun describes a world in which magic and technology coexist. In this world, orcs, elves, and humans coexist, and characters can elect to load themselves up with cybernetics and technology, or channel their magical abilities to become a potent mage or shaman. Characters might need to hack into advanced computer systems in order to collect leverage on an ancient dragon, except instead of sitting on a hoard of gold, that dragon is CEO of a multinational tech conglomerate.

The common sentiment of the internet on Shadowrun is a love for the setting, which is a bananas genre fusion of spellslinging and gunslinging, but a general dislike for, if not fear of, the rules. Shadowrun is notoriously pretty dense with rules, with multi-step procedures for basic tasks like firing a gun or casting a spell that requires so much number crunching and dice-chucking that it's just too much work. So, in a pretty smart move, Catalyst released a rules-light port of Shadowrun called Shadowrun Anarchy.

Before I talk about Anarchy, I want to talk a little bit about what I want from Shadowrun as a mechanical framework. I've only ever run the Third Edition of the game, the last to be put out by FASA before the license changed hands to Catalyst, but from what I understand the following sentiment still generally holds true.

For me, Shadowrun's crunch was the cost to entry for a game that leans heavily into the natural narrative arc we usually associate with heist fiction: characters receive an objective, spend a large quantity of time preparing for that mission, then execute, along the way reacting to unanticipated twists and failures as they come. Many of the points of friction people experience with the system can be understood as subservient to this idea of narrative. The game's near-pornographic obsession with specificity on the character sheet creates a fidelity that lets players feel like they've prepared precisely for the job at hand, turning every mission into the players' own Ocean's Eleven. There's a joy to be had in this sort of meticulous planning: learning that your extraction target is Belgian and being able to take some character ranks of French, loading up on armor piercing rounds after scouting a corp's heavily armored troll security, loading up on parachutes (and double checking the fall damage rules) in case you need to make a quick exit from a corporate high-rise.

Similarly, the game's dice mechanics ensured that even the most well-laid plans ran the risk of going off the rails at any moment. Shadowrun's notorious dice pools involved players throwing down a comical amount of d6s (frequently a double digit amount) and counting successes among them. These dice rolls then incur a series of checks, and chances for response by the target, which add in a layer of unpredictability. Dice rolls in Shadowrun are rarely cut-and-dry success and failure, as the game on the mechanical level is always looking to slip in wrinkles and caveats. Yes, you had dead aim while shooting this guy, but he exerted himself completely to jump out of the way. No, you weren't able to dodge that baseball bat, but you're so beefy with your cybernetic implants that the bat crumples upon hitting your skin. Yeah, you threw a fireball, but you threw it too good, and now the whole block is on fire.

Unfortunately, in Third Edition, these checks on every dice roll to see how and why specific actions are wrinkled or subverted in interesting directions also require a lot of number crunching. To fire a gun at someone on Third Edition is a seven-step procedure, involving a meticulous calculation of range and checking of modifiers and gun attributes, actually firing the gun, checking if the defender dodges, checking if the defender resists the damage, and staging up or down the effects of the shot depending on outcomes. Dice need to be rolled up to three different times in order to calculate if an attack lands. Compare that to D&D, where an attacker rolls once, usually just a single die, compares the result to a static number, then bam you're done, and this system looks... fiddly.

All this to say, while I like Third Edition's resolution system, I mostly like it as a consequence of liking the narrative moments it produces, moments where things can always go wrong at the last minute and unpredictability seeps into every moment. There's fun to be had in watching a system you meticulously planned working, and there's also fun to be had in a plan going off rails and improvising. If your extraction target is Flemish, not Walloon, and those trolls are actually wearing heavier armor than you expect, and those high-rise windows are double reinforced, you need to improvise on the fly. If a light system like Shadowrun Anarchy can replicate that feeling without the corresponding math homework, I'm more than happy letting my Third Edition rulebooks gather dust for a while, especially since most of my current groups generally dislike crunchy combat rules. Does it do that? Well, I think it tries, but I don't think it succeeds.

Anarchy's dice system, which is an adapted form of the Cue System, is a sort of trimmed-down version of what I'm used to in Third Edition: a character and their opposition rolls a set of dice pools at the same time, counts successes, most successes wins, and any successes you get over what you need occasionally incurs a boon, almost always increased damage, but sometimes the vague "something else good". I generally don't love this vagueness; it can be hard to quantify on the spot how much of a boon I should hand out given a number of excess successes ("You won this Speech check with 3 excess successes, so you convince him.... three better?"). I always ran into this issue with a similar system of Advantages running Genesys, and always gasped for relief when the game provided clear tangible rewards I could hand out for a given number of successes. But, hey, we have a framework for unpredictability, and the action-counteraction process of earlier has been reduced down into a simple dice roll, I'm down. (I should note this is also basically how dice rolls work in the current, Sixth Edition of the game).

Unfortunately, with these simplified rules comes a corresponding lack of fidelity, which is where my problems with Anarchy arise. Let's continue looking at the process of shooting a gun, which in Anarchy, is bog simple. You roll your weapon skill, the defender rolls their Agility, compare who got more successes, whoever got more wins, bam, you're done. Here, the solution is also the problem: there are very few knobs to tweak here, very few moving parts in this calculation, and as a result, all relevant modifiers to this roll, all relevant preparation, all basically has to affect this one roll. Whether you've got a full-auto assault rifle firing flaming bullets at a moving car, a precision sniper rifle with a thermal scope firing at a target on a foggy day, or a knife soaked in poison trying to slip in the ribs of a target in a kevlar vest, all any of this stuff can really do is increase the number of dice on one side or decrease the number of dice on another. Mechanically, all of these narratively interesting things have the exact same effect.

As a result, Shadowrun Anarchy seems to deeply dissuade preparation, the construction of the plan, or half of the heist-like formula I talked about loving so much. Choosing the right tool for the job doesn't matter anymore, because all of the little ways you can prepare, things like gun attachments and environmental bonuses and careful target selection and the billion other little factors you were paying attention to before, all fundamentally do the same thing mechanically, so you just want to pile on as much good stuff as you can, try and stack your side of the one relevant dice roll as high as you can with little consideration how you do it. The book itself seems to reinforce this idea: while normal Shadowrun offers a veritable Sears catalogue of guns, spells, equipment, skills, and anything else you could need, Anarchy gives you a scant couple pages. After all, if all shooting is in the game is comparing your Gun number versus someone else's Not Get Shot number, who really cares what kind of gun you're holding.

Now, this reduced possibility space for preparation is actually the side-effect of another fairly large change, one which I think is a far more concrete example of Anarchy's reduced emphasis on player planning: Shadowrun Anarchy implicitly assumes that players will not create characters, instead offering a bank of 30ish premade characters designed to be picked by players and brought into the game. There are rules for character creation, but they are buried fairly late in the text and most rules text explicitly refers to the use of these premades, so their use is pretty easily read as the default state of play. On some level, I feel like a little girl playing with dolls. In normal Shadowrun, I get to pick out the doll, choose the outfit I want for it, maybe some accessories, articulate it into the pose I want. In Anarchy, I'm instead given a set of dolls cast from a single piece of plastic: the clothes don't change, the pose doesn't change, you can't make it your own, all I can do is pick the one I want and hope whatever story we're playing today uses the exact way this doll was made.

Shadowrun Anarchy isn't for me. If I want a rules-light game that still creates mechanical space for each dice roll to produce unexpected consequences, Genesys does that in a more interesting way by decoupling the creation of positive and negative side-effects from the outcome of a roll (that is, a successful roll can still have bad side-effects, and vice versa). Hell, if I want a mission-based game that cuts dramatically down on prep time and character fiddlyness, Blades In The Dark is easy to hack, and still allows players the narrative satisfaction of successful planning by playing with the chronology of the story, framing planning as a series of just-in-time flashbacks rather than a laborious prerequisite to a mission.

Not to say Anarchy is for no one. I think if you don't care as much about the heist-style narrative framework as I do, and want to focus on a more improvisational, off-the-cuff style story where cool characters can just be cool, Anarchy is totally sufficient. On top of that, its extremely minimalist rules framework means that the system can handle Shadowrun's bonkers setting with minimal mechanical overhead. A traditional Shadowrun party can include a spirit-summoning sorcerer, a hacker who extends their consciousness into the internet, a rigger remote controlling a series of drones and vehicles, and a soldier-for-hire loaded with guns and cybernetics, and the fact that all of these concepts run on basically the same rules in Anarchy makes it really easy to run a game that has all of these bonkers ideas in it that isn't loaded down in edge cases. Plus, the game has a decent primer for Shadowrun's setting relatively unencumbered with the baggage of 30 years of plot developments, plus a deep dive into my home of Seattle as it exists in the setting that has tons of details to mine.

I'm a bit bummed that Shadowrun Anarchy isn't for me, but it did get me thinking a lot about complexity. Especially in the modern design space for RPGs, complexity is something we tend to abhor; the current design movements (the OSR, PbtA, Forged In The Dark) are exceptionally rules-light and focused on abstraction over fidelity. However, I think there's something to be said for the thought that some ideas require a baseline amount of complexity to come across, and that the boons of complexity in game design are similar to those of complexity of real-life, namely a feeling of mastery and satisfaction in growing to understand complexity. Perhaps I shouldn't be too averse to designing complex games, since some games can use that complexity as an instrument to a final design with the same precision that many games use simplicity.

//Quick Note: As of time of writing, BALIKBAYAN is currently in beta and being actively playtested, so depending on when you read this, some of what I say here might be bunk! Probably not the part where I say the game is good, though. The game's good.

BALIKBAYAN: Returning Home by Jamila R. Nedjadi of Sword Queen Games is a game that ultimately confronted me with two points of embarrassment: the first being that I'd somehow gone three years without reading the Belonging Outside Belonging engine as codified in 2018's Dream Askew/Dream Apart, and the second being that I'd gone 24 years without knowing really much of anything about the Philippines or Filipino culture. I don't bring this up to publicly self-flagellate for my lack of knowledge (although I should definitely know more than I do about the Philippines), but instead to say that BALIKBAYAN is a game that deals heavily in Filipino mythology and the modern culture of the Philippines, but I am not going to speak to either the way it deploys those ideas or the deeper connections it draws simply because I am by no means qualified to comment on that.

What I can say is to instead follow the creator (@temporalhiccup) on Twitter, check out the contributions and contributors to Filipino-centric game jams like the Hilagyo Jam, and to follow the #RPGSEA hashtag on Twitter to find tons of amazing creators, contributors, and players from the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the rest of the incredible Southeast Asian tabletop RPG scene. This post up on EN World seems like a good curated list to start with. Listen to what these creators have to say, look at what they're making. Alternatively, if you want to know a bit more about BALIKBAYAN itself, I highly recommend checking out this excellent interview with the designer over on Brie Beau Sheldon's site.

Also worth noting: BALIKBAYAN: Returning Home was in that big-ass Racial Justice and Equality bundle that was put out a few months ago, so if you bought that, you already have this excellent game.

As I mentioned previously, BALIKBAYAN is a game in the Belonging Outside Belonging engine as codified in Dream Askew/Dream Apart. This system is diceless and, as written in the Dreams, GMless, although BALIKBAYAN provides for both GMless and GM-driven modes of play. The core mode of action of this engine, rather than the declare-dice roll-result loop most games feature, instead implies a sort of cyclical motion of story through Strong, Neutral, and Weak Moves. Strong Moves are moments in which the players drive the narrative forward, with characters shining and their goals being achieved, but these moves cost a Token. Meanwhile, Weak Moves represent the antagonistic forces of the story taking control and players failing and being driven back, but invoking one of these moves earns you a Token. Neutral Moves, as the name implies, are kind of a mixed-bag as far as narrative effect, and are sort of implied to be the connective tissue that links narrative highs and lows together, with the book explicitly warning against an over-reliance on them.

With this mechanism, one can easily imagine a sort of pendulum motion imbued into the narrative, the Moves being a sort of framework that the story grows around in which players accrue Tokens by inviting misery upon their characters, only to later triumph by cashing in those Tokens. In this framework, good things always follow bad things, and bad things always follow good things, which is an interesting way to create a sort of rhythm to the story, and seemingly would create a sort of mixed tone which feels appropriate both for the aesthetic of cyberpunk and for the narrative of fighting on the back foot against a seemingly omnipotent threat from on high, the colonizing power of The Corp.

In traditional dice-based games, this cadence is usually loosely enforced by dice probabilities. In a Powered by the Apocalypse game, an unmodified dice roll yields triumph about 15% of the time, failure about 40% of the time, and a mixed result about 45% of the time, but the rhythm with which the narrative moves between these three tones is dictated only by probability. The results of a single dice roll, obviously, in no way influences the results of the next, and while one would expect the results of rolls to eventually resemble the above probabilities over a sufficient number of rolls, sometimes probability is an asshole, and you end up with a run of dismal failures or grand successes in a row.

The Belonging Outside Belonging system, on the other hand, takes a much more direct grasp on the cadence of the story, with each Move absolutely impacting the results of the next, as Weak Moves naturally lead to Strong Moves, and Strong Moves similarly lead to Weak Moves. The system does skew in favor of narrative highs through Lures, narrative cues each playbook provides which can grant players additional Tokens by leaning into their fellow characters' narrative roles. With the complete elimination of randomness from the system, Belonging Outside Belonging takes a pretty direct control over the tone of the story in a way I find deeply interesting, and in turn players assume absolute control over their characters: they succeed whenever the player wants them to succeed, and fail when the player permit them fail. This might be romanticism from me, but I do find myself enjoying the moments where my characters "surprise" me by doing something unexpected, as driven by the randomness of dice, but I think losing this in favor of direct control of the plot does promote the idea of players as storytellers rather than mere agents within the setting, an idea which is literally true in the GMless gameplay mode, in which all players share control of the story.

While Moves provide the small-scale narrative framework, Reckoning and Homecoming provide the large-scale framework. In the world of BALIKBAYAN, players are from a society of elementals, one which once helped humanity willingly but was eventually subjugated and enslaved by the humans, as represented by the all-consuming Corp. The player characters begin the story having escaped their shackles, and are now loose in the City that is their ancestral home. The campaign is essentially framed as a race between Reckoning, a tracker which, once filled, will represent the characters being re-enslaved by the Corp and the status quo of subjugation being re-established, and Homecoming, a tracker which, once filled, represents the elementals reigniting their magical power and finally striking down the Corp.

The completion of either of these trackers is an end state for the entire campaign although, interestingly, both end states describe a player character going off to rekindle the losing faction in the future. In this way, the game seems to refuse the absolution of both success and failure. In the event of failure, the spark of revolution still lives on despite the Corp's reasserted power, which is a common thematic beat in stories of squashed rebellion. Far more interesting to me, however, is the inverse truth: every victory against the Corp is necessarily incomplete, as a player character stabs their peers in the back and slinks off to rebuild the Corp anew.

Then again, it doesn't mention how the Corp is rebuilt, so I suppose while one reading of this mechanic is that the fight against subjugation is endless, and the evils of the world will never be truly defeated, another, perhaps more interesting reading is that we can't destroy those structures that oppress us, but instead we can change them, rebuild them into something fundamentally new, fundamentally good. There is always a Corp, but maybe we can make the Corp good?

Reckoning and Homecoming, along with the Filipino influence, are what I think sets BALIKBAYAN's narratives apart from other cyberpunk RPGs. Shadowrun, the closest relative I can think of to BALIKBAYAN as a cyberpunk game set in a world filled with magic, strongly emphasizes player characters sort of coasting through their world, acknowledging that this is a fundamentally broken setting but instead promoting a mode of play in which player characters generally focus on surviving and maintaining a quality of life in this status quo. Meanwhile, many of the greatest cyberpunk stories, stories like Neuromancer and Count Zero, Blade Runner 2049, and Ghost In The Shell emphasize an inevitable change to the status quo, with the characters, intentionally or not, reshaping the world. Much like BALIKBAYAN, these stories end the moment the scales are finally tipped, and the world changes from an old form to a new one.

With Reckoning and Homecoming, BALIKBAYAN enforces the idea that the characters in this world are not allowed to coast, and the status quo is not allowed to be maintained. At the end of a BALIKBAYAN campaign, either the Corp is destroyed and the elementals ascend to a new, empowered state of being, or the players are destroyed, re-shackled to an empowered Corp. These two tracks are naturally progressed through normal play, with triggers that would be hard to avoid in natural play. One of these two states, BALIKBAYAN states through its rules, is inevitable, if impermanent. To keep the world the same is an unsustainable state

Ultimately, BALIKBAYAN is a game that absolutely has my mind spinning with possibilities. The way this game directly takes grasp of the story in a way a randomness-based game simply cannot is extremely interesting, and the cyclic nature of the story BALIKBAYAN tells on both its personal and setting scales makes me look at cyberpunk as a genre in a new and different way. On top of all of this, BALIKBAYAN gave me something else: a starting point in Filipino folklore, a folklore that, simply by not being the Tolkien-esqe pan-European fantasy or one of the few world mythologies fetishized by the West (Greek, Norse, Egyptian), I have never really run into in the hobby before. I feel like I can take the elements this game draws from the folklore, the Tikbalang and the Aswang and others, and use those to start delving into this body of stories, a prospect that has me more than a bit excited.

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Quest, the first tabletop RPG from NYC-based The Adventure Guild, is an extremely exciting game to finally get my hands on. Everything about Quest, from its mechanics to presentation to the game's website all the way back to the game's (extremely Brooklyn) Kickstarter video speaks to a design philosophy of bringing new players into RPGs and creating a streamlined experience through minimalism. This can be quickly literally seen by flipping through the (gorgeous) rulebook and seeing how much the layout allows the text on the page to breathe with plenty of negative space, a start contrast to many RPG books which indulge in a sort of maximalist information design.

Flipping through Quest, the single most striking thing about its design is the near complete omission of, for lack of a better word, numbers. Despite clearly drawing on the tradition of fantasy RPGs going back to Dungeons and Dragons, Quest completely lacks stats. Dice rolls are unencumbered by any sort of modifiers: you roll 1d20, 20 is a triumphant success, 11-19 is a modest success, 6-10 is a conditional success, 2-5 is a failure, and 1 is a catastrophic failure. That's it for literally every dice roll in the game.

Most of what one might consider the "standard" items on a character sheet are either completely omitted or streamlined. Characters just start out with 10 HP, period. A quick rest can top you off to half HP, a night's rest can put you back at max. There's no money: all items are either trivial enough for you to just get whenever you're in town, or important/rare enough for you to have to barter for them. Abilities, magical or otherwise, draw from a pool of Adventure Points which players get at the end of a session but also can earn as a GM metacurrency for good roleplay, solving a tricky puzzle, accomplishing a goal, or just being a good table presence. Your inventory is 12 things that can reasonably fit on your person, no concern for encumbrance mechanics or weight calculation, just, 12 things.

The meat of what makes up a Quest character are abilities obtained from the role selected for the character (logically equivalent to a class in D&D). Each role's abilities are categorized into 5ish learning paths, which usually have 3-5 abilities per path. Abilities in a learning path must be learned in a certain sequence (the third ability in a path can only be learned after you learn the second, which can only be learned after you learn the first), but you are free to take abilities from multiple paths. You create a character with 6 abilities to start with, then you gain a new one at the end of every session. There are no experience points, in what I think is an extremely good move (XP systems, in my experience, are the first things jettisoned from a system in actual play, in favor of narrative-based advancement rewards).

Looking through the abilities is where a lot of Quest's minimalism and dismissal of numbers comes to light, and where the spoils of that design philosophy come through. So many advancement systems in RPGs are rife with obnoxious, incremental enhancements to a character, choices that give a character +10% to this or a +3 modifier to that. In Quest, there is nothing to increment, so these sorts of choices in character development literally aren't an option. As best I can tell, not a single effect or item in the game grants a modifier to dice rolls, either. Almost every single advancement a character can make details a new action that the character can take in the fiction, a whole new problem-solving avenue unlocked for them. Even the Fighter, whipping boy of the genre and notorious landfill for minor statistical buffs in other, bulkier RPGs, gets a whole slew of new abilities, and the Fighter's increased aptitude in combat is represented by automatic successes for attack roles rather than statistical boons.

One of my (few and small) gripes with Quest are the few times it does bring calculation or detailed resource management into the rules, because with so little math in the entire game it makes the few bastions of hard number-tracking stick out all the more. A few abilities are given durations in real time (rather than more abstract measurements like "scene" or "fight"), some down to minutes, and I can only imagine players immediately bickering about how many hits they can sneak into the one minute an enemy is stunned or frozen, a dispute that the rules can't adjudicate since little else in the game is given a duration in real time. Similarly, many of the Doctor's abilities only work on the toughest class of enemies when they are below 20% health, which I can only imagine playing out in one of three ways:

1. The Doctor just has to guess when the enemy is down to 1/5 life, risking whiffing the ability and wasting the AP if they guess wrong

2. The Doctor has to nag the GM after every bit of damage to see precisely when they can use all their cool powers

3. The GM has to commit to announcing any time a boss character drops beneath 20% health, either out of character or by weaving it into the narration in a manner that still reads as "Yeah he's beneath the threshold"

Option 3 seems like the clear winner to me, and I wonder why the game didn't commit to its no-number-crunching design and steer players away from terrible options 1 and 2 by codifying it in the rules, perhaps with a "Bloodied" state a la 4E which is declared by the GM.

Another thing Quest does that I like a lot are the legendary abilities. Each role has a few of these, many of them world-altering powers, and they are explicitly inaccessible via traditional character progression. Instead, the game requires characters perform some sort of appropriate feat in-fiction that grants them this power, and I absolutely love this system. Tying character progression to an in-universe event that justifies that progression is an idea I've always adored, ever since AD&D required 11th level Druids go find and beat up one of the nine 12th level Druids out in the world in order to claim their rank and level up. It's fun, it's cool to do, and it gives players a built-in motivation that can be used by the GM to draw them into an adventure.

Another thing I noticed reading Quest was a lot more subtle. In a lot of RPGs, intentionally or not, I find that the character sheet usually ends up subconsciously dividing into two groups: there's the soft character sheet, things like name, background, physical description, the bits that the rules don't actually touch in any meaningful way but are important narratively, and there's the hard character sheet, things like stats and skills and damage numbers, the things that the rules of the game interacts with directly. Generally, the soft character sheet tends to be something of an afterthought for a lot of players, something they fill in either at random, by half-heartedly scanning a random table, or maybe even filling in as the game goes.

Meanwhile, Quest kind of lacks the "hard" character sheet entirely. Essentially the only remnants of that part of the character sheet are the selection of a role and abilities. Other than that, your HP, your AP, your gear for the most part, are all set by the game. As a result, most of the choices you do get to make when making a Quest character are things that typically land on the "soft" character sheet: your appearance, your goal, your beliefs, your weaknesses. Filling out these aspects of your character gets a lot of real estate in the book, and the simple truth that filling out these aspects is most of the autonomy you get over the character during creation means that these aspects of the character feel far more important than in other games. It's a clever trick, but these now feel like the heart of the character, the true identity of them, rather than the sort of narrative outfit covering up the character's "true" being, a collection of numbers and stats that the game's mechanics actually use.

Quest is an infinitely interesting game. It feels very different from a lot of other minimalist RPGs, such as those that self-categorize as in the OSR. In many ways, those games, games like The Black Hack, MÖRK BORG, or Maze Rats, feel like distillations of the classic D&D feel: eight stats are reduced to three, combat rules are simplified, equipment lists are shortened. Quest, on the other hand, is a straight reduction. Where other games are like D&D put on a rigorous diet and personal training regimen, Quest feels like a surgeon made some very careful cuts with a scalpel to remove every system the game could survive without, removing them entirely and returning their narrative function back to the act of raw storytelling. Going forward, I'd love to run Quest and actually see it in action, because I imagine it's probably one of the purest storytelling experiences I could have with a game in my collection. I'm also curious to see if its minimalism can be applied in smaller doses; if specific subsystems of an RPG that risk becoming fiddly can be simply extracted from the design entirely, but still leave the core of the game relatively traditional. Also interesting to me would be what other games you could build from scratch with this sort of framework, games with extremely lightweight mechanics where character differentiation and ability mostly come from choosing from a veritable Costco of character options.

Oh, actually, one last note, Quest has an open license for creators to fiddle with Quest and make content for it, and in that license include a set of design guidelines that Quest was designed around, tips on how fiddling with specific parts of the rules will impact the game as a whole, and even a typography and style guide! Good stuff! More of this in games, please!

All very interesting indeed. Quest will happily stay in my collection, and I hope I get to run it someday soon.

Quest can be purchased directly from The Adventure Guild here.

For the uninitiated, I don't want to inundate you with technical jargon, but Fountain is what people in the art world refer to as "a goddamn urinal". Here it is:

Duchamp purchased a urinal from a local hardware store, flipped it over, signed it, and submitted it for exhibition by the Society of Independent Artists, an organization of art exhibitors which Duchamp himself helped to found, and whose board he sat on. Fountain was submitted as a sort of test of his fellow board members' dedication to the philosophy of democratic exhibition and to free expression. The board voted to remove Fountain from exhibition, and Duchamp resigned his board position in protest.

In 2011, I sided thoroughly with the rest of the board of the Society. This is not art, I thought, art is paintings of Dutch nobility, and the Pyramids, and marble Olympians with small penises! You can't just sign any old piss receptacle and call it art, where is the technique, the craftsmanship, the dedication?

As time went on though, my opinions about art in general and Fountain in particular started to move. At the time, I might have pointed to the great marble sculpture of the Greeks, Romans, and eventually Renaissance and post-Renaissance Italian masters as the apex of art. Truly, to carve solid marble into a form and even seemingly a texture resembling flesh was a sign of a true mastery of the medium. Look at The Veiled Virgin by Giovanni Strazza; not only did Strazza create a perfect simulacra of a woman's head out of marble, he then veiled her. Can you imagine the technical skill you need to turn white marble into a translucent veil?

Here's the thing about The Veiled Virgin, though, is that it doesn't actually make me feel anything. No thoughts are implanted in my mind by The Veiled Virgin. It's almost as though it is so close to reality that my brain just doesn't have the square footage in the possibility space to imagine anything. My only thoughts are "Wow, yeah, that looks like a woman wearing a veil. I bet that was really hard to do. I couldn't do that". I don't mean to insult the talent of Strazza or the many other talented sculptors of this style both working today and in history, but this is the same response I would have to someone grabbing a piece of chalk and drawing a perfect circle freehand on a chalkboard. I don't ponder it, it's not sublime, I just go "man, dang, that's a good circle".

Meanwhile, even when my anger towards Fountain faded, I still found myself thinking about it constantly. This seems as though it was Duchamp's intent, to encourage the audience of an artwork to spend less time considering the terms of its creation, and more time considering the ideas contained within. Fountain feels, like so many pieces of modern art, laser focused to trigger the gestalt, a very human part of the brain that takes incomplete images and attempts to use what it knows to complete them. To one used to thinking of artwork as the craft of the old masters, a urinal with a name on it is an incomplete thought, and the brain is forced to truly think about it to complete the thought. Instead of going "man, dang, that's a good circle", you begin with that most trite but useful of questions for modern art: "what does this mean?".

That thought process, that slow mulling over of a piece in my head, trying to construct a framework of ideas that the work makes sense in, is infinitely more interesting to me than just appreciating the fine chiselwork of a sculptor or the delicate brushstrokes of a painter, it is a sort of puzzle box that forces me to not only consider the work itself, but the world around the work, in hopes of finding a clue within the environment that will make Fountain click open like the Lament Configuration, that will make the thought complete.

As an aside, Fountain's most consistently funny unanswered question for me is that posed by its origin: Fountain is a urinal, and urinals are very much built with a meaning in life already assigned to them. In a section obliquely labeled "Interventions", Wikipedia goes on to describe the multiple times one or more people have attempted to pee into Fountain. Multiple people have succeeded.

The philosophy laid out by Duchamp would later be expanded upon by a lesser-known artistic movement called Fluxus, one I am extremely fond of. Fluxus artists returned to the artistic process held so sacred by traditional art critics, and found that even the process itself could be a vehicle for ideas and meaning, even to the point where the actual end product is rendered almost a leftover of the process. More renowned artists of the movement include Nam June Paik, John Cage, and Yoko Ono, but I want to talk about one Dick Higgins.

Dick Higgins is considered a co-founder of the Fluxus movement and worked in a variety of mediums, but I'm the most interested in his music, most notably a set of pieces called Danger Music, which went on to give its title to an entire genre of experimental music. As its title implies, the defining characteristic of danger music is that the performance of danger music must put the musician, the audience, or both into physical danger. One piece of danger music requires a live grenade to be thrown into the audience, another demands the performer "scoop out one of your eyes 5 years from now and do the same with the other eye 5 years later". Danger music project Hanatarash once drove a bulldozer into a venue. The performance of danger music is the point; listening to a recording of a danger music performance loses all meaning, unless one really enjoys the sound of panes of glass shattering in a crowded concert venue.

Danger music's mere existence raises so many interesting questions about music as an art form that I could frankly divert this entire post to just asking them. Do musicians have a responsibility to produce music that is safe? Is a piece of music still beautiful, still valid, still a complete work of art, if it is never performed, like that live grenade which has yet (to my knowledge) to be thrown into a crowd? Some genres of music, particularly metal and some more boisterous hip-hop, are meant to be played excruciatingly loud, to the point where they could cause very real hearing damage. Are these songs dangerous?

I bring up Fountain, Danger Music, and Fluxus because the kind of art I find the most interesting is that which is very openly disinterested in reveling in craftsmanship, instead focusing on using available media, techniques, and tricks to force the audience to think, to produce a new idea or worldview it wouldn't have without it, whether that process requires a master sculptor's years of experience or a Sharpie and a trip to Home Depot. Here, finally, after over 1000 words, I'll talk about video games.

Perhaps as a side-effect of the tools used to create video games still being so young, the discussion of video games as craft still heavily focuses on the craftsmanship around them. Popular discussion of video games, even by people who would openly consider them to be "art", is dominated by metrics of technical achievement: the framerate at which they run, the graphical fidelity of the game's world, the sheer size of the game's space for play, how many ping pong balls you can tape to a horse in a mocap studio so you can accurately simulate how its testicles will shrink in the winter.

To me, no game signifies this philosophy quite like The Last of Us. A 2013 game by Naughty Dog drawing heavily from The Road, No Country for Old Men, Resident Evil 4, and Ico, The Last of Us was a massive financial and critical success, and was in many cases a masterpiece of the craft of video game development. The game looks absolutely gorgeous, even more so with its HD remaster for current-gen consoles. The music is haunting and beautiful, the animations vivid and smooth, with every physical strike against an opponent being unflinchingly realistic. The writing is also excellent, helping to bring the lead characters, the grizzled and world-weary Joel and the youthful and hopeful Ellie, to life. The incredible motion capture put into these characters also certainly help to bring these two characters to reality.

While I have not played The Last of Us Part II, it seems to very much be carrying on that legacy, with game design Twitter going bananas over the game's incredible rope modeling, and the fabric physics exhibited when a character takes off their shirt (these sound remarkably pedestrian, but fabric is about as hard to render in pixels as it is in marble).

The thing is that The Last of Us makes me feel nothing, just like The Veiled Virgin. Its dedication to strong writing and to beautiful visuals and to grisly, realistic violence don't lead me to think about it, don't force me to scour the world for a framework in which to understand it, what the game means is laid bare. All that's left for me to think whenever Joel brains a clicker with a fire axe is "man, dang, that's a good circle".

Den vänstra handens stig is a video game I saw at PAX South in 2016. A one-man project with relatively simple pixel art, Den vänstra handens stig lacks what one would traditionally call "controls", despite being of a kind with traditional platformers like Super Mario Bros. Instead, the game character is controlled by an AI, one which repeatedly tries and fails to clear the game's levels, with each death causing the AI to learn a bit more about the best strategy to take on the game.

The singular control of Den vänstra handens stig was a single button on the show floor, hand made in a wooden case. The button, which is actually designed to have a needle sticking out of it which had to be removed to comply with PAX rules, actually does a lot: it kills the player character instantly, completely wipes everything learned by the AI, and restarts the entire game from scratch.

When I saw this game at PAX, I was entranced by it, and the struggles of this AI doofus as he tried and failed and tried and failed and tried and succeeded at traversing his hopeless little world were enthralling. At a certain point, a group of spectators, including myself, formed something of a phalanx around the button, aiming to protect it from people passing by on the show floor, who might be compelled by either malice or the haunting allure of a big button to reset the entire game.

Den vänstra handens stig is a game I think about constantly, even though it seems like development has stalled since 2016. To what degree is watching a video game being played playing the game? When we lose at a video game, when our progress is reset, or worse, when we simply cease to play a game, and all lessons on how to play it seep slowly from our memory, what does that incomplete play experience mean? Why is the proposition of completely obliterating all progress in the game, even when it might literally hurt me, so innately tempting?

When the game was initially put on Steam Greenlight, Valve's now-retired stab at allowing the community to vote on what games would be put on PC game marketplace Steam, a lot of the comments were extremely dismissive of Den vänstra handens stig. Here are some direct quotes:

• "it seems that all you do is jump over holes and climb up ledges"

• "This is terrible. Why would you submit this?"

• "Oh this is deeply unpleasent. This is NOT okay!"

• "Tired of these kind of games, so no. Also way to create one of the worst names ever for a videogame. Just damn."

When I look through these comments (although I must admit a lot of these are positive, and the game eventually did pass Greenlight's approval process), I kind of think of them like the board members of the Society of Independent Artists, dismissing Fountain as just a urinal, and as some vulgar piece of trash not worthy of exhibition. I think of teenage me in 2011, declaring that this is not a video game, video games have guns and murder and numbers that you make bigger so you can kill people better and big maps full of icons for all of the street races you can do. Surely, much as I thought that an artist had to at least make his piece instead of just buying it, I might have thought that surely a video game at least needs to have controls.

While Den vänstra handens stig never formally came out (to my knowledge), other games of its kind have. Every Sale I Drink A Glass Of Water is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: an ever expanding video of the creator drinking a glass of water every time someone buys the game. Like Den vänstra handens stig, Every Sale does technically have a control, it's just that the control input is the act of purchasing the game.

Moirai, a ten-minute adventure game now unplayable, placed the player in a deeply uncomfortable position. Sent into a cave to investigate suspicious moans heard from within, the player encounters a strange, knife-wielding man who looks extremely suspicious, and is sometimes drenched in a blood spatter. After some questioning, the player can let this shifty man pass, or kill them, before progressing deeper into the cave to find a woman wracked in pain, suffering from a botched suicide attempt. She hands you her knife and asks you to finish her off. If you don't oblige, she splashes her blood at you in a fit of rage. Upon resolving the encounter with a woman, on your way back up, you are confronted by a farmer, who subjects you to the same line of questioning you posed the knife-wielding stranger when you entered the cave, and then you realize that you are the knife-wielding stranger drenched in blood. Every time a player enters the cave, they are greeted by the saved responses of a player exiting the cave, and from those responses and without the knowledge that they are simultaneously confronting another player and essentially their own future self, the player will decide whether or not this figure will die.

These games are not masterpieces of craftsmanship. These are either one man projects or small team projects, mostly built by non-professional developers. They don't use the latest technology, they don't have exquisite graphics or perfectly crafted dialogue or delicately-tuned combat, but they are the perfect vessels for ideas, ideas which plant themselves in my head and make me spin them around while I lie in bed, looking for the angle at which I can fumble together an answer. I enjoy this process greatly, and every time one of these big budget AAA video games full of realistically rendered violence and horse testicles barges into store shelves, I find myself wishing that budget was instead cannibalized to fund a million Death Buttons or Glasses of Water or Recursive Farmer Murders.

I write this as something of a call to action, both to the reader and to myself. The vast budgets and photorealistic graphics and mocap studios might seem like an imposing barrier around the realm of game design, one which is as impossible to imagine achieving as creating translucent veils out of marble, but that is not what a good video game has to be. This model of what a video game is not only serves to dissuade people from playing with the medium, but also closes off the possibility space to a variety of ideas that cannot be expressed by the normal model.

Make something sloppy and simple and dumb, as long as you have an idea to bring to reality. Having that idea and expressing it is more important than anything, including the need for the thing you make to even be recognizable as a video game. Go grab your sharpie and sign a urinal. Then maybe pee in it.

Personally, I would say that one of the defining features of Doom (2016), which for convenience here I'm just going to call "Doom", is that the design of that game is tightly wound around the core combat loop. Combat is designed around a single rhythm, that of running around a combat arena, gunning down demons, a rhythm of charging in, ripping a demon apart for some health or some ammo, and backing off to release another salvo of ammunition. Everything about Doom, from the enemy design to the level design to even the narrative, is in service of this loop: back off, shoot, charge, rip and tear, repeat.

That's why I don't necessarily envy the task of having to make a sequel to Doom. That game is a perpetual motion machine of a design, one which converts movement to damage to glory kills to resources to movement, and having to expand on that framework in the way a sequel does stands two obvious risks: the feeling like anything you add will be unnecessary chaff, bolted onto the exterior of this machine, or worse, your additions might disturb the flow of that machine, breaking it in the process.

This is not to say that Doom was perfect, though, and that there was no room for improvement. The game mechanics had generally been milked for all they were worth hours before the game's climax, leaving the ending feeling a bit like it wore out its welcome. Speaking of the game's climax, in the third act the game seemed to forget that, no, I actually don't care that much about the Doom plot, please don't literally immobilize me and force me to listen to plot for five minutes.

So, with a tricky problem to solve, but definite space to improve and grow on the framework of Doom, we sit here in 2020 with Doom Eternal, technically the sixth game in the Doom series (if you count Doom 64, which Doom Eternal has surprisingly strong opinions that you should). Having just finished the game recently, I can finally answer whether or not Eternal meaningfully builds on the framework of Doom, or if it just gets in its own way in an attempt to expand for expansion's sake.

The answer is "yes". It does both.

Doom Eternal's combat loop had me grinning from ear to ear. Looking back at gameplay footage of Doom, a game praised for fast-paced, momentum driven, pulse-pounding combat, it feels positively glacial compared to Eternal. Base movement speed has been sped up, along with the addition of a quick dash, weapons shoot faster while maintaining their punchy feel, and enemies in Eternal are far more aggressive, mobbing you and forcing you to keep moving, lest you feel overwhelmed. Glory kills happen much faster (although I did have the upgrade that speeds them up equipped for most of the game, so that might skew matters, although the presence of that upgrade in Eternal is significant in its own right).

This uptick in speed is combined with a retooling of the game's resource system. Enemy corpses now serve as piñatas for health, ammo, or armor, depending on the precise way by which that enemy violently died. Maximum ammo counts have been pretty aggressively dropped, which combined with weapons' high rate of fire means you're wanting for ammo almost constantly. The aforementioned aggressive enemies create a similar strain on health and armor. The rhythm that was in Doom is here, but magnified in speed. You're always running away from threats and damage, and running towards your next target, in hopes of immolating, eviscerating, or exploding them to get whatever resource you need next. You isolate a target and burn them down whilst trying to avoid everyone else actively trying to kill you. You are always predator and prey, simultaneously.

The retooled chainsaw, an insta-kill weapon which causes enemies to spill bullets like a leaking Cabela's, deserves special mention. The chainsaw in Doom was a sort of last-ditch effort, a weapon you really only used in an absolute pinch, frequently either to save you from running completely out of ammo, or to wipe out an enemy that poses too great a threat. Eternal has repositioned the chainsaw to be your primary source of ammo, granting you a regenerating point of fuel for it, ensuring you always have it available, in exchange for requiring more than that single point of fuel for enemies stronger than your basic fodder.

Doing this directly correlates with the game's momentum, and the feeling of aggression promoted via the mechanics. Combat encounters are always filled with fodder enemies (they don't stop respawning until you kill the quote-unquote "real" enemies), many of whom, like the Imp or Gargoyle, add to the constant cacophony of attacks the player must either dodge or endure. The incentive to use the chainsaw is great, it removes a source of damage from play, however temporarily, and replenishes ammo. The chainsaw is always a good move; you don't risk running out of ammo, and there's always something to chainsaw. These two factors push the player to chainsaw constantly, which ensures the player constantly gets the dopamine hit of eliminating enemies, violently at that. The chainsawing of fodder enemies creates a sort of "background violence" to Doom Eternal, a feeling that even that time spent evading larger threats is still time in which you are on the attack. Simply put, the chainsaw ensures that, even in fights with late-game enemies who can endure hundreds of bullets (not an exaggeration), the player never goes more than a few moments without killing something.

So, the combat has been expanded while still maintaining a constant sense of speed and violence, making the player make interesting decisions in combat due to a rhythmic pace forcing the player to context switch between defense and attack (or, perhaps more accurately for Doom Eternal, attack and ballsier attack). How do the rest of the additions fare?

Well...

Let's take a step back and talk about the Doom Slayer, or Doom Guy, as a character. Even still, this sentence is kind of funny: the Doom Guy of the original Doom games is a blank slate, a void of personality, essentially a shotgun on legs. Doom, this is again 2016 Doom, knew this, and in building out the setting and lore of the world actually maintained the Doom Slayer (as he had been renamed) as a sort of elemental of violence, a storm more than a person. Sure, other characters would go on about cults and gods and the energy crisis and the good of mankind, but the Doom Slayer, both within the narrative and through the actions of the player, existed purely to rend demons. Every action he took was done, either in part or in totality, because it let the Doom Slayer kill more demons.

Doom Eternal attempts to massively expand upon the setting of Doom, establishing cosmological hierarchies, factions within the setting, and most notably, an origin and personality for the Doom Slayer, which isn't fundamentally bad, but the execution absolutely erases the Doom Slayer's established nature. Establishing this setting requires characters to explain this setting, and doing so requires the Doom Slayer to patiently wait while characters explain their dark schemes, in one case causing enemies directly responsible for the invasion of Earth by Hell to get away because Doom Guy gave them a chance to talk.

Now, I don't really care about the integrity of the character of the Doom Slayer, as far as I care from a narrative perspective they can retcon him into a 67 year old Italian man named Giuseppe who kills demons to raise money for his struggling turnip farm, I absolutely do not care. The problem with the recharacterization is that the Doom Slayer was designed such that it framed the plot of Doom in such a way that it tied with the game's mechanical loop instead of against it. In gameplay and out of it, the Doom Slayer existed to murder demons. Everything else felt like it was in service to that goal, and in this the game had a consistent tone and a clarity of purpose.

Eternal's rework of the Doom Slayer character muddles that tone, meaning there are times in the game where you, the player, want to go kill demons, but the game, and now the Doom Slayer, want to do something else. Enemies will appear, including an early appearance by what ends up being the game's antagonist, and the player's mind is thinking "KILL. I WANT TO KILL THAT", but the Doom Slayer is content to patiently listen to her admonishment, and a disconnect is born.

Less important but still annoying, a lot of the peripheral character building with regards to the Doom Slayer demotes him even further. Imagining the Doom Slayer meticulously arranging his off-brand Funko Pops on his shelves, or smacking himself in the head as he practices with his nunchucks (which are visible in his home office, right next to his gaming PC) contrasts the Doom Slayer as Warrior King and Violence Incarnate with the Doom Slayer, Someone's Lame Uncle. I get strong "present-day Stephen Seagal" vibes from this Doom Slayer.

Mechanically speaking, the additions to things other than combat are also pretty weak. The pacing between fights is dragged to a crawl by a new emphasis on first-person platforming, which admittedly is better than it usually is. However, these platforming sections aren't really lack any sense of mastery of the controls or a push towards exploration (the path is usually very obvious), meaning they just sort of take time. Bizarrely, these sections are devoid of enemies, and while I spent the entire game expecting a moment where I would have to successfully platform while in combat, the closest the game ever got was one switch you need to shoot mid-flight. Because of this, it's hard to not feel about the game as "the part I came here for" (the combat) and "this other stuff" (platforming).

Here, I think, is a lesson. Doom was a machine, single-minded in purpose. In adding these platforming sections to the game, Eternal is spending valuable time in its levels pulling the player away from The Thing They Came To Doom To Do (the slogan is "Rip and Tear", not "Rip and Tear and then Grab Onto This Wall so you can Reach This Monkey Bar"). I hypothesize this would have proven far less intrusive had the platforming section been more closely integrated with combat (simply adding some enemies to the platforming areas would be a start, although I suspect the current form of the platforming mechanics would be a little clumsy to try and balance with a combat encounter), or to build up this part of the game into something worth focusing on.

Other shooters, especially Titanfall 2, have pulled off this "combat-movement dichotomy" better, mainly by one, ensuring that the platforming sections were just as dynamic, action-packed, and exciting as combat, and two, ensuring there was a relatively high skill ceiling to the movement abilities available to the player. Titanfall's wall running was hard, it required timing and a good sense of momentum, which compounded with levels that required you to wall-run in increasingly elaborate and interesting situations. Moreover, this mobility is deeply tied to the combat of Titanfall 2, and even in the fiercest firefights (at least, while on foot), you will be wallrunning, jumping, crouch sliding, and using all of the movement mechanics to their fullest.

Doom Eternal's mobility mechanics mostly require you to find a climbable wall, jump to it, look for the next climbable wall, jump to it, ad infinitum, from the first level to the last. Other than "sometimes platforms fall", this mechanic is never built upon, and never truly challenging. As previously mentioned, the new dash is heavily utilized in combat simply in the need to maintain speed, but the other mobility mechanics introduced, including climbable walls and monkey bars, exist only as vestigial appendages to combat arenas, pieces of level design I noticed frequently, but never needed.

One time I saw a climbable wall in an arena in the midst of a fierce firefight, and I said, out loud, to my empty apartment, "why the fuck would I use that right now".

I'm nitpicking all of this only because the beauty of Doom were the moments where all aspects of the game all fed into the same core idea of "rip and tear". When the combat gameplay, the soundtrack, the level design, the narrative, and the character were all in harmony, all screaming at you "RIP THEIR GUTS OUT", it feels incredible. When Eternal hits those same notes, it brings out even higher highs. Looking back at old footage of Doom, I was surprised how incredibly slow it looked for a game I remembered as pulse-poundingly fast, which is a testament to the incredible sense of speed Eternal builds, when it wants to (which, admittedly, is frequently).

Unfortunately, my praise for Eternal cannot come without similar bemoaning of the lack of focus, the moments where the game tears me (heh) from what I want to do, which is visceral murder, so I can look at some hot new Doomguy backstory or do some platforming. These attempts to build onto the core loop of Doom instead feel vestigial, like in some version of this game they might have been cool, had they more tightly embraced that core beating heart of Doom Eternal, but instead I just wish someone would take a chainsaw to them and carve them off of my great game.

In case the content of this blog did not demonstrate this, I am deeply interested in all facets of game design, a domain that can be messily divided into video game design and tabletop game design (there are a bunch of other areas of knowledge too, like for gambling games, sports, gamification, and surely a bunch of other niches I'm unaware of). There's a lot of shared thought and space between video games and tabletop games, especially since video games from near inception to today have been using ideas from its older brother, a translation of ideas that tabletop games have started to reciprocate recently. There is, however, one idea that does not make the jump across that particular threshold so easily: the puzzle.

Puzzles, which I'll vaguely and probably incorrectly define as "a challenge in a game which is overcome with knowledge, logic, or lateral thinking instead of strength, skill, execution, or numerical advantage", are pretty tightly linked with both tabletop games and video games and have been since both mediums' inceptions. Generally speaking, people like a good head-scratcher, and a puzzle is a good way to provide a change of pace from the regular core action of a game.

I've seen a lot of puzzles in video games, and a lot of puzzles in tabletop games, and I can tell you that while puzzles in video games range from awful to transcendent, puzzles in tabletop games, in my experience, are almost unilaterally awful.

Again, some video game puzzles are definitely also bad

They're awful in a specific way, too: the puzzle is presented, players spend too long bashing their head against solutions, usually in a solution that too closely resembles brute force, until finally the energy in the room is so thoroughly sapped that someone looks at the Game Master and goes "fuck it, what is it" and the whole thing is just resolved by GM fiat or by ten goblins falling out of a ceiling tile in a desperate ploy just to create some semblance of forward momentum again.

How can it be that even the most action-packed video games can successfully include some relatively obtuse puzzles, and sliding a single puzzle into even a slow, investigative tabletop RPG session collapses immediately? I don't think it's all bad puzzle design on the part of tabletop RPG designers (although they're certainly not fully blameless), I think that there are fundamental differences in the two types of game which make one have a much easier time with puzzles than the other, the largest of which is going to be what I call "vectors of interaction".

When I refer to a "vector of interaction", I am talking about a single way in which a player can in some way affect the world of the game. You can think of these as "verbs", although I think they're a little bit broader than that. In Super Mario Bros, the vectors of interaction include moving left and right, jumping, crouching, and shooting a fireball. These are the fundamental vectors.

Since the player exists outside of the game and the puzzle exists within it, it is fairly reasonable to say that the only way a puzzle can be solved is by applying a certain set of vectors of interaction in a certain order. To open the locked door, you must move (a vector) to the enemy that has the key, attack (a vector) them until they die, pick up (a vector) the key, move (same vector) back to the door, then unlock (last vector) the door.

One of the strongest tools that puzzles in games have in creating the puzzle is by carefully curating the player's vectors of interaction. Games frequently set up puzzles by teaching the player what their vectors are, and then conditioning the player to recognize subtle hints which indicate to them what vectors might need to be used where. This can be very obvious (when you see enemies, you probably need to fight or kill them), or more subtle (whenever you need to find a ladder in The Last of Us, the ledge that you will use that ladder to access will usually be painted yellow). The Witness, famously, built an entire game, with tons of puzzle variety, around a single vector of interaction: guiding a line along a grid to a goal.

Games can also build puzzles by subverting expectations regarding vectors of interaction, perhaps introducing new ones, or making the player find new ways to use old vectors. For an example of the former, The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass has several puzzles that are solved by using vectors of interaction that the player might not even initially think to use, namely the DS's microphone and ability to close. The ending of Portal 2 does the latter exceptionally, by leveraging a gag from hours ago that the portal-friendly walls of the Aperture testing facility are painted with moon rock, in order to get the player to shoot a portal at the actual Moon.

Here in vectors of interaction we have a massive gulf between video games and tabletop RPGs, one which at first blush sounds like it might be in favor of tabletop RPGs: video games have an order of magnitude fewer potential vectors of interaction than a tabletop RPG. Every gaming platform has a limited number of control inputs, which can only be reused and combined so many ways before a game's controls become cumbersome. As a result, players' problem solving toolkits are dramatically limited in video games. You cannot hash out a verbal truce with Bowser at the end of Super Mario Bros. You cannot get through a locked door in Resident Evil by breaking it down.

Tabletop RPGs, as a (typically) completely spoken-word storytelling medium where the game exists in players' boundless imagination, has no such limitations. Players' vectors of interaction are functionally infinite: any action they can conceive of, at least any action that doesn't conflict with the fundamental rules of the game world's reality, is valid. An enemy can be shot, stabbed, talked down, tied up, avoided, thrown down a big hole, brought to exhaustion, brought to boredom, outlived until it eventually dies of old age, anything at all.

Admittedly, point-and-click adventure games actually have a similar problem, with their wide gamut of verbs available to the player and an unclear delineation between foreground and background

The problem is that infinite vectors of interaction equate to infinite potential actions at any given moment when solving a puzzle, which equate to infinite red herrings. When I as a player can talk to every single inhabitant of a town infinitely while investigating a murder, as opposed to a video game where they will inevitably run out of dialogue, I have the room to explore red herrings and dead ends forever. If they truly don't know how to solve a puzzle, and try to simply brute force it, they have infinite options to iterate through until they find the correct one.

Thus, a potential avenue to developing a puzzle that players will solve in a finite amount of time, ideally before everyone at the table spits bile at the mere mention of the word "puzzle", is the careful curation of vectors of interaction. By limiting the possibility space of a puzzle's solution, players can reason about a more limited set of options and, hopefully, come to a solution in a limited amount of time. I'll be discussing the ways you can do this in the next post in this series, but as a teaser, there are at least two strategies you can follow to do this, you can either add an additional layer of interaction to the game, limiting players' available vectors to a more manageable subset, or you can use signalling in order to let players trim down vectors themselves.

The other major solution that comes to mind, one which I'll also be covering, is what I like to call Gordian Knot puzzle design. This is to say, create a puzzle without a solution, at least not one in mind, and trust in the players' ingenuity, combined with the infinite vectors of interaction available to them, to produce a solution without you having to think of it beforehand.

These techniques are designed to either constrain or work with tabletop RPG's extreme breadth of vectors of interaction, and hopefully utilizing these techniques will help produce RPG puzzles that are actually enjoyable, for once.

To be honest, I always really enjoy end of year lists like these. The format just makes it really convenient to see what kinds of games certain people like and gravitate towards, the breadth of these lists usually means you end up finding a game or two you missed in the year to revisit (for me, these 2019 lists have gotten me to pick up A Short Hike, a game I totally missed), and it's just fun to argue about how good things you like are in comparison to other things you like but not as much.

To this end, I'll be putting out three lists for the end of the year: two Games of the Decade lists, one of my actual games of the decade (not this one) and one of games that I really liked and want to talk about but aren't quite good enough to land on that first list (this one), as well as a Games of 2019 list. I will freely confess that the only criteria for these lists is purely an amalgam of my tastes, my emotional reactions to things, as well as a few vague senses of nostalgia. These, like every other game of the year list, are opinions, and while I'll justify why I like all these games, ultimately the reason any of them are on a list is "I like them".

So, without further ado, here are 10 games from 2010 to 2019 that I liked quite a bit, but not more than 10 other games.

NieR: Automata

NieR: Automata is going to set a theme for a lot of these near misses, which is a set of games who knock either the mechanics or the narrative conceit out of the park, but not both. In NieR's case, we're going to be talking about a game whose plot, characters, and ideas are so powerful and interesting that this game literally made me cry, but whose gameplay is... well it's fine.

This game made absolute waves when it came out, and for extremely good reason. A game dripping with the original vision of designer and insane person Yoko Taro, NieR is this sort of mismash of a lot of ideas. Blade Runner? Starship Troopers? Frankenstein? It's a bit hard to nail NieR's thematic relatives, because the way it presents its ideas is so fabulously interesting. A game that, on first glance, you peg as "Oh, I get it, this is a 'what makes a robot a person' kinda stories" blossoms in a fabulously interesting way, into a game about duty and hope, a game about the way love ties us together and tears us to shreds, a game that is an infinitely more interesting statement on death than a million bloodsoaked gore shooters.

And then you have to play NieR: Automata, and with the exception of a few absolutely inspired moments (I cannot emphasize enough that I was full-force weeping at a credits sequence), NieR: Automata plays like a relatively bog-standard character action game. An interesting loadout system where chips containing skills and abilities must be slotted into limited memory failed me as I landed on a sufficient loadout about 8 hours into a 30 hour game and never touched it a game. The combat gets a smidge repetitive, the boss fights maybe a bit less good as the game goes on, and ultimately you reach a point where you want the game to just pull the controls away from you and just show you what it has, which is phenomenal. Middling combat is what barely drags this game down from being a great for me.

Dishonored (and Dishonored 2 and Death of the Outsider)

The only reason Dishonored isn't in my personal top 10 is that Prey exists, and basically does everything Dishonored does but a little bit better, but Arkane's breakout hit of the last console generation still has enough interesting ideas of its own to warrant mention unto itself. With Dishonored, Arkane Studios and creative directors Raphaël Colantonio and Harvey Smith came out swinging as the best immersive sim designers in the game today.

Dishonored and its sequels are such an unbelievable delight to play. The world of Dunwall is a delightful oilpunk hellhole, taking heavy cues from Industrial Revolution-era Britain with insidious veins of eldritch horror waiting in the wings. The levels in this game are so expertly crafted, to reward nosy players with new approaches to every assassination, and to be toyboxes that provide the necessary ingredients for players of any playstyle to experiment, play around, and ultimately leverage the game's wide and inventive set of tools to solve any problems before them.

As the series has gone on, its provided some of the absolute best levels that the immersive sim genre, if not video games as a whole, have ever seen. Lady Boyle's Last Party, The Clockwork Mansion, and A Crack In The Slab are levels that were an absolute delight to play, stuffed to the gills with fantastically interesting ideas. I want to replay these games at basically all times, if only because they are so dense with ideas and have such a wide possibility space that I think I could play them a dozen more times, each time playing a unique and interesting way.

Burnout Paradise

I'm not a big car guy, really. This is potentially to the disappointment of my father, who is as passionate about cars as I am about video games, but nothing about them other appeals to me other than their utility as a tool to get me from place to place. This largely extends to a disinterest in racing video games, but one shining, beautiful exception was out there, one which dared to imagine a car not just as vehicle, but as weapon.

Burnout as a series is the apotheosis of the genre in my eyes, and Paradise, the very pinnacle. Burnout recognizes the power of video games to provide a fantasy unavailable to most, the fantasy of driving very expensive cars very fast, and then goes a step forward to offer satisfaction for an even more untenable desire: what if you took that very expensive, very fast car, and you just ran it into some shit.

The world of Paradise City is heaven for those with such destructive tendencies, and presumably hell for insurance companies as well as, you know, anyone trying to get groceries or whatever. The open world of Paradise City lets you learn the roads as well as you know the roads of your own hometown, creating a real feeling of progression as you leverage your knowledge of shortcuts or busy intersections to grab a narrow victory in a race. On top of that, the game's density of activity creates this wonderful feeling like Paradise City is a big theme park, a wonderful, dumb place filled to the brim with morons like you taking big expensive sportscars and using them as blunt instruments. Burnout Paradise is, in a pure, beautiful sense, extremely dumb fun.

Bloodborne

Dark Souls canonized a whole genre, and was a masterpiece of game design which thundered into the zeitgeist with a player skill-driven difficulty, unique and interesting world, incredible encounter design, and some deeply satisfying combat. But it's also a technical mess, a bit visually drab, and is extremely uneven in quality, especially in the third act. These are problems largely resolved by Bloodborne, my favorite Souls game.

This is a word thrown around too much in games, but if I had to describe the fundamental ethos of Bloodborne, it's "brutal". Bloodborne is a game that revels in a gory, unpleasant violence, the violence of being ripped apart by gnashing teeth, the violence of a rusty axe slicing through boil-ridden, rotting flesh. Yharnam is Gothic Horror incarnate, a horrible place where the thin veneer of decorum and class and academia only serves to further highlight the incongruity of the plague-ridden, pus-dripping, flesh-rending, nails-on-chalkboard horrors inside of it. Yharnam is a fantastically enchanting place for how absolutely horrible it is. And you, slumbering Hunter, are here to kill it all.

There are a lot of reasons Bloodborne cinches this spot for me over Dark Souls, but this devotion to the idea of violence is a cornerstone of them. Where Dark Souls never quite gave me a feeling of mastery, only of practice, Bloodborne from minute one makes you feel like a violent killer, one who claws themselves out of their own grave over and over and over again, restless until every living thing you can get your hands on is dead.

Pokemon HeartGold & SoulSilver

Pokemon as a franchise is near and dear to my heart. Pokemon Silver was my second video game, and I played subsequent titles religiously until I sort of fell off around the era of Sun and Moon. However, I hopped right back on the Pokeboat with Sword and Shield, and that recent memory has just reinvigorated my memory that, dang, Pokemon is fun.

SoulSilver isn't perfect by any means. Obviously this is a game still deeply rooted in the franchise tropes that persisted for 20 years, and these more grindy, rote parts of the series are magnified by the fact that SoulSilver's pacing is garbage. I invite anyone who disagrees with me to revisit the game, and enjoy the pain as you suddenly run out of level-appropriate wild Pokemon in the midgame, right around a set of challenging Gym Leaders, forcing you to spend what feels like an eternity grinding. The existence of Sword and Shield, and the way those games have smoothed over the worst parts of the formula, only make this lull worse in hindsight.

Despite this, it's hard to argue with the personal gravity of SoulSilver, a game perfectly built to tug at my nostalgia. It's Pokemon Silver, one of my first video games! There's a whole extra region wedged in after the first Elite Four! The Pokemon run along behind you because we're best friends! No matter how my tastes in gaming mature, I think I'll always have a love for Pokemon, and SoulSilver is a perfect love letter from the world of Pokemon to me.

Assassins Creed: Brotherhood

Ubisoft's particular mantra of open-world game design has, in the last ten years, led to two major paradigms for the genre, one of people (most notably Ubisoft itself) aping it wholesale, and another of designers opting to reject it, creating games that exist in direct opposition to maps laden with waypoints and climbing towers. In 2019, it can be hard to remember a time when this sort of design was groundbreaking, and while its roots can be found in Assassins Creed II, the je n'ais ce quoi wasn't there until Brotherhood.

The game that unified Assassins Creed's worlds from a series of disparate maps together into the single, massive, sprawling city and countryside of Rome, Brotherhood was the start of something big for open-world games. This is the first open-world game I can think of where the mere act of traversal was, unto itself, fun. The characters were fun and interesting, the plot just a bit bonkers in a delightful way, and the world jam-packed with stuff to do, this game represented a bridge being built between the iconic open-world games of the previous decade, like Fallout 3, Oblivion, and Grand Theft Auto 4, and the rest of games, representing a free and open trade of ideas that would define the decade's games. If Assassins Creed could become open world so excellently, everything could.

On top of all of that, Assassins Creed: Brotherhood had some of the most interesting multiplayer of any game of the decade. Forsaking traditional CTF and deathmatch modes, Brotherhood's online play was a pulse-pounding game of cat-and-mouse, where hunters had to pursue their targets blending as closely with a crowd of NPCs as they could, both to keep their target at ease, and to hide from their own hunter. Tense, reserved, and clever in a way most games aren't, this mode's DNA still beats on today in games like Spy Party. An absolute delight.

Control

The newest game on the Near Miss List, Control was an absolute delight to discover this year. Featuring a delightful story which taps into a rich vein of ideas from The X-Files, Warehouse 13, the SCP Foundation, and more, Control features a sort of bureaucratic horror, a game which focuses on the common ground between two of the most unknowable forces in the universe: the strange, magical, terrifying forces which creep in our subconscious, popping up in dark shadows in the corners of our eyes, and the inner workings of the United States government.

The resulting game is a constant treat, a weird game of discovery and wonder and horror as you explore the innards of the Oldest House, in equal parts enchanted by a multiverse of things that go bump in the night, and the extensive government bureaucracy which so futilely hopes to categorize and understand them. This story is delivered by an exemplary cast of interesting characters, level design that manages to perfectly capture the oppressive beauty of brutalism, and satisfying moment-to-moment gameplay which involves a lot of telekinetically throwing bookcases at people.

Control's not perfect. The game's progression systems are... well they're pretty garbage, featuring an extremely boring and uninspired upgrade system so focused on banal statistical buffs that it feels almost anachronistic in a game this creative. Some of the environments drag on a bit longer than they need to, and the difficulty spikes wildly in a few seemingly random spots. However, The Oldest House is fundamentally an absolute delight to explore, and the next time The Board calls, I'll be there to pick up.

The Stanley Parable

An early star of what would eventually become a wide, wonderful field of metatextual games, The Stanley Parable wow'ed me when I first played it as a Half Life 2 mod over a decade ago, and it wow'ed me when I played the full release, and it's still kind of amazing today. This game is just so unrelentingly clever in how it uses the medium to make its point, and even today few games have managed it without coming off as aggressively pretentious and ham-fisted.

The moment you encounter the first choice in The Stanley Parable, the moment you go "wait, but what if I...", that moment is transcendent. The Stanley Parable is a defiant exclamation that the way we think about how we play video games is too narrow, and that by simply ignoring traditional norms for things like "control schemes" and "inputs" and "goals" we can discover some amazing new games. I've done a lot of things in a lot of games, but few of them were as successful at forming a lasting memory in my brain as standing still in a supply closet in The Stanley Parable.

The Stanley Parable is a thesis statement, the explosive start to an entire new era of game design, where games felt more free to talk about deep, complex ideas, to invert and skew and reinvent the base mechanics of play, where we figured out how to lie to the player and trick them and make it work.

El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron

Show me another human being who even mentions this game on any sort of games of the decade list, I dare you. El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron is a game that went for it in a crazy, beautiful, high-concept way resulting in a game that I can safely say is utterly unlike any of its peers, a game that took on a lot of big ideas and wasn't afraid to be completely goddamn inscrutable in service of its theme.

El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron is a loose retelling of the biblical Book of Enoch, in which the scribe Enoch must descend to Earth and bring seven fallen Angels to judgement, before God floods the Earth in disgust at the sin they have created. This quest brings Enoch to a mighty tower constructed by the Fallen Angels, one which defies all physical logic as it contains seemingly infinite expanses of abstract, beautiful space and also in one case a cyberpunk future city?

El Shaddai is a fantastic game. It's gorgeous, with a sort of watercolor aesthetic with which this strange, gorgeous world is painted. The combat is really interesting, featuring only a single attack button, which must be hit in different rhythms in order to yield different combos, and weapons which must be stolen from enemies regularly. Also, and this is crazy, this is a video game about the Bible, which is kind of batshit unto itself. El Shaddai has some pacing issues in the middle, its inventive combat isn't quite inventive enough to not get stale near the end, and it can be hard to tell what's artistically obtuse and what's poorly written sometimes, but a game this weird and interesting and ambitious made its mark on me deep when I played it, and gives it a place close to my heart.

Into The Breach

I bounced pretty hard off of Into The Breach's older brother, FTL: Faster Than Light. That game had this blend of randomness and panic in its core gameplay loop that I never felt really satisfied with my successes or my failures. When Into The Breach dropped into my lap, not only did its slow, thoughtful gameplay ensnare me to a far greater degree, it consumed my life. This game is, simply, amazing.

Into The Breach is a slow, calculating game, one which initially appears to be a Final Fantasy Tactics style tactics RPG, but in reality is an incredibly clever dynamic puzzle game, one in which every turn is a chessboard to be solved. Each mech and weapon in Into The Breach is deceptively simple, because they're meant to be used with each other, with the environment, even with the enemies as you work out perfect, beautiful ways to sweep the board, somewhere between John Wick and a Rube Goldberg Machine.

In the last ten years, no game quite made me want to sink my teeth into some puzzles like Into The Breach. Perfectly fitting five minutes or three hours of play, and with deep, emergent gameplay mechanics that let you essentially customize your own puzzles by way of what mechs you pick, I never don't want to play Into The Breach.

In fact, I'm going to go play it right now.

But, alas, I am but a mortal who still needs to hit the hay (not for lack of trying), and this industry will keep marching forward, producing masterpiece after masterpiece. But, despite this, I can still appreciate that which I did play. And that's really all this is: me, spending a moment to acknowledge the games that really moved me, the games that latched themselves in my brain and never let go, that influence my own design and my own tastes and just who I am as a person.

So, here they are, my personal top ten games from the last decade, the games which moved me, which changed what sort of things I wanted to make.

Death Stranding

Yeah, this game came out like two months ago, and I'm not even done with it. Guess what, it's on my list. My list, my rules, if you don't like it, write your own list.

The team behind Death Stranding have done what I've wanted a AAA game developer to do for years now: they've rejected the traditional ideas of what make a video game "fun". So many, too many games of this size now fall back on the same rote ideas of killing stuff, completing checkboxes on a map, going really fast, big setpieces, all of this stuff which is certainly fine, but when every game does it, I'm left feeling like video games as a medium are a bit stale right now. It's a very similar feeling to how I feel about big-budget American movies right now: one paradigm rules the roost, and anything that isn't that paradigm just isn't profitable enough (at least in the eyes of people with the purse-strings) to make.

Then Death Stranding charges in and dares to imagine an absolutely ludicrous kind of game, a game where a major console manufacturer can throw millions of dollars into a game, stuffed to the brim with cutting edge graphics and celebrity cameos and a 60+ hour runtime, about lugging a bunch of heavy shit from point A to B. Death Stranding has some traditional combat mechanics (which are the worst part of the gameplay, IMO), but most of the mechanics revolve around making you increasingly skilled at carrying increasingly ludicrous amounts of crap across a desolate, empty world.

Yeah, whole thing's not perfect. While the story and themes are interesting, the writing is garbage, and I'm becoming increasingly suspicious of if Hideo Kojima has ever actually met a woman, let alone is capable of writing one. The combat, like I said, is a little interesting but far too trivial to really matter. But, god dammit, the rest of this game is so interesting. The way it rewards learning the terrain of the world, the way it makes you feel a sense of community despite being completely isolated, the music, this game is truly something absolutely special.

Deadly Premonition

When Nintendo unceremoniously announced a sequel to Deadly Premonition during one of their Directs this year, I screamed. I rewatched the trailer at least 30 times, texted everyone I knew, posted to every social media account I have. This is my Shenmue 3, my The Last Guardian, my Final Fantasy 7 remake. My beautiful, terrible dream that I assumed would never in a million years come true.

In many ways, Deadly Premonition is deeply unfun to play. The car you spend comically too much of the game driving is both too heavy and too light, bafflingly. The wayfinding in the game is awful, it does an awful job of signalling where side quests are available (or even that side quests are available) and, of course, the combat is atrocious, multiplied by the fact that for a majority of the game there is one enemy type, which delightfully repeats the same, let's be generous and say six, barks ("I don't want to diiiiiiiiiiie")

So I want you to read all of that, and go to my Near Misses list and look at all of the amazing games that I very much did not give this spot on the list to, and think about how much I must absolutely adore the parts of this game that do work. The characters in this game are instant classics, each delightfully quirky and idiosyncratic in a way perfectly evoking David Lynch, the game's obvious thematic inspiration. There are so many amazing moments in this game, either in their genuine emotional strikingness or due to the wave of confusion they elicit. This is a game which is so quirky and charming and fun that even in its greatest slogs, I just always wanted to see what crazy thing was behind the next corner.

If there's one thing that Deadly Premonition absolutely oozes, in every aspect of its being, it's earnestness. The team behind this game clearly loved it, despite its flaws and their own limitations in budget, and god dammit it shows. There's something, I dunno, deeply charming about this game through and through, as though realistic graphics and big budgets and advanced combat systems are just layers of fog concealing the true, beating heart of a game, one which beats brightly in Deadly Premonition. I think everyone involved in Deadly Premonition had fun making it, and I'll be damned if that feeling doesn't pass on to me as I play it.

Fallout: New Vegas

I don't talk about Fallout: New Vegas as much as I want to on this blog. Depending on my mood, it's my favorite game ever made. It's the reason I have the Brotherhood of Steel emblem tattooed on my arm. I've played it a dozen times, and I'll play it a dozen times more. Many a game has attempted to capture what makes this game great, both from franchise heads Bethesda Softworks, and New Vegas's own developers, but none have matched it.

Obligatory "but it isn't perfect"s out of the way, this game is brown as hell, the combat is kinda bad, and Bethesda's engine can't handle large crowds of people to save its life and it shows in this game's lackluster final battle. Besides all of that, Fallout: New Vegas is perfect to me. New Vegas is an infinitely interesting place to me, one that's been cleverly set up to exist in a sort of deadlock at the game's outset. Every faction in New Vegas is at a stalemate, and it's the anarchic presence of the player that knocks down the dominoes necessary to set this world into motion. Watching your decisions ripple out and change this world is one of the great many satisfactions I get from New Vegas.

This feeling of player decisions leading to reward also exists in microcosm in the individual quests. A great many quests in this game allow for what feels in the moment to be an infinite amount of possibilities, as random relationships, perks, companions, skills, items, or whatever the player can muster can be slapped together to solve the problems of the Mojave, with the game seemingly being ready to handle any of them.

While the primary gameplay triumvirate of shoot-sneak-chat wasn't revolutionary at New Vegas's launch and is even less so now, the reason this game shines is how it uses it to let you tell a version of the game's story that feels genuinely unique. Whether you're the brainless bruiser for Caesar's Legion, or the nerdy coward fighting for the NCR, talking about how you played New Vegas never boils down to "I did the good path" or "I did the bad path", it feels like a story that is genuinely yours.

Prey

Prey claims a spot that I knew from the second I started this list would have to go to one of Arkane's great immersive sims of the last decade. The fact that Prey has beaten out Dishonored, a game I love so much that I have the Mark of the Outsider tattooed on my arm, stands as testament to how much I love this game.

Simply put, other than some pacing issues (there's a definite difficulty spike in the middle of the game, and an absolute difficulty crevasse at the end), there isn't much Prey does that doesn't blow me away. The first hour of Prey is maybe the best opening of any video game ever made, period. The retro-futurist aesthetic of the game is phenomenal. Talos-I is an infinitely interesting place to explore, cleverly designed to give up a few more secrets every time you pass through an area, filled with smart touches that make this space feel so much more real, most notably the fact that the whole station's crew has been named, given a role, and a fate somewhere in the physical game space, a feature that draws a surprising kinship between this and Return of the Obra Dinn.

It's really the immersive sim DNA running through this game, though, that gives it the beating, Typhon-corrupted heart that drives it all forward. An emphasis on the interactions between mechanics means that your whole time with Prey will be spent experimenting, coming up with new, clever ways to open doors, dispatch enemies, and get to places that you feel like you just maybe weren't supposed to get to yet, giving you a real satisfaction for understanding the way the game ticks.

And none of this even touches on Mooncrash, Prey's phenomenal DLC which turns the game into a unique twist on a roguelike, in which you use the game's systemic design to try and optimize runs through a moon base, in which you must try and get five characters to five distinct victory conditions, all sharing the same world, and the same limited resources. Mooncrash unto itself is inspired, and the fact that it's just another piece of this fantastic game makes Prey all the stronger.

Titanfall 2

There are three first-person shooters of various flavors on this list, but Titanfall 2 is the one which has the best moment to moment gameplay, the best control of emotion and energy on the microcosmic level that leaves your brain running a million miles an hour while you play. This game has a billion good ideas, all executed at a masterful level, all of which serve to hammer home the same beautiful, perfect thought: Go. Fast.

A pilot in Titanfall 2 is a projectile unto themselves. Running and bouncing off of walls, grappling around surfaces like a gun-toting Spiderman, sliding through doorways and beneath weapons fire, pilots are an incredible joy to move around as, and increasing in skill just results in you being able to move with greater ease, resulting in high-skill gameplay feeling a bit like you're flying. Combine this with the extremely brilliant decision to fill the large battlefields with constant NPC warfare, which the players can swoop into like a hawk to sow chaos, and Titanfall makes good on its promise to make players feel like veritable superheroes of the battlefield.

As if this wasn't enough unto itself, then the actual eponymous Titans get dropped into the battlefield, and the whole dynamic changes. Much like Battlefield's vehicles, the Titans add an additional dimension of combat to the map, but the much tighter spaces in Titanfall end up giving Titans a sense of claustrophobia in exchange for their power. Sure, you can literally crush a pilot under your heel, but there are so many little corners and angles for a pilot to come, will you even notice them when they do? Titan against Titan combat is a cacophony of ultra-powerful weaponry which will turn a passing pilot into mist, yet the agility and combat tricks of an unmounted pilot still makes them a deadly threat. Titan gameplay is interwoven deeply with on-foot gameplay in a way that just makes every fight even more interesting.

Also, for what it's worth, the campaign is fantastic. Genuinely good characters, some fantastic gameplay gimmicks that last just long enough to make an impression without wearing out their welcome, and curated setpiece moments designed to make the most of the game's best mechanics make the whole experience a slam dunk on top of the excellent multiplayer.

LISA: The Painful

The funny thing is, if you search this blog for LISA: The Painful, you'll find my review of it, one of the first things I posted here, which is actually a bit lukewarm. However, as the years go on and "quirky JRPG-inspired surrealist indie game" becomes a genre unto itself with classics like Undertale, Anodyne, and Barkley: Shut Up and Jam Gaiden, I constantly think about how good the good parts of LISA are.

A game that could be hastily described as "what if Earthbound, but the plot of Children of Men", LISA: The Painful puts you in the shoes of Brad, a drug-addled martial arts master who is self-appointed caretaker of Buddy, the last woman alive in a post-apocalyptic surrealist wasteland. In this hunt, Brad ends up joining up with a veritable carnival of weirdos, psychopaths, and at least one fishman who end up constituting your JRPG party. Each of these party members has unique mechanics, from Brad's fighting-game-adjacent combo system to a drunk whose abilities require him to maintain a constant buzz through the fight, all of which help spice up a Barkley-esqe active combat system.

On top of its unique combat systems, a wonderfully weird aesthetic, and a fantastic soundtrack, the thing that makes LISA truly amazing is how, even now years later, LISA is simultaneous one of the most genuinely depressing and genuinely hilarious games I've ever played. This game is an absolute masterpiece of writing and design, with a fantastic control of tone that uses an interactive medium to inspire genuine dread (the choices brought upon by running-antagonist Chris Columbo are mortifying), and tear-inducing laughter (the ladder and the bulldozer, for people in the know). So often writing in games genuinely fails to evoke anything, and for LISA to be able to ping pong between two vastly different tones and to nail both of them is a monolithic achievement.

Left 4 Dead 2

Left 4 Dead 2 is my favorite co-op game of all time, period. There are so many good ideas packed into the Left 4 Dead franchise that its kind of amazing to me that it's only recently that other games have started to take its best ideas, with homage games like Vermintide finally coming to their own. This listing is also slightly cheating, as Left 4 Dead 2 contains all of the original Left 4 Dead inside of it (and was also reskinned to make that baffling Japan-only arcade game, which I've also played), but that just hammers home even more how great Left 4 Dead 2 really is.

At first blush, there's not a ton of content in Left 4 Dead 2, with the base game only including 5 campaigns of 5ish levels each, but the beauty of Left 4 Dead 2 is in its infinite replayability, both due to how much of the gameplay complexity reveals itself over multiple playthroughs, and the AI Director which mixes up the gameplay elements and constantly tweaks the difficulty of every run. As you play better and better, learning to recognize the audio cues for each Special Infected and pull off advanced tactics like crowning Witches, the game responds in kind and gets harder, meaning that the game remains a challenge at all times.

There are few co-op video game experiences I've enjoyed more than getting a group of my friends together and running a campaign or two of Left 4 Dead 2. The game's use of Crescendo moments creates a delightful rhythm of panic and calm that few other co-op experiences can match, all the more fun when you toss in a few mods to, say, replace the Tank with Shrek.

There's a certain, I dunno, purity to Left 4 Dead 2 that I also enjoy. There's no XP or gear to get, no meters to fill. Just the same set of challenges to hurl yourself into, constantly getting harder as you get better and better. In a lot of ways, my feelings of Left 4 Dead remind me a lot of how other people talk about Spelunky: the feeling of tackling this monolithic, hostile thing, and slowly learning how it ticks.

Yakuza 0

Kabukicho is one of my favorite places on Earth. A seedier nightlife neighborhood of Tokyo, Kabukicho is lit up like the sun all through the night, with literally hundreds of bars to choose from in a few blocks. Some are tourist traps, with bright smiles and friendly faces trying to wave in an unsuspecting Westerner to get fleeced. Some are friendly neighborhood bars beating to their own drum, calmly relaxing to jazz or blaring death metal ambivalent to the crowd outside. Some of them don't even have signs. It's a neighborhood I've been to many times, one where I've met a wide variety of wonderful people, had some near-misses with some bad times, and ultimately a place I've had numerous unforgettable adventures, and Yakuza 0 is a perfect encapsulation of that.

Yakuza 0 is a sprawling story driven by its varied cast of excellent characters. From its dual protagonists, the moral paragon to-a-fault Kazuma Kiryu and the down-on-his-luck Goro Majima, to the colorful array of passionate villains, to the myriad of total weirdos you'll meet through the game (shoutouts to Mr. Libido, the Pants Thief, and the Bad Dominatrix), this is a game where, in both the melodramatic, sweeping crime epic of a main quest or the silly, ridiculous side stories, you'll be driven forward by meeting a stranger and suddenly being swept into the night on an adventure that will probably end well, just like my nights in Kabukicho.

All of this is built on a mechanical framework that's designed to just feel lightheared, silly, and just dang fun. The combat system deemphasizes execution in favor of situational awareness, rewarding perceptive players who pay attention to the environment with ridiculous, bombastic Heat Moves to bash through enemies. The legendary array of side content here is a treat, from bowling and batting cages to an underground fighting arena and an entire subplot of model car racing. It really does feel like a night out drinking: you have a plan and a goal, then suddenly someone says "LOOK, A KARAOKE BAR" and the whole thing just goes to hell.

The entire Yakuza series is a delight, and I can't wait to delve into the later entries as the full remaster collection continues to drop. Of all of the games promising grand adventure and unforgettable moments, only Yakuza offers the kinds of grand adventure that I genuinely love in real life, the kind where you let yourself be consumed by a bustling, living city, and go wherever the flow may take you.

Hitman 2

This one's another partial cheat: much like Left 4 Dead 2, the entire predecessor of 2018's Hitman 2 has been forward-ported, essentially doubling the content of the game. However, even if Hitman 2 stood alone, it would be one of the most infinitely fun and interesting games I've ever played, and the fact that it contains its entire, similarly wonderful predecessor ascends it to this list.

Hitman 2 is an incredible game for people who are interested in systems-driven game design. The core of this game is a logical engine, a series of rules by which these clockwork worlds abide. The first time you wander into Miami's F1 racetrack or the busy streets of Mumbai, you'll be bumbling around. Your kills will be messy, perhaps an axe to the face in front of a crowd of dozens. But as you play these levels, again and again, you'll see the rules of the world laid bare. You'll understand how they tick, and more importantly, how they respond to you.

True Hitman play begins when you enter these levels as a master, the strings which move the puppets of these sandboxes firmly in your hands. Then, you go from a bumbling, axe-wielding lunatic to the director of an elaborate play, making sure everyone is in their places for the elaborate show you have planned to go on. In some ways, Hitman 2 is, at its apex, kind of an art form? There's something deeply satisfying about envisioning an elaborate kill and pulling it off, swiftly, with no mistakes, no matter how complex, like putting on a grand show.

On top of all of this, Hitman 2 is just genuinely hilarious. There's something pure and beautiful about a deadpan assassin hurling a can of spaghetti sauce at an unsuspecting guard, or busting out an entire elaborate drum solo at the drop of a hat, or just wearing a big stupid toucan costume. It's great, and just adds to the feeling of conducting a show, as you're suddenly offered a new dimension of play, to create the stupidest deaths imaginable. Hitman 2 is just a pure delight through and through.

Pyre

I'm a huge sucker for Supergiant Games, and of their games, Pyre stands tall as my favorite. The pitch for this game is a bit intangible at first glance. It's hard to hear "Character-driven Purgatorial Basketball Tournament" and really have any idea what you're getting into, but what you are getting into as a fantastic story, paired excellently with some extremely interesting gameplay systems.

Pyre takes place in a purgatorial realm called the Downside, one where criminals and convicts from a great fantasy kingdom above are literally thrown down to a world beneath for their crimes. You, the Reader, rapidly assemble a rag-tag group of criminals to participate in a thing called The Rites which... well, which essentially are a sports tournament for your freedom. The game takes place over multiple cycles of this tournament, the winning team of which gets to select a player to ascend back to the world above, their sentence ended.

This tournament structure is the crux of Pyre's genius. Early on, you rapidly realize the world above is maybe not governed by the most benevolent of rulers, and you and yours hatch a plan: by bringing the right people back up topside, you can attempt to stage a coup and overthrow the corrupt system which threw you down here. You can tactically choose who you want to bring up to further this goal. Or...

You see, Pyre has no failure state. You can lose any given tournament. Actually, there's a moment that happened to me where I realized not only could I lose it, I had the ability to influence who ended up in the finals (by targeting and knocking out contenders earlier in the qualifiers), then throw the final match to allow characters not in my party to ascend. And you want to do this, too: the whole cast of Pyre is so well-written, crafted with such empathy and so interesting, that you might be willing to hedge your bets to save a character who you really think deserves it. It's up to you, if you think your revolution will succeed with one less person, you can maybe throw a tournament in favor of rescuing, say, the kind old man who's ostensibly your opponent but has always treated you with equanimity, or a vengeful veteran of the Rites who was once given the chance to ascend but had it ruined by the actions of another.

The cast of Pyre is so powerful, and the constant choices of who to raise topside and who to leave beneath, that I was enraptured by this game from start to finish. On top of that, I enjoy the gameplay quite a bit, the artstyle is simply sublime, and the soundtrack and sound design, as is so usual with Supergiant, is one of the best in video games. Truly, a phenomenal experience.

The Outer Worlds is a game which very much wants you to remember that the blood of Fallout: New Vegas is pumping through its veins. The announcement trailer specifically namedrops New Vegas as the studio's pedigree, despite the fact that Obsidian has released 5 games since, including its own wholly original and wildly successful Pillars of Eternity, which went unmentioned. The game is rife with small stylistic touches that point back to modern Fallout, from the particular way that characters are framed during dialog sequences to the syntax for in-dialogue skill checks to the way the game sometimes slows time for a cinematic depiction of a final blow on an enemy crumpling them to the ground. Both explicitly and subtly, this game is screaming to you "I'm cut from the same cloth as New Vegas".

Being kin with New Vegas is a strong sell for me. It's absolutely one of my favorites, I've played it for hundreds of hours, and I actually have a New Vegas tattoo on my left arm. A game that follows up on that game's ideas was always going to be an instant buy from me, and now having put a bow on my 20-or-so hour playthrough of the game, my final opinion is something along the lines of "Uh, you kinda did it?"

Fallout: New Vegas is a hell of a game to tee off against. Considered by many (myself included) to be the best Fallout game, which is unto itself an extremely highly regarded series, New Vegas had some ideas that few games of its ilk since have ever dared to match. Extremely solid writing and open-ended quest design made for a world that made good on the "play how you want" promises of the RPG genre, making a game that would anticipate your attempts to break its structure and allow you the freedom to do so. Some extremely solid character progression mechanics let you really create a unique avatar, such that every playthrough of New Vegas genuinely feels different. The grand plot of the game was crafted from the ground up for open-world play, solving the dissonance between "save the world" narratives and meandering gameplay by describing a world that was locked in a stalemate until an agent of chaos (that is, you) knocked it loose.

Despite all of this, New Vegas absolutely still has issues, some of its own creation and some created retroactively by the modern landscape of gaming. The combat is fairly lackluster and has gotten worse with age, the characters all have that cold and lifeless "Bethesda face", and the color palette of the game consists mostly of shades of poop brown and concrete grey. Furthermore, while the game's strategic possibility space of kill-sneak-talk definitely allows for a wide range of player choice, as time progresses and more games implement the same options, New Vegas's implementation feels more and more stale.

Understanding New Vegas's successes and failures is, I think, critical to properly evaluating the success of The Outer Worlds, because The Outer Worlds actively wants you to think of it in the same space as New Vegas. All aspects of the game feel like they are either following New Vegas, or are differing specifically in response to New Vegas.

So here comes The Outer Worlds. Coming out almost a decade after New Vegas, under the same studio (I can't say how much of the actual New Vegas team still works at Obsidian, admittedly), we're taking another crack at the same general design ethos. This game represents an opportunity to grab New Vegas's best ideas, shave away its worst drawbacks, and evolve this style of open-world player driven game, a style of game whose modern progenitor isn't exactly hitting homers right now.

The Outer Worlds makes some fantastic steps forward for the genre. The greatest of these are the companions, who feel in many cases like the crew of Firefly as rendered through the mechanics and writing of Mass Effect. They're generally a set of interesting characters, who crucially provide insight into the setting, as well as have a lot of genuinely interesting banter with one another. The simple decision to let you have two human companions at a time (instead of New Vegas, which let you take one human companion with either a non-sentient robot or a dog) creates tons of space to explore the relationships of your crew.

Combat, while still probably not up to snuff for a lot of people, is definitely a step in the right direction. V.A.T.S has been replaced with a time slow-down ability which drains a meter of, I dunno, time juice, giving you those moments of quiet mid-combat to plan while still relying on your gunslinging ability instead of V.A.T.S making you roll the dice. A tactical dodge added to your core repertoire, along with what seems to be a decreased prevalence of hitscan weapons, makes movement feel much more important than in gunfights in the Mojave. Some streamlined companion commands, as well as very spammable companion abilities, provide crowd-control that I wish I would have had against some of New Vegas's threats (coughCazadorescough).

If there's a place where I can point to The Outer Worlds being lesser than New Vegas, it's in quest design. Almost every quest in the game entails going somewhere, shooting some guys (or sneaking past some guys or speech checking some guys), getting a thing, and taking it back to one of maybe several people back in town. There isn't a sense that you can really do quests any way you want. Instead, other than the kill-sneak-talk triumvirate for dealing with enemies, it seems that everyone's going to do every quest essentially the exact same way.

A lackluster character progression system doesn't help with this. Skills are leveled up in clusters of related skills instead of individually for their first 50 ranks, a system which definitely led to me becoming a jack-of-all-trades without any real specialties. While many of New Vegas's perks could be called on to open up new ways to play (such as Cannibal, which gave you a new source of health regen and opened up new dialogue options in certain quests), The Outer Worlds's perks are mostly bland statistical buffs, few of which even hit at new ways to handle the game's challenges. This compounds by rendering the game's flaw system, a super interesting idea wherein the game will offer you narrative-driven debuffs in exchange for perk points, irrelevant. As a result, your character ends up lacking anything resembling a unique feature.

Strangely adding to this is the game's loot. There are not that many weapons in the game, which opts to have you find enhanced versions of early-game guns and melee weapons as the game progresses instead of giving you wholly new weapons, meaning you'll be shooting the same assault rifle at hour 20 that you were shooting at hour 1. There's a very small set of equipment mods, most of which you'll have found before you left the first planet, which don't really help to make your loadout feel special. Ironically, this is a problem that Fallout 4, a game I otherwise don't like, solved with a crafting system that helped your guns feel genuinely unique. In this game, you end up feeling like an indistinct character, wielding a factory-default weapon, doing the same quests the same way as everyone else.

So my opinion of this game is sort of mixed. Steps forward in a lot of ways, including many I haven't the word count to bring up here (the art style is so much better). Steps backward in others, including many I still haven't the wordcount to bring up here (I found myself missing the Pip-Boy radio a lot).

Ultimately, when it comes to my opinion of the game, I have to talk about Philly cheesesteaks. It'll only take a second.

In my hometown (which is nowhere the fuck near Philadelphia, for the record), there are two Philly cheesesteak places literally across the street from each other. According to a story my dad told me that might be complete bullshit but serves as a fantastic metaphor, the owner of one of these restaurants is a former employee of the other, who quit either because he hated the owner, the owner hated him, or maybe both. He quit, opened up his own cheesesteak place across the street, and the two have been taking potshots at one another ever since. Apparently they have a penchant for keying each others' cars.

The funny thing is, the new cheesesteak place, the one started by the disgruntled ex-associate of the first cheesesteak place, unmistakably bears resemblance to the old place. They have literally the exact same menu. I don't mean both menus have the same items, I mean the new cheesesteak place appears to have taken the physical menu from the old place (legally, I hope), put black tape over any mention of the old place's name, and hung it up as their own menu.

Here's the thing: both restaurants? Damn good cheesesteak. I go to both. I definitely prefer the old place, but I'll go to the new one in a heartbeat. I still prefer both of them to half of the restaurants in this town, most of which are boring, flavorless corporate chains. I don't want to go to the old place forever, I want these places to grow and get better, and if the thing that motivates growth in the North Texas cheesesteak scene is pure, unfiltered spite? Then, sure, go for it.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm in the mood for cheesesteak.

I'm running a couple tabletop RPG campaigns right now, but the one I'm probably having the most fun with is a game of Technoir I'm running with three friends from college. I originally learned about the system (as I imagine many people did) through Friends at the Table, a superb actual play podcast which used the system during their COUNTER/Weight series, but it was only once I started to really get into the gears of the system that I realized how incredible it is.

So, on a high level, Technoir is, as the title implies, a game about playing noir-style mystery stories in a far-future cyberpunk setting. Players set about unraveling a massive conspiracy which consumes the world around them, and they do that not by doing forensic analysis and deducing facts and listening to testimony, but by knocking heads together until someone finally blurts out the truth in between bloody gasps in a back alley. Also they all have cyber eyes and katanas and stuff.

Actually, the marriage of cyberpunk and noir is extremely potent here in Technoir. Cyberpunk as a genre is extremely interested in the concept of debt and transaction as a motivating factor for story. Much like noir protagonists, cyberpunk characters are usually broke, requiring massive sums of money to afford the technology that allows them to merely exist in this world. That debt binds them to the corporations, or criminal enterprises, which employ them. A cyberpunk can't just "go off the grid". Despite the fact that this world sucks, this world is also the one that pays them. Gibson hammers this theme fairly strongly with Case in Neuromancer, who is unwillingly pulled into the plot by the need for resources which only his criminal benefactor possesses, and to a lesser extent with Turner in Count Zero, who is unwillingly dragged back into his life as a corporate mercenary, but ultimately knows he has no choice.

Technoir brilliantly leverages this dynamic through the use of Connections, a set of six non-player characters which serve as the glue which binds the players to this world. During character creation, players define their relationships with these Connections, emotionally linking themselves to these six people. They can also take favors from these Connections both during character creation and play, and the one they are almost certainly going to take early on is lending money, putting them in very literal debt to these characters.

Now, the characters are bonded to these six characters, but that's half of the puzzle. The other half comes in the Plot Map, a graph of connections that the GM maintains which represents the full extent of the conspiracy. At the start of the campaign, the Web is fairly sparse, but as play continues, nodes are added to it, representing people, places, objects, and events which one way or another are a part of the conspiracy.

Now, here's the clincher: every time a player takes a favor from a Connection, a node representing that Connection gets a new link to another node on the Plot Map. I promise that I'll get into a detailed analysis of this in a second, but first I want to exclaim to the heavens that this is fucking genius.

So, narratively, here's what happens. Every time a player calls in a favor from a Connection, their debt to them grows, forcibly linking the two characters over time, as this increasingly lopsided transactional balance grows into Chekhov's Debt, a looming specter to be cashed in by the Connection at any time. On top of this, every time a player calls in a favor from a Connection, that Connection's own involvement in the grand plot deepens and gains wrinkles and details.

These simple facts in concert give me as the GM so much to work with. The character is becoming increasingly entangled with the conspiracy itself through their Connection, while also giving this broad, intangible conspiracy a personified face through Connections. A Connection might call in the player's debt and force them to do something relating to the conspiracy at large, making the players active agents in the conspiracy itself while masking the true nature of their involvement under the simple guise of "paying a debt". Drawing links between a Connection and the conspiracy gives the GM ample room to motivate the Connection for a betrayal of the players, which will sting all the more due to the amount that the players have interacted with the Connection.

What might seem to be a set of disparate mechanics all essentially create an elaborate trap for the player characters. The favors are an alluring lure on a fishhook, dangled in front of the players and shimmied around for them to look at. The Connections themselves are the fishing line, running from that hook all the way back to the central mystery. All the GM needs to do is dangle the bait in front of the players for long enough before they bite, and then they take hold of the players' debts like a reel and drag them into their eventual demise in the dead center of the mystery.

If you're relatively well-versed in Internet, you know who Chuck Tingle is. If you don't, uh, buckle up. And maybe don't read this in public.

//Content Warning: This post is about erotica. So, y'know. Erotica stuff incoming. Actually, lemme just put a page break here if you're scrolling at work.

Chuck Tingle is an enigmatic figure on the internet, possibly going by a pseudonym if not an invented character entirely, who is renown for posting what I can only describe as "oddly specific gay erotica". While his topics vary wildly, Tingle's bibliography of books ("Tinglers") can generally be sorted into three categories:

1. Anthropomorphized Animals/Objects With Weird Professions (as featured in Gay T-Rex Law Firm: Executive Boner, Wereplane Butt Party, and Sentient Phantom Tow Truck Pounds My Butt)

2. Thinly Veiled References To Current Events, and I'm Talking The Thinnest of Veils (as featured in Revengers Buttgame: Antguy Gets Small To Go Into Thamos' Butt And Then Gets Big And Hard as well as Pounded In The Butt By The Fact That It Took Less Time For This Book To Be Written And Published Than The Entire Length Of Tony Scarymoochy’s Term As White House Communications Director)

3. Erotica Parodies Of Things That Do Not Seem To Lend Themselves To Erotica Parodies (The Tell-Tale Butt, This American Butt Hosted By Ira Ass)

Tingle has a throughput that most authors can only dream of, with no fewer than 243 books associated with his name on Amazon at time of writing (admittedly including compilations). His covers show a mastery of Photoshop few can claim to wield, and he was even nominated for a Hugo.

This is pretty par for the course for a Tingle cover, hilariously specific title and all

Perhaps most surprising of all is how unfathomably wholesome Tingle's writing is. While he does write almost exclusively about sex, it's always written in a remarkably tender, careful, loving way. Tingle himself declares his goal is to Prove Love Is Real, and is, obviously, very accepting of all manner of non-heteronormative relationships. He even put out a compilation of stories about platonic and non-sexual love (such as Not Pounded By The Physical Manifestation Of My Need To Please Everyone Because Sometimes It's Okay To Give Back To Yourself).

In case my, pardon the pun, intimate knowledge of Tingle's work isn't clue enough, I love Chuck Tingle's work. It's simply unlike anything else out there, and is simultaneously hilarious in its absurdity, and extremely comforting and wholesome, easily a more earnest description of romance than a thousand vampire novels or saccharine Hallmark movies.

So imagine my surprise when Chuck Tingle came out with a tabletop RPG! Amazed by the collision of two of my very niche interests, I popped on Amazon the second it was out (at work, which, in hindsight, bad call), and ordered a copy of The Tingleverse: The Official Chuck Tingle Role-Playing Game. It's, uh, not what I expected.

To pivot hard from niche internet celebrities to niche gaming terminology, The Tingleverse is what is frequently referred to as an Old School Revival or OSR game. To avoid descending deep into a Matryoshka doll of definitions, OSR games are ones which attempt to capture the minimalist vibe of old dungeon-crawling tabletop RPGs, most notably older editions of Dungeons and Dragons.

The Tingleverse has a fairly strong line of connection to Dungeons and Dragons, bafflingly. The classes ("trots") map pretty cleanly to D&D tropes, from the Bad Boy (Fighter), Charmer (Bard), Sneak (Rogue), True Buckaroo (Cleric/Paladin), and Wizard (Wizard). Characters have a limit of spells (sorry, Cool Moves) per day, there are saving throws, and a lot of classic D&D spells have made their way into the spell list, albeit under different names.

The... weird thing about this is that Dungeons and Dragons, and by extension The Tingleverse, is a game mostly about fighting and killing things. Characters have stats for how well they can fight things and throw fireballs and have magic swords. Which, like, cool, but that's not really what Chuck Tingle stories are about. Rarely if ever do Chuck Tingle characters kill each other. Quite the opposite, actually.

Which brings me to the other interesting thing about this RPG. It is, at its absolute raunchiest, a mild PG. I don't even remember reading the word "butt" anywhere in the book, which is normal for most RPGs, but you read those titles up there. There are oblique references to the nature of the source material (all player characters are, by default, 18 and up) but there's no mention of, y'know, the feature presentation.

I did not write this game nor did I consult with Mr. Tingle so I cannot for the life of me speculate why this is the case. Chuck Tingle's work, while wholesome and very good, is wildly inappropriate for children, so it's hard to imagine gathering the family up to play this RPG based on everyone's favorite erotica author.

Yes, every single book in this recursive sequence actually exists

There's a common piece of game design wisdom that gets passed around originally from Jared Sorenson, a storied RPG designer. These are collectively known as the Three Questions, and they are things you ask to describe what a tabletop RPG is.

1. What is your game about?

2. How does your game do this?

3. How does your game encourage / reward this?

I think Tingleverse positions itself as a game about love. The book has this statement of purpose early on:

Ultimately, the Tingleverse is a place that thrives on love. All players are limited to the good alignment (which will be discussed later on), and will find the most success on their journey if they find healthy, positive ways of solving problems. While this can sometimes means [sic] a head-to-head battle with Void worms, players should always be encouraged to move through their world in a way that proves love is real.

So, this is the text's answer to Question 1, but Questions 2 and 3 are concerned with how, the ways in which a game brings its statement of identity into being, first with mechanics which embody that identity, and then with incentive structures that encourage players to cooperate with this identity. And this is where Tingleverse misses the mark for me.

Tingleverse characters have stat blocks featuring Strength, Dexterity, Fortitude, Book Smarts, Street Smarts, and Charm. They also have Attack Scores, Ranged Scores, and Defense Scores for resisting damage. They have health, which is reduced by taking damage. They have weapon and armor proficiencies. These characters are fundamentally defined by their ability to fight. You can say your game is about love, but when your game has a 12 page Combat chapter and no Love chapter, and every monster provided in the book has a "Combat" section, and the book has a list of magic weapons that can be found and wielded, it makes me think your game is actually about Fighting. Sure, there's no rules stopping me from loving, but there's no rules about loving either.

I think the idea of a Chuck Tingle RPG is genius. RPGs in general are too frequently about murder and violence, and a wholesome game about love and sex, set in a world so crazy and farcical that you alleviate any awkward tension around the table, is an excellent idea. I would shell out a remarkable amount of money for an RPG that actually had mechanics that tried to gamify eroticism.

And there are some good ideas in this RPG! There's an enemy that is a Void-corrupted rabbit, poisoned by too many trips across the multiverse by magicians pulling them out of hats. The Cool Move that removes fear effects is called "Soothe Bud". That's a good name!

But it just isn't the game I want. While this is ostensibly a game about Tingle's worlds, the rules in it still belong to a world about killing monsters and taking their stuff. What the game says it's about, and the way it acts, the way it attempts the "How", just falls flat.

I'll still buy a Second Edition though.

Crackdown is not a series known for subtlety. The most recent entry in the series, Crackdown 3, has players leaping off of skyscrapers to shoot rockets into robots while yelling, and I quote, "quack quack motherfucker". This is a series where a valid answer to the question "How do I deal with these enemies?" is "Have you considered throwing a semi-truck into them?" and yet, the series still has some genuine cleverness to the way it handles its level design.

To catch up anyone who hasn't played the games, Crackdown is a series about the Agency, a sort of megacorporation police force whose genetically modified Agents solve organized crime by punching it very hard. Superhero games in all but name, Crackdown games are open-world sandboxes in which Agents can leap over skyscrapers, throw cars, and slaughter criminals with a small army's worth of firepower. It's some good dumb fun.

For my purposes, the system throughout the series that I'm going to focus on is the "Skills For Kills" mechanic. Simply put, the only way to improve the games' five skills is to use them. if you want to increase your Firearms, you gotta shoot some guys. Increase your Strength by punching guys, your Driving by doing street races and some sick drifts, and your Explosives by blowing stuff up. The fifth skill, however, Agility, is slightly more interesting.

Agility is not improved just by jumping a lot. Instead, the worlds of Crackdown are littered with Agility Orbs: glowing and humming green balls precariously perched on top of tall things. The taller the thing, the more XP bundled up in the Agility Orb at its peak. The more of that XP you collect, the higher your Agility skill goes, and the higher your Agent can jump. Within this wrinkle is Crackdown's genius.

As I mentioned before, Crackdown is open world: each of the three games dumps you into the world after a brief tutorial and says "Go wherever! Have fun murderin'!" This presented an interesting challenge to the developers. They wanted to provide players a freedom to go wherever they want, but want to avoid the world feeling homogeneous, and the gameplay feeling samey. Open world games frequently suggest a player's path through a world through the scaling of enemy difficulty, but that doesn't really work for Crackdown: the player Agent becomes a walking WMD that even the game's toughest enemies usually crumple to fairly early into the game. Here, I imagine, is where the level designers piped up and went "We have an idea".

Crackdown and its sequel take place in the fictional Pacific City, an ocean metropolis spread across three islands, and the path through these three islands is implied not via enemy difficulty, but through the height of their buildings. La Mugre features short apartment complexes and undeveloped spaces, The Den features taller industrial complexes and fancier apartments, and the Corridor is a Manhattan-esque cluster of luxury skyscrapers.

Agents freshly inducted into the world will be able to leap La Mugre's one- and two-story buildings fairly easily, but if they venture into the Corridor they will find themselves climbing skyscrapers at a snail's pace, having to carefully look for nearby handholds. As their Agility skill increases, and their jump height increases, the highest buildings of La Mugre become vaultable in a single leap, and soon even the Corridor's towers become easy to climb, with a greater jump height and air control allowing the player to skip large swaths of the handholds on a building's exterior.

I want to emphasize again that these buildings are not a hard limit. With a few exceptions, the buildings in the Corridor are scaleable even to rookie Agents. The process, however, is slow, and makes the Agent an easier target for any enemy sharpshooters who happen to see their Spiderman impression. However, if that new Agent can scale even a few of these Skyscrapers, the top-tier Agility Orbs waiting at the top represent massive experience point gains.

This level design creates one of the most intuitive progression systems an open-world game has ever implemented. The difficulty of the islands is instantly communicated to the player, even from the other side of the map. The game doesn't need to implement bullet sponge enemies to scale difficulty, but instead makes the traversal of the environment, something much more intuitive to visually parse than whether Dude With Gun X is stronger than Dude With Gun Y. It also means that a player's increase in skills have a very tangible effect on gameplay: instead of just "the numbers go up", the players can see themselves fly over buildings they once had to scale, reminiscent of a superhero.

Crackdown 2, in my opinion, perfects this progression by offering a pair of wonderful, natural rewards at the end of this journey: the Wingsuit, and helicopters. The Wingsuit allows players to glide deftly through the air, moreso the higher the building they jump off of is, creating a natural progression. You've spent the whole game getting better at climbing buildings, and the Wingsuit gives you something new to do when you get to the top of one. The helicopters, available only on a helipad which requires a massive leap to get to, provides another natural end state: you've spent the game getting closer and closer to feeling like flying, so what if we let you actually fly.

So. Agility Orbs facilitate a set of soft skill barriers in the world, giving players an implied path of least resistance through the world while still letting them venture into dangerous territory for high rewards. They provide a means of progression that is far more tangible than just "your numbers go higher", and feed directly into the game's core ethos as a power fantasy.

There is one problem, though.

Crackdown fans probably can already guess what I'm going to say, but those of who you haven't played the series might be reading all of this talk about running and jumping and gliding and say "wait, didn't you say this series has cars?"

You'd be forgiven for forgetting, because I've played all three Crackdown games and frequently forget myself. Many games that emphasize unique or interesting traversal mechanics suffer this problem: the cars in Saints Row IV are notoriously useless, and Infamous and Prototype just throw them out entirely, not even letting you get into one. In Crackdown, however, Driving is a skill just like Agility, and it's handled, well, worse.

For one thing, running and jumping and gliding through the city is just more fun than driving. This alone is a huge problem, but it gets worse. In an effect to mirror the "tangible skill growth" of Agility, Driving causes the handling of every car you get into to improve with every level of Driving you accomplish, but the implication of this is the death knell for Driving: when you're low-level, at the earliest stages in the game, the cars handle like garbage.

This creates a sort of feedback loop in player progression. At the start of the game, cars are clumsy and kind of hard to control, while the player character themselves, while slower than their maximum potential, is still responsive and fun to control. This encourages the new player to focus on Agility, and after they've done so for a while and their Agility score eclipses their Driving, the player has less and less desire to go back and start again from square one with Driving. Combine this with the fact that many of the story and optional objectives in Crackdown games are located in and around skyscrapers (that is, inaccessible by cars), and none of the other skills can be used effectively in concert with Driving (you can't really punch someone while driving), and Driving is frequently neglected entirely.

Crackdown 2 partially mitigated this by filling the streets of the city with zombies to run over, but it still wasn't, like, great.

There is one good nugget of design in Crackdown's cars, specifically the cars of the first Crackdown. While the Agent is free to hijack any car in the city, there was a suite of three special Agency cars that could be deployed. Not only did these cars handle better with higher Driving, they physically transformed, offering that tangible sense of progression as what was once just "a pretty good sportscar" morphs into "off-brand Batmobile" as you get into it.

I've been using the word "tangibility" a lot, and I think that's the big takeaway from Crackdown. Progression is often the key hook that keeps players playing a game, and there's been a lot of ways that progression has been done. I'd be foolish to say that "the numbers go up" isn't an effective strategy (the golden age of clickers and loot games we're currently in proves as much), but games like Crackdown show that designers can look beyond the balancing of equations to more immediate methods of making a player feel empowered as they grow within a game.