Men_in_Boxes
Snake Oil Salesman
The older I get, and the more games I play (thanks GamePass) the more I realize there really only seems to be two kinds of games.
Type 1: Games where the developer tries to show the player how clever they are.
Type 2: Games where the developer tries to get the player to be clever.
The last two games I downloaded and tried on GamePass were Psychonauts 2 and Gang Beasts. Psychonauts is a critical darling and Double Fine seems to be viewed as a bastion of creativity. Gang Beasts looks like **** and apparently sold over 30,000,000 copies (wtf?).
Psychonauts 2 has players watching cutscenes and reading wacky dialogue from NPCs. There are enemies called Regrets that fly and drop bombs called...regrets on players. There are enemies called Doubts that produce a slowing substance for the player. Get it?! There's definitely creativity on display but the game constantly tells the player "Do the normal videogame thing you've done for 30+ years (shoot enemies, run from A to B, jump on boxes to reach power ups...) and we'll feed you more of OUR cleverness."
Within two minutes of firing up Gang Beasts I'm asking a kid how to climb a wall (the controls are purposely unintuitive) and he tells me he'll only help if I tackle another player off a ledge. I try, fail, try again and then this really bizarre Lord of the Flies dynamic starts unfolding where kids are ordering other kids around and they're kind of obeying eachother. The players seem to be the focus here.
Certainly most games are a mixture of the two types, but do games ultimately boil down to this paradigm?
Type 1: Games where the developer tries to show the player how clever they are.
Type 2: Games where the developer tries to get the player to be clever.
The last two games I downloaded and tried on GamePass were Psychonauts 2 and Gang Beasts. Psychonauts is a critical darling and Double Fine seems to be viewed as a bastion of creativity. Gang Beasts looks like **** and apparently sold over 30,000,000 copies (wtf?).
Psychonauts 2 has players watching cutscenes and reading wacky dialogue from NPCs. There are enemies called Regrets that fly and drop bombs called...regrets on players. There are enemies called Doubts that produce a slowing substance for the player. Get it?! There's definitely creativity on display but the game constantly tells the player "Do the normal videogame thing you've done for 30+ years (shoot enemies, run from A to B, jump on boxes to reach power ups...) and we'll feed you more of OUR cleverness."
Within two minutes of firing up Gang Beasts I'm asking a kid how to climb a wall (the controls are purposely unintuitive) and he tells me he'll only help if I tackle another player off a ledge. I try, fail, try again and then this really bizarre Lord of the Flies dynamic starts unfolding where kids are ordering other kids around and they're kind of obeying eachother. The players seem to be the focus here.
Certainly most games are a mixture of the two types, but do games ultimately boil down to this paradigm?
Last edited:
