Being on a content conveyor belt moving you endlessly forward from set-piece to set-piece is, ironically, often way more interesting than an open world game, or a metroidvania, or something more “exploration focused”. I believe that this is because videogames have a resolution problem.
We can grow more familiar with a person, place, thing, or concept. I think mostly that’s what “exploration” means outside of videogames. You can explore a branch of math, or a lover’s body, or the 3rd wave coffee scene in Paris. These would all be a process of becoming more familiar. If your interest in a phenomenon was only superficial, then it can quickly go from fresh, exotic, exciting to mundane, boring.
So I ask you: how long would it take you to intimately familiarize yourself with the screenshot above? How long until you ran out of new things to discover? Contrary to what some might have you believe, a similar place in Breath of the Wild is similarly boring: some green lumps here, four roughly identical models of trees, maybe a rock.
Now imagine a similar place in the real world. The real world does not have a resolution problem, and literally any human could spend a decade exploring literally any patch of dirt and grass on the surface of the earth. The real world is infinitely deep, where as any videogame regardless how many millions were poured into its graphics or its horse dick physics is a piece of trash.
That being said, a videogame is a part of the real world and so you can explore a videogame. I mean explore the game itself, not just interact with its systematizations of exploration. The trouble is that videogames tend to suck compared to other parts of the real world. This is often how we experience videogames: we are excited by the freshness, the game becomes a kind of fetish, we rant online. But how many hours does it take for a videogame to lose its lustre? I’ve spent hundreds of hours exploring Starcraft 2 but felt pretty done with Breath of the Wild after maybe 30. In comparison I’ve spent more than a decade exploring computer science and I’m just getting started.
I like to play GAMEFEEL games. Games that give you intimate, direct control over a part of a system. Games that are designed to facilitate your exploration of the system, helping you find the interesting and fun things you can do in it. Games that are focused on this kind of experience, where every aspect of the design is meant to support the player in their exploration.
Jack (HAIKU games, emphasis droqen’s)
But the more I play these games, and the more I understand how they work, the more I am left wanting – wanting for something more than the crystalline perfection of the design. I’ve learned this system, but now what? I can dance in it, play it like an instrument, and there is certainly a perennial joy to be found in that!
Jack (HAIKU games)
When I hear Jack talking about HAIKU games, to me what I hear is a kind of (loving, helpful) “stay in your lane”. Videogames have a resolution problem: they will never be our musical instruments, languages, or literature. “Videogames” is a hobby with a great deal of depth and room for study, but I think each videogame is more like a hobby with not a lot of depth. You can learn to play Mario really well, or you can learn to play the piano really well. You can learn Braid or you can learn Spanish. You can read the text of FFVII, but I assure you there are more interesting texts in other media. Playing videogames is worthwile, but the cost of playing any particular videogame quickly becomes overwhelming compared to the available depth.
Jack’s “but now what?” above addresses this resolution problem. We love these GAMEFEEL games because it can be really interesting to move Mario around the screen gracefully, or to grasp and hopefully master a curious puzzle like Recursed. But then what? The game continues, and you continue to play.
This is why HAIKU games made me think “ah yes, videogames: stay in your lane”. Be polite, be expressive, be real; don’t overstay your welcome, don’t pretend to be a piano, or a novel, or life itself. Be Videogames. Videogames have a resolution problem (I insist, there is no escaping it). I take Jack’s suggestion as a call to work with that constraint rather than against it.
And so, I want to play HAIKU games… I want the games to be brief, like HAIKU, and leave me with some space to find some meaning for myself. I want the games to have helped me learn something about me, in my world. I call them HAIKU games because I see myself engaging with these games and with HAIKU in similar ways. I interact with the medium and discover for myself a system that ties the individual pieces of the game (or poem) together. A system of natural beauty that comments on human experience, that feels at once personal and universal.
Jack (HAIKU games)
It’s not just about brevity! It’s about density, brevity, and humanity. If you pour water on a haiku it will explode so be careful.
Somehow I read most of the articles responding to this one before this one itself. When the others mentioned a “resolution problem” at first I though it meant “A problem with how individual actions are resolved” then I thought it meant “A problem with how games end, how games are resolved.” Now that I read the article itself, I see that it means “A problem with the detail / density / depth of a game.” Interesting how many meanings the word “resolution” has!
Unrelatedly, I wonder how multiplayer games interact with the resolution problem? In a sense, having another player in a game with you increases its resolution to include all the detail of the other player(s) (that can be expressed through the game).
Yeah! I think the responses to this post are really good and they kind of point out the problem with my specific examples. Videogames are part of the real world, so they don’t actually have a resolution problem. You can speed run a game, or you can mod it, or you can decompile the source and find unused assets, etc. etc. etc. I think multiplayer fits into this category, maybe we can call it meta-game.
So I think what I am talking about is that the “intended reading” or a game tends to be pretty shallow. In particular, “exploring” in a videogame is an obvious place where you run out of interesting artifacts way earlier than you would “exploring” outside. I still stand by the statement that “videogames are a great hobby, but maybe any particular videogame is not a great hobby”, but I also think I was a little too harsh in the wording of this post.
That all makes sense to me! I am really enjoying how you 4 freely ideate and contradict and argue with each other across your posts. There is certainly a grain (or many grains) of truth in this post but it’s also true that there is a meta-game to every game with infinite resolution.