Dear all of you guys:
I made a small IF for GMTK jam where I wanted to talk about loss and memory. So I played around the idea of erasing thoughts, memories, words; and tho I ended up using that mechanic just for one of the four situations (because is hard af to write), I thought a lot about the idea of erasing as a mechanic.
In games you always build. You repair, you fill, you paint, you create things where there were none. I could only think of a few games that counteract this. The easiest example is If Found… , a visual novel where your main (and almost only) mechanic is to erase a notepad. Another game that resolves around this is Donut County, where you swallow stuff until you leave the landscapes empty.
And there are also a few similar situations in Florence. And here I’m getting closer to my point: Florence is interesting because of the way it breaks with traditional expectations and forces you to erase, to un-build, to not-act-at-all and just let go. And games never ask that of you. They ask you to act, to interact; they demand your attention. This is the same reason why I thought Ynglet’s checkpoints were so genius. You don’t have to activate anything, you just have to take a rest; to stand still for a few seconds, to save yourself considerably more time in case you were to fail a jump. But I more often than not would forget to do so; being so immerse in the action, I would not stop.Â
I don’t know that I’m coming to any resolution here, just a bunch of insights I had that I wanted to discuss with you and read your thoughts on.
Is there really an intrinsically more pleasant feeling in repairing than destroying? Is just a moral/ altruistic dream we’re striving for? Is it a childhood thing (to fill the coloring books rather than fighting against the eraser to repair a mistake in our drawing)?
Or maybe there are a lot of games that take advantage of this dynamic and I’m just missing them. (Would love to play them, in that case!)
Don’t forget the plethora of combat games, in which the dynamic is nothin’ but erasing. I’ve thought about combat in games a lot – it’s crucial! The very fact of erasure eases the burden on AI design. (I talk about it a little in my 48-minute stream of playing Dark Souls if you have time for THAT haha: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1059903318)
Although this is ‘active destroying’, which is different from the type of destroying you’ve been talking about, the destruction of letting go. I suppose what I’m talking about is MINING games vs GARDENING games (Kreminski: https://mkremins.github.io/publications/GardeningGames.pdf)
Super Mario Sunshine is all about cleaning up the island.
Popping all the bubbles in a sheet of bubble wrap is satisfying. Is this the same as coloring in a coloring book though?
In Donut County you do erase the stuff, but you also grow/build your hole. The things you erase are just the raw materials you use to build your hole.
In some sense, erasing is just the other side of the coin of building.