So, games always take on some responsibility for what the resolution of the game experience is, and it has a limit. They can’t avoid it. Zeigfreid insists (and I think we agree).
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.
Zeigfreid (Brevity is the dark souls of wit)
Players can take some responsibility themselves and play beyond the game’s ‘inherent’ resolution – and games can encourage this to various degrees.
In some sense, Haiku Games accept the bulk of the responsibility, see the resolution limit (the ‘problem’), and decide to work within it. This is what Zeigfreid was suggesting that I was suggesting. When we cede responsibility to the game, we eventually get bored – the gamefeel content runs out. We have seen all there is to see, hit the resolution limit. So, if we have a finite set of content, let’s make sure it is all tied together in a pleasant and intriguing way. To accept this constraint but make the game bigger, we can evoke themes and ideas beyond the game, that connect to our lived experience, in our past, and on occasion in our future. The game becomes something we carry with us, a lens that helps us see and appreciate the world. More than the gamefeel challenge and flow state, more than a mental exercise, more than a pastime, more than a moment.
And I think in fact many games work like this – with the game being a curious device we operate to drip-feed ourselves some ‘non-gamefeel content’ which evokes different themes and ideas that we connect with to various degrees. An elaborate book. Operating the device must influence us too, changing what evocations we are receptive to in an important way.
But I dunno, I often can’t connect with non-gamefeel content, and I don’t have a good understanding of why.
In some cases, the curious device is the interesting thing that we are receptive to, and I have a better time connecting with that, and appreciating it as a game that reaches beyond itself – but it is a limited reach, out only to what can be simulated, and only what can be done by the player themselves.
It’s not enough. I am compelled to try to make games about other things – maybe a case of trying to use a hammer on a screw, but maybe not? Surely not, right? It seems to me like there should be a way to bring the non-gamefeel content back into the realm of gamefeel content, in a way that has an expanded reach. And it might involve asking the player to take on some more responsibility, the expand the game’s resolution, but in a way that resonates with what the game has presented. Not making their own rules – playing a ‘different game with the same equipment’ – but still playing the same game, just ‘out of bounds’.
Seeing and owning the transformation from being constrained to recognizing a greater freedom.
Droqen (What (or Who) is responsible? Whoever takes responsibility.)
What I mean is this: I want the aesthetic leap of the non-gamefeel content to be a part of the game. I want the player to internalize it, make it part of their planning, part of their reason for doing things in the game. I want the player to believe it, to leverage it. And it can’t be simulated, it can’t actually be a part of the game – that would be fighting against the resolution problem, which we know quickly reaches diminishing returns. So in a sense I want the player to have faith in it, to believe it without having any reason to believe it, except that it feels right. And with that faith, they can take actions in the game that were not previously taught by example and simulation, by logical necessity, or direct commandment. The player takes some ownership of the ‘non-gamefeel content’, folding it into the gamefeel. And this requires some additional responsibility on the player’s part, to imagine what they could do, and to do it, because they want to. The game prompts them, but it might not be able to make an explicit goal out of it. Ideally the game could provide feedback at that point, but I am not sure if that could work if it isn’t simulated, it might be beyond the resolution of the game. It is a strange goal of the design, really, to take responsibility of the player taking responsibility…
Perhaps it’s not possible. I don’t know what these actions look like. But I want to see them. I want to play them. Maybe they already exist, in non-gamefeel content, and I just don’t have the literacy to see them. Certainly it would help to learn how to connect with them, even if its only to get a clearer idea of how to fold them back into the game. Either way, it’s nice to dream about these haiku games.