I haven't played this game, but I'll definitely add it to my watchlist from this insightful conversation.
I had an interesting experience with friction playing the Retro Bowl (football) and Retro Goal (soccer) games on my iPhone. I don't usually play sports titles, but they build an interesting feeling where you just can't win 'em all. If you are building a franchise, some matches will be impossible to win, so you just need to try your damndest to lose less. While action games will warp you to a checkpoint when you die and roguelikes will bring you back to the beginning, these games give you a penalty and let you proceed. It's a fun procedural narrative when you have an abyssal record, pissed off investors/fans, and a team with great potential, but low morale.
Unfortunately, these games are single player but F2P, so there is a tempting micro-transaction of spending $2/$5/$10+ to get a morale boost or funds. I appreciate the design decisions, but it does make me think the game traps you into failure until you spend some cash.
I had to admit that I spent real money in Retro Goal. I actually justified it by pretending I had to take Qatari funding to keep my Premier League team afloat.
Maybe I’ve had good luck but I’ve run across more f2p games that have all the trappings of dark patterns and having to pay just to win and … they’re actually good games and skill wins over pay to win.
I wish there was a good way to classify a “f2p… but reasonably balanced “ game.
You are absolutely correct that the genre is maturing more than many gamers realize. Many gaming pundits that I follow seem to get caught in a particular game, and it changes their perspective of the format as a whole. For example, I have been hearing a lot of praise for Final Fantasy: First Soldier lately.
I actually think something similar to the Gartner hype cycle applies [1]. Any shovelware became profitable during the Zynga/King heydays, but quality declined and the ecosystem become more competitive. We are now hitting a point where some quality is needed to distinguish ones self.
Do you have examples of good F2P games? I'd like to take a look.
To me, a bad pattern -- usually done by F2P games, but I don't think it's mandatory for them to use it -- is both the mindless grind ("am I having fun with this, or just clicking stuff?") and the pay-to-skip aspect. To me the latter is the worst, an admission by the game developers that their game is boring and the only way to get to the "good parts" is to spend money to fast-forward them. Usually there aren't even any good parts, it's all skippable.
Some notables from the Big Names:
* Call of Duty Mobile
* Alto's Odyssey (personally prefer Alto's Adventure)
* Genshin Impact is pretty polished
* League of Legends: Wild Rift
* Hearthstone/Legends of Runeterra
* SoulKnight
* My Friend Pedro
I have had a lot of fun with Brawl Stars. Supercell got a bad wrap because Clash of Clans was so frequently mimicked, but they clearly have some passionate designers.
Skill is the majority component in the game (given that top players can take a level 1 account all the way to legendary level) and it is so generous handing out in game currency to level up cards you can happily never spend a penny on the game.
So surprising given it comes from the same people as Clash of Clans.
> and roguelikes will bring you back to the beginning
I think the best roguelikes are the ones who let you fail and then proceed limping. Or maybe the best games in general, since I'm not sure if Rimworld counts as a roguelike. Either way, to start from the beginning in a good roguelike means to have made a chain of bad decisions.
That's more a quality of the "rogue lite" subgenre, no? Which I do personally prefer to the traditional kind. Though "fail but keep going" can go very wrong, in the case of something like FTL, where you can easily have "lost" by the end of the first or second area due to a bad roll, but still manage to limp all the way to the end (with no hope whatsoever of winning). An early "game over" would be preferable there to keep new players from wasting their time on doomed-in-the-first-15-minutes attempts that won't even be good for learning purposes (the way you have to play when you're already dead but don't know it yet and are just trying to maintain forward movement, is very different from what you do when you're on anything resembling the path to victory, in that game).
Your observation about FTL sounds about right. Though, if you are an experienced player and playing on a lower difficulty, there's many scenarios that you can turn around that might look lost?
I am not sure if FTL is the best example here? FTL is slightly unusual because it has a turn-limit, because you always have to move forward, and you might not have enough time left to recover.
By contrast, in Nethack there are basically no mistakes that damn you to limp along and lock you out of winning. Either you die quickly, or you can recover into a winnable position. (Though you might be locked out of certain niceties for a run, you don't need any specific permanently-loseable nicety to win.)
Yeah FTL's problem is that once you fall behind in the game's economy, if you will, there's only very limited ability to take it easy and try to catch up, but it lets you avoid a lot of combat so it's possible to limp along almost-losing all the way to the end (or damn close) and reach the boss in such a state that you can hardly scratch it. The trouble is that if you aren't able to handle encounters, you're already toast, because you need to be handily winning most encounters to stay ahead in the game-economy. If you're avoiding fights out of necessity, you're likely doomed—which is part of what I meant about playing-to-limp-as-far-as-possible and playing-to-win looking very different, so the former not even being very useful practice for the latter.
IIRC (it's been a while) the luck component in it is also largely negative, in that bad things can randomly happen to you but (substantial) good random effects are minor and unusual, so you can't even luck your way into enough resources to have a hope of winning, as in something like Nethack where a desperate prayer or drink at a fountain or something might totally turn your game around. If you're more than very slightly behind, the game's not going to hand you enough to salvage your run, period.
I think part of the trouble is the illusion-of-choice map system. In reality, you have to be taking certain routes to do well, by deliberately seeking encounters, et c. The illusion is that you can take an easy route through an area and still be on a path to victory. IMO the maps are kinda pointless in that game, given how the mechanics work, basically just providing an opportunity to fuck up without knowing it, and also permitting the limping-to-the-end-but-long-ago-doomed effect.
I find FTL frustrating because I like some aspects of it but IMO it makes some major mistakes in terms of game mechanics, to a degree that I find it hard to appreciate the things I like (mainly the tactical combat minigame). I get what they were trying to do with the rest of it—the time pressure cutting off options and forcing choices, et c—but it doesn't all come together correctly. Needed one more conceptual pass to make it all fit properly, which is even more frustrating when it's not that complex a game. All that effort to finish it, but fundamental flaws left in place throughout.
One saving grace is that a game of FTL doesn't really last that long. So even if you limp along, you didn't waste that much time.
I never really went into limping mode, though. I usually tried to turn my games around by staying aggressive; but eg burning through my missiles and drones faster when the run goes badly. In some sense, if you have missiles left when you die, you didn't use enough missiles.
There's some strokes of good luck in FTL, like the scrap collector or the long range scanner. But they tend to increase your longer term average, they don't provide an immediate bonus. (Exactly as you say.)
I'm guessing they're a step up in complexity, but the Football Manager series might be up your alley. Especially starting in the lower leagues, there's going to be a similar dynamic, where your semi-pro team just isn't going to be able to win everything out of the gates.
I have had some fun with Football Manager, and it does have a similar vibe of "letting the story play out". However, the Retro games allow you to actively control players in the match itself, instead of only being the manager like in FM.
That's the cool thing: an extremely skillful player may thrash an opponent and earn a big reward, but in a different situation may only be able to "avoid disaster". I feel like this is similar to real-life, but isn't really applied in a lot of games.
I had a similar urge in Retro Bowl but it wasn't based on my impression that I was being "trapped" into failure unless I spent cash so much as that's what legitimately happens when there's a finite game clock. The Green Bay Packers for example, can absolutely take up the last 9-10 minutes of the game in real life leaving you with 30 seconds for a hail mary strategy. That's a real life pressure that I felt in that game where the CPU has the ball and the lead.
That's very interesting. I felt like Retro Bowl was well made but almost too easy. As long as I had a mid-term QB and a top tier WR the games were a breeze.
> What sorts of shortcomings do you feel may be integral to a work? That can be removed?
> > If you had infinite time and budget to make a game, I believe it’s still entirely fair for you, as an artist, to choose the limitations that define your work. Or for your work to, in some way, be compromised! You're a flawed human being, making a flawed execution of a flawed creative vision. The word ‘flaw’ in itself, when applied to art, is not an inherent detriment. It is instead an acknowledgement that we are communicating to each other in the limited way that we can given our limited time and perspective in this universe, and that this is in fact what makes those words exceptional.
> > My point isn't that things should not be fun, but that so-called ‘shortcomings’ can be a critical part of making them fun, especially when intentionally chosen. With that context, it's been kind of jarring to play critical pieces of game canon for the first time and see imaginary Steam reviews pop up in my head. If Silent Hill 2 was released for the first time today, I’m fairly sure it would have negative Steam reviews for how foggy it was. Are those theoretical reviews correct? Yes. And are all of those theoretical reviews also wrong? Undoubtedly.
This is such a interesting take, particularly that first paragraph which alone probably made the article worth reading and sharing.
I think friction works best when it's not completely out of the player's control. That way it's an opportunity for the player to exert their agency. If the player can't exert any control over friction though, if it's a fixed cost they have to repeatedly pay and can't do anything about, then it's just drudgery.
As an example, in Papers, Please, the UI is a significant source of friction. But the player can compensate for it by figuring out the best way to organize their workspace and the best "route" to go through all the pieces of information they have to check, and then implementing that consistently. Figuring out the best way to do things is a substantial part of the gameplay.
Also, in general with cases where there's no fast travel and travel is used as a source of friction, the player may still have many ways of reducing its cost. They can choose more efficient routes, find shortcuts, or obtain faster ways of traveling. An extreme case is Morrowind, where, by the middle of the game, most players will have memorized the network of various overlapping travel options and/or found or created a magic item that will allow them to zip around at ludicrous speed.
I haven't played Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator, but if organs eat each other, I wonder if there are any mechanics that allow the player to compensate for that, such as being able to re-arrange them as they're loaded to keep organs likely to eat one another far apart.
Some thoughts; note it's not my intention if some sound mildly antagonistic:
What other examples of "friction" are there in this game besides that some organs in your inventory may eat other organs? That's just a single example but I don't see anything else mentioned.
What's the difference between "friction" and just challenges in a game (or good old plain "difficulty"). I understand many casual click-and-wait games in the last decade essentially autoplay, and there's no way to lose: you just click, and wait (or expedite the wait by making a micropayment), and that's all there is to them. Has this become so much the norm that the concept of a game that can be difficult, or requires skill, or where you can lose, is surprising?
Are UI limitations themselves a sort of friction? That's a concept I can get behind: one of my absolute favorite games is "Papers, Please!", which effectively deploys cumbersome UI as a gameplay element. You are bureaucrat and most of your game area is your desktop, which is tiny, and you must shuffle papers and overlapping game elements in that limited space under stress and with a time limit -- and the experience is great, if frustrating. So if friction is this -- a conscious way to limit the player's interaction with the game, in ways that enhance and add challenge to the gameplay experience -- then I'm ok with the term!
I'm not convinced every bit of frustrating UI is good "friction". The author mentions many old games, but to be honest, even as a retrogamer I find going back to some clunky UI decisions of old games so frustrating it impedes my enjoyment of those games.
I think some "friction" is indeed useful, and that the convenience of a modern UI is sometimes detrimental to the gameplay experience. To name another example, also from Lukas Pope (hey, fanboy here!) in "Return of the Obra Dinn", the player is an insurance inspector unravelling the mystery of a merchant ship that returned without crew. There is no way of teleporting between spots in the ship, even if it would be a modern and convenient UI: the author has said he wanted to recreate the feeling of walking inside a medium size ship, and teleporting would have destroyed that feeling.
However, the extreme of "sometimes the UI makes you misclick or doesn't respond accurately" would be frustrating for no good gameplay role. It seems the issue described in that twitter thread, of clicking on an item but it got sold so it got swapped with another one at the last second, and you end up buying the wrong one, is borderline frustrating for no good reason.
A player could accuse the author of being lazy, e.g. "you just didn't think this through and now you want to claim bugs are features", whereas the limited UI in a game like "Papers, Please!" -- like it or hate it -- is evidently intentional, and there's no mistaking that.
>What's the difference between "friction" and just challenges in a game (or good old plain "difficulty")
The first example that comes to my mind would be Witcher 2 and the use of potions. You are a bit squishy and the beneficial effects from potions are impactful. However, it is a bit of a slog to prepare and consume the potions before an encounter.
In contrast, Witcher 3 simplified the mechanic to such a degree that it might as well be Diablo where you are chugging potions mid-battle.
Since I care about memorable stories that emerge through play, convenience is not king. It’s a difficulty balance to strike, as we all have different frustration tolerance and different reasons for playing games in the first place. I’ve always been an explorer in games, and I used to care more about being powerful. Now what little free time I spend in games is less about the (illusion of the) end goal and more about the escape into a low/no-stakes arena where the journey matters most and I don’t much care if this moment is the last I’ll ever spend in this game. I’m trading time and some light decision-making practice for memories, both solo and with friends.
>Since I care about memorable stories that emerge through play, convenience is not king.
As an example, I think the biggest mistake Blizzard made with World of Warcraft is a) adding flight, and b) making flying so easy.
a) devalues the hard work developers and artists put into gorgeous scenery, because those flying high overhead will miss much of it. b) destroys much of the gameplay when outdoors (where most flying occurs), because it's far too easy to (say) hover straight down near some item that needs collecting, grab it, then take off again VTOL-style.
Imo the original WoW flight paths were the best. Allowed you to travel far within reasonable time, while not giving you a drop point in nevery nook and cranny. You had to actively think about which way to choose to get from anywhere to anywhere: "Is it faster if I go a little back and fly closer to my destination, walking the rest? Or do I run directly?". I think it was Cataclysm that placed gryphon masters everywhere, what a shame that was..
The way he describes friction reminds of the book Anathem by Neal Stephenson. Good book with a giant obstacle of tons of made up vocabulary. I read that a long time ago, and now I'm not sure how much I enjoyed the story/characters and how much of it was just a different level of immersion and satisfaction from getting through the friction.
If you liked Anathem, I'd recommend reading Gene Wolfe's series, The Book of the New Sun [1]. I didn't quite like it the first time, but decided to reread the series because I kept thinking about it a year later. The world is deep, and Wolfe does a great job of revealing parts of it, bit by bit.
The use of vocabulary in the series is so unique that someone produced a companion dictionary called the Lexicon Urthus [2]. There's also a great podcast called Alzabo Soup, that covers the series in depth, chapter by chapter.
The Book of the New Sun is my favorite series of all time, and the only one I have read 3 times, first when I was 13, and the last after 40. The first two times, I did not have a clear idea of what was happening, just thought it was beautiful. The third time I actually got a grasp of the narrative arc, understanding who Severian was and who he became. Just, a marvelous series.
As an additional data point - I've read Anathem multiple times and have loved it every time but I read The Book of the New Sun series and really disliked it (though to be fair, I only read TBotNS series once). But I know that TBotNS gets great reviews. So as always with books, your mileage may vary.
Gene Wolfe (the author of TBotNS) loves unreliable narrators. His books are almost like a game of trying to figure out how exactly he is lying to you, with only the flaws in the narration as your guide. They don't come to a satisfying conclusion where all is revealed to you; you may never even realize you've been tricked.
It's another example of friction, you have to realize the game you have entered, and be willing to figure out a novel (or in this case trilogy) sized puzzle, where the puzzle pieces are buried in perfectly ordinary prose. If it sounds like fun, and you're up for the challenge, his books can be a unique pleasure. If not, you will miss out on a lot of the more interesting things that are happening between the lines.
If you're interested in the concept I recommend Fifth Head of Cerberus as a better entry point into Wolfe's writing. It's a collection of 3 novellas set on the same planet. They are inter-related but each is basically its own story-puzzle, in a much more digestible size than New Sun.
I really _really_ tried to enjoy The Shadow of the Torturer but I couldn't fall into rhythm I guess. As English is my second language, I had to struggle to know if a word was invented or just obscure English (I found that the author uses a fucktonne of the latter after I finished it). And I hate needing a glossary to read a novel (looking at you Tolkien).
It struck to me like an 80s animated movie: extremely rich from a technical point of view but, well, not a good history and even boring for some people (think about Vampire Hunter D or Angel's Egg. For the record, I love these movies).
Meh, I'll give it another go, after I finish Blindsight from Peter Watts (2006). Thanks for reminding me of that saga!
I couldn't imagine trying to read Wolfe with English as a second language — definitely commendable! One thing I'd recommend if you're giving it another go is to read the chapters, then listen to Alzabo Soup (the podcast) afterwards. It's a spoiler-light discussion of the book, and they highlight a lot of things I missed on the first read.
Another recommendation is to try the Book of the Long Sun series instead. I actually recommend that to folks more frequently if they aren't sci-fi readers. I think it's a bit more approachable in terms of language, and the tone is very different. There's also no character like Severian in that series, which I think is a good thing.
Hey thanks for the suggestion! :)
You know, I found Severian to be really interesting as a character. I wanted to see how he turned out and expected a lot of development... But the book falls kinda short.
I always tended to stick to Sci-fi but recently I found that I didn't dislike Fantasy as I thought (I love the books from Brandon Sanderson).
Regarding the obscure English: I _loved_ learning those words as I have a thing for old and obscure words, you should see the face of my friends when I speak on _proper Spanish_ but they can't get a thing hahah ;D
I really enjoyed Anathem, but I don’t think that the vocabulary is supposed to be an obstacle; it is supposed to be a clue. The word “anathem” in the title should be a mystery but should also remind you of both “anathema” and “anthem”. Once you finally find out exactly what it means in the world of the book then you should see how those words both fit really well. At that point you probably won’t have any idea _why_ those words fit so well, but once you’ve finished the book you should be able to see that it is not merely the author’s contrivance; it was a clue to the deeper plot of the book (or to the nature of reality, if you take it seriously enough…).
Loved Anathem both for the language and for the ideas in it. Rationalist monasticism has such a weird draw for me, despite being something I'll never do.
If you like books with their own language, Hannu Rajaniemi's Jean le Flambeur trilogy does it more and better than anything else I've read (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7562764-the-quantum-thie...). It actually makes me question my interaction with regular language, since there's so many words that you can barely grasp in there... but I wasn't super bothered and thought I understood it sort of ok. But I doubt I could really explain them if pressed too, they just sort of felt well defined based on context that I accumulated.
It made me think that my brain just doesn't go very in depth with words and is pleased with a shallow contextual understanding of what they mean. Sort of like the protagonist(such as he is, more like primary victim) of Blindsight by Peter Watts(he's a science communicator that can sort of get the shape of concepts at a shallow level, but never really understands them).
I've never really heard it talked about explicitly so I don't have vocabulary for it but I think playing with this is a fairly common device in fiction. It also fills a similar role as throwing a bunch of languages/writing systems or fiction formats does at you does. I'm thinking of 'always coming home' and 'the last samurai.' Each kind of disorients you at first and obscures parts of the books, but then is rewarding as you learn them and reveal those elements.
Definitely notable when it's tweaked up really high like stephenson likes to do, but I think that's a knob a lot of authors twist to varying degrees.
By the way, this game made the rounds recently for actually having Kinect 2.0 support[0]. And of course within a month someone actually recently beat the game this way[1]. Much to the surprise of the developers who did not at all design the game around it and basically hacked the support together in the span of five hours.
Reminds me of the intentional friction in Red Dead Redemption 2. When you go through a house to take things, you have to literally see your character pick things up before it can be placed in your inventory. There is no auto-collection in this game.
The result is a slower-paced game where you really feel like some guy in the outdoors cooking skinned rabbits on a stove and picking your way through an abandoned cottage in the countryside.
R* could have easily not designed this friction into the game but it adds to the ambiance. To contrast this would feel very out of place in GTA, which thrives on a frenetic, chaotic experience.
Another example of intentional friction is all the fiddliness of walking and generally antagonistic terrain in Death Stranding. Since a primary way the player interacts with the game is laying down roads and lines and stuff that generally eases the pain of getting from Point A to Point B (and moreover, asynchronously cooperating with other players to construct useful routes), the initial process needs to be painful in order for the construction to feel cathartic.
I had an interesting experience with friction playing the Retro Bowl (football) and Retro Goal (soccer) games on my iPhone. I don't usually play sports titles, but they build an interesting feeling where you just can't win 'em all. If you are building a franchise, some matches will be impossible to win, so you just need to try your damndest to lose less. While action games will warp you to a checkpoint when you die and roguelikes will bring you back to the beginning, these games give you a penalty and let you proceed. It's a fun procedural narrative when you have an abyssal record, pissed off investors/fans, and a team with great potential, but low morale.
Unfortunately, these games are single player but F2P, so there is a tempting micro-transaction of spending $2/$5/$10+ to get a morale boost or funds. I appreciate the design decisions, but it does make me think the game traps you into failure until you spend some cash.
I had to admit that I spent real money in Retro Goal. I actually justified it by pretending I had to take Qatari funding to keep my Premier League team afloat.