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   Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (wandereruber@poa.st)'s status on Monday, 28-Apr-2025 04:55:25 JST Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer
   You shouldn't just think of your video game as "fun" is a common sentiment among game designers and the industry in general these days and I wonder if there's anything good to be had from that discussion, given how Neill Druckman famously said this before making The Last Of Us Part 2 which ruined everything that the first game was besides the fun.
   
   On the other hand, many games, especially in more engineer-y games, have a staggering amount of tedium now that is just shrugged off if you mention it. You constantly have to fiddle with the, mostly terrible, UI and micro-adjust things because the larger vision just does not work.
   
   There's also something that Jonathan Blow talked about in regards to his puzzlers. He said he tries to make his game teach people something. You might be cynical about it since The Witness is just connect-the-dots basically, but he really did a lot with the concept and it does generalize well. Plenty games today where one moment has no relation to the next. The campaign isn't an "extended tutorial" because there is no generalized core of knowledge that you can carry through it all. Portal 2 was a success precisely because it was that. Wasn't a hard game, but it did teach you itself and firing that final portal in the boss fight was really neat.
   
   Is there a video or article about this that stuck with you? A good example game that "taught itself to you"? An engineering game that is "fun" instead of tedious?
   • Embed this notice
     lainy (lain@lain.com)'s status on Monday, 28-Apr-2025 04:55:25 JST lainy

     in reply to
     @WandererUber the tedium is the message
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     lainy (lain@lain.com)'s status on Monday, 28-Apr-2025 04:58:46 JST lainy

     in reply to
     @WandererUber there really is something to it. Some Japanese rpgs still pad 2 hours of game with 30 hours of boring grinding. I think many people just like being a sort of machine, doing tasks.
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     Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (wandereruber@poa.st)'s status on Monday, 28-Apr-2025 04:58:47 JST Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer

     in reply to

     • lainy
     @lain Apart from the pun, this is true actually because people play these and then get into engineering because they think "oh this is what the job is going to be like" (it is. it is tedious)
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     Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (wandereruber@poa.st)'s status on Monday, 28-Apr-2025 05:08:53 JST Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer

     in reply to

     • lainy
     @lain alien planet man
     Even as a kid I never did that. Even pokemon felt too grindy to me I, I bypassed every trainer I could, never battled wilds and just powered through it with my starter. (I wasn't very good at it)
     When I played some gba romhacks on an emulator years later, I played "properly". Because the emulator had a 4x speedhack. In the original, they put in the option to disable animations (the cool part) so you could do more grinding (the dumb part) in the same time.
     lainy likes this.