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Inspiration from Games

8 years ago3,392 words

I enjoy creating things, particularly games, though it's been a while since I last did. I'm not sure what to work on now, though I've been using some games I've recently played for inspiration.

Has it really been weeks since my last post? Shocking. Partly it's due to the same old depression - the feeling of wearing a suit of lead that weighs down my body and mind all the time and sucks all the joy out of life - and partly it's due to studying for the end-of-academic-year exams.

I hate exams. I thought I'd left them in the distant past, and it feels sad - as in pathetic - having to worry about what letter I'll earn for my answers to some questions on a bit of paper. Hoping it's some variety of an A, which it usually is, but probably won't be on these. I hate exams because they're such a stupid form of assessment. You're given a strict time limit, deprived of all external sources, and expected to regurgitate mostly memorised context-irrelevant information despite the pressure. I doubt it reflects real-world situations at all. I remember doing a programming course once, back in the days where I was working on MARDEK 3, and doing poorly on the accompanying exam despite the fact that I could code relatively competently in more comfortable conditions. It's ridiculous.

But I've been focusing a lot of effort onto that, while longing to do something creative again.

I don't know what though, really. Time and money seem like enemies. I want to make a game, but I can't really just do that in a weekend. It takes ages, and at the end, would it make me any money? Would earning something from it require promoting myself in a way I feel incapable of? Would I have to face the critiques and rage of unpleasable players? It all feels so draining. If it were just a matter of making something I personally like and then pressing a 'release' button and watching the money roll in, perhaps I'd be much more productive (I say, totally living in the real world as usual).

Or would I be more productive? Since I had brain surgery, I feel like something's been missing, in regards to creative motivation or inspiration. Or perhaps it's not that, but being here at university, having an actual friend whose infrequent company I enjoy. Focusing on psychology, growing up. Finally. Feeling like 'silly games' aren't something I'd be respected for, would never lead to love. I don't know. I feel too caught up in all kinds of tangled thoughts and feelings, pointing in different directions. I envy those who know where they're going and why, without crippling doubts and uncertainty. If such people exist.

Anyway, games. They're something I've made in the past. They're always a solitary experience for me; I don't play or even talk about them with other people, usually. I don't really have the interest. But I'll write a bit here about some I've been playing recently, and how they've been influencing my own ideas.

I've been playing a few mobile games recently. Some of them have just been basic word puzzle things - mind-numbing - while others are vaguely RPG-like; an attempt to understand what variations on that familiar genre others are making these days. I'm in a bubble and have little-to-no contact with 'gaming culture' - that is, I don't follow any kind of gaming-related news sources - so I don't know what's popular or new. I'm vaguely aware that a new Zelda game came out, but it's for a console I'm not likely to get, unfortunately. Too expensive. Mobile games are generally free, I can play them anywhere, and it takes little effort to acquire them or start them up, which is why I've been playing those.

Nostalgia led me to search for Final Fantasy games, and there are loads of those. I've played a few, but I can't even remember their titles despite playing them on and off for weeks. The only one I've yet to delete is called Mobius Final Fantasy, and it looks like this:



I'm quite impressed by the graphics, how that can run on a phone. And I was impressed by the gameplay at first too, because it was simple, but not too simple. Enough to require at least a little bit of thought, more than just tapping repeatedly. Battles involve controlling just the one character and essentially alternating between basic attacks and magic in order to stagger enemies and... stuff. Mechanics. How fascinating.

I did like that it didn't seem to just be a nostalgia-fest like the other Final Fantasy games were (in those, you generally collected characters from previous installments). It feels more like a novel experience... though it's heavily based on some basic concepts from Final Fantasy I. But not mindlessly.

It's weirdly sexist though. The main character is male, he's accompanied by a female fairy he constantly calls annoying and tells to shut up, and there's another male character who literally says that women are trouble or something. Oh, and a princess who you have to save. Hmm.

While I enjoyed it at first - for the FFXIII-like music if nothing else - after playing it for a while, I came to find it so mind-numbingly repetitive. A grind-fest. Doing the same repetitive battles against the same handful of creatures again and again and again and again to accrue immense numbers of 'skill seeds' to upgrade your stats to do the same thing again and again but with slightly bigger numbers. It goes on and on, endlessly, with new events being added constantly so there's always something 'new' - superficially, at least - to do.

There's another game by Final Fantasy developers called Terra Battle, which I also have. It looks like this:



You swipe your characters around the grid, and they attack whatever's in a 'pincer' between them. Again, it's simple, but complexity emerges from the basic rules. It's much less sophisticated than Mobius Final Fantasy graphics-wise, but was similarly - for me, at least - initially interesting before becoming repetitive and grindy.

It also has something I've noticed in a lot of these mobile games - particularly Eastern ones, though I'm not sure if that's true or not - which is collecting characters of various levels of rarity (A rank, D rank... SS rank for some reason; I hope I get an SS grade on my exams), usually by some kind of random draw using premium currency. It's hardly new; real-world card games have been built by booster packs for decades. And there is a certain appeal to it. A desire for rarity. It's notable that the ranks often start at something like 'rare' before going to 'super rare' and 'competent politician rank' or whatever (I hope you're impressed by the originality of that joke, because I'm not).

But it all feels so crowded, so vapid. So cluttered. There are a billion different characters and events and it's impossible to collect or do everything. And what's the point anyway if the gameplay is so very repetitive? I suppose I've just become very jaded about the idea of grinding and collecting, and wouldn't want to make a game focused on such things myself.

It's interesting looking in the app store and seeing that the screenshots of these types of games rarely even feature the gameplay; they just boast about all the many things you can collect. I'm reminded of something called ∞ Bartle Types ∞, which were a system intended to categorise gamers' preferences based on their personality: Killers, Achievers, Explorers, and Socialisers. I suppose games like this appeal heavily to Achievers, which align with SJ Myers-Briggs types, which are apparently the most common in the population. Maybe.

I've also been playing Hearthstone - which you've probably already heard of, since it seems quite popular - for quite a few months now. My friend introduced me to it, after her boyfriend introduced her to it. I have mixed feelings about playing it for that reason... Discomfort, thinking "this is their thing", as if intruding, or perhaps it's more accurate to say jealousy is evoked by imagining them playing and talking about it together while I just get it 'second-hand'. It's difficult to put into words, and most likely just one of the bizarre faults my mind seems to have that other people wouldn't share. But anyway, irrelevant.



I've never really played card games like Magic: The Gathering or Yu-Gi-Oh or whatever other ones there are (I dabbled in Pokemon and Digimon cards when I was little, but only as a child might), so Hearthstone is new to me. I do enjoy it, and I feel that it's much better than the grind-heavy repetitive games because each match is (usually) different. There's always a sense of novelty, always something to keep you on your toes.

While cards are gained through random booster packs, it bothers me less than the way it's handled in all those other mobile games. Perhaps because you get multiple cards, or cards can't be levelled up so it avoids the excessive granulation that irks me. I like the small, fat numbers on the cards for that reason; the difference between 3 and 4 means more than that between 517 and 524 or whatever. And I'd rather have just 'attack' and 'health' than a collection of increasingly specific vital statistics that I can't keep track of and don't really care about.

Games like Hearthstone feel more like a 'sport' than the story-based games I'm used to, though. I suppose they're played in tournaments in a way that RPGs never could be. Mobius Final Fantasy and Terra Battle at least have a vague plot that you progress through, so there's the thought of an end being reached eventually. While Hearthstone technically has 'story'-based adventure things, they aren't really the same thing. This isn't a bad thing at all though; it makes Hearthstone easier to pick up and play whenever, even after ignoring it for months, without feeling like you have to catch up or anything.

I'm not good at it though. I've been struggling to make it beyond rank 19, and seem to lose as much as I win so that isn't happening (I was amazed that the match to get that screenshot went as well as it did; that's rare for me). I feel with things like that that other people have more 'game-oriented minds' than I do... It's something I felt when hearing feedback about my games like MARDEK, or listening to people talk about games like Pokemon or Final Fantasy. I enjoyed making and playing those for their worlds, characters, stories; the feeling of exploration. My favourite Pokemon is Girafarig because I find it intoxicatingly cute, not because it has good stats. They talked about party builds, stats, strategies. I never really cared about that. I've played Pokemon for most of my life, but I'd do poorly in competitive battles because I just don't really think in terms of strategy. I can't even play chess! And have no interest in learning. It isn't that I'm entirely hopeless; I'm just 'okay' at games, and seem to lack the honed edge that other players have, meaning I can beat the AI easily enough but not them. Perhaps my mind just doesn't work that way. So then I end up losing in Hearthstone and feeling worse than before I started. Hmm.

I don't like games where for one person to experience the joy of winning, the other has to experience the pain of defeat. It's why I prefer single-player games, or cooperative ones (at least in theory; I haven't played any, really). I'm not a fan of competition, so I wouldn't really want my own games to include that.

Coming back to mobile games, I want to mention one I found quite beautiful, called (for some reason) Monument Valley.



It's a short and inventive little game I can't really describe in terms of genre. I wouldn't call it a 'puzzle' game, and 'adventure' sounds wrong too. It's beautiful, and intriguingly mind-bending, in an Escher-esque kind of way; the geometry doesn't make conventional sense. I'm quite wowed thinking how it might have been achieved programmatically, actually.

I mention it because it's short, and I was able to finish the whole thing in an afternoon. At first I thought that was disappointing - especially since I'd paid for it, unlike with the other games I'd played for weeks - but I came to feel that something that did have a clear ending, that didn't linger in my life with endless grinding and events, left a nicer imprint in the mind. The final memories of it were positive, rather than it just becoming so tedious I lost interest. Perhaps I'd rather do something short and self-contained like that, than some endless or billion-chapter-long thing. More like a film than a TV series or way of life.

I played a couple of Steam games, too. I finally got around to playing Portal and Portal 2, after avoiding them for years for no good reason. They were impressive. I was impressed. But I don't really have much to say about them; they didn't inspire me, particularly, even if they were really quite good. I won't even bother with a screenshot!

A similar game that did inspire me was The Talos Principle.



It's a puzzle game, and solving the puzzles was a nice bit of mental exercise, but what drew me in and left a mark in my mind was the setting. It explores themes like artificial intelligence, religion, the nature of the mind and heaven and all that, and it does so intelligently. Or at least I thought so. It's something I'll remember.

I'm always interested in exploring such themes in my own work. I feel that this game did so in quite a 'masculine' way; that is, focusing on externals, on logic, on problem-solving, with little attention to the inner world or emotions. There's a 'developer's room' in the game where you can see simulacra (now there's a pretentious word) of the people who made it, and they're all male. Unsurprising, but that's what puts me off games development. It's almost all guys.

I have issues with gender, you see, which I should probably talk about in more detail in another post. I mean I've talked about it a lot before, but there are some things I want to work through with my words. Some other day, though. For now, not entirely unrelatedly, here's another game I've apparently (briefly) played:



It's called Episode, and it's very much for women. It's story-based - there's no 'action' to speak of - and it seems to involve mostly women standing around in various pretty outfits talking, about things like popularity and boys.

There are a bunch of stories of various genres, such as comedy, where a beautiful high school teen is whisked away by an obnoxious bad body classmate; drama, where a strong, independent, beautiful twenty-something is whisked away by an obnoxious bad boy she met on the road; or fantasy, where a gifted, beautiful young woman is whisked away by an obnoxious bad boy vampire. Lots of variety, you see.

The story I've briefly been 'playing' through is the totally relatable experience of a wealthy, intelligent, confident, beautiful, 17-year-old American high school girl (upon whom I dubbed the exquisite moniker Frogsnogger McFelch) whose aim is to get into Yale university, and she's trying to achieve this by becoming student president. It's like the story was meant just for me!! Gosh, I sure do hope I get more votes than my bitchy rival.

I played it for a couple of reasons. One is technical; I've been wanting to make a 'game' which is essentially just an interactive story, where you watch character models emote and talk and that's about it. I was curious to see how they'd done it, and did get some ideas from that.

But I was also just curious to see what kinds of themes stories aimed at women focus on. It's not like I was completely oblivious and had never been exposed to them before, but still, interest. I can't say I don't boil up with bitterness at the repeating trope of what's essentially "this confrontational arsehole doesn't have a nice thing to say about me! Swoon~!" It's irritating spending a lifetime cultivating kindness and compassion (I'm not claiming success, but I try), trying to understand others' perspectives and say nice things that truly mean something and which aren't instrumental flattery, only to see that the exact attitude I'd hate to have is portrayed as some sexy fantasy ideal. SS rank kindness is more appealing than D rank kindness though; who likes what comes commonly? What isn't rare?! Isn't it more satisfying to squeeze out a drop of kindness than to merely witness a torrent that flows readily forth anyway?!? Maybe that's how it works. I can only speculate. Though it's not really any different to the profusion of slim, busty, shamelessly lusty bimbos who populate pornography. Maybe that's irritating to plump or modest girls, or women who try hard to be respectable and see that's not what's attractive, really. But all that's a whole other bucket of fish. Is that how that idiom goes? Bucket of fish? I can't remember. Tub of trout.

Oh, wait, it's kettle of fish. Fascinating. Maybe I'm not even using it right. I don't know. Self-doubts. They consume me, always. That's not attractive. I'm not attractive. And so the mental cycle goes, to much darker places after that.

But games! Yes! I would quite enjoy making something - whether it's a game or a sort of browser-based interactive 'webcomic' - which isn't so much an action-based gaming experience with stats and mechanics and exploration and all that, but which is instead just a shortish, simple story about things that I've been wanting to write about for ages... Mental health, a quest for meaning, the feeling of isolation, things like that. Being an artist; using a creative medium to express my soul~.

About a year ago, I planned a project called 'Soulmate', about the delusion of perfect love, and the inner journey of dissolving that while overcoming and understanding oneself in the process. I loved the idea and still do... but I'd planned it as a vast RPG, as I do, and I'm not sure whether such a thing is really feasible, considering my depression and solitude. I do quite like what little design work I managed to do for it, though.



I'd be interested in returning roughly to the idea, but more briefly; less like a 50-hour RPG, and more like a one-or-two-hour interactive film, sort of. Probably quite simplistic, nothing grand. I don't have the resources or skills to make something visually stunning or full of content.

I'd like to explore themes that are meaningful to me at the moment, such as disconnection from others, loneliness, and - perhaps triggeringly - suicide. As well as love, and finding a new lease on life.

I have some ideas, but nothing fleshed out yet, so it doesn't seem worth posting here about them. Maybe when I've developed them a bit more. I've been playing around with Unity, with 3D modelling, so maybe I'll use those in some way.

I don't think I'll ever make money from games. I'm not a businessman, and the thought of promoting them or being popular or asked to speak at gaming conventions terrifies me deeply. But if I could use games as a form of personal expression to give my own life meaning, that'd be more important to me, even if they were only seen by a handful of people. And I suppose I'd rather make an experience that leaves a lasting impression, than a time-waster that becomes increasingly tedious.

Anyway, congratulations on skimming this far if you have! Perhaps soon I'll actually have something to show.