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Art Doesn't Expire
Apr. 18th, 2024 08:35 pmSo there's a thing that kinda bugs me about a lot of the criticism/discourse/whatever surrounding older games. Namely, there's this tendency to chalk way too many things up to either hardware limitations or the developers simply not being "advanced" enough at game design. Not to say that hardware limitations aren't real or anything -- obviously they're still a factor even now, and maybe if big developers actually acknowledged that we wouldn't get shit like the most recent Call of Duty being over 200gb in size -- but people are extremely quick to attribute design choices they don't like, or that don't fit in with modern sensibilities, to some kind of arbitrary limitation, as though the devs didn't WANT to use random encounters or limited inventory or whatever, they were just FORCED to do so by circumstance.
The other thing, that game design is a linear progression we are steadily getting unilaterally better at, is of course bullshit.
When the Super Mario RPG remake was coming out, it was pretty faithful to the original but added a few things that people called (ugh) "quality of life" and widely regarded as just straight upgrades. One of these things was making items stack in your inventory rather than each individual item taking up a slot. The thing is -- I liked that the game did that! A lot! It made you stop and consider what you were carrying around, if you really needed all those healing mushrooms or if Mallow was going to be enough, if those old accessories were REALLY worth hoarding. It meant you had to go into a dungeon WITHOUT a completely flooded inventory prepared for every eventuality, because if you did you wouldn't have any room for cool stuff hiding in treasure chests. It also made the game feel a little more cozy, a little more like going on an adventure with your friends, because it sort of encouraged you to imagine the characters ACTUALLY stuffing these items in their backpack for the road, since 20 bottles of syrup don't condense down into a single item in real life. Earthbound also used a strictly limited per-character inventory, presumably for the exact same reason.
Maybe you disagree with me on this, maybe you do agree but think the effects aren't worth the hassle, maybe you think the new inventory does something even better, maybe you don't give a shit at all, but I really think it's uncharitable to the artists who made some of the most widely beloved games of all time to relegate certain design decisions to, essentially, the realm of "mistakes". Making the inventory something you needed to kind of grapple with does run counter to modern game design sensibilities which favor making menus as fast, frictionless, and invisible as possible. Changing it to be more in line with that might be a good move (clearly a lot of people who aren't me think so) but it's not an objectively good move, because it's a different artistic decision that doesn't sit on a binary of good to bad.
So much of the rhetoric surrounding game design revolves around hashing out what constitutes "correct" or "incorrect" design decisions rather than looking at it in terms of what it might be trying to accomplish, and as someone who loves older games and also a lot of the ASPECTS of older games that people tend to consider dated, I think it's very frustrating.
I intended to post something about Final Fantasy 5, but somehow got sidetracked talking about design philosophy and also Super Mario RPG, a game I'm not even particularly invested in, but I guess maybe it constitutes important backstory for my thoughts or something. Anyway I'll just put the FF5 stuff in a later post.
I guess the other thing that's important to establish is: Video games are art, and not just the writing or the visuals or the music or whatever, I mean like everything. Tetris is just as much a piece of art as any RPG with an intricate story. I also do not think it's possible to divorce the "narrative" of a game from its "mechanics" -- it is always a complete package.
(This is also why I dislike the current trend of calling easy modes "Story Difficulty" or whatever...first of all it sounds weirdly euphemistic, like they're trying not to offend people with the suggestion they may prefer the game be easier, and second I'm sorry but I don't think reducing the amount of friction in some areas of the game results in more focus on the nebulous "story", it just provides a slightly different way of experiencing it.)
The other thing, that game design is a linear progression we are steadily getting unilaterally better at, is of course bullshit.
When the Super Mario RPG remake was coming out, it was pretty faithful to the original but added a few things that people called (ugh) "quality of life" and widely regarded as just straight upgrades. One of these things was making items stack in your inventory rather than each individual item taking up a slot. The thing is -- I liked that the game did that! A lot! It made you stop and consider what you were carrying around, if you really needed all those healing mushrooms or if Mallow was going to be enough, if those old accessories were REALLY worth hoarding. It meant you had to go into a dungeon WITHOUT a completely flooded inventory prepared for every eventuality, because if you did you wouldn't have any room for cool stuff hiding in treasure chests. It also made the game feel a little more cozy, a little more like going on an adventure with your friends, because it sort of encouraged you to imagine the characters ACTUALLY stuffing these items in their backpack for the road, since 20 bottles of syrup don't condense down into a single item in real life. Earthbound also used a strictly limited per-character inventory, presumably for the exact same reason.
Maybe you disagree with me on this, maybe you do agree but think the effects aren't worth the hassle, maybe you think the new inventory does something even better, maybe you don't give a shit at all, but I really think it's uncharitable to the artists who made some of the most widely beloved games of all time to relegate certain design decisions to, essentially, the realm of "mistakes". Making the inventory something you needed to kind of grapple with does run counter to modern game design sensibilities which favor making menus as fast, frictionless, and invisible as possible. Changing it to be more in line with that might be a good move (clearly a lot of people who aren't me think so) but it's not an objectively good move, because it's a different artistic decision that doesn't sit on a binary of good to bad.
So much of the rhetoric surrounding game design revolves around hashing out what constitutes "correct" or "incorrect" design decisions rather than looking at it in terms of what it might be trying to accomplish, and as someone who loves older games and also a lot of the ASPECTS of older games that people tend to consider dated, I think it's very frustrating.
I intended to post something about Final Fantasy 5, but somehow got sidetracked talking about design philosophy and also Super Mario RPG, a game I'm not even particularly invested in, but I guess maybe it constitutes important backstory for my thoughts or something. Anyway I'll just put the FF5 stuff in a later post.
I guess the other thing that's important to establish is: Video games are art, and not just the writing or the visuals or the music or whatever, I mean like everything. Tetris is just as much a piece of art as any RPG with an intricate story. I also do not think it's possible to divorce the "narrative" of a game from its "mechanics" -- it is always a complete package.
(This is also why I dislike the current trend of calling easy modes "Story Difficulty" or whatever...first of all it sounds weirdly euphemistic, like they're trying not to offend people with the suggestion they may prefer the game be easier, and second I'm sorry but I don't think reducing the amount of friction in some areas of the game results in more focus on the nebulous "story", it just provides a slightly different way of experiencing it.)