April 15, 2024
Let Games Be Games (I'm overthinking it)
Okay so, four months between posts, not a good look. I’ve found that it’s hard to find the time to write about making a game when I could be spending that time working on it directly. That mindset is to blame for some of the stuff I’m going to be talking about in this post, so I feel like if I’ve got to write about something, it ought to be this. This is a short little story about gaining tunnel vision towards a project from working on it for so long.
For a long time, DNR was just what I did. There wasn’t time for much else. It was difficult for me to spend time playing games because I felt it was getting in the way of my work, so I would watch movies and get inspired by those instead.Games inspired by movies are nothing new. Max Payne and Silent Hill 2 immediately come to mind for their respective John Woo and Jacob’s Ladder inspirations. But this approach is risky. After all, you are making a video game, and not a movie.
I knew that you could suspend your disbelief much more for a videogame than a movie. But I didn’t realize just how different things could be even between different games. I remember my biggest inspiration at the time of going into DNR was Hotline Miami. The gameplay and story of those games are very tightly woven together, leading to a very grounded experience. Theres an explanation for everything. Theres a reason you’re killing so many Russians, there’s a reason they’re all cooped up together in buildings (and you know their address), there’s a reason you’re competent enough to kill them all without getting hit once, and in the second game every character, new and old is placed on a collision course with eachother. And I think that works for HLM because there’s hardly anything fantastical about it. You don’t have to suspend your disbelief that much because the events of the games are believable on their own. They could have really happened, and we’ll just never know. This approach doesn’t work so well for a Sci-Fi story like the one DNR has, though. Turns out a game about trying to stop your slow transmutation into a shapeshifting reptilian creature while already struggling to feel alive requires a much greater suspension of disbelief. I could be inspired by the gameplay all I wanted, but trying to write in the same way was impossible. It feels obvious in retrospect.
A month or two ago I finally got around to playing killer7 for the first time, and it’s what made me come to realize all of this. many have likened Suda51's games to some kind of videogame version of punk rock, and playing killer7 I could really see why. He really just doesn’t give a fuck. It’s a difficult thing to describe. I know there’s reasons and explanations for why much of the game is the way it is, but it felt like the explanations and connections to the lore came second to their inclusion as part of the gameplay or part of the absurdity. It made me realize that yeah, games can have a deep story and still be gamey. By "gamey", I just mean those kinds of things that are primitive or unrealistic, yet don't need explanation, as everyone knows they're like that for the sake of the game. You don’t need to have a solid explanation for everything. There should be something, but if the premise itself isn’t entirely grounded, you can get away with some things that might otherwise break immersion.
Being locked into one way of writing for a level of realism that I’m not even going for made things unnecessarily difficult for me, but I didn’t know any other way because I had tunnel vision towards just a few inspirations. Hotline Miami works because its story is built on top of the gameplay, exploring the cause and effects of the violence you perperate. Sometimes, the story you want to tell isn't as directly related to how you actually play the game, or the types of environments and foes you encounter. Since then, I’ve started to take note of just how gamey games can get in order to strip back some of the more convoluted ideas I've had for DNR over the years. It’s easy to disregard how simple a lot of things are (enemy movement patterns and behavior, level designs, etc.) when you’re used to it already, so it’s been interesting going back and analyzing a lot of my favorite games and noticing the elegant simplicity of these sorts of things.
For a long time, DNR was just what I did. There wasn’t time for much else. It was difficult for me to spend time playing games because I felt it was getting in the way of my work, so I would watch movies and get inspired by those instead.Games inspired by movies are nothing new. Max Payne and Silent Hill 2 immediately come to mind for their respective John Woo and Jacob’s Ladder inspirations. But this approach is risky. After all, you are making a video game, and not a movie.
I knew that you could suspend your disbelief much more for a videogame than a movie. But I didn’t realize just how different things could be even between different games. I remember my biggest inspiration at the time of going into DNR was Hotline Miami. The gameplay and story of those games are very tightly woven together, leading to a very grounded experience. Theres an explanation for everything. Theres a reason you’re killing so many Russians, there’s a reason they’re all cooped up together in buildings (and you know their address), there’s a reason you’re competent enough to kill them all without getting hit once, and in the second game every character, new and old is placed on a collision course with eachother. And I think that works for HLM because there’s hardly anything fantastical about it. You don’t have to suspend your disbelief that much because the events of the games are believable on their own. They could have really happened, and we’ll just never know. This approach doesn’t work so well for a Sci-Fi story like the one DNR has, though. Turns out a game about trying to stop your slow transmutation into a shapeshifting reptilian creature while already struggling to feel alive requires a much greater suspension of disbelief. I could be inspired by the gameplay all I wanted, but trying to write in the same way was impossible. It feels obvious in retrospect.
A month or two ago I finally got around to playing killer7 for the first time, and it’s what made me come to realize all of this. many have likened Suda51's games to some kind of videogame version of punk rock, and playing killer7 I could really see why. He really just doesn’t give a fuck. It’s a difficult thing to describe. I know there’s reasons and explanations for why much of the game is the way it is, but it felt like the explanations and connections to the lore came second to their inclusion as part of the gameplay or part of the absurdity. It made me realize that yeah, games can have a deep story and still be gamey. By "gamey", I just mean those kinds of things that are primitive or unrealistic, yet don't need explanation, as everyone knows they're like that for the sake of the game. You don’t need to have a solid explanation for everything. There should be something, but if the premise itself isn’t entirely grounded, you can get away with some things that might otherwise break immersion.
Being locked into one way of writing for a level of realism that I’m not even going for made things unnecessarily difficult for me, but I didn’t know any other way because I had tunnel vision towards just a few inspirations. Hotline Miami works because its story is built on top of the gameplay, exploring the cause and effects of the violence you perperate. Sometimes, the story you want to tell isn't as directly related to how you actually play the game, or the types of environments and foes you encounter. Since then, I’ve started to take note of just how gamey games can get in order to strip back some of the more convoluted ideas I've had for DNR over the years. It’s easy to disregard how simple a lot of things are (enemy movement patterns and behavior, level designs, etc.) when you’re used to it already, so it’s been interesting going back and analyzing a lot of my favorite games and noticing the elegant simplicity of these sorts of things.