I have long lamented the over use of combat in games, not for pacifist ideology, it's just a cop-out as a game mechanic for a lot of games. The medium can represent a chasm of possibilities but usually all the focus goes of AAA titles goes into combat.
Which is to say the indie game and cozy game niches respectively have a lot of scope, because their possible gameplay is "everything that isn't combat", and I welcome the variety and creativity.
My first answer is that one of the most amazing mechanics ever designed is health points, I believe invented by Dungeons and Dragons. Almost every non-health win condition feels more arbitrary than health. Whether it's shooting balls in hoops, crossing a finish line first, or collecting victory points they are all less intuitive and feel more contrived than "you have this many points, at 0 you die."
The second is that many game designs are essentially about conflict, whether with other players or game agents. The ultimate conflict is life or death violence, aka combat. So it's a quicky and easy way to raise the metaphorical stakes. If you take an olympic fencing game and instead make them use real swords and no armor then it's a lot more dramatic with no change in the game mechanics.
Making non-violent games is not undesirable, it's just harder to do well when combat fits so naturally. You end with non-violent games being worse on average, non-dramatic low stakes metaphors and contrived win conditions.
I touched on this in my own reply to the grandparent comment [0]. I realized a while ago that lots of competitive games I played regularly were making me feel animosity towards the people I was playing them with, and it led me to think about this issue for quite a while.
Competition is such a default in game design that a game not based on it often isn’t recognized as a game at all. There are cooperative games, but aside from Minecraft, none of them are particularly popular. It’s arguable that this a reflection of the human condition; living things are always fighting for resources, so games attempt to emulate this competition.
It’s odd that this ended up being the paradigm, though; digital worlds can provide us with a space to explore what we would conventionally consider to be impossible - infinite worlds which obviate the need for competition in the first place. There’s maybe a commentary on human nature to be made that even in a game like Minecraft, so many players’ first inclination is to start fighting each other.
One of the things I like about Minecraft is that it isn’t structurally adversarial. Most conventional multiplayer games are fundamentally about outperforming another player.
Even when a game is not explicitly violent, I think there is a compelling argument to be made that it continues to shape the player’s perspective as to how the world is and ought to be. Mario Kart is no different from Call of Duty in this regard; both share triumph over others as their win state, whereas Minecraft offers at least the possibility of a (practically) infinite world that is purely cooperative.
I often like to think that the afterlife is something like a big Minecraft server, where our wills have been perfected such that the idea of competitive strife never even crosses one’s mind, and all there is to do is expand into a horizon of possibility. Naturally this makes me very unpopular at LAN parties.
It's interesting to me, the shift I've had to co-op games over the years (both board and video games). With one group of friends, we play exclusively cooperative games, whereas another only wants to ever play competitive games. For me, co-op is just so much more relaxing. It's also far more social, whereas playing competitive games the socializing usually happens outside of the game itself. You can definitely be over-competitive in cooperative games too though.
Unless the game designers specifically accounted for it, cooperative games can rob the autonomy of less confident players. One overbearing player can hijack the whole game. To them to win the game as designed it feels correct to do.
In competitive game it's possible the less skilled player may never win (not true for party games), but at least only they are personally invested in their win so no one can righteously take over.
Agree, Undertale is absolutely brilliant in that aspect. Especially the beginning (the part that is in the demo version). The mood changes after that, for the worse I thought. Things got a bit more silly/naive than I like. The ending is absolutely brilliant again, tough, in the same way (it is a reflection on game mechanics). It is not 4h because you'll want to retry some parts.
Yes, I sim race, but don't enjoy other sport games. But that's pretty limited scope, when it comes to creative worlds and storytelling isn't it? I am interested in what a game in a world like Bioshock would be like if the game could have no combat.
It horribly breaks the stories of many games. The obvious modern example is Last of Us 2 where sparing a single life seems pretty meaningless given the mass murder spree you’ve been on to get there.
Well to first describe the specific types of copouts, so many amazing story missions eventually boil down to "kill everyone who is in the way of pulling the switch that achieves our goal". Or "here is a complex social build up describing conflicting morales, with multiple possible solutions socially/mechanically... kill the person you disagree with."
What if instead the majority of the gameplay was unique game mechanics that actually achieve the goal. Instead of "oh no it's full of monsters who are in the way of the buttons", why not having to scavenge the parts, solve some mechanical and electrical puzzles. Maybe find a person and get the right dialogue options to get information you need out of them, that actually applies to the puzzles, etc... this is all in existing games already of course, but hopefully that illustrates what I am getting at.
Cyberpunk 2077 had this issue in spades, as all the storylines were so interesting, and could have had such interesting game mechanics tied to them. But it was mostly combat.
I am not saying that makes it a bad game, just that there is so much room for other mechanics.
Well that is interesting, but I was referring to the wording of the phrase "chasm of possibilities." A chasm is not something I would metaphorically associate with "great potential." A chasm is usually a bad thing, its a hole, a gap, you fall in and the only possibilities are that you are heroically saved, or you die.
The Chasm of Possibilities sounds like a comedic juxtaposition, like something from The Phantom Tollbooth or Hitchhiker's Guide.
Oh! Yes a chasm in the sense that, all possibilities have vanished into it, rather than being implemented.
That is funny though, English is my first language and I am reasonably well read, but for whatever reason, common turns of phrase are entirely missing, so I fill in the blanks, and don't always hit the mark.
Which is to say the indie game and cozy game niches respectively have a lot of scope, because their possible gameplay is "everything that isn't combat", and I welcome the variety and creativity.