Architect Address July 2021

Hello and welcome to that most auspicious of occasions, the architect address, welcome, welcome, take a seat. Today we’re here to talk about some of the videos that came out recently, what I think of them and what it was like to make them.

First up, let’s talk about the video I did all about short games, ending and Before Your Eyes. When you’re in my line of work, you end up playing a lot of games, so that means that I rarely get to actually finish them. Seriously, I think about 10% of my steam games I’ve actually finished - and that’s doing some pretty generous rounding up. Basically, because I don’t have the time to invest a bunch of effort into a really really long game every day, I’ve come to really appreciate shorter titles and until before your eyes came along there wasn’t a game that I could really point to as exemplifying the strengths of this sort of design.

Shorter games with better paced endings are kind of illogical on the face of them - you’re paying the same amount of money for less videogame which makes a lot of them quite a hard sell. But what you don’t think about is how having less content can actually be a boon because not only do you actually get to experience more of the game, what’s there is probably better on a minute to minute basis because there’s less padding. But beyond that, there is a deeper call to try and completely complete games that before your eyes directly challenges by not letting you do that, and making a deeper point in the process that wouldn’t hit anywhere near as hard if it never forced you to continue and miss out on stuff.

As far the video, it, uh, didn’t do too well for a variety of reasons, I think not many people are actually interested in pretentious arty games with weird gimmicks like I am, and there’s also the matter of Jacob Geller releasing a basically identical video around the same time which did loads better, that bastard. But I’m pretty happy with how the video did, and it was absolutely great for patreon uptake so hello new people, welcome to the page, thank you for giving me money.

The next video was all about permanence, which is a concept I totally made up so if you’ve got a better suggestion I’ll start using that instead, thanks. Honestly, I love getting really wanky about the mechanics of storytelling and how videogames can do it better, and I’d struggled to find a way to talk about games allowing us to assemble emergent narratives over time, which is weird, because it’s what makes a bunch of awesome games tick.

I had the script mostly planned out but Wildermyth really exemplified the sort of design I was looking to cover and allowed me to leap into this topic full force. Honestly, I have quite a few issues with the game, I think it’s pretty easy when you get right down to it - it needs a few more events to avoid repetition, and there’s a weird problem with how retirement works. Essentially, doing well in a given chapter means you get more years of peace afterwards, which translates into your adventurers retiring sooner, which is bad. I guess you could argue it fits the narrative and helps to stabilize difficulty but it does feel pretty bad to be punished for doing well like that. Not sure how they’d fix it but it’s the one black mark in a game that’s otherwise really good.

Going through some other highly permanent games was a lot of fun too - Death Stranding is ace, playing a bunch of oldschool roguelikes was fun, and even shadow of war had its moments. That last one pisses me off though, because when you get right down to it, both of the shadow of games are deeply, deeply mediocre videogames with boring combat and rubbish writing and a bunch of rubbish open world padding, all held up by the nemesis system, which is really good. So now that the nemesis system has been patented, no-one else is allowed to use it, and it’ll never actually get used in a game that deserves it, which is kind of a shame.

All in all I think with this video I spent a bit too long explaining and elaborating on a fairly intuitive concept so I don’t think it needed to be as long as it was. I really like all of the examples I used and I’d really been looking for an excuse to try out Hunt Showdown but there’s quite a lot of filler at the start and at the end that doesn’t need to be there. I THINK the next few videos are going to be a bit shorter though but I guess time will tell on that one.

With that, I’ll leave things there stay cool, stay safe and play some videogames for me, okay - bye!