Getting Over It (Spoilers?)

[Music] if you're aware of getting over it with Bennett fadi it's probably the result of a streamer or youtuber playing through the game that's not a bad thing it's clearly one of the reasons the game has been as successful as it has but it also gives the game something of a reputation of being a game designed for streaming online merging goat simulator style absurdist humor with a sort of infuriating difficulty of something like a Mario maker level or kaizo game it would be easy to dismiss getting over it as a quirky game tailor-made to get attention by having youtubers get angry and scream at a naked man in a pot for a few hours but I think there's more going on here the game makes it pretty clear it's something of a meditation on challenge difficulty failure suffering pain and what they mean so let's talk about failure if you're not ready for that like if you've already had a bad day then what you're about to go through might be too much feel free to go away and come back I'll begin I've said before that when states and failure states contextualize play and I still think that that's true they in conjunction with whatever metaphor wraps the mechanics give meaning and direction to the otherwise abstract or arbitrary systems that drive our games when state still players the system states that are desirable and lose states tell players the states that are undesirable but it's not a strict black-white up-down yin-yang thing despite simply describing opposite concepts they actually accomplish very different goals when states tend to be in more of a long-term or medium-term goal they are the thing that you are aiming to achieve you know beat the level win the game that sort of thing and once a victory is achieved that particular challenge is then considered beaten you have now achieved victory we can move on [Music] failure states on the other hand to present a more urgent threat they tend to be the thing that prevents you from achieving the win state or the complication that makes it more than a simple task consequently we're wind states try to provide a sort of long-term context and promise of release law states afford an immediate tension and for the record lacking tension is fine sometimes you don't want ludic tension games like Tacoma which can't be lost in the traditional sense rely on narrative tension instead you can still have engaging games without failure States or ludecke tension but by including the lost state the fate of the game is now in question winning is no longer a certainty or a matter of simple effort it's also probably important to point out for the sake of this piece that like win states lose states can be formal or informal or explicit or implicit whichever terminology you want to use the point is that a lose state can be a formally recognized system state thing like failing to keep given virtue above the minimum two turns in a row in the shredded aisle [Music] or an informal implicit metaphor thing like getting stung by bees an animal crossing there's no real systemic recognition of the failure but come on you got stung by bees and you got a big well it sucks when in law states are also potentially granular failing a jump is a loss of sorts and the end is nigh but losing a life is a loss at a higher level of granularity and losing all your lives is a higher level of failure still so just because there aren't formal permanent high level GAMEOVER screen style system Lu states and getting over it with Bennett fatty doesn't mean there aren't losses and failures to be experienced along the way just ask anyone who's plated oh sorry about that getting over it offers plenty of opportunities for losses at small medium and large scales of granularity whether they're formally recognised or not and they kind of are given that the game automatically plays songs or sassy quotes when you lose significant progress [Music] game academic Jesper Juul has actually written what is as far as I can find anyways perhaps the only book dedicated to the nature of game failure the art of failure an essay on the pain of playing video games in it he tackles failure from a number of perspectives but early on inquires about what he calls the paradox of failure which he phrases the following way one we generally avoid failure two we experience failure when playing games three we seek out games although we will likely experience something that we normally otherwise avoid in other words of games necessarily cause us an experience that upsets us why do we play them you'll frames as paradox is potentially a subset of the more generalized paradox of painful art ie why do we read sad books or watch scary movies and while he proposes a few solutions and attempts to reframe the paradox in different ways the one that most interests me is the one based on work by Gregory curry on the problem of painful art and splits our desires between immediate emotional responses and long-term aesthetic demands the example used by curry and by proxy Yul is Desdemona from Othello but this is a video game video on YouTube so let's swap that out for Final Fantasy 7 saris the immediate desire when playing is that we don't want eros to die because that's sad and we don't like being sad but the long-term aesthetic desire is for eros to die because it drives the conflict of the work and results in a more emotionally fulfilling experience that enriches the events and character interactions that follow if eros doesn't die that meaning and aesthetic value are lost it reframes the paradox not as contradictory behaviors but conflicting desires when you will translate scurries work to games he frames it like this the immediate short-term goal when playing games is to avoid failure but the longer-term aesthetic goal is to play games that let us experience partial or temporary failure there's something in experiencing a game that permits or at least opens the possibility to failure that we craved even if we don't like it when we fail in the moment can I see another's world and not be in sorrow - can I see another's grief and not seek for Kind relief William Blake there are some other analyses on the paradox of failure in the book and the whole thing is worth checking out but the point is that we go into games expecting at a minimum the possibility of some pain and unpleasantness some part of us wants to be hurt it is the territory that games are built on victories to be savored and defeats that sting but how did designers figure out that sting well you will also points to a distinction between failure and punishment to quote you'll directly to discuss whether a game is easy or unfair we should first distinguish between failure and punishment when we say that games are becoming easier it concerns not only our likelihood to fail at a given task but also the punishment we receive upon failing the frustration and pain we feel as we play games depends not just on how frequently we fail but what the punishment is for failing and it takes copious amounts of both for games to really elicit powerful pain you will cite Super Meat Boy as an example of a game that has regular failure but very little in the way of punishment consequently even though it is very difficult to make lots of progress in Super Meat Boy it isn't seen as a particularly mean or painful game to play getting over it however not only involves regular failure and setbacks but also punishment Stern uncaring unyielding massive amounts of punishment sometimes it's a reset of a few feet maybe 45 seconds of work maybe 10 minutes worth other times it's a cataclysmic failure erasing the past hour or more of progress sending you back to basically the start of the game with no recourse but to pick up your hammer and begin again as punishment for a single errant flick of the mouse miscalculation of an angle or misjudgment of force it's not just hard to progress but punishing for failure and it's inevitable that you feel a little crushed every time it happens even if you're expecting and accepting of it and it's here where the anger and frustration at a game's eagerness to see you fail and sadism and doling out penalties meet with eul's paradox of failure that benefit II has planted his flag with getting over it the game makes no secret that it is very much interested in the idea of player suffering the quotes and songs the game throw at you were all meditations on loss and endurance in the face of hardship to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought and with old woes new wail my dear times waste William Shakespeare sonnet Eddy the monologue by Bennett Fadi himself that you hear as you progress through the game recognizes how cruel the tower he's built really is an orange is sweet juicy fruit locked inside a bit appeal that's not how I feel about a challenge I only want the bitterness it's coffee it's grapefruit it's licorice he acknowledges that it takes a certain kind of player to progress and in a sort of reverse beginner's guide Fadi grows more intimate and believes that he the designer understands you more and more the further you get we have the same taste you and I it's not ambition ambition x' opposite an observant mission to taste two feet up to the point where he whispers his appreciation of your pain softly in your ear you've learned to hike is no way left to go but up in a moment I'll shut up but let me say I'm glad you came but more than anything it's the design of the game that sells this idea of suffering the challenges the game asks you to overcome our conquerable but not even necessarily through direct skill fadis previous efforts like co-op and girp are both difficult failure focused titles about indirectly controlling the movement of a character but those games feel more like experiments and locomotion co-op highlights the difficulties and mapping individual human muscles to keyboard inputs and girp has players turning their fingers into pretzels to climb a mountain reflecting the contortions of their avatar on screen getting over it is in this sense similar you don't control an avatar but you control inputs that ask your avatar to do something as Fadi himself points out have you thought about who you are in this are you the man in the pot Diogenes I use hand I use the top of his hammer I think not well your hand moves the hand I may not follow nor the man nor the man's hand in this year is will his intent he embodied resolved in his uphill ascent getting over it intentionally removes you from direct control in order to make your movements less directly predictable which leads to errant inputs which leads to failure and while both girp and clop are very hard and involve a lot of hilarious failures neither seems designed to punish players quite like getting over it part of that is the scoring system co-op and girp both feel like the goal is to see how far you can get getting over it however offers only the singular challenge climb the mountain and beat the game or don't that seems like a minor design change but it totally recontextualizes failure if I get further than I've ever gotten in coop but then I trip I still feel like that loss is kind of a victory I have now moved further than I've ever come before and a game recognizes it if I get further than I've ever gotten and getting over it and then plummet to the beginning that is just that much more progress lost it is a game designed to elicit specific feelings of frustration aggravation and loss from players in part by removing direct control of your avatar and in part by designing a map and progression system where various levels of failure are likely but go unremarked upon I'm not certain how long getting over it was actually in production but frustration seems to have been on fadis mind for a while in January of 2017 fadi published a list of different types of game frustration in his blog it's an amusing article and my favorite part is that in typical blog fashion the headline was a list of some of my favorite flavors of frustration in games number 7 will shock you and then the list intentionally skips the number 7 in an attempt to make the list itself frustrating regardless in it body states quote game designers take it as axiomatic that if players feel frustrated something has gone wrong with the design yet frustration is an essential ingredient in many all of the most famous and influential designs what would Space Invaders be if you never had to start again what would miss be like if you were never stumped a game that is completely devoid of frustration is likely to be a game without friction without disobedience games that are perfectly obedient are mere software and I love how this encapsulates a lot of fadis design methodology that the player should never be fully in control of the experience whether that means the physical bodies or the systems at large that system shouldn't be pliable and wait for the player to come through and win but push back against player intent to some degree it also hints at a frustration with modern mainstream game design and which is a target of getting over it in one way or it's no secret that through the 2000s and into the 2010s traditional single player games have grown increasingly forgiving as budgets have blown out of control and his content has gotten more expensive ensuring that every dollar spent on beautifully rendered levels and characters is actually used and seen by players has become a bigger and bigger priority additionally a lot of these games have had an ever-larger cinematic meant with a focus on narrative and pacing this meant that these sorts of games became less about a games design and more about finding a simple core gameplay loop to keep your hands busy while you churned through can scripted sequences designed to feel like their systems driven but at no point should the system actually try to stop you from making progress but at a minimum it means that these sorts of games can no longer be obstinate unyielding and uninviting they can no longer be sour or difficult or mean-spirited these games by fadis definition anyways are just software empty calories saccharine treats that give you with the dopamine release of victory reliably and cheaply and at no cost or sacrifice getting over it seems like a response to that school of thought obviously its design breaks with tradition it embraces the pain of failure not just as a fact of life but is something desirable a bit of salt to make this sweet that much more delicious but it carries this idea of inverting linear content driven games in the way it presents itself as well instead of expensive levels delicately modelled 3d characters and a storyline that carries itself with purpose and direction the game is an absurdist dream that takes place on a mountain of trash literally and figuratively and that's fadis word not mine the years now people have been predicting that games would soon be made out of prefabricated objects bought in a store and assembled in and for the most part that hasn't happened because the objects in the stores are trash I mean they're trash in the way that food becomes trash as soon as you put it in the sea things are made to be consumed and used in a certain context and once the moment is gone makes an informant occur in the context of technology those moments pass by in seconds the games world is a pile of prefab elements some original but some taken from asset stores and other places the music is sampled from the public domain and let's play with Kotaku's Tim Rogers body even mentions the player character is a stock Adobe fuse model you you rendered this guy yourself the guy yeah no he said adobe few stock character number one that's what I figured I see it it's a game of disposable content a game where the content itself doesn't matter the only thing that matters is the challenge and the feelings it evokes mechanically and that feeling more often than not is lost with moments of joy when getting to a new area or even more rarely preaching the summit still I don't think it's a game that hates traditional game design thought it doesn't loathe winning or even really fetishize pain the way some Maseo core platformers or kaizo games do but I think it does serve to pose the question of why we have moved away from punishments and disappointments and the more aggravating aspects of games especially when there's so much a part of how we draw pleasure from them again the paradox of failure suggests that while we don't like failure we do find ourselves drawn to games that offer a real possibility of it if getting over it does make a meaningful lasting critique of games designed to be effortlessly consumed without pain it's that at least two fadi our failures make these challenges real imaginary mountains build themselves from that if its deployment and it's our repeated attempts to reach the summit that turns those mountains into something real if you can beat it effortlessly the first time out is it really a challenge if you were given an infinite number of chances to make this next little section perfectly right is that really a challenge or is a challenge something that asks something of you and can take something in return if the challenge of getting over it is more real than other games it is because it is a singular challenge that many will not complete it isn't designed to be completed even if it technically can be like climbing Mount Everest or bowling a perfect game it is a goal that is either met or not met you can beat half life on easy and you can win a hand at poker based on the luck of a draw but there are no variables here it exists on its own it's not even about skill per se although you certainly get better as you play more than anything it's about prezerv ins about having to put yourself through the ordeal and coming out the other side and in that there's an emotional realness that no number of scripted chase sequences or QuickTime event cutscenes can provide getting over it also has something of a thematic b-side the games mountain of trash may well serve as a meaningful counterpoint to the very serious and highly advertised content and triple-a games but it also works as a critique of digital culture at large the entirety of getting over it is after all based heavily on sexy hiking a B game made of various elements scraped together to form something new heck that game's title sequence is basically a MIDI cover of the x-files theme fadi has basically done an HD version of the same thing collecting a pile of assets and not even attempting to give them cohesion commenting on their nature is trash having been unmoored from any reasonable context maybe this is what digital culture is a monstrous mountain of trash the ash heap of creativity's found in the landfill with everything we ever thought of in it grant infinite and unsorted but in that context as digital trash Fadi discovers a place for his harsh acerbic mechanics trash is disposable but maybe it doesn't have to be approachable what's the feeling like are you stressed I guess you don't hate it if you got this far feeling frustrated it's underrated expensive digital games have to focus on accessibility but cheaper games be games and then the experiments can afford to be rougher harsher and more indifferent if there is a place for heartburn as gameplay it exists here among the trash the game jam game made over a weekend the rough hewn work of an indie just starting out the programmer art filled games of a theorist that doesn't care about content but cares deeply about design in its implications maybe not everyone will get it but given its budget and the scope of these games is digital trash not everyone has to if as Fadi suggests play has something akin to taste there are flavors of it that can only be experienced by stepping outside of the safety of curated lists and 9 out of 10 reviews and instead looking at asset flips and B games and I think that's a lesson the YouTube audience desperately needs to hear more of as you can tell from all the late game footage I've had to borrow from other corners of YouTube I still haven't beaten it despite putting several hours into it that tower of trash that mountain of prefab assets is still there unconquered for me and I've lost all my progress several times at this point but each time getting back up becomes a little bit easier and yeah the gameplay does taste rough and bitter and uncaring and I absolutely have to be in a certain mood to play it without just falling into frustrated despair but maybe there's something to fadis idea that the game's unyielding nature makes it more real because I don't feel bad that I haven't beaten the game it doesn't really care that I have or haven't it'll still be there unchanged waiting for me if I decide to try it again in the meantime the progress I have made and the progress I've lost are all mine and there's this sort of pride in knowing that even if I am to fall from great heights as much as the landing might sting I've done it before and I can do it again it may be a trash game contributing a trash culture but that doesn't mean it's trash [Music]

Channel: Errant Signal

Views: 160,515

Rating: 4.89183 out of 5

Keywords: Getting Over It, Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy, Errant Signal, Jesper Juul, Bennett Foddy

Id: DCcA4FyWeXI

Length: 20min 45sec (1245 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 31 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/z827]

This is pretty good.

Definitely offered an interesting and in-depth perspective into what most would dismiss as snarky or pretentious.

[u/Aggrokid]

One part of this video I don't get: so we humans WANT to experience frustration/failure for the sake of a better big picture?