The Forbidden Fun of Breaking Games

let me ask you a question what is the most powerful that a video game has ever made you feel what is the single moment where you felt the strongest the most capable and the coolest that you could ever possibly be for me there's a couple of very strong contenders for the throne one possibility is the intro level for Metal Gear Rising which sees you not just utterly annihilating a massive boss Mech about 20 times your size while hardcore metal thrashes in the background but you doing that twice and the second time involves you running down a church in bullet time dodging a barrage of missiles before literally chopping the metal gear in half it's awesome another pick could be the Redan fight in Elden ring particularly before they made him weaker there's something just epic about charging across that massive expanse of desert alongside your summon Pals all working together to face down an impossibly strong super boss and trying to dodge [ __ ] arrows that kill you in a single hit that few games have ever quite matched or maybe the thing that made me feel the most powerful was just the sensation of swooping across Gotham City in one of the Batman Arkham games knowing deep in your heart that you're in equal parts feared and respected that you could dive down and dispense Justice at any moment and crucially that you're not playing the new Suicide Squad game long story short power fantasies in video games are a dime a dozen no matter where you look across almost any genre there will be a literal mountain of titles promising to make you feel cool from RPGs with huge numbers and oceans of legendary items to Brawlers with ever bigger bosses for you to beat up and I think if you asked most people what goes into making an effective power Fantasy game they'd all more or less respond in the same way a good power fantasy is all about massive spectacle tightly choreographed moments designed to put you in the spotlight and most importantly of all making you the player the most Unstoppable badass and well powerful thing in the entire game it's a pretty easy thing to work out or is it see I've begun to think that maybe there's a little bit more to the creation of a great power Fantasy game that initially meets the eye because as much as I really like my power fantasy favorites there's loads of titles out there that are very similar to them and meet all those criteria that I just mentioned and yet can't give me that same great exhilarating feeling that I've come to expect action RPGs like Borderlands and Diablo give you more Loot and in greater quantities than the likes of Dark Souls as well as making you way more powerful relative to your enemies so they should feel more satisfying right but for some reason hacking a giant demon to death with bits of rusty metal and scaming up whatever rubbish you can feels more empowering than a BL ating armies using a bunch of legendary gear and there's something about the fact that you can beat up the main antagonist right at the start of dad of boy that makes your overall Journey less satisfying than in the spectacle fighting greats such as in Metal Gear Rising where almost the exact opposite happens not only that on the other side of the coin there are just as many titles that don't meet what we consider to be the blueprint for a power Fantasy game that do manage to make me feel cool in the way that real life never could getting my first vehicle in death stranding figuring out I could break break the universe in babz U and flying off the tallest peak in a short hike are moments from Mostly nonviolent games where you don't really directly compete against anyone they gave me more of a sense of Triumph and Mastery than a million different competitive games which are exclusively themed around this Dynamic what gives if Supremacy and spectacle aren't at the core of a power fantasy then what the hell is this was a question that I first started to really Ponder when I discovered a game called batro because in spite of the fact that it's little more than a silly card game Rog likee batro has managed to give me power fantasy experiences so compelling that I'd easily rank it alongside the games I mentioned at the start of the video and yet it contains almost nothing in common with what we typically consider to be a power Fantasy game to quickly explain the way batro works is that every round you draw a hand of playing cards and you need to play up to five of them in standard poker hand configurations in order to score points score enough to beat the anti and you can proceed run out a chances to play and you lose that's it the game is incredibly simple but batro uses this straightforward Foundation to build on the rules and conventions of Poker in fascinating ways rather than pitting you against other players and against the luck of the draw batro strategy and progression is all about how well you can manipulate what cards end up in your hand what they do and how much they're worth you might start the game playing a simple flush for a couple of hundred chips but by the end game you're assembling those same flushes boosted to be worth five times more by these Planet cards made out of wild cards that count as any suit and further added to by these bonus cards that give you an extra 30 chips each and all of that gets Modified by your Jokers which can give you some bonus cash to buy more weird cards to put in your deck add an extra 15 to your multiplier thanks to this banana and even multiply your multiplier by three thanks to this astronomer Joker and I've not even mentioned all the nonsense like tarot cards it's insane playing batro is an exercise in taking a nice simple game with straightforward rules and utterly breaking it to perform stupid Combos and insane tricks that you feel like you shouldn't be allowed to do as you start raking in millions of chips and mutating what was once a nice simple 52 card deck into a hyper optimized Point scoring machine and it feels awesome as far as I'm concerned there's no denying that assembling a mega combo that totally breaks the game into two and lets me millions of chips in a single turn makes you feel just as cool as turning a battalion of bad guys into Pate in a more traditional power Fantasy game but that begs the question if a feeling of power in games doesn't come from cinematic spectacle or seeing your enemies driven before you and can be found somewhere inside game that you can't even really win what is the key ingredient of a Feelgood Power Trip game well if you ask me the thing that makes us truly feel powerful in a game isn't anything physical or even really anything emotional at all but instead the rather more simple idea that our actions and our decisions matter games can throw a never-ending barrage of crazy effects our way give us a million different numbers to optimize and constantly tell us how cool you are but without grounding this stuff in a tangible context to give it all a sense of weight and make it feel like we we have genuine agency games will never be able to do more than tickle our surface level monkey brains and will miss out on the deeper more satisfying feeling of control that ultimately lies behind all good power fantasies so what do I mean by this idea that all good power fantasies are ultimately rooted in context and control well I think the easiest way to demonstrate that is to look at one of the oldest and most wellestablished ways the games have of creating a power fantasy and that is through progression and growth the lifeblood of RPGs Shooters strategy games and basically anything else where your level of Mastery and systems level power changes over time is this feeling of gradually getting stronger leveling up acquiring a new weapon unlocking some cool new ability all of these foundational gameplay moments feel good not just because of the shiny graphics and the fact that they are a reward for a job well done psychologically they represent an increase in our ability to influence the game world and do things that we couldn't before whether you're returning to a starting area in an MMO to destroy some enemies that once threatened you or unlocking a powerful neutral ability in a Metro Vania getting stronger in a game always feels good because it gives you a greater degree of control over how you interact with the mechanics and thus to what extent you can achieve your goals The crucial thing to understand about that feeling of power though is that it can only come from comparison without something to judge yourself and your power level against whether it's an enemy an environmental obstacle or just a number it's impossible for a feeling of control and expertise to be anything more than Emeral and surface level this is why games with aggressive scaling mechanics sometimes sometimes feel kind of unfulfilling in quite a few open world and loot cry InCentric games enemies scale directly to your level or gear meaning that although you're constantly increasing in power in a numerical sense enemies take just as many hits to go down and deal an equivalent amount of damage to you that they did before preventing you from experiencing a direct and palpable increase in your ability to manipulate the World by comparison games with fixed levels where you can grow to surpass certain enemies can use your relationship with the world as a means of judging your strength and so can offer a much more effective power fantasy unfortunately the very fact that our understanding of power is always relative can make a feeling of growing stronger very difficult to maintain because once you've experienced the fun of realizing that you can now conquer some new challenge that impression of how strong you are becomes the new Baseline and in order to continue to feel like you're increasing in strength the game has to boost your power again as well as provide some new way for you to put into use this is why in games with the most effective power progression curves boosts in your strength are infrequent but also are big and visible so as the give the maximum impression that you're now stronger than you were before Pokémon Evolutions are a great example of this not only do evolved creatures get a big stat boost and some new moves they also look way stronger too helping to convey a big exciting leap in power batro also does its fair share of this as well rather than give you a lot of tiny decisions that each incrementally increase your efficiency your power is instead decided by a small number of big swingy Jokers and multipliers all of which have drastic effects and thus feel much more individually impactful than a larger number of less important decisions of course this whole idea of growth doesn't necessarily mean that power fantasies need a long-term power curve or even any form of numerical progression at all they just need to establish a baseline expectation of what you're capable of and then allow you to exceed it look at all lot of the crunchiest most feel-good action games in recent memory stuff like the Final Fantasy 7 reboot games Doom Eternal and SEO the reason why these titles all have such satisfying battles is because functionally they all have very similar combat Loops first of all you soften enemies up with fast but relatively low impact basic attacks then you gradually wear down their defenses before finally you expend that resource you've been building up to unleash a super powerful finisher move like stabbing someone in the face punching them in the face or cutting their face into lots and lots of teeny tiny pieces the reason why these attacks feel so cool to use is because in every fight there's always that great ramp up to you being able to use them that it shows that you can appreciate just how powerful they are if you could use say heat actions from the yakaza games whenever you wanted without limit they'd still look really cool but they wouldn't feel cool because you wouldn't have that fun buildup of regular punches and combos to make you really appreciate smacking someone in the chops with several tons of solid rock it is important to note though that simply getting stronger often isn't enough for a true power fantasy there needs to be a palpable sense of relative increase in your ability many games make the mistake of starting you off feeling a bit too powerful and in so doing ruining the fantasy of getting stronger over time games like Dynasty Warriors and some character action games like the new God of Wars begin with you at about 90 5% of your maximum possible cool factor and while this is great to start with it also means that further increases to your power don't feel anywhere near as impactful with a few notable exceptions because not only do they mostly take the form of invisible incremental stat Buffs you also never feel like enemies ever pose that much of a threat to you anyway making the increase to your power feel kind of pointless on that subject this does bring me on to the idea that an increase in personal ability isn't the only form of power fantasy the games can create for some genres where strict mechanical progression isn't the Focus or for games that want the feeling of power to be earned rather than luxuriated in it can sometimes make sense for titles to focus Less on our personal journey and more on the obstacles that stand in our way by doing this games change the framing of your power fantasy you no longer feel cool because you're gradually becoming more and more capable you feel cool because you're able to triumph over stuff that's more powerful than you and rest control from them that might seem like an arbitrary distinction but the resulting shift in how the power context is presented to us can result in some drastically different feeling games the likes of Shadow of the Colossus for example goes through extreme pains to demonstrate that you are slower weaker more fragile and you'll never guess smaller than the big boys you're trying to kill but this extra emphasis on how weak you are as well as a core gameplay Loop that focuses on Scrappy All or Nothing risk-taking only heightens the thrill of your eventual Victory if you could just swordfight these guys to the death and wand was a giant Colossus himself they wouldn't be anywhere near as satisfying to take on tison VA 2 is also a great example of how overcoming something stronger than you can be a great power fantasy opportunity when you're in a titular Titan you get the nice straightforward fun of stomping around in a big tough robot but rather than making the only threat to a Titan another Titan smaller more Nimble Pilots can help turn the tide by being a nuisance and with the right weapons can even do a lot of damage to enemy Max taking on an enemy Titan is thrilling because you're in incredible danger but with the right approach you can [ __ ] or even destroy a valuable enemy asset withth way more points than you and massively swing a match in your favor single-handedly while this technique of making the player seem outmatch to heighten their eventual Victory gets used all over the place it's the bread and butter of games that are more punitive and hardcore stuff like Souls like games masochistic Platformers and horror stuff trade a delicate line between making the players seem totally out of their depth but secretly giving them the tools they need to Triumph anyway some of these games make obstacles very deadly but give the player infinite retries other games adjust resource availability to always keep you teetering on the verge of running out of stuff and others just have a decades long self-perpetuating marketing scheme to trick you into thinking that they're unbeatably hard and brutal when realistically they're beatable by even relatively casual audiences to speak totally hypothetically about no game series in particular regardless of the technique used all of these games are obviously on our side really they just need us to think that the odds are against us so as to create the maximal possible gap between how powerful we feel and how much we can eventually achieve creating the biggest possible power fantasy this is again something the batro does very well the blinds increase in value exponentially making each new one seem like an unbeatable new challenge where waiting on the horizon and forcing you to dig deep to find the most powerful synergies to overcome them most of which coincidentally also scale in an exponential manner it is worth pointing out though that rather than making the player weak as a way of making the rest of the game seem like a worthy opponent games can also achieve the same effect by making the player feel vulnerable something like Hotline Miami where you die in a single hit or long-term strategy games with permanent consequences give us as players both a tangible sense of control over our environment and a feeling that all of our decisions matter by making it so that even a single misstep has serious consequences to cite something very recent hell divers 2 is actually one of the best examples of this vulnerability power fantasy that I've ever seen as a superar grunt you die really fast and your primary weapons are mostly pretty garbage but you also have access to incredibly destructive strategems which feel all the more powerful because of how screwed you are without them the fact that they can blow you into a million pieces also helps to convey the deadliness of these tools as well as how dangerous the charges that can apparently shrug off orbital artillery are as as well on that subject the context for how we understand our feeling of power in games need and come from within the narrative lens of the game itself at all in much the same way that overcoming a challenge that appeared to be Beyond you is great fun because it proves your control and Mastery over something you thought was stronger than you we can get the exact same power Fantasy by feeling like we've G one over on the game itself the key to this sort of fun stems from a reversal of the implicit power relationship between you and a game normally the game informs how you play but when you come up with some silly nonsense like abusing potions and enchantments to punch dragons to death or fly around in an Elder Scrolls game you get placed in the driver's seat and that can be very satisfying indeed roulette style Rog likes are probably the purest expression of this kind of fun because they rely not necessarily on you mastering super intricate rule sets but on creating Bonker synergies that make you feel like you've cracked the game wide open stuff like Risk of Rain or The Binding of Isaac or Nea allow you to create some truly nutso strategies that let you totally trivialize the game and this feeling that you've trans sendage not just any sense of challenge but the structure of the game itself turning you into an immortal teleporting one hit kill machine god with infinite money is a really cathartic experience that feels good because you reach this state as a result of putting your knowledge and decision-making into action this feeling of breaking the rules and seizing control of a game for yourself is even apparent in stuff that we don't ordinarily consider to be good power Fantasy games many survival build titles which often start pitting you against a harsh unforgiving environment frequently transition into giving you a huge degree of control control over your surroundings as you go from merely scraping by to thriving often this means completely demolishing the carefully balanced Survival Systems by giving you stuff like effectively infinite food or defenses you can use to trivialize monster attacks or automation mechanics but rather than ruining the game this sort of stuff can actually feel incredibly affirming as you're able to sit back and relax knowing that the world that once scared you is now entirely under your command in this way all the Cosmetic decorative stuff that these games often contain are not just a way of making your base look nice but also serve as is a physical expression of Mastery and control the very fact that you're so above your survival needs that you can spend resources on stuff with no gameplay effect is a power fantasy all of its own there is a careful balance to this style of power fantasy though yes if a game locks its high level systems down too much players will never be able to escape their confines and have fun breaking the rules but equally if players are given too much leeway then the fun of taking command of a game isn't anywh near satisfying because now you're doing it with permission it's the difference between using Game knowledge and quick thinking to build a mind craft nether portal without needing to get diamonds and just giving yourself a portal Block in creative mode one is a clever way of out thinking the game the other is just arbitrary cheating I think the best middle ground can be found in games that clearly account for and acknowledge players breaking the rules but without necessarily helping them do it Mario's warp zones as a reward for going out of bounds or full at New Vegas letting you steal all that gold you're technically not supposed to steal are great little bits of leniency in the player's favor that are never acknowledged but are clearly only in the game to reward people who think outside the box this is an area in which batro absolutely thrives it leverages our expectations of not just how poker is supposed to work but also how its own rules are supposed to work and allows you to completely bend them to your whims whilst also clearly acknowledging this capacity and building in little rewards to make these flexes of your creative muscles feel worthwhile from little stuff like figuring out that you can swap the order of your hand and Jokers to make them trigger in a different order to entire hand types the game keeps hidden and only unveils when you do something stupid like play a hand of five of exactly the same card batro gives you some incredibly flexible tools but also never gives the game away letting you discover this stuff for yourself whilst also being clearly built with these sorts of broken strategies in mind I think in a broader sense it's this very Dynamic that many games forget and it's why titles that seem like they ought to convey a fun Dynamic power fantasy often end up feeling kind of hollow a feeling of power can't be given to you in order for it to matter you need to acquire it under your own steam however that power always needs limit in order for it to Define itself and so in order to create a compelling power fantasy us players need to accept that we're never going to completely use of the developers and take total dominion over a game but equally we do need to push against what seem to be the boundaries of our control in order to experience power for ourselves after all if you activate some cheat codes or use a mod to give yourself infinite money and make all enemies die in a single hit sure you feel strong for a little bit in a sort of kid with a magnifying glass torching an anhel way but in a greater sense you've made yourself weirdly impotent there was no satisfying journey to this level of control none of your accomplishments had to be fought for and by removing the developer from the equation entirely your act of rebellion against the game doesn't really mean anything and so will never satisfy your more fundamental need for agency equally games that don't expect the player to put in any effort at all and give us loads of context for a power fantasy but no actual control also end up losing grip on both locked down overly cinematic gameplay and false choices that don't end up mattering often end up only High highlighting how little control you really have when the illusion invariably shatters leaving you hungry for more and from a cynical point of view some games even do this deliberately by purposefully denying players the chance for a more fulfilling Sensational power with constant level ups that change nothing about how you play and distracting surface level effects the trick you into thinking you have agency players are left perpetually unfulfilled and are thus nice and vulnerable when a game says that for a real feeling of power they'll need to open their wallets of course much like cheating paying money to skip grinds or look at some anime boobies won't satisfy a power fantasy belong because it didn't come from organic effort though I suspect that's somewhat intentional really I think what this all comes down to is that when we talk about power fantasies we put too much focus on the power and not enough emphasis on the fantasy the reason why games are special is because they give us the capacity to express our will in much more direct and impactful ways than real life could ever really give us and so by reducing this concept down to Mere Ultraviolence and shiny Graphics as cool as those things are we end up ignoring why power fantasies are such an enduring and important part of video gaming as a medium all those games I mentioned at the start sure they're all traditionally combat Centric experiences but the key to their power fantasy comes from elsewhere the power fantasy of Batman comes from the mix of total freedom and the responsibility of Performing your superhero Duty the Redan boss fight is cool because you get to bring together all your NPC allies from the first half of the game for a big climactic team up and metal gear risings early game power trip is only memorable because most of the game is about re earning that feeling of power on jet stream Sam takes it all away from you and of course while batro obviously doesn't have any fighting its power fantasy doesn't come from competition or spectacle either instead it comes from being able to take a game that's mostly random and turn it into a test of skill and strategy as you plan for every eventuality and manipulate probability to your whims for example when you hit the high Roll On A Wheel of Fortune tarot card exactly as planned hang on hang on nearly got it just one more come on this one for sure it's got to happen sooner or later hello and welcome to hang on where are we we are no not in the intro not in the middle bit where I get distracted and talk about games are not supposed to ah yes the after the video section that part of every single video where I make uncomfortable eye contact with you and demand that you give appropriate thanks to a couple of cool people that I think you need to be made aware of first up a cool internet person and this time around it's a YouTube channel and a YouTube man named Quinns who has recently gone on a quest and started a YouTube channel by the same name it's uh it's called Quinn's Quest if that wasn't clear anyway Quinn's Quest is a YouTube channel all about recommending cool tabletop RPGs that you may not have heard of in a weird 80s TV show format and while there are only two episodes out so far they are both great and quins as always is a fantastic host these videos are super in-depth lovingly produced and they even have interviews with the designers of these subject games if you're a all interested in some of the few non-digital games worth playing please do give Quinn's Quest a look next up I'd like to talk about the mysterious Puppet Masters that control my every move and by that I mean my patrons whose infinite kindness generosity and patience is what allows me to make these videos and to have the financial security needed to not fill them with adverts for terrible pay to win trash no matter how many times I wake up to see a rage Shadow Legends marketing executive standing over my bed and licking their lips in exchange for becoming a patron not only do you get the warm fuzzy feeling of helping to keep independent games media alive in a time where basically all of the big journalistic Outlets are getting shut down but you also get early access to episodes behind the scenes content bonus video gaming analysis goodness and even your name in the credits like those people who you just saw leave the left hand side of your screen and also these people who are kind enough to give me $10 a month and they are Ali Wright Andrew leano asaran ano 994 Brenan Spalding Brian nariani B scaran FDD Constantin amend Cosmic 360 Daniel medes Das kangaroo Durk Jan carel diger ekon Edward Frank linwoods Eugene bulin gazal ifer 93 Jacob Dylan riddle jinoy Kevin helpus Luke kakorin mace window 54 Marica vladina Al Mark valant meme Dragon M oi Nate graph Oliver Marhofer Patrick rberg Peter tomasic radex Regal Rex Ray's dad Sila ffy steam rollan Steve Riley Ty guran Tyler Duncan Uprising whims wisp Zack bradm and ciao okay thanks for watching I'll see you very soon bye

Channel: Adam Millard - The Architect of Games

Views: 109,578

Keywords: Games, Video Games, Gaming, PC Gaming, Adam, Adam Millard, Architect, AoG, Architect of Games, Review, Analysis, Game Design, indie games, Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom, Yakuza, Like A Dragon, Balatro, Helldivers 2, Helldivers, God of War, Devil May Cry, Batman, Doom, Doom Eternal, Resident Evil, Sifu, Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy 7 Remake, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, Tribes 3, Spectacle Fighter, Coolest games, Diablo, Borderlands, Power Fantasy, Breaking Games, borken games

Id: YEPE2eVGE0o

Length: 24min 3sec (1443 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 19 2024