Videogames Will Never Escape The Elements (and neither will you)

fire air water Earth metal electricity nature uh Magic poison is that is that different from nature oh light and dark radiation if you're playing a Persona game does does ice count or is that just cold water dragon dragon is Dragon One Look whatever I'm sure I don't have to tell you that if there's one collection of ideas that seems to crop up in video games over and over again no matter how overdone it becomes it's the use of elements as a motif from different flavors of magic to weakness and resistance systems and even to aesthetic design it seems like the one idea that video games have never been able to quite let go of across their entire history is to inject the classical and some not so classical elements into every facet of their design that they can it goes without saying that the elements are about as fundamental to the language of video games as jumping or teabagging and they can be found in brand new games really old games and even in titles created in entirely different cultures but I think the weirdest thing about the elements as a cultural phenomenon at least when it comes to games is just how consistently they're portrayed how many times have you played as a fire themed character in a game and discovered that they're the exact same kind of aggressive but fragile burst damage dealer as all the other pyromancers and that they love kissing pastries just as much too why is is as a hazard or steamed around you losing control of your character either you getting slowed down and frozen or bizarrely you slipping around all over the place and going too fast and I'm sure you're just as sick as I am of stumbling into a video game swamp and groaning as you realize that yet again it's one of the many thousands of video game poison swamps that's going to gradually sap your health great long story short the influence of the elements is everywhere in games and the more you're able to see just how widespread these patterns are the easier it becomes to spot the hidden rules that govern them when was the last time you needed to actually check whether a wet enemy would be vulnerable to Electric damage B basically never because it's always true in fact the only example I can think of where this wasn't the case is in atomic heart where wet enemies not being vulnerable to lightning felt downright weird that's just how ubiquitous and consistent the elements are but equally this all begs the question of why why do games seem so intent on drawing from such a seemingly narrow pool of inspiration in such a way that least of them all feeling kind of the same as far as zapping fish or blasting enemies with fire or exiting poison swamps might be they're not exactly a surprise anymore and so if games really wanted to create truly Fantastical worlds and interesting new experiences surely they could just not be beholden to these tired old quasi mythological tropes right is it so hard to make up some new elements or make the old ones do different things are game designers artists and writers lazy you're lacking in creativity or is there something more going on here you'll never guess it's that second one see the elements as a system as well as other similar systems I'll get to in a bit are much more than mere surface level flavor that you slap on top of an existing product to make it look nice they're an example of what I'm going to call a paradigm a system of associations and assumptions that serve as a conceptual framework that we can see the world through back in the day classical societies used the elements as a way of understanding the world and grouping similar objects and phenomena together hot things have shared characteristics wet things behave in the same sorts of ways and by creating these sorts of typologies humans could start to build a more complete understanding of how the world fit together and construct rules for how its various pieces interact now it goes without saying that all these systems from the Greek four elements to the Chinese five phases that replaces air with metal and wood are scientifically speaking nonsense but the fact that these paradigms stuck around in various forms for more than a thousand years across multiple desparate cultures and are still evidently influential today is a testament to just how useful they were as a way of abstracting and simplifying a very complicated world so why is any of that relevant to video games well fast forward to the modern day and while most people don't believe the elements are fact anymore they as a paradigm are still hugely influential and the cultural associations we formed with them back in the day are still very much around it's why I can show you these four Elementals from borders Gate 3 and without ever having even played the game you'll be able to tell me which one has the most health Earth which one has the highest dexterity air which one can do the most damage fire and which one has a healing ability Okay C on the table the water Elemental doesn't have a heal but it's upgraded version the water meridon does even with the Advent of modern science we still use the classical elements to contextualize and understand our relationship to the world not only that our brains still work in the exact same way that they did thousands of years ago and we are still hardwired to tackle complex systems in the same way by creating new paradigms that allow us to condense lots of interconnected bits of information into abstract categories just look at taxonomy which sorts the infinite variety of life on earth into nice little easy to understand boxes or the seasons which take incredibly complex climatological patterns and boil them down into four nice broad groups each with their own distinct cultural associations none of these systems have any real bearing or physical reality but they're crucial for navigating a complex world and organizing our thoughts there's a reason why matching the elements up with colors emotions and different biomes all of which are paradigms themselves comes to natur and why sorting various people and characters into their Myers Briggs personality types is so fun in spite of the fact that no one should ever take the system seriously we are conditioned to do it on both a cultural and neurological level and so by building virtual systems environments and characters around paradigms like the elements games can leverage thousands of years of cultural education and millions of years of psychological Evolution to their advantage not just making their mechanics easier to communicate but also giving us as players a bunch of new ways to engage with them so what are some examples of how games can do this and what are some other examples of paradigms in action well I'm very glad I wrote you asking into the script because paradigms are key to several incredibly important aspects of game design as each one offers a new potential Vector of understanding and interaction between us and the game even when we don't notice that they're present at all take for example the case of classic video game guns you might never consciously think about it but simply by playing enough Shooters and by watching enough action movies you will have built up a subconscious gun Paradigm that allows you to not only recognize and sort just about any weapon you may stumble upon but intuitively know how best to use them by spotting key signif fires such as a long barrel a scope and a big chunky stock for instance you can easily recognize a sniper rifle whenever you see one lying around and without firing a shot you'll also know that it's going to have a slow rate of fire high damage and maybe even a bonus for hitting we points and that means that you can instantly jump right into using it without having to read a manual first the same principle holds true for non- gun-based video game elements as well you can reasonably ensure it that poison related attacks are almost always going to map onto damage overtime effects and that ice attacks are going to be the more consistent defensive counterpart to hyper aggressive fire why mostly because there's no reason not to by piggybacking on existing contral associations both from within games and outside of them developers get to skip making exhaustive tutorials and we get to have fun messing around with systems that align with our intuitive assumptions making them much more satisfying to play around with not to mention the fact that game designers understand the world through paradigms 2 and so it would probably make just as much sense to them to give their lightning wizard chaining attacks and speed Buffs as it would for us to expect them to play that way to demonstrate just how important paradigms as a common design language are you need only look at games that don't obey them the awful daikatana for example a game that goes out of its way to contain only weird looking guns with odd functions doesn't adhere to any sort of archetypal gun design Paradigm at all and as a result Discerning use cases for its various guns is a maddening exercise in trial and error made worse by the fact that most of them can kill you if you use them wrong note in better fps games from the nautis such as half lifee 2 not only do all the guns including the alien ones fit into classic design paradigms but the only one that you can't immediately Inuit the function of the gravity gun gets a dedicated tutorial all to itself so you still get to learn what it does armed quite literally with an intuitive knowledge of what particular Concepts look like in the abstract and the qualities we expect them to have us players can use paradigms to decode quite sophisticated information without any instruction at all video game monsters and environments are a great way of looking at this without even being told you probably Associated all your classic bad guy archetypes and all your classic video game biomes into a mental order of hostility allowing you to instantly calibrate your expectations for how you're supposed to be interacting with the world grasslands forests regular animals and anything goblinoid in nature are all classic early game foda that we've been conditioned to feel comfortable and in control around conversely lava inhospitable wastelands dragons and anything evoking religious iconography all sit on the opposite end of that danger scale and will put us instinctively on edge regardless of their actual threat to us look at the dragons in Skyrim they are really really easy to kill but deep set video game instincts still make them feel intimidating because we've been associating them with being dangerous foes ever since the days of DnD D equally by giving each element of our enemy design and environmental paradigms their own unique feel outside of their level of challenge games can get individual areas and foes their own distinct identity preventing them from feeling generic and homogeneous Undead foes provide a great chance for a bit of horde survival gameplay and players naturally expect humanoid enemies to be capable of the same Advanced tactics they are similarly by splitting up physical locations into multiple distinct biomes each with their own allocated mechanics and themes developers can keep gameplay feeling novel and memorable without actually using that many new ideas the great platformer Yellow Taxi goes V for example has a pretty limited set of mechanics but uses the semantic fields of its various environments to provide experiences that feel very different and show its core tool set through a variety of different lenses the city level is all about platforming over rooftops the sewer is all about riding down rivers of toxic waste the various towns force you to do a Crazy Taxi Time attack sty mini game and this arcade level is all about doing bowling ball based puzzles they all use the same mechanics but by tying them to a thematic Paradigm each area feels much more unique as a result even outside side of combat developers can use paradigms to subtly convey an incredible amount of high content information that would take way longer and be much less effective if explained directly take color for example arguably the most simplistic and Universal Paradigm there is the presence or absence of various colors can subtly invoke cultural associations between them and various emotions to throw out an example from nowhere in particular the reason why unnatural Lovecraft and OB beasties are so often purple is because it isn't a color often found in nature and as a result it's always been associated with stuff that doesn't belong in the natural world similarly thanks to ancient cultural and genetic conditioning we universally associate light with a feeling of security or safety and darkness with uncertainty or danger and as a result without even thinking we are drawn towards illuminated areas and repelled by Darkness like a moth to a flame something developers like valve used a great effect these two factors of light and color combined to great effect in one of my favorite parts of the game Super Lial by off the lights and splashing some runaround the game turns utterly benign environments into scary Tableau in a way that keeps working even once you already know that the game is making jokes at your expense it's important to note though the paradigms aren't just used as a way for developers to quickly and intuitively convey information sometimes we can also create them ourselves through play when games throw a large number of very different enemy types at you at once often it's not because they're bad at pacing a tutorial isation but because formulating a strategic paradigm for yourself can be very rewarding the Halo games are great here the games do an amazing job of communicating the role and capabilities of each enemy but it's up to you to figure out how to evaluate each engagement on a strategic level can you afford to clear out some low-level Grunts and jackles early or do you need to focus on the much more threatening Elites and brutes how does your weapon selection affect things what about the terrain in order to answer all of these life-threatening questions you need to be able to plot each alien's relative threat effective range and durability against each other and developing this Paradigm is not only a better marker of Mastery than mere mechanical skill it's also great fun and the same is true for Boomer Shooters tactics games and beat them UPS all genres to see you planning out a web of relationships between yourself and the various enemy types if you want to succeed another great example of paradigms being learned organically rather than taught can be found in Magic the gatherings caie in MTG oh no not that one the couple is split between five different colors white blue blacked red and green with each one being assigned roughly 20% of the game's mechanical and thematic scope each color has this very clear identity on both a gameplay and aesthetic level something that really helps when it comes to understanding complex board States and constructing synergies not to mention balancing the game as a whole by giving various colors distinct strengths and weaknesses to prevent them from having the answers to everything green for example is the color of growth and nature and so it has a lot of cards based around playing lots of lands and bringing out big Stompy creatures so not only do you know the kinds of strategy you ought to be pursuing when making a green deck but also when you see an opponent slap down a forest you already know what kind of cards they're going to be playing over the next few turns and what you should be doing to fight back namely casting a bunch of instant and sorceries the green has a hard time countering the reason why paradigms are such great tools for learning is that they serve as a way to abstract and simplify very complex systems and allow us to engage with them in a way that our brains can handle to go back to the elements for a second Elemental damage systems give us the fun of strategic planning and outmaneuvering our opponents without the need to have read sunzo big book of War beforehand turning complex strategic minuche into just a handful of big simple and meaningful decisions that are much easier to get your head around and also much easier to balance half the reason why Pokémon is so fun for kids is because optimal play at least within the context of the single player is very intuitive and very rewarding just match up the types to either deal double damage or cut your damage in half with greater Mastery of the game's internal Elemental Paradigm leading to the ability to totally wipe the floor with gym leaders in less easy games these kinds of resistances and vulnerabilities also give us an extra layer of strategic Nuance to play with preventing titles from becoming a simple numbers exercise by forcing the player to constantly re-evaluate their strategy in order to maximize your damage and avoid getting one shot by [ __ ] like this you need to be constantly vigilant for the effect Elemental alignments are going to have helping to keep things fun for longer and crucially in a way that doesn't increase the mental overhead too much as it's all based on known elements Al relationships though as with anything balance is still important you don't want to end up like pal world where the elemental system is so simplified that it actually ends up removing depth instead giving everything an objectively correct counter element and making fire the de facto best type as for some reason it has two strengths and only one weakness unlike everything else in a similar vein systemic mechanics particularly those derived from Real World cultural paradigms can condense a lot of the potentially fiddly aspects of simulated physics into big chunky pieces that are much more fun to play around with for example in borders Gate 3 fire rather than being a chaotic complex and difficult to simulate chemical reaction will always behave in predictable consistent ways if something looks like it oughts to be flammable fire will always ignite it if you put water on fire it will always go out and will always create steam similarly water hit by electricity will always conduct and water hit by ice will always freeze this is decidedly not how these things work in real life particularly when it comes to putting water on a grease fire but in games with systemic mechanics accurate true toli simulations aren't always more fun to deal with and they're definitely harder to manipulate and simulate and so that's why developers frequently throw in Elemental contrivances like nonsense electrical mechanics to help systems fit together and make it easier for us to mess around with them which is ultimately the point unfortunately the very things that can make Paradigm so helpful for both communicating and understanding the subtleties of games can also make them kind of syy as I mentioned before the very fact that humans are capable of spotting patterns and categorizing various gameplay elements can also mean that we end up ruining the fun process of learning how games work for ourselves and can also spoil games in advance without even trying how many RPGs have you played that have standard classes and parties that you've been able to instantly solve long before the game expects you to Bulky tanks in the front supportive healers in the back and dedicated DPS classes in the middle is a classic strategic Paradigm that's so widespread and so universally applicable that many players can use it to understand games a little bit too effectively demolishing their challenge ahead of schedule equally there's only so many ways that you can iterate on classic video gaming environments before Novelties start to turn into chores fire levels where the floor is lava and Temple levels where you get chased by the Indiana Jones Boulder are great ways to make a particular biome stand out but equally once you've seen these gimmicks once you've seen them a thousand times ditto for slippy ice levels sluggish water levels and the aforementioned muddy swamp levels really anything involving a change to fundamental move mechanics get so fast particularly if you can see it coming and have already internalized its subtleties to make matters worse trying to shake up an existing Paradigm or offer an alternative doesn't just mean asking players to go through all the hard work of putting together a whole new way of perceiving a game it can also mean going up against the cultural inertia of the old Paradigm many titles attempting to dethrow Pokémon have gone for differently structured but conceptually similar Elemental paradigms and as a result none have succeeded not even very hyped ones like temptem because when you get right down to it the Pokémon derived model is so entrenched into RPG monster design and general video gaming culture that it's basically impossible to mentally overwrite therefore instead of trying to replace existing paradigms in an effort to regain a sense of Discovery and mystery I think games are far more successful when they instead Bend and twist existing paradigms into Fun new shapes or introduce new elements that add additional depth to well established ones Shovel Knight for example does a great job of refreshing tired old platform of tropes by reframing them all through the lens of shovel Knight's core abilities the obligatory fire level still has an omnipresent bottom of the screen Hazard but now you're traversing it by bouncing around on this green slime and the ice level is still all about slippy flaw but now you're engaging in some tense Jewels with shielded enemies and braving platforming gauntlets entirely built around the limitations of your horizontal slash darkest dungeon upsets the traditional strategic Paradigm that is the Holy Trinity by not outright removing or replacing it but by structuring encounters and possibilities such that healing is very limited and so that one character can't reliably hit the entire board drastically weakening the Trinity's power and forcing you to hybridize your characters without removing it as a nice beginner friendly template and cassette Beast shakes up Pokémon's Elemental Paradigm not by replacing it but by adding new effects through standard interactions now electricity arcs through water to deal a double hit metal can shatter Rock reducing its defenses and fire can even temporarily melt plastic into poison type these varied effects are all easy to remember because they build on both Pokémons and realities Elemental paradigms instead of fighting them of course that's not to say that games can't be successful by subverting classical paradigms because sometimes the sense of confusion and uncertainty that doing this creates can be a real Boon something like rainworld which ignores the tropy biome Staples in favor of various flavors of post-industrial wasteland does a great job of making the player feel out of the element pun intended because all the stapled progression arcs and familiar tropes associated with the each biome are nowhere to be seen what this means is that you have to learn a whole new set of biome relationships and conventions from the ground up as you explore which can be great fun for those who can power through the early confusion in a similar Vein The Surreal psychological RPG off and the management games cultist Sim and book of ours use entirely alien Elemental systems to underpin their worlds meaning that all those nice convenient associations between symbology emotions physical properties and so forth that you're used to being able to make simply aren't possible anymore and you have to figure out a whole new way to understand these worlds by poking around with things until you sort of begin to understand what the hell Graal is supposed to represent ultimately paradigms are something that we can never really escape from and that are never truly done evolving both because they're a Cornerstone of our culture and because they're a fundamental part of our psychology ever since humans got the bright idea to start splitting up the world into things you can eat things you can't eat and things that eat you we've loveed nothing more than sorting the world into typologies and paradigms that think I want to shape the way we look at our environment however when our attachment to paradigms goes beyond using them as a tool and instead starts to restrict the ways that we can interact with media then we have a problem portrayals of the elemental Paradigm in games all feeling the same isn't an issue with the elements themselves but the limited ways that they get used and The Limited ways that we think about them and so by learning about paradigms drawing connections between them and even by expanding our definitions of their constituent parts we free up developers to do cool new things with age-old ideas and give us fresh and interesting ways to experience familiar Concepts just look at what jrpgs managed to do with associations of light and dark 30 years ago the light aligned order and peace people being evil all along and the final boss being God was a crazy twist and now the Monstrous evil characters actually being the villains is practically subversive all in all paradigms in our relationship to them are constantly changing and the only way that they lose their incredible power as a means of decoding and organizing a chaotic universe is when the very structure that they offer blinds us to the possibilities that the world and video games have to offer whats to stop games from making a fire themed healer nothing and that's why dota's Phoenix who uses the life-giving power of the sun is such a cool and fresh feeling concept what's to stop games from not starting in a tranquil green grassland also nothing what matters is the movement from a place of comfort to a place of hostility which is why Journey's desert setting ending in frigid mountain peaks intuitively makes sense on a narrative level even if it's not what we expect from those biomes and is there any reason at all why swamp levels have to be the worst in their respective games yes actually there is and his name is hamazaki and I swear to God if there is a poison swamp in the Elder ring DLC I'm going to fly to Japan and fill your house with sewage to see how you like it for a change and no I don't care if I get arrested somebody has to make a stand for this and if no one else is going to do it it's going to be me hello one and all and my sincerest apologies that this one took as long as it did burnout is a [ __ ] but me whining is not what we're here for we are here for the after the video video segment that part of every single video where I shout out some cool internet people as well as my even cooler internet patrons first up let me point you towards a cool thing that I think you need to be made aware of and this time it's a podcast by the name of the beef and dairy network podcast which uh just bear with me on this one it's a fictional industry news podcast about a surrealist alternate universe beef industry wherein people get their faces replaced with a bull's face Cults are formed by and around Psychopathic elderly butchers and last is a highly addictive and dangerous controlled substance trafficked by those dly new zealanders the reason why the weird world of the beef and dairy network pcast works at all is because it's all delivered with a completely straight face the narrator and his guests completely buy into the concept and treat it very seriously and the results are funny shocking and at times pretty disturbing um it's not going to be for everyone but I really enjoy it think of it like a very English version of Welcome to Night Veil and you're like 60% of the way there there's nothing quite like it please check out the the beef and dairy network podcast another group of people who are without compare are my patrons and this is the point where I'm usually sycophantically complimentary of my patrons in a comedic way but I do want to this once stress that without them I would not be able to do this and I am eternally grateful for their support seriously the fact that they're able to keep me afloat during some rough few months for me personally is such a mental Lifeline that I genuinely do not know what position I would be in without them seriously thank you if you also like the channel and want to support it then I will do my best to make your investment in my dream job worthwhile by giving you early access to videos some behind the-scenes sneak peeks extra game design content and a shout out in the credits uh some of those people you should be able to see on the side of your screen right now and the rest those people who've given me $10 a month why any of them do this I have no idea they get a special voice shout out instead and those people are Ali Wright Andrew LeBron asaran alna 94 brenon Spalding Brian larani BOS Skyrim for Todd Constantine amend Cosmic 360 Daniel Mez Das kangaroo Durk Jan carel diger Exton Edward Franklin Woods edua the space bun Eugene bulin gazal ifer 93 Jacob Dylan riddle jinoy Kevin helpus conov Luke kakorin mes 54 Marica vladina alter Mark valent meme Dragon M oi Nate graph Oliver mofer Patrick rberg Peter tomasik reded X Regal rejax Ray's dad Silvera ffy steam Rolan Steve Riley Ty guren Tyler Duncan Uprising Von boomslang Whimsical wisp Zack brandmire and Chow okay that's all from me see you around hopefully faster next time bye

Channel: Adam Millard - The Architect of Games

Views: 113,290

Keywords: Games, Video Games, Gaming, PC Gaming, Adam, Adam Millard, Architect, AoG, Architect of Games, Review, Analysis, Game Design, indie games, Tears of the Kingdom, Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy 7 Remake, Diablo, Borderlands, World of Warcraft, Fortnite, Elements, Avatar, TLA, the last airbender, Fire, Earth, Water, Air, Magic, Baldur's Gate 3, Genshin Impact, Pokemon, Darkest Dungeon, Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom, Halo, Doom Eternal, Water Levels, Poison Swamp, Another Crab's Treasure, Persona 5, Palworld

Id: yzSzJqAAyxg

Length: 25min 59sec (1559 seconds)

Published: Wed May 01 2024