Games Have Different Energies

28 Nov 2021

I played quite a bit of Control yesterday, and really enjoyed it. It is such… It is my kind of game. And I was thinking about this just now in that I don’t plya the kind of game I’m trying to make and that makes sense to me.

Different types of games, and I’ve been thinking about this as I switch between Spelunky 2 and Hades and Control and watch Jen playing Dragon Age and Jon playing Skate, different types of games have different types of energy.

Frequencies, I guess, since that’s so much the context of Control anyway. So I’mmaking a game about inventory management but it’s definitely about min/maxxing in a way that I don’t want to get into in a game like Control. I really like that Control takes that min/maxxing really far away in fact. There’s a variety of weapon and personal mods and it’s easy to say that “health +21%” is better than “health +17%” but is either of those better than “health recovery +18%”?

Some games provide a layer of information on top of it. The results of the functions the weapons feed into I guess? This weapon has speed x and damager per hit y so DPS = x * y. Maybe the slow heavy weapons add a stun or knockback and maybe the quick light weapons do something else (interrupt spells or add damage over time or whatever) and that makes the comparison slightly different but when given that specific information my inclination is to modify my playstyle to accomodate the higher number.

Sometimes. In Fallout or The Outer Worlds or really anything with a sniper build I end up leaning in that direction.

As is so often the case this was an exploration, not a conclusion. There are even fuzzier ambient thoughts floating around in there but nothing I have tried typing even satisifies the above’s very low bar for coherence.