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I've seen a lot of comments or responses from people saying that Animal Crossing's mechanics are unfulfilling or "pointless", but I think they're missing the sp

• conception 7y ago
  Your points are all correct but I think most folks are missing it’s a genre of Japanese game https://screentherapyblog.wordpress.com/2018/03/13/iyashikei/ https://screentherapyblog.wordpress.com/2018/03/13/iyashikei... - basically healing games that are just supposed to give your mind and soul a break. Laying on the grass and seeing shapes in clouds is also “pointless” but it’s not invaluable.
  • ebg13 7y ago
    > it’s not invaluable invaluable (adjective): extremely useful
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    • Qu3tzal 7y ago
      I guess it was used as to mean "without value", which is not exactly what it means. The prefix "in" of "invaluable" does mean negation but it means negation in the way that the value of the object is such that it doesn't exist. It's so valuable that you cannot even quantify it, it transcends the notion of value. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/invaluable#note-1 https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/invaluable#note-1
    • fphhotchips 7y ago
      "Inflammable means flammable? What a country!" In this case the context makes the meaning clear, but this quirk of English has confused people for years.
      • tarsinge 7y ago
        In French it’s inflammable for flammable too, but the weird one for me is inhabitants (it’s just habitants here).
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      • leetcrew 7y ago
        interestingly, you can track this issue back to latin, which has a preposition "in" (meaning in, on, to), which is often attached to verbs, and a prefix "in-" which negates the word it's attached to.
    • kurthr 7y ago
      Perhaps, valueless?
    • WJW 7y ago
      Seeing shapes in clouds is not "extremely" useful, but it's nice. Neither useful nor useless I suppose.
      • inopinatus 7y ago
        Try asking a meteorologist.
    • conception 6y ago
      Whoops - good catch. Not without value. :)
  • loquor 7y ago
    Great point about the Iyashikei theme! Its very prominent in anime as well.
  • DanielleMolloy 6y ago
    Thanks for linking this article! This explains these games very well.
• tikhonj 7y ago
  I like this definition, because it lets me think of pressing a button to get a walk signal to cross the street as a video game. Makes the walk home more satisfying. I'm not even being 100% facile—I used to think about this on the way home from Bart before I stopped taking Bart thanks to the quarantine.
• ccktlmazeltov 7y ago
  urr... that sounds like a very simple reduction from someone who does not play video games. There are MANY types of games and they provide different types of pleasure. For example multiplayer games usually bring pleasure through cooperation, socializing, and becoming better. sandbox games like minecraft can provide pleasure through creation. other video games like the last of us are just deeply emotional and touching through story telling etc.
  • danbolt 7y ago
    Exactly. There's a pretty wide spead of phenomena we like about video games. I think that's why I suggest a relationship via interaction as a cover-all.
• yetihehe 7y ago
  1) a player performs some sort of input into a game 2) the game responds with some sort of audiovisual phenomena in regards to that input 3) 1 and 2 are repeated, creating a relationship between the player and the game You can reduce that to "control and achievment". Games give you a little world you can control and achieve something. Even if this something is some value in a meaningless counter (like cookie clicker, I was hooked on that for a while).
  • Loughla 7y ago
    I think you've hit on something with this, for AC. Right now, the world is seemingly more out of control and random than normal, for many people. Nothing they can do, literally nothing they could possibly do (outside suicide) can change the trajectory of their own lives due to something outside of their control. But in games like AC, you control everything. So it's sort of like a child of abuse developing OCD or some other neurological disorder. It's a coping mechanism. Maybe there's something to that?
• Smaug123 7y ago
  Mark Rosewater, a designer of Magic: the Gathering, wrote a very interesting piece on what a "game" is: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/what-game-2018-06-04 https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/w... He says a useful model is that if the game has no goal, it's better termed a "toy" (like Lego); if it doesn't give you "agency", it's an "event" (like watching a film); if it doesn't have mechanics that restrict what's possible, it's an "activity" (like jogging); and if it has real-world relevance, it's "life". I haven't played Animal Crossing and don't know where it falls on those spectra.
  • zimpenfish 7y ago
    AC has both external ("pay off your loan to expand your house", "expand the village population", "fill the museum") and internal ("I want a house full of XYZ furniture that coordinates with my outfits", "I want a garden of fruit trees", etc) goals. You have agency - there's no penalty for not expanding your house or visiting other islands, etc. The mechanics do restrict what's possible but then I can't think of a game (except perhaps Dwarf Fortress or real-life RPGs) where they don't. And there's very little real-world relevance beyond, I suppose, "don't be a dick and life is easier for everyone."
  • op03 7y ago
    I think all the different stories one hears from creative people about their success is at a psychological/sociological awareness level equivalent to pre-Maxwells Equation understanding of Magnetism and Electricity. Thanks to Zuckerberg & Co collecting more data in a day about behavior, than Psychologists and Sociologists have done through their lifetimes what is becoming obvious is there is a very WIDE distribution of all kinds of Psychological Traits, Needs and dozen other factors in any population. And they aren't static but dynamic like electric and magnetic fields. Not just 2 fields interacting but 20 or something. Creative people are able to connect with some subset and produce group behavior that are not always reproducible because the Maxwells Equations of Psychology and Sociology haven't yet been discovered.
    • Smaug123 7y ago
• badpun 7y ago
  > "a series of interesting decisions" as Will Wright puts it I think that was Sid Meier.
  • gustavorg 7y ago
    Correct: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/164869/GDC_2012_Sid_Meier_on_how_to_see_games_as_sets_of_interesting_decisions.php https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/164869/GDC_2012_Sid_Meie... https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sid_Meier https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sid_Meier
  • glaberficken 7y ago
    yes, Sid Meyer Here is Sid talking about that quote in 2012 (apparently he first said it in 1989) https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015756/Interesting https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015756/Interesting
• mntmoss 7y ago
  Definitions of games are quite prolific. In academia many end up going back to Huizinga's "magic circle" [0] which he was writing about in the 1930's, before any video games were around(although many immediate mechanical precessors were in evidence like pinball and slot machines). From the perspective of a game creator or player, what tends to be of primary importance is the information conveyed through the game, which can be primarily aesthetic(a pretty picture) or deal with specific themes and principles. In this light, introducing the magic circle is of some importance because of its clarifying property: the information is exploring these concepts, and not some others that you might be interested in. And so it goes with many opinions about games, too: if it doesn't cover the topics they want in they way they like, players reject the game. Some players need to see violence and power struggle, others need cozy reassurance. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_circle_(virtual_worlds) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_circle_(virtual_worlds...
• slightwinder 7y ago
  > I'm going to posit that a video game is the three following things In other words: Action from the player delivers result from the game, giving the player a sense of satisfaction. And that's the point. There is a direct correlation between action and satisfaction. The more challenging and complex your action is, the higher can be the satisfaction when you finally get a good result. And that's why people see Animal Crossing as kinda pointless, because everything is so simple, there is no complexity in action, thus no high satisfaction as direct response. Instead there is the very long game, where you do many many small actions over a rather long time to gain some rather small or middle sized result, while you have many many more mechanisms where the result is simple just random. For people who are fixed on shortterm direct satisfaction, this is bad, because it's a slow longterm process with little outcome. It's basically like an extrem-sportler who needs to find the joy in just walking through the park.
  • TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Haven't played AC yet, but it reminds me of Stardew Valley. Another game many would call pointless - besides the dungeon sidegame, you essentially run around the map, planting crops, picking crops, selling crops and gifting mayonnaise to people in exchange for story progression. There's little challenge here, and little complexity. But at the same time, the game is extremely relaxing. The music, the ambiance, the story, all make you rest. And that's the goal of the game. -- Anyway, I question the connection between complexity of action and satisfaction. Take rhythm games. Yes, many people play them for mastery, but a common (perhaps more common) way of playing is just to enjoy your rhythmic jumping/button pressing/hand waving to the beat with some fancy audiovisuals also synced to the rhythm. There's near zero complexity here. But what matters is the state of flow you achieve, it becomes an emotion pump.
    • slightwinder 7y ago
      > Another game many would call pointless As far as I know it can become quite complex and deep. More complex than Animal Crossing. > But at the same time, the game is extremely relaxing. The music, the ambiance, the story, all make you rest. And that's the goal of the game. I thought the goal is building up your farm and collecting all the bundles and achivments? I guess at the end the goal depends on the player. Which is the point, whether it's pointless depends on the satisfaction the player gains from playing. > There's near zero complexity here. I find them quite challenging. Yes, from the mechanical point they are simple, but execution-level is still rather high depending on your personal skill. Animal Crossing is similar. For a kid it might be challenging enough to do all those stuff and things, for a teenager or adult, it's just braindead dialog-clicking with no challenge in excecution at all. The satisfaction comes over time.
• limomium 7y ago
  Actually your simple reduction doesn't hold, which is the very reason I stopped playing Animal Crossing: If you perform NO input, the game STILL responds. i.e. If you don't play, the game still simulates its world. Weeds grow, town inhabitants move out, etc. It's basically an addiction-based dark pattern. The game punishes you for not playing. I play games on MY TIME, and I won't make myself slave to one.