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>And finally, the main problem is: sure, if you compare hobbyists (who make what they want for fun) with professionals (who are making a product that needs to s

>And finally, the main problem is: sure, if you compare hobbyists (who make what they want for fun) with professionals (who are making a product that needs to sell more than a small handful of copies), of course you're going to find that hobbyists are more free to experiment with wild permutations of mechanics. But in doing so, they conflate personal ability with situational constraints. What about professional designers if they were able to work without commercial constraints, like hobbyists? This last paragraph reminds me of the video game world and common arguments on indie games vs AAA/big studio games. Indie games with their hit or miss experimentation, AAA games with their formulaic selling strategy. But in the video game world there have been professionals who have stepped back into the indie world to make something lower budget and more experimental. Those end up being about as hit or miss as the 'actual', for lack of a better word, indie games. So I guess my point is, I think the constraints themselves do play a part in hobbyist type games and a professional under the same constraints is likely to produce the same kind of thing. Something experimental that may be awesomely fun or it could be kinda lame.

scollet 6y ago
I think you both are hitting on that thin slice; the Venn diagram of strong design, managerial pressure, and resources.
meheleventyone 6y ago
A big part of the actual success of a game is the aesthetics and the marketing. How good the actual game is doesn't necessarily correlate. Indie games these days are as conservative as regular studios. Loads of a proliferation of the last big thing etc. The real standout indie genre is porn games and even those stick to a generally similar design. The problem for developers from larger studios is that the bizdev side of things is largely kept apart from them. So they might make something within a niche that's great but is never going to find an audience. Which is a long winded way of saying no one bar hobbyists or people taking an extreme roll of the dice are operating without commercial constraints.
- GuB-42 6y ago
  Genuinely curious about porn games. They all seems to be either a show of pretty models with somewhat controllable animation or a "nothing special" game with explicit scenes thrown in for your enjoyment. Some of these games can be excellent, I am thinking about some Japanese visual novels here, but they all seem to be rather formulaic. Maybe I am missing something big here. I am not too much into porn games, and you are unlikely to stumble upon them unless you are actively looking for it.
  - meheleventyone 6y ago
    Honestly I defer most of those questions to someone that understands the landscape better. It was an underserved market though and lots of people enjoy unrealistic depictions of sex so combining that with games is hardly rocket science. The bit I find interesting is despite the porn industry in the west being big on tech like streaming and VR it’s not really there on games. Too much reliance on real people or something? More generally I think it’s super interesting how puritanical the games market is in comparison with books or movies. Even within serious games.
    - GuB-42 6y ago
      One problem, I think, is that making good porn games is difficult. Sex is all about contact, and just look how messed up physics can be, even simple physics in AAA games. If something like throwing a punch is difficult to do right, even thought there is a single point of contact, imagine how hard a sex position where the entire body is in contact can be to simulate. To make things worse, sex (usually) deals with human bodies, complex objects we are very familiar with, and therefore, small errors can get us right into the uncanny valley. A solution, of course, is to use prerecorded scenes. But if you lose interactivity, you might as well watch a movie, something there is no lack of and can be cheaply produced. So while the idea is not rocket science, the execution may very well be. Of course, there is always the solution of taking an existing game genre (visual novels are a common one) and add porn to it. But as good as the game might be and as hot as the porn can be, it isn't very interesting as a concept.
ArtWomb 6y ago
>>> professionals who have stepped back into the indie world This immediately reminded me of Notch and the birth of Minecraft. What's amazing is that the private alpha launch is recorded for posterity in the TIG forums: https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=6273.0 https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=6273.0 The gameplay mechanic is everything. On day one, players were mining rocks, building castles. And a decade later, that same intuitive territorial need, that taps into primitive desire is still alive. Players are mining rocks, building castles (and much more)! I also think about the classic card game Uno. We've now got like four generations of fiercely competitive players in my family. There's decks in the kitchen, the living room, even in the car. It's so simple to start a game. Infinite replayability. And the latest innovation: blank cards. So you can literally draw an "Eat my Underwear" for infinite expansion. That endless replayability in gameplay mechanics can then be considered to be the crux. Headshots in FPS are just as satisfying in Valorant as they were two decades ago in Counter-Strike. Perfect information, turn-based strategy games are all variants of millennia old Chess, which is experiencing a renaissance. One of the best things on the web today is the 3000+ Stockfish superhuman lichess.org WASMX real-time analyzer with 8-ply depth search. It's a portend of things to come for the coming era of AI-mediated design. So what we are really talking about is an exhaustive exploration of the gameplay mechanic space. With the criterion that if it is endlessly replayable, it will be "fun" forever. Great discussion all around, I really enjoyed reading everyone's comments. Welcome counter-programming to all the noise in the current noosphere ;)

scollet 6y ago

I think you both are hitting on that thin slice; the Venn diagram of strong design, managerial pressure, and resources.

meheleventyone 6y ago

A big part of the actual success of a game is the aesthetics and the marketing. How good the actual game is doesn't necessarily correlate. Indie games these days are as conservative as regular studios. Loads of a proliferation of the last big thing etc. The real standout indie genre is porn games and even those stick to a generally similar design. The problem for developers from larger studios is that the bizdev side of things is largely kept apart from them. So they might make something within a niche that's great but is never going to find an audience. Which is a long winded way of saying no one bar hobbyists or people taking an extreme roll of the dice are operating without commercial constraints.

GuB-42 6y ago
Genuinely curious about porn games. They all seems to be either a show of pretty models with somewhat controllable animation or a "nothing special" game with explicit scenes thrown in for your enjoyment. Some of these games can be excellent, I am thinking about some Japanese visual novels here, but they all seem to be rather formulaic. Maybe I am missing something big here. I am not too much into porn games, and you are unlikely to stumble upon them unless you are actively looking for it.
- meheleventyone 6y ago
  Honestly I defer most of those questions to someone that understands the landscape better. It was an underserved market though and lots of people enjoy unrealistic depictions of sex so combining that with games is hardly rocket science. The bit I find interesting is despite the porn industry in the west being big on tech like streaming and VR it’s not really there on games. Too much reliance on real people or something? More generally I think it’s super interesting how puritanical the games market is in comparison with books or movies. Even within serious games.
  - GuB-42 6y ago
    One problem, I think, is that making good porn games is difficult. Sex is all about contact, and just look how messed up physics can be, even simple physics in AAA games. If something like throwing a punch is difficult to do right, even thought there is a single point of contact, imagine how hard a sex position where the entire body is in contact can be to simulate. To make things worse, sex (usually) deals with human bodies, complex objects we are very familiar with, and therefore, small errors can get us right into the uncanny valley. A solution, of course, is to use prerecorded scenes. But if you lose interactivity, you might as well watch a movie, something there is no lack of and can be cheaply produced. So while the idea is not rocket science, the execution may very well be. Of course, there is always the solution of taking an existing game genre (visual novels are a common one) and add porn to it. But as good as the game might be and as hot as the porn can be, it isn't very interesting as a concept.

ArtWomb 6y ago

>>> professionals who have stepped back into the indie world This immediately reminded me of Notch and the birth of Minecraft. What's amazing is that the private alpha launch is recorded for posterity in the TIG forums: https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=6273.0 https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=6273.0 The gameplay mechanic is everything. On day one, players were mining rocks, building castles. And a decade later, that same intuitive territorial need, that taps into primitive desire is still alive. Players are mining rocks, building castles (and much more)! I also think about the classic card game Uno. We've now got like four generations of fiercely competitive players in my family. There's decks in the kitchen, the living room, even in the car. It's so simple to start a game. Infinite replayability. And the latest innovation: blank cards. So you can literally draw an "Eat my Underwear" for infinite expansion. That endless replayability in gameplay mechanics can then be considered to be the crux. Headshots in FPS are just as satisfying in Valorant as they were two decades ago in Counter-Strike. Perfect information, turn-based strategy games are all variants of millennia old Chess, which is experiencing a renaissance. One of the best things on the web today is the 3000+ Stockfish superhuman lichess.org WASMX real-time analyzer with 8-ply depth search. It's a portend of things to come for the coming era of AI-mediated design. So what we are really talking about is an exhaustive exploration of the gameplay mechanic space. With the criterion that if it is endlessly replayable, it will be "fun" forever. Great discussion all around, I really enjoyed reading everyone's comments. Welcome counter-programming to all the noise in the current noosphere ;)