7 ms·

Notes on rarely-seen game mechanics

189 points by luu 3y ago

ZeroGravitas 3y ago
I think the "shake box" mechanic has been used twice by Nintendo, once on the DS with sound, and once on the switch with haptic vibration. https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/Nintendo-DS/Make-10-A-journey-of-numbers-271507.html https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/Nintendo-DS/Make-10-A-journ... Make 10: The Nut Tapper subgame. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm8v_WJ3Xek https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm8v_WJ3Xek 1-2-Switch: Ball Count
- Beldin 3y ago
  Surely one of the Wario Ware games does this at least for one minigame? I mean, they're chockfull of weird game mechanics.
  - LelouBil 3y ago
    They're also very fast-paced so I don't think it would work
akuchling 3y ago
Another perception game is Dive (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/304324/dive https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/304324/dive), which has a stack of translucent plastic sheets. Some of these sheets have silhouettes of sea creatures on them (fish, sharks, even a whale) and you need to estimate how many sheets down that shark is.
haizhung 3y ago
A game involving pain tolerance is called „pain station“ and e.g. playable in the computer games Museum in Berlin. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PainStation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PainStation Each time your opponent scores a hit in pong against you, you get an electric shock. The person first letting to of the metal handle delivering the shocks loses.
- throwbadubadu 3y ago
  Also heat and get your hand whipped.. and the hand whipping is actually the most painful and leaves a permanent mark for few days (so you can keep mocking your visiting friends/colleagues for the rest of their trip :D). See it in action here: https://youtu.be/JEfCGsXIeRY https://youtu.be/JEfCGsXIeRY
- latchkey 3y ago
  Such a great scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MI9_cLu5-JY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MI9_cLu5-JY
- Karellen 3y ago
  > Dave continues, discussing a P.K. Dick story in which the characters take turns holding their fingers in a cigarette lighter. In the story, they're not burned, because Dick, but you could imagine playing this as a brutal game in our non-Dick universe. In fact I thought I might have heard of people playing exactly this game, but I'm not sure. Reminds me of Lawrence of Arabia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvQViPBAvPk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvQViPBAvPk > Ow. It damn well hurts! > Certainly it hurts. > Well what's the trick then? > The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.
  - yamtaddle 3y ago
    Given the amount of influence the book Seven Pillars of Wisdom pretty clearly had on Dune, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if that's a case of the film Lawrence of Arabia (1962) influencing Dune (1965)—that little exchange could plausibly be the seed of inspiration that became the Gom Jabbar scene.
- gavaw 3y ago
  When I was a kid, I remember seeing an arcade cabinet which was decorated with tacky paintings of Uncle Fester, but instead of having a screen with controls it only had metal rod that was like a joystick that you had to hold. It would give you electric shocks of ever increasing power until you gave up, and that was your final score. I always wondered if it ever killed anybody...
immibis 3y ago
Chess-but-you-can-make-your-opponent-undo-a-move-by-chopping-off-your-finger sounds like something out of an Iain M. Banks novel.
- TomK32 3y ago
  Have you seen The Banshees of Inisherin? Was in cinemas earlier this year.
- cainxinth 3y ago
  Ha, I just finished “The Player of Games,” and I agree.
  - cwillu 3y ago
    “I must request that we engage in a wager of the body.”
- whateveracct 3y ago
  Sounds like a Kaiji arc
- mjd 3y ago
  Was there a game something like that in “Consider Phlebas”? I thought about mentioning it in the article but decided it wasn't worth the time it would take.
  - Loughla 3y ago
    There were body bets in Player of Games. In consider Phlebas they had the game Damage where players bet/lost lives either extra people you 'owned' or your own life depending on the size of the game.
- bitwize 3y ago
  John Wick made the High Table take a move back by cutting off a finger.
- AndrewOMartin 3y ago
lostphilosopher 3y ago
The Metal Gear Solid boss fight with Psycho Mantis is my favorite example of rarely-seen game mechanics (in this case in a video game). (Spoiler alert on a game from 1998.) https://www.thegamer.com/metal-gear-solid-psycho-mantis-boss-battle/ https://www.thegamer.com/metal-gear-solid-psycho-mantis-boss...
- Physkal 3y ago
  Very interesting, Was there any dialog clues that hinted to that specific solution?
  - fendy3002 3y ago
    Yes, if you die once you'll get a call telling about it. If you die the third time, you'll be able to break two statues, nullify his mind reading. Or, from youtube said, you can defeat him without both, since he'll evade seven attacks and will be hit by the eight.
  - spondylosaurus 3y ago
    IIRC, if you take long enough to figure it out, you can call your "support team" in-game and they'll give you hints about trying the second controller port. (Also I love that this and the comment chain immediately above it are both Kojima games. Can't wait to see what kind of mechanics he throws at us in DS2.)
- doublerabbit 3y ago
  And that of needing the games cd case for Meryl's codec if you wish to proceed further in the game, iirc. Otacon: "there should be a codec number on the back of the game box" I do enjoy when they include pseudo-reality in to character.
  - ender341341 3y ago
    I hated that one, cause it wasn't game box but disk case, and in game I'd just picked up a disk and spent forever trying to figure out how to look at the case before looking up the answer.
corysama 3y ago
Kojima made a GBA game about a vampire hunter who was stronger in the daylight. The cartridge featured a light sensor that could detect if you were playing it out in the sun. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boktai:_The_Sun_Is_in_Your_Hand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boktai:_The_Sun_Is_in_Your_Han...
- autoexec 3y ago
  Sure you'd be stronger, but for those playing without a backlight you'd also be nearly blind. The GBA SP would spare you from struggling to make out anything on the GBA screen under direct sunlight, but the cartage also went in at the bottom facing you and the floor, not at the top facing the outside world which might have made the sensor less effective.
  - janderson3 3y ago
    Oh my. I had a GBA that me and my dad modded to be backlit. Boktai was so good on that system. I didn't think about how lucky I was that I could play the game pretty easily.
  - everdrive 3y ago
    The original wide GBA, as well as the first run of the SP had a reflective screen, and would look wonderful in direct sunlight. It’s only the second gen of the SP which had a backlight (rather than a front light) and could not perform in the sun.
    - xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
      Indeed, the original solution for the GBA was a peripheral lamp to illuminate the screen just like natural light: The Worm Light It's almost as if the peripheral port was made for it.
    - autoexec 3y ago
      > The original wide GBA, as well as the first run of the SP had a reflective screen, and would look wonderful in direct sunlight. None of mine ever did. The best lighting seemed to be sitting with a lamp behind you but with actual sun overhead everything was too dark to make out.
bombcar 3y ago
The Mario Party series often implemented "strange game modes" where you had to do things like blow on the controller microphone just enough, etc. They're fun for very short party games; but with many you could see how they'd be horribly annoying over an entire feature-length game.
btilly 3y ago
Another pain tolerance game is https://www.amazon.com/Jumpin-Banana-PP1048-Shocking-Tanks/dp/B000V6IBBS/ref=cm_cr_arp_mb_bdcrb_top?ie=UTF8 https://www.amazon.com/Jumpin-Banana-PP1048-Shocking-Tanks/d.... If you set your controller to give you a bigger shock when hit, your shots do more damage and it is easier to win.
lifefeed 3y ago
Talking about pain tolerance using "Episode 13 of Survivor: Borneo" is (accidentally?) a great example, because underneath the game of pain was an incredible tactical decision by Richard which ultimately won him the game. (The short version is there were three players left: Richard, Rudy, and Kelly. Rudy was popular, Kelly was a hard competitor, and Richard was sly. If Rudy made the final two, he would win against either of them. Richard and Rudy had long standing deal to help each other, and if Richard broke that then Rudy would vote against him from the final jury, and Richard had burned enough bridges that he needed every vote he could get. By Richard deciding to step down, he made the bet that Kelly would win the challenge and the immunity, and would vote off Rudy, because she would know she couldn't win against him. So Richard made the final two, against Kelly, without burning his friendship with Rudy. And he won.)
LanceH 3y ago
It's not quite pain tolerance, but puts the competitor in duress and wastes their time: In the winter sport of biathlon (skiing and shooting), if a target is missed, there are penalty laps around a small loop before they can continue. It's partly a time penalty, but also just uses up more of their reserve. Then there is the steeplechase which is basically running around the track with the misery of running in wet shoes. Or maybe all of running, really. I was in a running club years ago. Professional coach, and athletes from high schoolers to hobbyists to the world record holder in the 5k. We were at breakfast and one of the hobbyists asked when it stopped hurting so much. The pros laughed and said, "It never stops hurting. It's about making them hurt more." Now that I think of it, my kids have seen great success in wrestling from the same approach of just being more willing to be miserable than their opponents. It's not simply a matter of being more fit, either. People just give up due to pain at different points.
- Xcelerate 3y ago
  > It's not simply a matter of being more fit, either. People just give up due to pain at different points. What’s interesting though is that you don’t know how much pain everyone is experiencing for a given level of fitness. I ran D1 track and cross-country but was not the fastest on the team. So I would often wonder: did I get beat because my teammate was able to withstand more pain than me or because they could run faster with less pain than me? Then on one of our strength training days, we decided to have a planking competition, and I ended up winning. What surprised me though was that there was no correlation between the order of the fastest runners and the order of who lasted the longest planking. Maybe I just had some genetic advantage with ab strength that made it easier for me? It would be cool if there was some sort of competition where you could measure the perceived pain each person’s brain is experiencing, normalize the pain to be the same for each person, and then see who lasts the longest (this gets into the problem of qualia though, so not likely to happen).
mysterydip 3y ago
One of my favorite sites to browse when I'm looking for inspiration is this site of 300 game mechanics: http://www.squidi.net/three/ http://www.squidi.net/three/ . Even if I don't copy something verbatim, reading through them starts my brain juices flowing, and I'll remix them with some of my own ideas or combine a couple together to get me unstuck on a problem I'm having with one of my designs.
- YokoZar 3y ago
  Is there a similar list of more generic or common mechanics? I've always been curious if a list that contained things like "tiles-based", "roguelike", "rhythm game" would yield interesting results if combined randomly.
  - mysterydip 3y ago
    I think there's "game generators" like that out there, but I don't know any off the top of my head. Good idea, though!
  - cableshaft 3y ago
    There was an attempt to create a taxonomy, basically, of board game mechanics. It was collected into the book "Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design: An Encyclopedia of Mechanisms". The book "Characteristics of Games" exists as well, that might have a good list in it. It's for all types of games, though, including sports. Richard Garfield (creator of Magic The Gathering) is one of the authors of that book. There's also Unpub: The Unpublished Card Game, which is a deck of cards that each has a theme, a core mechanism, and game component listed on each card, and you combine cards to pitch a board game design based on it. It's not still in print but you can get a copy cheap (I think I have one somewhere). https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/175848/unpub-unpublished-card-game https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/175848/unpub-unpublished... Also BoardGameGeek has a list of common board game mechanics here: https://boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgamemechanic https://boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgamemechanic Dice Tower did a live show on Youtube where they made a tournament bracket of 64 board game mechanisms and let the audience vote in real time for each match-up. So you can see what the most popular game mechanics are for board gamers from that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNE1BQ_PRe0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNE1BQ_PRe0
adamredwoods 3y ago
This article was a response to: https://blog.plover.com/notes/alien-poker.html https://blog.plover.com/notes/alien-poker.html >> Will we ever hear about why the aliens might already know how to play Go? Which I found a bit more interesting (as an avid board game player). >> “There is a mathematics game,” said the alien.… “The game involves a screee—" Some word that the autopilot couldn't translate. The alien raised a three-clawed hand, holding a lens-shaped object. The alien's mutually opposed fingers turned it so that Louis could see the different markings on each side. "This is a screee. You and I will throw it upward six times each. I will choose one of the symbols, you will choose the other. If my symbol falls looking upward more often than yours, the artifact is mine. The risks are even." >> "Agreed," said Louis. He was a bit disappointed in the simplicity of the game.
- db48x 3y ago
  Unfortunately for the alien, there was a tide…
Beldin 3y ago
Eternal Darkness for the gamecube had a sanity meter. A bit reduced sanity and you'd literally start seeing things. Even lower and things got weirder... including faking a gamecube reset, faking lowering the volume on your tv (with faked on-screen volume bar), etc. The list of examples [1] is beautiful. [1] https://eternaldarkness.fandom.com/wiki/Sanity_Effects https://eternaldarkness.fandom.com/wiki/Sanity_Effects
- fullstop 3y ago
  The one which pretended to delete your save file got a lot of people.
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  A similar, but dramatically more light-hearted use of such mechanics was Resetti in the original Animal Crossing for the Gamecube. If you shut off your game without saving (either because you were save scumming, or just on accident), then on your next boot a hard-hat wearing mole would hop out of the ground, introduce himself as Mr. Resetti, and scold you. Repeated infractions would make Mr. Resetti become increasingly irate, including some sort of punishment, such as forcing you to type out (using the incredibly tedious joystick-character select) messages of either repentance or praise of Mr. Resetti, or a fake system shutdown.
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glitchc 3y ago
> Have-to-drop-out is often a bad game mechanic Tell that to Fortnite and other battle-royale games. > And there's that game where two players take turns hitting each other in the face until one gives up or is too battered to continue — I don't know what it's called. Hilarious!
aidenn0 3y ago
Definitely had friends play the "See who can hold your hand in a candle flame the longest" Also, drywall bingo: there's a wall of drywall that is about to be demolished. Pick a spot near the middle of the wall and headbutt it. If you hit a stud, you lose.
michaelbuckbee 3y ago
It's likely outside the radar of anyone on HN without kids but Roblox is a wild ecosystem of game mechanic mashups that I've not seen anywhere else.
titoasty 3y ago
I made one with a weird game mechanics: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1778910/Let_It_Slide/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1778910/Let_It_Slide/ You have to drag to move. Sounds painful, and it is. That's really weird and you have to re-learn how to move your character, which can be frustrating and show how used we are to standard movements. After a few minutes you get used to it and it becomes fun. I made it when I researched how to "physically" play differently.
drb493 3y ago
Seaman for dreamcast utilized a microphone in which you would talk to your fish (that also would develop to grow a human head). It relied on voice commands. You could praise it, scold it, order it to clean its tank. In response it would insult you or ask you trivia facts. The game also used the dreamcast clock to age the fish even when the game was not running. It had an anti-cheat mechanism where it would detect if you altered the clock and would punish the cheater accordingly.
riffraff 3y ago
Ah there's a fairly common perception game played at fairs in my home region: guess the height of the hanging ham. A ham (technical, a prosciutto) is hanged on a rope and people have to guess how far it is from the ground. The winner takes it home, of course.
dannyeei 3y ago
My partners family plays a version of Canasta where you start dealing by picking up all the cards you think you’ll need to deal and if you picked it perfectly you get another 100 points. It’s a great addition to the game and makes it a positive to be the dealer.
jayd16 3y ago
Short-term memory seems super common. Simon is an example similar to the one given, and of course there's the popular matching flipped cards mechanic you see in a lot of games.
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treve 3y ago
Much more tame, but when the switch was released one of the first games was 1-2 switch, which was basically a tech demo. One of the coolest games is 'ball count'. All you do is tilt the controller. The force feedback is so accurate it feels like metal balls are moving inside of it, and you win if you guess how many balls are in the controller. Never seen anything like it, and it changed how I think about the relationship of sound and what causes a specific sound. I'm trying to remember a TV show that joked about this, about some engineers making a device and a superior asking for the machine to make a different sound. The joke was that the sound any machine makes directly correlates to it's function, but this never made 100% sense to me until I played this switch game. --- Another game that comes to mind (although it might also be a stretch) is F-Zero GX, a Gamecube race game I got into well after the Wii was already released. To unlock every track you had had to take the GC memory card, find a F-Zero AX arcade machine, insert it there and win every race. This was in 2008, decades after the arcade heyday. I was super lucky I lived in a big city that had an arcade (now closed) that also happened to have this machine. According to my research there were only a few in North America. So I found myself freezing in Toronto winter in my 20's throwing quarters in an arcade machine several nights. This added a lot to the F-Zero experience. (later on I found out I could have unlocked everything at home, but I'm glad I never found out until later). The era of Arcade gaming always spoke to my imagination so I was grateful to have this (belated) experience. --- I can go on. I think all my examples are by Nintendo. Pokewalker comes to mind and also Streetpass. All these ideas really speak to me. The common thread is probably that they all create some connection to the real world.
- Krssst 3y ago
  > To unlock every track you had had to take the GC memory card, find a F-Zero AX arcade machine, insert it there I don't know in America but least in the EU version, winning the first 4 cups in Master difficulty was enough to unlock the AX cup; no need to go to an arcade.
- ok_dad 3y ago
  PS5 controllers do amazing haptics now.
rgmerk 3y ago
Pain as a video game mechanic (with bonus Kim Basinger and Sean Connery): https://youtu.be/MI9_cLu5-JY https://youtu.be/MI9_cLu5-JY
g_sch 3y ago
Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20230516100811/https://blog.plover.com/notes/game-mechanics.html https://web.archive.org/web/20230516100811/https://blog.plov...
BiteCode_dev 3y ago
All of them are regularly used in board games and video games, so I have to assume the author is not a huge gamer. In Lords of Xidit, you have to remember each time a player puts something in the central bank to time when it's worth getting it. In the just freshly out zelda, you can cross ceilings, but since you are often in caves, you have to approximate the volume of the above structure to figure out where you exit. In the exceptionally good "Inscryption", you win/lose by tilting a balance 5 ticks in the other direction. There is a bonus item, pliers, that will let you pull one of your teeth out, and put it in the balance to add one tick. The animation and noise are sick. And it's the mark of great games to have great gameplay, so you can be sure game creators are trying them all. We are not in the 80' anymore, games are crazy. Give a try to Ark Nova, Great Western Trail or Mind Bug and you will see how vast and diverse the possibilities of gameplay are. That's on board games, so you can image what happens with a computer where you have very little limits. The indie scene is fantastic, I haven't had that much fun since the 90'.
ryan-c 3y ago
Reminds me of ferret legging: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferret-legging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferret-legging
OkayPhysicist 3y ago
On the topic of pain-based games, I once witnessed a group of teenagers engage in what seemed to a 10 y.o me an extremely brutal example. The contest consisted of two players, sitting across from each other over relatively long, smooth table. After coinflip to decide the first player, each would take turns flicking the coin across the table, with the goal of making the coin over the opposite edge. The defending player would attempt to block this using their knuckles, which were required to be pressed down against the table with their fingers curled back towards them for the duration of the opponents turn. The winning strategy seemed to revolve around being able to launch a coin fast enough to significantly bloody your opponents knuckles, and then take advantage of their flinch response to rack up points, all while grin-and-bearing the opponents attempts to do the same. By the end of the evening, the table was smeared with blood on both edges, and the nickel they were using was so caked with the same that it was difficult to differentiate between heads and tails.
wildpeaks 3y ago
Rare mecanics I'd love to see again are Freeze and Reverse Time from Timeshift (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TimeShift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TimeShift). You can Freeze Time to do things like turn water into a walkable surface, go through electricity, throw a bunch of bolts at once (this one also exists in Dishonored). Reverse Time is more rare (I recall only Braid having something similar ?) and is even used in one of my favorite speedrun tricks ever: shoot at something to make it explode (such as a motorcycle), reverse time to bring the exploding fragments back into their original object's shape, jump on one of the fragments (such as a tire) and let time play again, catching a ride on the explosion. You can even influence where the fragment is going by shooting at it in Slow Time before reversing, it's not precalculated physics.
web3-is-a-scam 3y ago
One mechanic that people tend to hate but I really loved at the time was Word Tendency in Demons Souls. If you died repeatedly in body form the game got harder as tendency tended to black (dying is frequent in souls games and if you are in body form you have more HP, dying in body form put you at 50% Max Hp and uou had to use a consumable item or kill a boss or invade another player and kill them to get your body back). Killing bosses moved it toward white. Tougher enemies would appear in black tendencies, but you’d get more experience points. The game was slightly easier in white tendency. Different paths would close or open depending on your tendency. Trying to figure this stuff out in 2009 before the ubiquity of internet wikis was something else, as this mechanic was not explained very well (souls games are obtuse in general, really by design). There was also a separate “character tendency” mechanic that affected quest lines and other things. It made completionist runs annoying and it was just a pain to manipulate it in certain ways to get the outcome you wanted - would have loved a rework in the later souls games but they just abandoned it. Demons Souls is probably still my favourite Souls title for just all of the weird, quirky, unpolished/jank things about it it made it quite a unique experience.

189 points by luu 3y ago

I think the "shake box" mechanic has been used twice by Nintendo, once on the DS with sound, and once on the switch with haptic vibration. https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/Nintendo-DS/Make-10-A-journey-of-numbers-271507.html https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/Nintendo-DS/Make-10-A-journ... Make 10: The Nut Tapper subgame. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm8v_WJ3Xek https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm8v_WJ3Xek 1-2-Switch: Ball Count

Beldin 3y ago
Surely one of the Wario Ware games does this at least for one minigame? I mean, they're chockfull of weird game mechanics.
- LelouBil 3y ago
  They're also very fast-paced so I don't think it would work

akuchling 3y ago

Another perception game is Dive (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/304324/dive https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/304324/dive), which has a stack of translucent plastic sheets. Some of these sheets have silhouettes of sea creatures on them (fish, sharks, even a whale) and you need to estimate how many sheets down that shark is.

haizhung 3y ago

A game involving pain tolerance is called „pain station“ and e.g. playable in the computer games Museum in Berlin. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PainStation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PainStation Each time your opponent scores a hit in pong against you, you get an electric shock. The person first letting to of the metal handle delivering the shocks loses.

throwbadubadu 3y ago
Also heat and get your hand whipped.. and the hand whipping is actually the most painful and leaves a permanent mark for few days (so you can keep mocking your visiting friends/colleagues for the rest of their trip :D). See it in action here: https://youtu.be/JEfCGsXIeRY https://youtu.be/JEfCGsXIeRY
latchkey 3y ago
Such a great scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MI9_cLu5-JY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MI9_cLu5-JY
Karellen 3y ago
> Dave continues, discussing a P.K. Dick story in which the characters take turns holding their fingers in a cigarette lighter. In the story, they're not burned, because Dick, but you could imagine playing this as a brutal game in our non-Dick universe. In fact I thought I might have heard of people playing exactly this game, but I'm not sure. Reminds me of Lawrence of Arabia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvQViPBAvPk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvQViPBAvPk > Ow. It damn well hurts! > Certainly it hurts. > Well what's the trick then? > The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.
- yamtaddle 3y ago
  Given the amount of influence the book Seven Pillars of Wisdom pretty clearly had on Dune, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if that's a case of the film Lawrence of Arabia (1962) influencing Dune (1965)—that little exchange could plausibly be the seed of inspiration that became the Gom Jabbar scene.
gavaw 3y ago
When I was a kid, I remember seeing an arcade cabinet which was decorated with tacky paintings of Uncle Fester, but instead of having a screen with controls it only had metal rod that was like a joystick that you had to hold. It would give you electric shocks of ever increasing power until you gave up, and that was your final score. I always wondered if it ever killed anybody...

immibis 3y ago

Chess-but-you-can-make-your-opponent-undo-a-move-by-chopping-off-your-finger sounds like something out of an Iain M. Banks novel.

TomK32 3y ago
Have you seen The Banshees of Inisherin? Was in cinemas earlier this year.
cainxinth 3y ago
Ha, I just finished “The Player of Games,” and I agree.
- cwillu 3y ago
  “I must request that we engage in a wager of the body.”
whateveracct 3y ago
Sounds like a Kaiji arc
mjd 3y ago
Was there a game something like that in “Consider Phlebas”? I thought about mentioning it in the article but decided it wasn't worth the time it would take.
- Loughla 3y ago
  There were body bets in Player of Games. In consider Phlebas they had the game Damage where players bet/lost lives either extra people you 'owned' or your own life depending on the size of the game.
bitwize 3y ago
John Wick made the High Table take a move back by cutting off a finger.
AndrewOMartin 3y ago

lostphilosopher 3y ago

The Metal Gear Solid boss fight with Psycho Mantis is my favorite example of rarely-seen game mechanics (in this case in a video game). (Spoiler alert on a game from 1998.) https://www.thegamer.com/metal-gear-solid-psycho-mantis-boss-battle/ https://www.thegamer.com/metal-gear-solid-psycho-mantis-boss...

Physkal 3y ago
Very interesting, Was there any dialog clues that hinted to that specific solution?
- fendy3002 3y ago
  Yes, if you die once you'll get a call telling about it. If you die the third time, you'll be able to break two statues, nullify his mind reading. Or, from youtube said, you can defeat him without both, since he'll evade seven attacks and will be hit by the eight.
- spondylosaurus 3y ago
  IIRC, if you take long enough to figure it out, you can call your "support team" in-game and they'll give you hints about trying the second controller port. (Also I love that this and the comment chain immediately above it are both Kojima games. Can't wait to see what kind of mechanics he throws at us in DS2.)
doublerabbit 3y ago
And that of needing the games cd case for Meryl's codec if you wish to proceed further in the game, iirc. Otacon: "there should be a codec number on the back of the game box" I do enjoy when they include pseudo-reality in to character.
- ender341341 3y ago
  I hated that one, cause it wasn't game box but disk case, and in game I'd just picked up a disk and spent forever trying to figure out how to look at the case before looking up the answer.

corysama 3y ago

Kojima made a GBA game about a vampire hunter who was stronger in the daylight. The cartridge featured a light sensor that could detect if you were playing it out in the sun. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boktai:_The_Sun_Is_in_Your_Hand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boktai:_The_Sun_Is_in_Your_Han...

autoexec 3y ago
Sure you'd be stronger, but for those playing without a backlight you'd also be nearly blind. The GBA SP would spare you from struggling to make out anything on the GBA screen under direct sunlight, but the cartage also went in at the bottom facing you and the floor, not at the top facing the outside world which might have made the sensor less effective.
- janderson3 3y ago
  Oh my. I had a GBA that me and my dad modded to be backlit. Boktai was so good on that system. I didn't think about how lucky I was that I could play the game pretty easily.
- everdrive 3y ago
  The original wide GBA, as well as the first run of the SP had a reflective screen, and would look wonderful in direct sunlight. It’s only the second gen of the SP which had a backlight (rather than a front light) and could not perform in the sun.
  - xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
    Indeed, the original solution for the GBA was a peripheral lamp to illuminate the screen just like natural light: The Worm Light It's almost as if the peripheral port was made for it.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    > The original wide GBA, as well as the first run of the SP had a reflective screen, and would look wonderful in direct sunlight. None of mine ever did. The best lighting seemed to be sitting with a lamp behind you but with actual sun overhead everything was too dark to make out.

bombcar 3y ago

The Mario Party series often implemented "strange game modes" where you had to do things like blow on the controller microphone just enough, etc. They're fun for very short party games; but with many you could see how they'd be horribly annoying over an entire feature-length game.

btilly 3y ago

Another pain tolerance game is https://www.amazon.com/Jumpin-Banana-PP1048-Shocking-Tanks/dp/B000V6IBBS/ref=cm_cr_arp_mb_bdcrb_top?ie=UTF8 https://www.amazon.com/Jumpin-Banana-PP1048-Shocking-Tanks/d.... If you set your controller to give you a bigger shock when hit, your shots do more damage and it is easier to win.

lifefeed 3y ago

Talking about pain tolerance using "Episode 13 of Survivor: Borneo" is (accidentally?) a great example, because underneath the game of pain was an incredible tactical decision by Richard which ultimately won him the game. (The short version is there were three players left: Richard, Rudy, and Kelly. Rudy was popular, Kelly was a hard competitor, and Richard was sly. If Rudy made the final two, he would win against either of them. Richard and Rudy had long standing deal to help each other, and if Richard broke that then Rudy would vote against him from the final jury, and Richard had burned enough bridges that he needed every vote he could get. By Richard deciding to step down, he made the bet that Kelly would win the challenge and the immunity, and would vote off Rudy, because she would know she couldn't win against him. So Richard made the final two, against Kelly, without burning his friendship with Rudy. And he won.)

LanceH 3y ago

It's not quite pain tolerance, but puts the competitor in duress and wastes their time: In the winter sport of biathlon (skiing and shooting), if a target is missed, there are penalty laps around a small loop before they can continue. It's partly a time penalty, but also just uses up more of their reserve. Then there is the steeplechase which is basically running around the track with the misery of running in wet shoes. Or maybe all of running, really. I was in a running club years ago. Professional coach, and athletes from high schoolers to hobbyists to the world record holder in the 5k. We were at breakfast and one of the hobbyists asked when it stopped hurting so much. The pros laughed and said, "It never stops hurting. It's about making them hurt more." Now that I think of it, my kids have seen great success in wrestling from the same approach of just being more willing to be miserable than their opponents. It's not simply a matter of being more fit, either. People just give up due to pain at different points.

Xcelerate 3y ago
> It's not simply a matter of being more fit, either. People just give up due to pain at different points. What’s interesting though is that you don’t know how much pain everyone is experiencing for a given level of fitness. I ran D1 track and cross-country but was not the fastest on the team. So I would often wonder: did I get beat because my teammate was able to withstand more pain than me or because they could run faster with less pain than me? Then on one of our strength training days, we decided to have a planking competition, and I ended up winning. What surprised me though was that there was no correlation between the order of the fastest runners and the order of who lasted the longest planking. Maybe I just had some genetic advantage with ab strength that made it easier for me? It would be cool if there was some sort of competition where you could measure the perceived pain each person’s brain is experiencing, normalize the pain to be the same for each person, and then see who lasts the longest (this gets into the problem of qualia though, so not likely to happen).

mysterydip 3y ago

One of my favorite sites to browse when I'm looking for inspiration is this site of 300 game mechanics: http://www.squidi.net/three/ http://www.squidi.net/three/ . Even if I don't copy something verbatim, reading through them starts my brain juices flowing, and I'll remix them with some of my own ideas or combine a couple together to get me unstuck on a problem I'm having with one of my designs.

YokoZar 3y ago
Is there a similar list of more generic or common mechanics? I've always been curious if a list that contained things like "tiles-based", "roguelike", "rhythm game" would yield interesting results if combined randomly.
- mysterydip 3y ago
  I think there's "game generators" like that out there, but I don't know any off the top of my head. Good idea, though!
- cableshaft 3y ago
  There was an attempt to create a taxonomy, basically, of board game mechanics. It was collected into the book "Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design: An Encyclopedia of Mechanisms". The book "Characteristics of Games" exists as well, that might have a good list in it. It's for all types of games, though, including sports. Richard Garfield (creator of Magic The Gathering) is one of the authors of that book. There's also Unpub: The Unpublished Card Game, which is a deck of cards that each has a theme, a core mechanism, and game component listed on each card, and you combine cards to pitch a board game design based on it. It's not still in print but you can get a copy cheap (I think I have one somewhere). https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/175848/unpub-unpublished-card-game https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/175848/unpub-unpublished... Also BoardGameGeek has a list of common board game mechanics here: https://boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgamemechanic https://boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgamemechanic Dice Tower did a live show on Youtube where they made a tournament bracket of 64 board game mechanisms and let the audience vote in real time for each match-up. So you can see what the most popular game mechanics are for board gamers from that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNE1BQ_PRe0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNE1BQ_PRe0

adamredwoods 3y ago

This article was a response to: https://blog.plover.com/notes/alien-poker.html https://blog.plover.com/notes/alien-poker.html >> Will we ever hear about why the aliens might already know how to play Go? Which I found a bit more interesting (as an avid board game player). >> “There is a mathematics game,” said the alien.… “The game involves a screee—" Some word that the autopilot couldn't translate. The alien raised a three-clawed hand, holding a lens-shaped object. The alien's mutually opposed fingers turned it so that Louis could see the different markings on each side. "This is a screee. You and I will throw it upward six times each. I will choose one of the symbols, you will choose the other. If my symbol falls looking upward more often than yours, the artifact is mine. The risks are even." >> "Agreed," said Louis. He was a bit disappointed in the simplicity of the game.

db48x 3y ago
Unfortunately for the alien, there was a tide…

Beldin 3y ago

Eternal Darkness for the gamecube had a sanity meter. A bit reduced sanity and you'd literally start seeing things. Even lower and things got weirder... including faking a gamecube reset, faking lowering the volume on your tv (with faked on-screen volume bar), etc. The list of examples [1] is beautiful. [1] https://eternaldarkness.fandom.com/wiki/Sanity_Effects https://eternaldarkness.fandom.com/wiki/Sanity_Effects

fullstop 3y ago
The one which pretended to delete your save file got a lot of people.
OkayPhysicist 3y ago
A similar, but dramatically more light-hearted use of such mechanics was Resetti in the original Animal Crossing for the Gamecube. If you shut off your game without saving (either because you were save scumming, or just on accident), then on your next boot a hard-hat wearing mole would hop out of the ground, introduce himself as Mr. Resetti, and scold you. Repeated infractions would make Mr. Resetti become increasingly irate, including some sort of punishment, such as forcing you to type out (using the incredibly tedious joystick-character select) messages of either repentance or praise of Mr. Resetti, or a fake system shutdown.

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glitchc 3y ago

> Have-to-drop-out is often a bad game mechanic Tell that to Fortnite and other battle-royale games. > And there's that game where two players take turns hitting each other in the face until one gives up or is too battered to continue — I don't know what it's called. Hilarious!

aidenn0 3y ago

Definitely had friends play the "See who can hold your hand in a candle flame the longest" Also, drywall bingo: there's a wall of drywall that is about to be demolished. Pick a spot near the middle of the wall and headbutt it. If you hit a stud, you lose.

michaelbuckbee 3y ago

It's likely outside the radar of anyone on HN without kids but Roblox is a wild ecosystem of game mechanic mashups that I've not seen anywhere else.

titoasty 3y ago

I made one with a weird game mechanics: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1778910/Let_It_Slide/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1778910/Let_It_Slide/ You have to drag to move. Sounds painful, and it is. That's really weird and you have to re-learn how to move your character, which can be frustrating and show how used we are to standard movements. After a few minutes you get used to it and it becomes fun. I made it when I researched how to "physically" play differently.

drb493 3y ago

Seaman for dreamcast utilized a microphone in which you would talk to your fish (that also would develop to grow a human head). It relied on voice commands. You could praise it, scold it, order it to clean its tank. In response it would insult you or ask you trivia facts. The game also used the dreamcast clock to age the fish even when the game was not running. It had an anti-cheat mechanism where it would detect if you altered the clock and would punish the cheater accordingly.

riffraff 3y ago

Ah there's a fairly common perception game played at fairs in my home region: guess the height of the hanging ham. A ham (technical, a prosciutto) is hanged on a rope and people have to guess how far it is from the ground. The winner takes it home, of course.

dannyeei 3y ago

My partners family plays a version of Canasta where you start dealing by picking up all the cards you think you’ll need to deal and if you picked it perfectly you get another 100 points. It’s a great addition to the game and makes it a positive to be the dealer.

jayd16 3y ago

Short-term memory seems super common. Simon is an example similar to the one given, and of course there's the popular matching flipped cards mechanic you see in a lot of games.

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treve 3y ago

Much more tame, but when the switch was released one of the first games was 1-2 switch, which was basically a tech demo. One of the coolest games is 'ball count'. All you do is tilt the controller. The force feedback is so accurate it feels like metal balls are moving inside of it, and you win if you guess how many balls are in the controller. Never seen anything like it, and it changed how I think about the relationship of sound and what causes a specific sound. I'm trying to remember a TV show that joked about this, about some engineers making a device and a superior asking for the machine to make a different sound. The joke was that the sound any machine makes directly correlates to it's function, but this never made 100% sense to me until I played this switch game. --- Another game that comes to mind (although it might also be a stretch) is F-Zero GX, a Gamecube race game I got into well after the Wii was already released. To unlock every track you had had to take the GC memory card, find a F-Zero AX arcade machine, insert it there and win every race. This was in 2008, decades after the arcade heyday. I was super lucky I lived in a big city that had an arcade (now closed) that also happened to have this machine. According to my research there were only a few in North America. So I found myself freezing in Toronto winter in my 20's throwing quarters in an arcade machine several nights. This added a lot to the F-Zero experience. (later on I found out I could have unlocked everything at home, but I'm glad I never found out until later). The era of Arcade gaming always spoke to my imagination so I was grateful to have this (belated) experience. --- I can go on. I think all my examples are by Nintendo. Pokewalker comes to mind and also Streetpass. All these ideas really speak to me. The common thread is probably that they all create some connection to the real world.

Krssst 3y ago
> To unlock every track you had had to take the GC memory card, find a F-Zero AX arcade machine, insert it there I don't know in America but least in the EU version, winning the first 4 cups in Master difficulty was enough to unlock the AX cup; no need to go to an arcade.
ok_dad 3y ago
PS5 controllers do amazing haptics now.

rgmerk 3y ago

Pain as a video game mechanic (with bonus Kim Basinger and Sean Connery): https://youtu.be/MI9_cLu5-JY https://youtu.be/MI9_cLu5-JY

g_sch 3y ago

Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20230516100811/https://blog.plover.com/notes/game-mechanics.html https://web.archive.org/web/20230516100811/https://blog.plov...

BiteCode_dev 3y ago

All of them are regularly used in board games and video games, so I have to assume the author is not a huge gamer. In Lords of Xidit, you have to remember each time a player puts something in the central bank to time when it's worth getting it. In the just freshly out zelda, you can cross ceilings, but since you are often in caves, you have to approximate the volume of the above structure to figure out where you exit. In the exceptionally good "Inscryption", you win/lose by tilting a balance 5 ticks in the other direction. There is a bonus item, pliers, that will let you pull one of your teeth out, and put it in the balance to add one tick. The animation and noise are sick. And it's the mark of great games to have great gameplay, so you can be sure game creators are trying them all. We are not in the 80' anymore, games are crazy. Give a try to Ark Nova, Great Western Trail or Mind Bug and you will see how vast and diverse the possibilities of gameplay are. That's on board games, so you can image what happens with a computer where you have very little limits. The indie scene is fantastic, I haven't had that much fun since the 90'.

ryan-c 3y ago

Reminds me of ferret legging: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferret-legging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferret-legging

OkayPhysicist 3y ago

On the topic of pain-based games, I once witnessed a group of teenagers engage in what seemed to a 10 y.o me an extremely brutal example. The contest consisted of two players, sitting across from each other over relatively long, smooth table. After coinflip to decide the first player, each would take turns flicking the coin across the table, with the goal of making the coin over the opposite edge. The defending player would attempt to block this using their knuckles, which were required to be pressed down against the table with their fingers curled back towards them for the duration of the opponents turn. The winning strategy seemed to revolve around being able to launch a coin fast enough to significantly bloody your opponents knuckles, and then take advantage of their flinch response to rack up points, all while grin-and-bearing the opponents attempts to do the same. By the end of the evening, the table was smeared with blood on both edges, and the nickel they were using was so caked with the same that it was difficult to differentiate between heads and tails.

wildpeaks 3y ago

Rare mecanics I'd love to see again are Freeze and Reverse Time from Timeshift (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TimeShift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TimeShift). You can Freeze Time to do things like turn water into a walkable surface, go through electricity, throw a bunch of bolts at once (this one also exists in Dishonored). Reverse Time is more rare (I recall only Braid having something similar ?) and is even used in one of my favorite speedrun tricks ever: shoot at something to make it explode (such as a motorcycle), reverse time to bring the exploding fragments back into their original object's shape, jump on one of the fragments (such as a tire) and let time play again, catching a ride on the explosion. You can even influence where the fragment is going by shooting at it in Slow Time before reversing, it's not precalculated physics.

web3-is-a-scam 3y ago

One mechanic that people tend to hate but I really loved at the time was Word Tendency in Demons Souls. If you died repeatedly in body form the game got harder as tendency tended to black (dying is frequent in souls games and if you are in body form you have more HP, dying in body form put you at 50% Max Hp and uou had to use a consumable item or kill a boss or invade another player and kill them to get your body back). Killing bosses moved it toward white. Tougher enemies would appear in black tendencies, but you’d get more experience points. The game was slightly easier in white tendency. Different paths would close or open depending on your tendency. Trying to figure this stuff out in 2009 before the ubiquity of internet wikis was something else, as this mechanic was not explained very well (souls games are obtuse in general, really by design). There was also a separate “character tendency” mechanic that affected quest lines and other things. It made completionist runs annoying and it was just a pain to manipulate it in certain ways to get the outcome you wanted - would have loved a rework in the later souls games but they just abandoned it. Demons Souls is probably still my favourite Souls title for just all of the weird, quirky, unpolished/jank things about it it made it quite a unique experience.