The Hand That Feeds

In 36 years, since the release of Metal Gear for the MSX in 1987 and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake in 1990, the game design philosophy changed a lot, obviously. We mastered it by iterating the products to find what we called The Flow, a state of mind where the player understands every system in the game and knows how to use and merge them to reach or complete a goal.

We also changed the design to fit our needs, both in terms of feeling and in terms of product goals.

We tend to forget, but we are making products to be bought.
And in most cases, to be enjoyed.

We can’t forget as designers to realize we are making games for others, not only for us to be enjoyed, at least if we pretend to earn money out of it. So the approach that we’ll take when creating a game must be very specific, to meet certain target expectations in every area of the game.

Meet what the user expects.

One of these expectations had the greatest impact in the design philosophy, and I will call it The Hand-holding.

And that’s where the problem lies.

I’ll Keep Coming

A week after writing the first draft of this (yes, this time I didn’t write a post in an hour and release it without looking back), the Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol. 1 was released. A great time to revisit them I thought, so I started with the MSX ones.

Almost 10 years ago I played Metal Gear (MG) and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (MG2) on the PlayStation 3, and I never re-played them again until now.

The impact that this revisit had was not planned at all.

The Light That Kept Me Awake

In today’s world a game like MG/MG2 would be crucified by players and the media.

I wasn’t alive in 1987, but I know for a fact that game developers didn’t have the same knowledge or experience that we have today. Everything was still very new, imagination was the limit… with the ram and storage available, amongst other things. Technology was ever-evolving. There was no road, so they were building it.

…

How do we entertain a Player?

That question is the most difficult to answer in game development, and at that time there were no rules. Experimentation was everything.
Designers chose, without knowing, a philosophy that today cannot exist without being labeled as lazy or bad design.
The philosophy of figuring it out (mostly) all by yourself.

…

Why it cannot exist without controversy?
Because The Hand-holding is the norm.

I know that I’m being far too dramatic and extremist here, but I need to put it this way because I believe that we took from the players one of the biggest enjoyments that someone can ever have.
The eureka moment, one that fills your brain with dopamine and serotonin for discovering something all by yourself.

We took that, but we added frustration-free experiences, so you can enjoy a game without ever worrying about failure.

But… At what cost?

Someone Broke in… And Stole Your Curiosity

There are games today that still challenge the minds of players, specially the ones in the Immersive Simulation space and in Puzzle, Horror/Terror genre. But the mainstream of games tends to treat players as someone that can’t resolve anything by themself. And in the last decade, we made players believe that they truly can’t.

…

In MG, there is a section filled with security cameras on both sides of a corridor, and you can’t pass through them. They are unsynchronized, so you could stand still between the movements of the one on the right for example, but yet, the camera from the left eventually will spot you.

How can you pass this?

It’s fairly simple, you need the famous cardboard box to hide in it and wait for the cameras to pass so you can move through the section of the level.

Famous today, not in 1987.

How did they pass it without a guide, Twitter, YouTube or a forum?

…

In MG2 there are a lot of complex mechanics, but for the sake of simplicity, I’ll talk about one that I think you can completely ignore until a section of the game where you need to jump from a high place with a hand glider to reach another section, and the only “help” that you have is an item description.

If you got your hands on that item, and read it, that’s for sure…

Let’s pretend that you didn’t have this information.

To jump from the high place, you are told by Codec (The radio from the series) that you can only do it if the wind faces the north. So you need to know as a player how the wind is at the time you’ll make the jump…

How on earth in an 8-bit game will I figure the wind direction if I can’t see it?

Well, you need a gas grenade, and see the direction of the smoke.

How would I figure it out?

…

I asked friends, colleagues and looked over the internet to know that this part is very problematic, and even some of them went as far as telling me that it was impossible.
But wait… If it is impossible, how did they finish the game in the 90’s?

Leaving that cheeky question behind, I truly believe based on the facts that I have, today’s gamers can’t beat a game like MG2 without a guide or whatever source of information they prefer. They’ll get frustrated, annoyed, even calling the game bad. They don’t have time for this “puzzle”.

…

The world has killed curiosity in favor of having everything directly into your hands whenever you want without any effort.

Chapter 2

Failure, Frustration and Perfection

In today’s world, at least for a vast majority, is to live with the use of social media, but not as a tool or a way of communication, but rather as an addiction.
One that controls the life of the people, where they can’t live without it. We are too deep in the hole.

—

[Nonsense, you are being far too extremist here]

Let me ask you something.
How many times a week do you eat without YouTube, Twitter, Instagram or Tik Tok?

[…]

When you go to bed at night, do you check these apps, and keep scrolling down and down and down?

[…]

Do you use them pretty much all day, especially to kill time?

[…]

Why do you use them all the time?

[…]

—

No one’s being judged here, I’m no one to do that, and I won’t.
Don’t read this as a judgment, but rather as one of the connections to the problems I want to highlight here.

Most people use social media all the time, and what do they see there or share to the world?

…

As humans, we tend to look for acceptance, to show others how cool we are, our achievements, or whatever we want, being nothing also a valid response.
It depends, we are not programmed the same.
This doesn’t sound bad, it shouldn’t be bad.

But what happens when your only input to your mind is the best versions of others, where everything is perfect?

—

[Wait, you are telling me that I can’t post or talk about my life because…?]

No, I’m not saying that. Please, Keep reading.

—

When your mind only knows perfection, you will try to find it, only to realize that life is different. In some cases you might achieve it, in others maybe never. And that’s ok, or it should be.

And that leads to failure.

Scared of the Unknown

People are scared of failure. How could they not, right?

Everything that you see in social media is the best final version of that product. You are consuming it, and someone generates income by your consumption, so it’s a product.

This product changes the way you need things, and you experience it. You don’t want to fail, what is that? and why me? No one fails…

Why me?

This can be translated to all the faces of our life, including a game, the topic of this post.

We can’t fail at a game, or feel frustrated by it. Our curiosity must be met right now. We want to continue, but we don’t want to fail. Failure is bad because others don’t fail.
We need The Hand-Holding philosophy.

…

Do you see it? Let me show you one more time.

“We can’t fail at <noun>, or feel frustrated by it…”

…

By this, today’s developers can’t take these decisions mentioned above, because we will alienate players. We can’t ask the majority of them to think as hard as possible, because they are not accustomed to it anymore, and they want to have a good time, and that’s not bad at all.

right?

…

—

Incident #1

A few months ago on Twitter everyone talked about the “yellow paint incident” (as I like to call it) in the DLC Separate Ways for Resident Evil 4. If you don´t know, the problem was that the environmental objects of interaction were highlighted with a yellow paint, and in this case was a ladder.
All of twitter was making a mockery of it, saying “why they do it” if they ruined the experience and the reality they were creating.

Here you can see one of the Tweets

I assure you that the yellow paint was added because in playtesting of the game, the players were missing it and they didn’t know how to proceed, and we don’t want people saying that this game is too hard or it’s bad and you drop it because you didn’t know what to do, right?

Following this discussion, a famous clip of a player not knowing what to do in a QTE (Quick Time Event) in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 appeared.

Here's the clip from Twitter

I think you’ll get the point after seeing it.

Incident #2

God of War Ragnarök was having an incident when it came out, and this one falls directly into the category of The Hand-holding philosophy in a literal way.
In all games in the franchise, puzzles are very important for the flow of the game, connecting various levels and rewarding the player not only for being good at smashing buttons. But in the latest installment they applied feedback from the first part of the new saga (God of War 2018). The feedback was in the puzzles. They were “too hard” to some users, they didn’t know what to do.
The result was that they give constant hints to players about what to do in every single puzzle, creating no puzzles at all, and an Atreus that won’t shut up.

A rare example of going too far with the Hand-holding philosophy, but that’s what players want, right?

You can read more here

—

Games like MG and MG2, in that time, wanted to last as long as possible, Bang for the Buck, so the difficulty was elevated in every way.
They didn’t have season passes or any of that stuff… oh sorry, that’s for another post.

Developers didn’t think their users wouldn’t get past some parts of the games, or that they wouldn’t understand it. If they did it and they designed it, how would they not resolve it? People are clever, they didn’t treat users as unintelligent.

Time wasn’t a problem, but now it is. No one has time, there is too much to do, too much to see, too much to play, too much to argue.

Too much.

And most importantly.

We need everything now.

False Expectations Create False Realities

This chapter wasn’t about Metal Gear. It was about how this world has changed our brains, for better or for worse, and the design of everything (a word that I abused in its use) is compromised by this. Or I should say, made exactly to work like this.

Are we less clever than before?

Is it better to not know the answer?

Why should I care if I’m happy?

The response doesn’t change the fact that we can do absolutely nothing about it. But eventually, this pattern will break. Not because we will evolve, no.

I don´t think so.

But because something else will have our attention.

The future will be made out of today’s kids that only know how to make what they consume, and they want to do it because they enjoy it. We will see what the future of the generation raised on those pillars make.

For us, people +20 years old, we can only awake.

Nobody’s stopping us, except leaving the comfort zone…

Are we ready for that?

Do we want that?

Chapter 3

Recoiled

[So, is The Hand-holding philosophy good or bad?]

I won’t make an argument of how you should enjoy things, no. I’m just telling what was left behind, in most cases, to make frustration-free experiences. Not all of them, but the vast majority.

Curiosity-free users.

This will be a problem, one that will make the game industry (in the Triple A scene), at some point, reach a reboot state. Games nowadays need different tactics to maintain people’s interest in a tsunami of offerings. It’s a warfare where the target is your attention. People will get tired of it…

What will replace this?

…

Or will we break the circle where we are the products?

MRT’s Seal of Approval #1

Game: No Sun To Worship by Antonio Freyre

Movie: Mandy by Panos Cosmatos

Album: Fatalism by Polaris

Taking a Look at the Downward Spiral

Death Stranding’s main message was everywhere… connect. Almost too much in your face. Everything in the game is linked together and has more than one meaning, like the name of the main character, Sam Bridges.

In the game, the premise is that you need to reconnect America… and you will use a lots of bridges (and many other things), made by you and other players, a tiny example of everything that is in the game.

This is all well known by now, after almost 4 years of its initial release on the PlayStation 4. People played this game out of curiosity, or because they were long-time Kojima fans. But the thing that always pops up when you talk about this game is the concept of “walking simulator”, “delivery boy”, or the things that are unique to Kojima-made games. But not so much about the concept that is in your face, but easily missable in my opinion.

I think of Death Stranding as a Downward Spiral, not only because they share “DS”, but because they work kinda the same. You see the spiral going down very clearly, you see Death Stranding message, but you don’t see the bottom of the spiral, where it ends.

Neither in Death Stranding.

Walking Towards the Bottom

Connect.

That word has a lot of meaning inside, and outside of Death Stranding.
In the game, our main goal is to reconnect America, and to do so you need to connect with the people that is alive in this “fictional” universe. The world is broken, everyone splitted, all alone.

Connect with the people, with the “living” people that’s left in the world.
I will talk about this concept later.

If we look at today’s world, it’s not very difficult to see why this has a lot of meaning on the outside.
My interpretation of the message was very clear from day one, but mutated in my head years later, where I lived personal experiences that made this game resonate with me even more.

I tried to look into the bottom of the spiral to see what else lies behind the shadows.
What I found was that this game is indeed a tool.

Chapter Two

Staring at Shadows

It’s very interesting how the word “Connect” is as important as “Disconnect”.

In the game, you need to connect with living people, but disconnect with the ones that died and are “stranded” in the world.
Ghosts.
This is very important, and I took it like a metaphor.

Connect with the “living” people, but disconnect with those who are “dead”.

We can interpolate that into our normal life today, where we are spending too much time on social media, maybe looking at someone’s life to celebrate it, maybe hating on something or someone without knowing each other, all of this behind our phones.
We hide ourselves with “avatars”, for good or for bad, and everything bad that we say has no real consequence… at least for the one doing the bad talk. The other person behind does not exist in our brains. The only thing that exist is a response to whatever we say and an impulse to be always right.

We are living in an era were we are saturated with communication, where everyone fights for your attention, but we are lonelier that ever behind our devices. We can “connect” digitally so easily today with everyone, even with the people that we don´t want.

We are completely disconnected, more than ever, from reality.

Chapter Three

Looking at the Carvings on the Wall

The design of the game is very interesting, focusing on doing actions that are not so seen in the “action” genere.
If you kill someone, it will destroy a part of the map for the entirety of the playthrough. But the game gives you a lot of tools to defend yourself, and even “connect” with others in non deadly ways.

Connect with your blood, connect with the rope… Connect.

Even the social mechanics are key in the game loop so you can work with other players around the world to reconnect America and save what’s left from the event that destroyed it all.

Connection is very important in the conception of the game, and “one” of the greater messages that it has.
Most of the games are made with a message in mind, with something that the people involved in it wants to tell the world, to make it a better place. And I think that Death Stranding is tackling one of the biggest problems in moderns society with its story, its mechanics, its game loops, even the music.
Everything is connected in a way where the “game” takes a second place in the overall experience. And in the first place is the message, the connection that the world seems to have lost when trying to have much of it.

Connect is only one of the messages, the spiral is greater and deeper.
I might write about them in the future…

Chapter Four

Not Even Close

When I look at Death Stranding now, I don’t see the game I played in 2019.
I see people screaming, begging us to not make the things worse, to learn from the past, to move forward, united.
Also, I see a tool specifically designed to change minds, to change the world in many ways, reaching what every piece of media should achieve.

And yet, when we talk about this game we tend to disconnect…