Limitations, Creativity, and Games

I have taken the LimitationsPill.

They say limitations breed creativity, and that's probably true. What people tend to mean by that is the idea that as technology got better everything else got worse because we became less creative because we could do more. This is very silly, that's not what this post is going to be about.

It's more about the self-imposed limitations, they don't necessarily need to be there but you set up rules in order to tighten what the fruits of your labor becomes. Famous example of limitations is the ones that were placed on the Roadrunner cartoons, a long series of rules detailing what aught to and aught not to be in one. If you ever felt that there was a real pattern to Roadrunner, that's because of the adherence to these rules.

Among other things, it states that the Roadrunner aught to always run on a road, that the Coyote aught to not wisen up to how stupid he is trying to catch one bird instead of ordering take out or something, no dialogue, the Coyote is not to be harmed except from his own stupidity...

It's a pretty common theme across cartooning. To have a coherent product made out of the messy production filled with howevermany key frame artists and inbetweeners and writers and designers you need to set a lot of boundaries. Typically this takes the form of the no-no sheets where animators are given a specific set of directions of what not to do when animating.

If there's any medium that breaks these sorts of limitations as much as possible, it's games. Games aren't linear events going from point A to point B, they're setpieces that the viewer explores and interacts with. Even something like a sidescrolling platformer has different events happen based on what the player chooses.

Because of this it's very easy to go overboard in designing shit, because a lot of designers want to account for an incredibly wide variety of player actions and decisions. Or perhaps they just want to make the game look like it has more going on than it really does, because designing a good game is hard.

This didn't just take the form of the big kitchen sink open world game with a billion different chores to do, but a lot of the time there were older games that would just have far too many useless mechanics, presumably because they had no idea what would and wouldn't be useful.

It's usually the job of the game director(s) to decide what does and doesn't get in the game and what direction it ultimately takes. Certainly those people are putting in the effort to make sure a game doesn't have so much shit in it that all of the individual parts are underbaked and the player is left overburdened, right?

lol no

The lack of the tight creative decisionmaking and refusal to set anything beyond very general boundaries can lead to very dull games. If you don't know what your main focus is going to be then what the hell are you even doing? Assassin's Creed games are good examples. What the hell are these games about now? Certainly not stealth and being an assassin, you just have 500 different minigames all over the place all at once.

Assassin's Creed tries to be about being a detective, then economics, then going to do a bunch of sidemissions and exploring an open world, then it's about uncovering historical lore and RPG mechanics and fdsfgs

You don't have infinity time to work on everything to make it all perfect and beautiful. Assassin's Creed with all of it's stupid extra bullshit in an attempt to be realistic ended up becoming some of the most dull shit on the planet when really all it needed to do was tighten a focus around stealth and action combat, aka the things people actually care about. All of the dumb minigames and extra chores can be left to the wayside.

Counterexample, Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin is fairly enjoyable because it's focused on two primary mechanics: farming and beatemup combat. Both feed into eachother and are easy to go back and forth between. The island you play on is not a big open world that just has a billion different things in it, nor is there an in-depth relationship system with the characters that you talk to, instead the game is segmented into stages and relationships are built up via quests that primarily involve one of the two main mechanics.

If something is important in Sakuna, then it feeds directly into your ability to farm or fight. For example, food giving you buffs, scavenging giving you fertilizer, quests unlocking new weapon upgrades... There's no dumbass one off minigames that have a completely different game state from everything else and are just there to be cinematic. There's no sequence of carrying a giant rock for 5 minutes while the NPCs have to wait for your dumb ass to catch up.

It's not that you can't have an interesting story but it has to be done in a way where the player isn't going to be asking every 5 seconds why he hasn't blown his brain out yet. One of the least immersive and suspension of disbelief breaking things you can do in a game is constantly change the primary gameplay. If I need a fucking tutorial shoved in my face for something in a game when I'm about to finish it then it's garbage and you need to fix it.

I get it. Players can be retarded. They're retarded because you've trained them to act like retards. If people are actively rewarded with intelligent actions then they'll make more intelligent actions. If they're not, they'll come to expect that it's a bunch of on rails bullshit where the only thing to do is twiddle your thumbs until something happens.

What I'm saying is, limit yourself and do a lot with a little, not a little with a lot.

If your game's about punching people, find the most interesting ways to punch them. God Hand is a great example of a tightly focused game, and it's all about punching people. You can juggle them, you can launch them, you can break their guards for extra damage, you can pull out a special move that punches them even harder, you can pick up weapons and use them as a substitute puncher, even doors are interacted with by punching them hard, and they punch back.

There's hardly an interaction in God Hand that has nothing to do with punching. The only other thing is gambling, which is designed to get you more money at a risk so you can punch harder.

I've really come to accept this idea more and more as I've explored Pico-8 games. Pico-8 is a 'fantasy console' that's all about design limitations. You can only have so many pixels, so many tokens in the code, so many spaces on your level map, so many sounds...

And yet a good amount of the games are far more creative and impressive than the average AAA game these days. Instead of being another bland Walking Dead inspired TPS where you're given several thousand options to do things but will only ever use one because the others suck, you get a tightly designed experience based around a simple concept.

There's plenty of neat derivatives and demakes, but also concepts such as a roguelite based around comboing a variety of enemies across the screen, platformer that involves many movement options around a simple roll, action puzzle game where you have to carefully make jumps to avoid getting squished, and even gambling your life against vampires with the ever-present risk of losing it all.

And this is all really just the tip of the iceberg for the kinds of games made in Pico-8. If regular people can come up with simple, creative concepts like this, I don't see why a giant video game company can't. Maybe it's because they don't bother with tightening the scope of a project to create a more thrilling experience. Maybe it's because the last thing any of them think about is the basic gameplay, and advertising material such as trailers and graphical design is more important.

Do video game companies really even explore videogame prototypes anymore, like Nintendo did with BotW? Probably not, the games are already far too expensive for most of them to bother, with budgets often dwarfing the equivalent of 3 or 4 different films. The closest thing I've seen like that recently was the Wolverine leak showing off alpha gameplay and it was already shaping up to be another generic Batman Arkham combat game.

No, because they can do anything they end up doing everything and as a result of this all of the parts inbetween end up half-baked and fucking boring. Part of this could be laid on the players themselves, people who just want to see Wolverine do cool things at the press of a button rather than actually play a game, but just as much of it can be laid on the developers who simply aren't interested in giving the variety of Marvel superheroes their own interesting gameplay mechanics.

At most you might get some quirky unengaging way of traversing your way across the open world, something inoffensive and automatic like Spiderman swinging webs everywhere. It'd be interesting if that was a mechanic that was expanded upon, even necessary to master in order to beat the game, but because of the ridiculous scope of the Spiderman games it just ends up being more bullshit hold-button-to-freerun stuff.

They can't go more in depth on web swinging because there's 9000 other mechanics and gamestates to focus on, and they can't go more in depth with anything else for the same reason. There's not just Spiderman's shit to worry about, there's the MJ bits too, completely pointless sections added in solely for the purpose of cinematic narrative nonsense that do nothing but take up extra time in what could've gone to the main gameplay.

Putting aside any contempt someone might have for the character herself, it's just not good design. MJ's controls are fundamentally completely different from Spiderman's, it's not a variation on him, you might as well be playing a completely different game. They've bloated the scope so hard that they accidentally made two shitty games instead of one good one.

And it's not just some side minigame either, like goofy video poker or a small arcade game. MJ's features are as fleshed out as Spiderman's, and all of this effort was put into sections that the player is going to think suck because they were torn away from the core of what the game is supposed to be about.

There's room for these sorts of alternate-sections, but they have to reinforce what the player already knows instead of having to teach them everything from square 1. As silly as this might sound, MJ should play a lot like Spiderman but in a way that makes me rethink how I approach an obstacle.

Narratively speaking at that point it wouldn't really be MJ anymore, because MJ is not a superhero. Perhaps Miles makes an appearance and has his own unique spin on the Spiderman style, or you'd even play as one of Spiderman's villans like Doc Ock and have to work around using his tentacles instead of spiderwebs. Maybe MJ just ends up being able to do something like this anyways, I don't know any Spiderman lore but maybe there's a justification for it.

A lot can be done just by changing a few principles on your core idea. MJ being so different from Spiderman doesn't show off how creative the team is for thinking of something so different, it shows off how uncreative they are for needing to hamfist her into the game in such an awkward way.

Completely different from that, TF2. Ignore that today it's been updated into a giant shitheap, the basic design around the game is fairly genius.

On a very basic level, all of the 9 classes are the same. They're all humans who move around and have health bars that lead to their death when depleted, they all have guns with ammo that shoot, and they all capture shit when you stand on it. There's a 'common sense' you can get used to among them all. There's a basic core to TF2.

But all of them end up very different because of some basic changes made in just a few stats. The scout is made different from the engineer by moving faster and having a faster cap rate, the heavy and soldier are primarily made different by the functions of their main weapons, and the demoman can be split off into two distinct playstyles just by swapping around his weapons.

There's only a few cases where classes become removed from normalcy, such as engineer buildings and spy cloak, and even these cases are easy to get used to.

These variations on a theme built up to create 9 incredibly distinct playstyles, but because they're all variations the players can still come to expect how certain things will happen. You're not suddenly playing an RTS when you switch to engineer, nor does the game turn into Metal Gear Solid when you play the spy. They don't need to make these huge departures from your expectations to deliver unique gameplay styles.

It's a deliberate limitation on the scope of the gameplay likely born from its tumultuous development cycle. Beforehand they were thinking of making a game based around the idea of being apart of a team that has a 'commander' who would play an RTS game and try and lead players and build the defenses, but aside from this forcing the team to rely too much on someone who could be a bag of rice, it's also just so massively divorced from everything else in the game and becomes a skillset that has to be learned from 0 instead of inferenced based on playtime spent elsewhere.

Set some rules. Set some boundaries. Set some limitations.

Everything extra waters down something else and makes it that much more complicated to expand on.