Total Playtime is the official Jank podcast, funded entirely by our paying subscribers (and formerly our backers on Patreon). This week’s episode is free, but subscribers get additional episodes every other week. You may join them by subscribing here, and you can find all previous episodes here.
Alice and Nate were both unavailable this week, prompting Brendy and I to realise the crushing shortage of local whimsy in our lives. Our daily existence is simply devoid of rural oddities or freestyle whimsy that lends itself to a banging cold open, so we ended up with several minutes of middle-aged car chat which Brendy heroically drags back to a gaming reference.
Those matters aside we turn to the matters of the week, chiefly Saber’s CEO lashing out at a departed writer who handled it by having a great night out that ended in karaoke, which is the sort of karmic vengeance we should all aspire to. Plus: good philanthropy yet with concerns about whether philanthropy can actually be good, the ongoing destructive instincts of large corporations, and big walks with medium guns.
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Maybe you've observed this too. There's a line some games cross past which you no longer feel like you're playing the game. The game is playing itself, and you are there to be fed feel-good brainjuices. I'm not talking about idle games - you're doing something, but you're not really doing something. Sometimes you click a glorified "next" button and flashy numbers rocket upwards. Sometimes you put a pip into a skill tree over here, instead of over there. Poncle's bestselling bulletnothing is the leading exemplar of this. I think it's rubbish, partly because it feels like treacle. But mostly because it is accelerating a dull trend in game design: to make the game auto-go while building a coffin of upgrades around the player until they have precisely zero thoughts, swimming in whatever the opposite of a sensory deprivation tank is, flooded with dopamine. Death, I say! Death to the self-playing videogame.
Vampire Survivors is not alone in hoodwinking me into the sensation that I am doing something when in fact I am a sad void pressing left and then right. Loop Hero sets your hero autotumbling around a circuit of monsters, and the closest it comes to having meaningful decisions is in the basic Carcassoning of resource and monster tiles. Ball X Pit is a roguelike ransacking of a classic arcade brickblooper with autofiring bullets. It eventually contains a full admission of defeat to the automaton approach to game design: an unlockable character called "the Radical" who will play brickblasting runs on your behalf and choose upgrades without any input from the player whatsoever.
Vampire Survivors turned a basic shmup into a karmic hamster wheel. BallXPit is an LCD brickpong toy running on cruise control.
The self-playing game automates a primary verb of play. That is a fancy way of saying: Me no shoot, game shoot for me. It then gets you as fast as possible onto a trundling treadmill of dopamine and ostensible progress, while sort of reminding you of another game you played before. The physicality of this "kernel" genre underneath is not really needed. It just needs to look like bullet hell. It just needs to seem like Breakout. They can become lauded, successful games, praised for their addictive charms and approachability.
To me, they are automated fun. Poisoning hand-to-eye happiness with the anti-activity of the idle game. We are lurching toward the idlefication of all genres. Why stop at Asteroids and Breakout? Let us automate Doom. Let us automate Street Fighter. Let us automate Rogue. You think I'm joking, but somebody is already working on the latter and it's giving me a bad case of the squinty eyes.
Self-playing games take microdecisions away from you in favour of macrodecisions. You don't need to choose where to aim your gun every second, but you will need to decide what ammo upgrade to select for the next level. This is an inviting approach for game designers (and not unique to the self-playing game). It allows designers to sidestep the difficult psuedoart of "gamefeel", and player skill becomes less of an issue to account for. You can focus on the metagame, the upgrades and abilities and perks and extras. The exofun. All you need to do is make the braintickling numbers work, and then make it look flashy.
But what if some genres are the microdecisions?
If somebody automated Devil Daggers, I would stab them in the hands with a barbeque fork. If somebody automated Tetris, I would have them arrested. When a designer of a racing game makes drifting round corners feel the perfect balance of scrapey and buttery, this feeling can carry the entire racer despite how bad its story mode inevitably is. On the other hand, when somebody strips an essential verb out of Asteroids and claps on an incremental skill tree, I can't help but feel they have piggybacked on the physical feeling unlocked by bygone engineers to deliver what is effectively Cookie Clicker under the hood. This is not a revolutionary new form. It is Candy Box sans the sense of humour, with a lobotomised arcade classic attached.
I started Sandustry on a whim at 8:15pm on a Friday evening. I was still playing at 2am. I went to bed, woke up at 9am, and immediately started playing again. It's rare that a game gets its claws into me like this. It's even rarer that I feel good about it.
Sandustry, now in Early Access, is a factory builder with a great hook: every pixel is physically simulated. Think Noita, but instead of a deadly roguelike, you're laying down conveyor belts and sorters to gradually process all the natural resources of an alien world. Factorio but with gravity. Satisfactory but I'm satisfied.
I used to think I had a complicated relationship with 'busywork games', the kind that give you a todo list of simple (and sometimes prima facie tedious) tasks, and invite you to decide whether the experience is a flow or fugue state. I love some of those games (Pokémon Pokopia, Turnip Boy) and flee almost instantly from the seeming pointlessness of others. I now think my relationship is very simple: some todo lists feel worthwhile and others do not, and it's a matter of design as to which is which. In other words, it is the games that are good or bad, not me.
This factory was hell but I was proud of it anyway.
Too often factory builders feel like they're putting artificial obstacles in my path and daring me to work hard enough to render the inconveniences moot. That power curve can feel good, but more often than not it feels too much like the bad kind of wasting time. I don't want to cup water for ten hours to earn a bucket.
We created Text Adventure, our videogame book club, with sincerely open minds: we wanted to see how official novels intersect with, and perhaps elevate, the games on which they are based. The answer, six books in is: badly and emphatically not, respectively.
There is of course a tension between what makes a good book and what makes a good game. A novel, by definition, lives or dies by narrative; a game lives or dies by gameplay. An effective character in a game is one that’s distinct enough to be meaningful but flexible enough to bend to the player’s will; a character in a novel needs to be built such that the reader understands the choices they will see them make. Worldbuilding in prose can be done precisely and with the assumption that the reader is paying attention; worldbuilding in games is done via multiple formats by multiple people and with the assumption that the player will not notice unless you forcibly control their gaze, and even then, only maybe.
It is possible for a videogame book to bridge this divide, but based on our first season not all of them try. I don't want to just blame the writers for this: I suspect that they were commissioned on a flat rate with a hard deadline and issued with either a voluminous and unyielding brand bible or a marketing Powerpoint, or both, and made the best they could in the time available to them. It is technically possible to create something great under such circumstances if you try hard enough, but anybody who’s done creative work-for-hire will have found themselves coming up against somebody with the power of creative sign-off and zero-to-negative creative ability, and after a while you accept that it’s easier to just cash the cheque and move on.
The nadir of our first season was Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, a mesmerisingly terrible book which set out to include the entire game, side-quests and all, along with correctly capitalised references to the trademarked weapons technology. Its slavish reproduction makes abundantly clear how bad so many game stories are, because absent the engagement that comes from holding a controller it’s just a series of too many events with not enough connecting tissue.
You don't realise how much plot there is in an Assassin's Creed game until you have to read a 500-page summary of it.
This approach of ruthless documentation is doomed to fail because the vast majority of games are, necessarily, driven by what’s fun to play and the narrative is usually something that’s forced to align with that. The simplest solution is to separate the two entirely, like the visual novel-style conversational asides between characters that break up gameplay in titles like Tactical Breach Wizards, but the sort of game that’s big enough to get a spin-off novel invariably weaves its story into the game itself.
An essay on Eliza, Luddites, and the ghosts in the company Slack
In the field of games we do a lot of arguing for videogames to be considered as cultural works on a par with other fields: film, television, theatre, art. One way of doing that is to explore games critically on their own terms, but this article is my attempt at Taking Games Seriously from another perspective: putting a videogame in dialogue with other pieces of culture and not arguing that it belongs there. Just… assuming it does.
In magazines like the London Review of Books or The New Yorker you’ll often get several works about a topic used together to approach it from several directions – putting them in dialogue. And that’s what this is. A kind of ‘comparative study’ which (for the first time? Has someone done this before?) includes a videogame. The topic I’m exploring is the digital worker in an age of AI and digital surveillance. The game is Zachtronics’ Eliza, written and directed by Matthew Seiji-Burns – a 2019 visual novel that explores a burnt-out Seattle AI tech worker’s experience of re-entering the world, and figuring out who she wants to be in it.
The work of fiction is Calvin Kasulke’s Several People are Typing, a modern take on the epistolary novel, which is entirely made up of the exchanges between people on the channels and DMs of a PR firm’s Slack. At the beginning of Several People Are Typing, the central character wakes to find his consciousness has somehow left his body and become trapped in the work Slack.
And the work of non-fiction is Jathan Sadowski’s accessible and punchy The Mechanic and the Luddite. Subtitled ‘a ruthless criticism of technology and capitalism’ Sadowski’s book explores how contemporary digital technoculture presents new and increasingly inextricable challenges when resisting capital’s exploitation of every part of our lives.
Together we can use the three works to come at the question: as technology is so intertwined with our lives and work, how do we unpick ourselves from the machine?
Good morning, videogames. I fell hard for a new game on Friday night and I am eager to get back to playing it. Thankfully my links are already all picked out, neatly folded, and arranged in a row below. There are some good ones this week.
I could feel myself reverting to boyhood, storming out of the proverbial playdate cursing my erstwhile friends after particularly infuriating games. I fell victim to those school-age anxieties – Do these guys even like me? – coming out the back of marathon double-digit-hour gaming sessions, at the end of which everyone is more or less nonverbal. I could feel my neural pathways atrophying with every inside joke repeated unthinkingly, landing to lesser and lesser effect as the night wore on. I grew hypersensitive to small and more than likely imagined changes in social gravity: who’s up, who’s down, who’s spending less time online, who can get people to come online just by getting into the
It's been another week on Jank, and a surprisingly soggy one. Brendy celebrated the particularly alluring appeal of watersports walking simulator Pools:
Have you ever noticed how nervousness and excitement are the same feeling? I mean bodily, when you stop and examine what's going on in your belly and on your skin and to your breathing. It's all the same response: something is about to happen. Pools makes me feel that way. For this reason, you could chalk the game up as a damp squib - after three hours of anticipation, nothing does happen. But it doesn't matter to me. Just to live in that feeling of butterfly belly and to walk through this soggy maze wondering what's around the next corner is enough.
I have fond memories of battling the tide with sand as a kid, trying to keep a fort from crumbling, piling up new walls like the sea is an invading army, and secretly revelling in the collapsing facades, relishing my losing fight. Is this what Dwarf Fortress is like for Nate? Sandcastle captures that feeling with
