Feature

Vampire Survivors is a self-playing videogame. 

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. 

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.