knowledge checks in abrasive game designs

[highimpactsex]

is this another rambling post about how the SaGa series is a masterpiece? yes, but hear me out: the series exemplifies the best game design principle that makes for interesting gameplay and we can see this in other games.

in fact, i talk about many different kinds of games! i barely talked about SaGa! What's Happening To Me. Has My Minor Head Injury Done Something Weird To Me.

vulnerability

but first off, i need to preface an obsession i have with certain game designs. i love it when games demand players to "get" what they're doing. to use an analogy: it's like a player going into an art museum, seeing some abstract art, and then having to fixate on it to get any meaning. tons of people would see this in bad faith and think it's garbage, but others who want to challenge themselves will try to accrue any meaning they can from the art. when the latter happens, they're usually surprised to see the artist express themselves in a very vulnerable way.

in this regard, i'm pretty inspired by sylviefluff's article titled "The Designer's Heart Laid Bare", which in my opinion is one of the best pieces of game criticism. she says many wise things there, but for this piece, what's most relevant is this:

How many designers do you think are actually hateful and intentionally make bad games that are meant to make players suffer? Well, maybe that happens sometimes. You hear stories about old games where the designers made it unfairly hard so it couldn't be beaten in a rental, or so it would suck up more quarters at the arcade. I prefer to think this was uncommon, but rather than denying that this ever happened, I'm going to argue that this just isn't an interesting lens for analyzing games. What can you conclude from this lens? That the designers (or perhaps the company employing them) cared more about money than making a good game, and basically nothing else.

I think it's vastly more interesting to assume the designer believed in their work and genuinely loved it. Then you're forced to engage with the idea that the design decisions you don't understand were made with care and had a purpose. And then you can see why it's an expression of vulnerability to put out a work that you love, while knowing that others might find it confusing and hateful, and tell you that the things you love are terrible.

i dig this idea a lot since it succinctly describes what i find very interesting in what's described in the post as "abrasive game design". it's abrasive because it challenges you to understand the game mechanics, to Respect the Jank, to deeply know every quirk and detail there is. in other words, the player must engage in a "dialog" with the designer through the system. the system is the "language" the player is expressing in to the designer.

i want to go further than sylvie here and say this idea can also be seen in many replayable games like the SaGa series. this is where what i term knowledge checks come into play: without knowledge, the game cannot be beaten.

don't panic

so the questions become: what do i mean by knowledge checks and how do they come about?

knowledge checks, to put it simply, are just the game putting up challenges that can only be figured out ahead of time. what that usually means is you play the game for a bit, stumble onto a wall, and then find your progress softlocked because you didn't pick up a certain random item, didn't trigger some flag, or not play it efficiently.

i'm sure a few people reading this might be disgusted. okay, most people would. but i want to make a case where the paradox of needing foreknowledge for the future can make for interesting gameplay here.

so i want to bring up an infamous example from the world of text adventure gaming that has terrorized my brain since i learned of its existence during high school. there's an infocom adventure game that adapted The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy into this monstrously difficult adventure game and there's an early puzzle related to the babelfish:

Although the solution is engraved into the brain of anyone who ever played 'Hitch-Hiker's Guide', the problem itself bears repeating, as it was deliberately and cleverly designed to mock and frustrate the player's efforts. Indeed, the rest of the game ran along those lines, but the Babel Fish puzzle is the most notorious on account of the fact that it appears quite early on in the storyline. It breaks one of the cardinal rules of constructing text adventure puzzles, in that the solution is impossible to rationalise in advance, but it does so with such charm and devilish ingenuity that it is forgivable.

Essentially, after awakening in the hold of a Vogon constructor ship, the player - as Arthur Dent - must retrieve a Babel Fish from a Babel Fish vending machine. In the book and television series Dent's friend Ford Prefect simply pressed a button and collected the fish from a pan, after which the book explained to the audience the significance of the fish and its role in causing "more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation".

In the game, life is not so simple. After the player presses the button, the fish is vended, but with such force that it flies across the room and into a hole. The sequence of events for the novice player goes as follows:

Above the hole is a hook, from which the player eventually decides to hang his dressing gown; this causes the vended Babel Fish to hit the gown and drop to the floor...

... where it falls down a drain ('press button and catch fish' is not a valid input). The player may then decide to block the drain with his handy towel, which causes the fish to hit the gown, drop to the floor, and land on the towel...

... where it is cleaned away by a cleaning robot that dashes into the room, and dashes out again via a small panel. At this point the player realises that the game is toying with him or her. Undefeated, he or she may choose to block the panel with Ford Prefect's satchel*, at which point the Babel Fish flies into the gown, drops to the floor, the robot picks it up, runs into the satchel, and throws the fish in the air...

... where it is cleaned away by another cleaning robot, one tasked with maintaining the upper half of the room. It is this additional puzzle that caused players the most anguish, as the solution is not at all obvious - it involves placing some junk mail on Ford Prefect's satchel, which, when sent flying through the air, occupies the second cleaning robot enough for the Babel Fish to arc gracefully into the player's ear.

this is bullshit, also known as genius ass game design. this puzzle was indicative of the puzzles to come. it's horrible because you wouldn't know about the sequence; you're likely unable to finish this puzzle because you're lacking the ingredients to solve it. this means you have to restart the game and try to figure out what the fuck the game is asking you for. thus, the only way to solve this puzzle is knowing what to expect in the future.

this is an extreme textbook example of what i'm describing as a Knowledge Check. no way you're beating this game without getting walled and restarting until you finally overcome it. it's the best gameplay loop, i swear.

in fact, history agrees with me because i'm always right. the reason i knew about this puzzle is because it's gained a notoriety and helped the game sell. in fact, Hitchhiker's the book was unknown until the game. this esoteric puzzle made douglas adams a household name. thanks to this convoluted as hell puzzle, the book is now regarded as one of the funniest books by reddit -- a real honor.

IFWiki, a wiki for all things interactive fiction, has a small page that succinctly describes the puzzle: "A cascading series of puzzles, increasing in difficulty, in which a seemingly straightforward solution leads to a new and unexpected complication."

this kind of puzzle has become a staple for interactive fiction games, especially sierra's adventure games. people these days, especially those who dislike how "clunky" adventure games menu-ing can become, are not into these styles of gameplay. they might argue that these game design is meant to "inflate" gameplay time, waste players' money and time, and so on. this is the bread and butter of youtube video essays on the decline of adventure games: they aren't fun because they're bullshit.

and while i'm sure there's monetary and cynical development reasons to include such strange puzzles like this, it doesn't explain why this babelfish puzzle has lived rent-free in my head for almost twenty years. it surely doesn't explain why Hitchhiker's became a household name thanks to the game. there's a draw to these kinds of demanding titles, even if they are merely "trial and error".

perhaps, this pull toward such games is the "dialog" that sylviefluff is describing in her discussion on abrasive game design:

Conservative Game Design (I love this term) is about engaging with the rules of a system, but Heartful Game Design is about using a system as a means to engage with the creator of the work. That engagement with the creator is the dialogue.

the infocom Hitchhiker's game makes me feel like i'm engaging with douglas adams and steve meretzky, the people behind this game. i understand the diabolic sense of humor in the game puzzles as a faithful adaptation of the book's own comedy. and my own laughter and confusion are "dialog" with the designers: they cracked a weird ass joke and i sorta got it.

this weird ass joke is what zoomers would call SOUL, what boomers would call auteurism, what sylvie would call heartful game design, and what i would call brain poison terrorism. they don't leave you because they are so fucking weird and soulful. you have no choice to go "who the hell would know this?!?!" and that will stick with you.

this is Peak Knowledge Check design.

so because of their quirks and difficulty, adventure game design has always been fascinating to me. their approach to knowledge checks is usually unfair puzzles that don't follow everyday logic, but we can still evaluate their "internal logic" and how consistent they are. and in many cases, they tend to hold up quite well to scrutiny if we're thinking in the bullshit systems the game is thinking.

what's more: there's a healthy speedrun scene in adventure games. one of my favorite youtubers, OneShortEye, documents speedrun communities taking on adventure games. it sounds utterly unhinged to optimize precise clicking and puzzle design, but there's also some unique insights to how the game is programmed and designed that can only be gained through routing speedruns.

gotta go fast

which brings to my next point: what makes for interesting speedruns also makes for interesting replayable gameplay. in this sense, Knowledge Checks come into play in rather interesting ways.

in certain game dev/criticism circles, people have encountered the masterful famicom kusoge Atlantis no Nazo which can be described as a primitive metroidvania of sorts. "Designer's Heart Laid Bare" is for example a thoughtful contemplation on the abrasive game design in that game. panecelor considers it his GOTY of 2022 because

It's an NES, there's not too much it can really do... and yet this game is packed with mystery and exploration. and frustration, but I like that. If a game lets me win too readily, it can make the experience feel a bit fake to me. the slow but eventual mastery of the physics, enemies, and labyrinthine world structure was so rewarding. It was fun slowly drawing different maps week by week as I explored the world.

this is another example of how games check your knowledge. how familiar are you with the obfuscating map design of the game? you might not progress in the sense you're beating someone new and seeing new content, but you're accumulating knowledge. learning is fun and game overs can't ever take that away from you. same with early dungeon rpg titles like Wizardry: your RPG parties may be wiped, but your maps of the dungeon are still around. this gameplay loop of knowledge accumulation is also found in pure roguelikes like the Spelunky games and Slay the Spire as well as randomizers: the more you know their quirks and exploits, the further you can progress in the game session.

indeed, the entire premise with Romancing SaGa 2 is you're passing knowledge down through generations. the accumulated knowledge from the success and failure of each generation (and play session) becomes vital in overcoming the final boss, a serious Knowledge Check that can only be overcome with a lot of prep work.

when you finally beat the roguelike/drpg/Atlantis no Nazo/Romancing Saga 2, you feel rewarded because you won through your cumulative knowledge. it's unbelievably satisfying to reach the epilogue. the payoff has to be immense because it's all Your Effort and nothing else. the game didn't help you; it challenged you and you overcame it. a successful dialog with abrasive game design always ends in "I did it! Thank you, game, for believing in me!"

but what do you do after the game? you're not going to throw out the maps and notes, right? that would be a waste.

maybe, you should share that knowledge and offer advice to struggling players. maybe, you should try to get better at the game and find new routes. maybe, you gotta go fast.

this is where the connection of "speedrunning = replayability" comes in.

there's a hololive vtuber named inugami korone. back when she was cool and could stream any game she wanted, she was also into Atlantis no Nazo. for almost twelve hours straight, she was playing this goddamn game until she could clear it. i watched it live. it was a Phenomenal Experience.

the next day, she tried to do a deathless run but failed. i once read a tweet by her that i can't find anymore where she played the game in front of her grandmother and cleared it without a jiffy. two years after she first played it, she tweeted her latest completion of the game and mentioned how fun it is.

i was utterly fascinated by her coming back to this game after all these years. she's done something similar with Dragon's Lair (FC) and it took way longer to beat (unfortunately, the stream is removed from public access but supercuts are still around). when she finished that game, she felt relieved. she also got good enough to do a deathless run the next day. but while i'm sure she has fond memories(?) of that game, she doesn't display as much enthusiasm as she has with Atlantis no Nazo. her interest in the latter seems detached from her usual predilection to kusoge.

rather, i think she has fun speedrunning the game. not only does she have this map of the game burned into her brain but she wants to use it -- and use it well. the Knowledge Check placed on the player is already high, so it'd be a waste to just forget it. instead, you might want to push your Knowledge and the game design itself to their limits. speedrunning and challenge runs like deathless runs are all new approaches to have new dialogs with the game designers.

in other words, the dialog doesn't stop with the first completion of the game. it's actually a never-ending relation until you finally get bored. these games become akin to your close friends who ideally are people you can never get exhausted talking with about. but to really find that close friend, you gotta know them very well that you and the friend-game are vulnerable enough to reveal each other your deepest secrets and obsessions.

and you know what, this just sounds like the new Hitman series.

gotta execute fast

wait, what.

kastel, is your head okay? i know you had a light concussion and you started writing at like midnight.

well, mister rhetorical question, 1) my head's never been okay, even before the accident 2) i'm also onto something very interesting here about challenging game design that remains memorable to this day.

the newer Hitman games are intriguing in this discussion about Knowledge Checks because it is as if the designers know very well that Knowledge = Replayability = Speedrun = Fun. it marries all of them into a polycule through this overarching idea we usually call execution.

in the Hitman games, your first run is likely exploratory and Just Bad. you're told to infiltrate an area and assassinate people, but you need intel. you'll have to study the layout, the way people behave, and so on in order to blend in and get closer to your target. some of this can be gained while playing the game, but there are many events throughout each map that have their own strange adventure game-like logic to make the killing easier.

an example: you might encounter a car accident while walking around the place, but you're unsure how this connects to the overall game design. only until you've finished the first round that you might have an idea how this accident could connect to more efficient gameplay. you could become stealthier with this new foreknowledge, perhaps even avoiding the need to savescum in order to complete the mission. the more knowledge you have means you'll play better and be an actual hitman.

this idea of Execution = Knowledge in the Hitman games has been explored by game critics like superbunnyhop. in these videos, they bring up how the feedback loop of repetition and reiteration seamlessly allow you to achieve better ranks. they also refer to the demands of foreknowledge the game has on players, which is what i call Knowledge Checks.

i'm not really saying anything original here. but what i'm aiming to do here in this post is to show that Knowledge Checks aren't just in Hitman, Atlantis no Nazo, or the SaGa series -- it's everywhere in replayable game design.

when games like Hitman ask you to "git gud", they don't mean to belittle you. what they're doing is to know the games deeply because the fun of the game design is execution. Knowledge Checks are simply a demand for better player execution.

you can apply these same principles to arcade games and genres like shoot em' up too. indeed, that's where i learned that accumulated knowledge is the greatest roguelite mechanic that's actually present in every video game. there's no such thing as a hard game over in this sense; every new session is a continue. when i play Time Crisis games, i know when to step off the pedal, protect my player character from what's usually an unfair shot, and save a life.

in a way, i am defending the unfairness of certain game mechanics. they actually jolt you away from Standard Operating Practices and make you find a way to go around this. there's clearly a threshold where unfairness becomes unfun, but i don't think people have brought up that games being unfair can be fun especially when we overcome them.

and i believe we can evaluate the fairness of unfairness through Knowledge Checks. if a game is unfair because it is too unpredictable, then yeah it's gonna suck. but if a game is unfair in interesting ways that require some prerequisite knowledge, then you'll not only learn to mitigate that but also be better at the game when you have to restart it.

you know what's coming up and you can prepare for it. you'd feel like a genius once you overcome this.

conclusion: how it ties to player expression/freedom

i started thinking about stuff like this while playing the SaGa series and trying to grasp why i'm so enamored with the particular series. i've thought up some stuff as seen in this recent series of blog posts, but here i feel like i'm getting closer as to why.

it all comes down to player expression. i firmly believe the systems found in video games (and any interactive media) should be treated like "languages" to learn and converse in. i can express myself by learning to navigate the intricate systems in Dwarf Fortress (an example of a game with high Knowledge Checks but not necessarily speedrunnable) or learn new pathways in the survival horror game Pathologic.

if a game isn't replayable to some degree, i just see it as static and uninteresting. it's lifeless or, as zoomers would put it, soulless. i return to abrasive games like Dark Souls because they are difficult and this difficulty demands me to learn the systems well in order to express myself. otherwise, it's an easy piece of cake and i don't feel accomplished.

this is perhaps my issue with "difficulty discourse" outside of bad faithing in accessibility. very few people have the tools to discuss abrasive game design, so they talk about it in the contexts of difficulty and gatekeeping. it misses the point of what makes some games difficult and therefore compelling.

for example, we can easily discern the execution difficulties in Dark Souls, but how do you describe the difficulty of games like Romancing SaGa 1, a game where a deeper-than-average understanding of the game is needed to start the game? you can't even progress in the game in any meaningful way if you don't know how time even works! you'd need to experiment and realize that holy shit going into battles advances time. that's a degree of difficulty obscured by the general discourse.

indeed, people would call this "obscurantist game design". players would argue, "How are you supposed to know that? This sucks. I'm quitting." it's an abrasive game design decision that remains unpopular with many people.

but as i've tried to explore incessantly in this ramble, this leads to interesting avenues within reiterative game design. it starts dialogs between players and game designers through system mechanics, makes the world feel large and mysterious, and the solutions can get kinda funny they terrorize your brain since high school. you keep coming back to these games because you want to test your knowledge and see how far you can go.

if we want to severely oversimplify playing experiences to the point of absurdity, then video games are really glorified quizzes on how well you understand the systems. my knowledge is my own. i can share it, sure, and i have picked up wisdom from other people over the years. but the way i play a game is still intrinsically me.

this is especially true in abrasive game design where the game designers have put their Souls into the game. can my personal knowledge of the game be close to their understanding of the game? it's hard to say and it reminds me of the paradox all translators face: we're translating texts by people who aren't us and we're supposed to get the text too. sometimes, we get each other. sometimes, we talk past each other. only our imperfect knowledge that we refine constantly can help us communicate. it is this strained dialog that accounts for the real difficulty in abrasive video games:

The developers believe we can solve a problem in the language they've devised. Can we reciprocate -- that is, can we players answer their call back with the tools they've given us?

there's no way such "translations" will be 1:1 accurate and there will always be unintended approaches to the game. miscommunication occurs in the forms of bugs, glitches, and exploits.

but there's still this trust in us: developers believe we're able to translate our expression as players in the language they've given us and solve the problems they've posed. it's a heavy responsibility on the players when they play such abrasive games and many do indeed shirk it off.

for those who stick around, such games become meaningful to them. the knowledge they've attained can only be Personal.

conclusion 2: personal knowledge bugaloo

to put it another way, i want to resolve the dialectic of standardization and specialization in video game criticism.

many people have talked about the former since (especially recently) many games do allow you to transfer different skillsets. you aren't at a complete loss if you pick up a fighting game if you know your fighting game basics. there's some "shared/institutional knowledge", even if you aren't deeply familiar with the eccentricities. you can at least reliably see the left analog stick as movement.

experts love standardized controls and institutional knowledge. they expect things to be mostly the same, with the differences being the true identifying markers. a game should play like other games but still has something different. 80% same, 20% different.

but if it's too radically different (i.e. too unconventional), then it must be bad game design. they require us to actually specialize in the game from the getgo. that's too much time wasted on one work. life is too short, gotta try something else that's more approachable.

to a certain extent, i get that. not everything will jive with you and you could be latching onto better things. i've certainly avoided writing about things i don't get in order to not offend people; i can only admit i have ignorance like other people.

but i honestly think it remains a cop-out and has caused grave misunderstandings on abrasive game designs. there's this impression i often see on social media: these game designs are for hardcore masochistic macho gamer men nerds. it is so the opposite of reality: there's way more queer fans of Dark Souls than the discursive spaces are willing to admit.

i certainly had this misconception until i played Elden Ring last year.

so i want to specify/explain to the yeasayers and naysayers on what's so compelling about the abrasive game designs i've played: Knowledge Checks and the experiences they've created are some of the major factors that made them very fun. these high demands placed by the developers mean each player is going to have their own personal saga (heh). no one is going to have the same experience beating gwyn for the first time because everyone has their unique strengths and weaknesses, all dictated by the Knowledge they're able to accumulate and execute in their playtime session.

it's why people into High Difficulty games have such strong affection toward these systems-heavy games. we can only describe this relationship as something close to love. like someone deeply in love, such players want to embrace all the games' strengths and flaws and that can only be quantified in how much knowledge they're able to gather.

so clearly, people who pass such Knowledge Checks have acquired knowledge of a personal nature. people replay and speedrun with their Personal Knowledge the same way we write articles about the media we love: they are our personal displays of affection and reflect how we relate to the work. in another way, the personal gives meaning to the otherwise theoretical/abstract interaction between player and game.

it's why games don't feel complete without a player. their personal enjoyment (i.e. Personal Knowledge) fills in the blanks and the player has to create that knowledge by first experimenting with the game. only a difficult game, i.e. one that has a high Knowledge Check that demands specialization, can truly create the need to start up the engines for Personal Knowledge.

when one specializes in something, they can only be passionate about what they're into. this skill is pointless, useless, and so on outside this specific use-case. but the fact we've poured our souls into it for better execution and optimization means we are truly engaging with the game mechanics and treating the developers/games as close friends.

there's something majestic about people being ultra knowledgeable and obsessed about the media they love. perhaps, it is because their passion is personal knowledge put to good use: to overcome the high Knowledge Checks and beyond, to truly understand the mechanics inside out, and to finally say to the game designers through the game, "I can hear you loud and clear".