r/truegaming

In the world of live-action tv/film, you get laughed at if you willingly watch foreign stuff in anything but the original languages of the actors on screen. And with animation, especially Japanese produced stuff, there's forever been the "sub vs dub" debate. But with games... it's only a game here and there where I see people very loudly championing for the original actors and performances. We largely just deem English the universal way to experience characters and worlds even if it's not the native one that the developers maybe first envisioned with it.

There's some major contrasts to that, like the Yakuza franchise. But even outside of Japanese, a lot of people play things like the Metro games in English. It's largely about Japanese vs English when it comes to video games just because of the huge volume of games they produce, but nowadays even Korean and Chinese titles are becoming more popular. I mean, all these gacha games that MiHoYo makes like Genshin and ZZZ are natively voiced in Chinese, but I almost only see gameplay clips and people sharing stuff in English.

This isn't like a "dubs are bad" discussion I'm trying to make. It's just interesting how typically if you're passionate about media that's foreign when it comes to shows and movies, you probably eventually engage with it much more in it's native language. But with games, even passionate gamers still seem mostly prone to just playing all things in English or whatever language reflects their own.

Again, it's not a matter of one being better or being wrong, etc. It's just an observation and something I've wondered.

Honestly, is it just because IGN gave it such a good review that most people are looking for reasons to hate it?

Or is it just the nature of the genre and it being mostly a true walking simulator is the issue?

Personally I find it cheesy and charming at the same time. But I grew up in the era so it's also nostalgic as fuck for me.

As far as walking simulators go though my personal experience has been a 9.5/10 mostly due to the nostalgia.

But I also don't see how people are like hating on the game as hard as they are and that's my main question.

The game itself may not be a game, but it's entertaining and has one of the best soundtracks of any game I've played in years. I just don't get the hate.

You can draw a parallel between the evolution video game graphics, and the transition from drawing to photography.

In short, before being an art form, drawing was a way to represent reality, and photography made that purpose way more effective.

You can see the same trajectory with video game graphics, that were primary made to imitate reality, and as technology evolved, that has never been easier. Pretty much anyone can run Unreal or Unity, pick some photo-real assets on the store, put some lights and create a somewhat realistic scene (and yes, that's big shortcut, because someone actually had to create these assets, but you get the idea).

So I was thinking about what made "retro" graphics so appealing for some people, and nostalgia probably plays a big part, but I don't think it's the main factor.

If I reuse my drawing/photography analogy, if I have to capture a random scene, I could either painstakingly pain it, or photograph it.

Obviously photography can be an art form, you can spend a lot of time choosing a specific lens, framing the picture, arranging the scene, placing some additional lights, and even modifying the picture afterwards.

But you also can just pick your smartphone, vaguely aim at the object, press a button and voilà, and it would be good enough in a lot of case.

Whereas you can't "cheat" with a painting, to get an accurate result you have to put efforts in. But more importantly, you have to put intent in every-line, every splash of colour. Not a single drop of paint would be placed randomly, it's there because the creator wanted it to be there.

If given the choice between a dull photo of a random street, and the same scene painted by a not very talented painter, I guess most people would still find the painting more interesting, because at least the personality of the painter is shining trough.

It's the same thing with "retro" graphics, when you didn't had real time dynamic lighting, real time physics and so on, you had to fake everything by hand. And so the way every single object was lit was made with specific intent. Maybe it was made to look more real, but maybe what the dev thought was realistic was not, or maybe the dev just thought it was cool, whatever the reason, they have to put actual thought into it.

Of course this can still be present in modern games, even with a realistic graphic engine you can fake some effects to get more dramatic results, it's what separate an interesting looking game from a store asset flip shovelware that may be photo-real, but also completely flat and lifeless.

But again with "retro" graphics you can't cheat it, you have to actually think for every small detail, so by default it gives more life and personality to every single details.

For those who do not know, here's the Wikipedia article. In summary, I think we had legendary triple A games before 2011, after which we started seeing an extraordinarily nice boom of indie games until maybe 2020. Then, what do we have in the last 5-6 years? I was thinking whether I'm biased since we did not have enough time to observe how big the recent games will be, but then I knew Skyrim was a big thing the moment it came out, or Stardew Valley.

I really feel like there's been a drought, and I felt gaslighted based on how people suggested that I was just nostalgic.

I think the biggest win of "respecting a player's time" versus player immersion and enjoyment of the game as presented is that Insomniac's Spider-Man on PS4 has fast-travel and has a specific trophy for using it 5 times. That number is important, because according to data tracked on psnprofiles.com, 66.43% of players got the trophy for PSNprofiles users, and 38% got it overall among Playstation players.

Like, how many times do you fast-travel in a typical open-world game with fast-travel? The answer is definitely a lot. I bet most players who played Skyrim probably fast-traveled more than five times before they finished the Bleak Falls Barrow quest for Whiterun.

So let's focus on that 66.43%/38% of the players who got that trophy, and compare it to other trophies that were nearly at or at a higher percentage of completion that players of the game received for completely optional content or end-game content.

• 66.41%/35.2% of players got the optional "Backpacker" Trophy for finding all of the hidden backpacks.
• 65.77%/35.8% of players got the optional "Hero for Higher" Trophy for getting to the very top of the Avengers tower and perching there for a second.
• 75.47%/47.8% of players got the optional "Amazing Coverage" Trophy for activating every single Surveillance Tower.

But more importantly...

• 83.05%/65.4% of players completed Act 1
• 76.75%/56.0% of players completed Act 2
• 71.91%/47.9% of players completed Act 3

That third one is especially telling for one reason: That is the number of players who went through the entire game's campaign, which takes around 17 hours per How Long to Beat and means that more people did that than used the fast travel system more than four times from beginning to end.

That is a staggering number to look at when you think about it. Once you unlock the ability to fast travel in the game after completing the mission "Wheels within Wheels", you can pretty much fast travel at any point from then on by clicking a point of interest from the menu map.

If you don't like the subway animations, you can even disable them to make the fast travel faster.

Yet a statistically significant enough amount of people chose to beat the entire game instead of fast-travelling five times during their entire run.

I'll admit, I'm one of them. Why would I fast travel for three seconds to get to a mission all the way across the map like 2km+ away when that's 2km+ of New York skylines to swing through and have a blast for five minutes while I catch up with the audio banter and maybe stop a few crimes along the way? Fast-Travel would have been a complete waste of the game's potential and the enjoyment of the traversal.

I still think that's an amazing statistic to consider. More people beat the entire game than fast-traveled.

Other than exploding cars, racing lines are the most representative of my growing separation from the racing game genre. Having a line on the track telling you where your car should be and when you should brake is the opposite of what games should be to me.

Yes, the lines are optional. Yes, they can be a good feature to optimize gameplay. But to me the picture they paint by being on by default says all the wrong things to the player from the get-go.

This is the correct way to "play"

Having a colorful line telling you what you should be doing at all times is incredibly disruptive to actually playing. There's a line right there telling you what the best thing to do is, of course you will follow it and that isn't playing, it's executing. Playing is about trying out new stuff, seeing what works and what doesn't, testing the limits of the system. Racing lines don't want you to do that.

A game should be about setting rules and letting players forge their path within them. Setting the rules and immediately telling you how to use them is robbing the player from what I consider to be the actual playing.

I see you coming with your "it's optional, who cares?". I care. As I said, it's about what the line says about the game. The line tells you the game is solved. Don't go looking for a best way to play, don't go experimenting. This, right here, is the best way to play.

Not even teaching the fun stuff

I refuse to believe that people think the fun in a racing game is following a line. The fun comes from improvising in different situations, taking risks, or you know... fucking slamming into other players. The line just doesn't show all that.

If a game was going to give me a constant reminder of what to do, at least make it something fun.

The fact that a line is possible at all is boring

I'm talking arcade racers here, there should be more to the game than a golden path. Shortcuts, drifting, jumps, boosts, drafting, tricks, crashing into others ... There should be enough ways to play for racing lines to not even be considered a possible solution to the problem.

Hand-holding much?

I'm not the biggest detractor of hand-holding in games, but I am surprised that with all the push-back there's been against it, racing lines has somehow made it to the other side unscathed. It's the most "you should be doing this" feature ever, more so than any objective marker or talkative character, yet it's completely accepted.

This post might come as a bit of a rant because I really tried to like Outward as it has many mechanics and features I would enjoy in a singleplayer game but I felt that it REALLY was disrespecting my time.

For those who don't know Outward, the premise of the game is basically being an immersive RPG experience, which means eating, drinking, sleeping and being an utterly useless idiot in the beginning. Thing is, I love all that premise, so why not give it a try?

The game begins with you having to pay a heavy sum to your town's leader as your family owes the town and you're supposed to pay the debt. You're in deep shit and have to get the money one way or the other, and that's fun! You can head out of town and try killing something... And you're dead. But that's fine! You get back up in the town and you can go right back... Or not. Your health and stamina got "burned", which means they won't regen until you sleep. So you go after someplace to sleep and back to exploring! This time you got a backpack with you, but it slows you down and you can't roll properly. There's a button to put your backpack down and you must do that for EVERY enemy until you get better gear/get better at the combat. Well that's starting to get tiresome...

The problem with all those mechanics is that I've played for quite a few dozen hours, but they never get better! You unlock all sorts of magic but you never get a way to fast travel, only maybe a 15% speed boost from a mask. You go to explore and if you die like 3 times you get teleported to fuck knows where and have to rest then WALK all the way to a town to get food/water to go back to the place you died to try again. It's a fantasy game! Why is there no fast travel, albeit limited? Even a mount would be better than having to WALK THE ENTIRE MAP! And here's the kicker: when you're walking the first time the game is absolutely amazing and you probably wouldn't want to just teleport somewhere, but after you backtrack like 5 times, well, there's better use of my time than doing that.

Now Outward has it's fanbase so I get people liking it but... Come on! Backtracking the same area for the 10th time doesn't add anything to the player nor the game, so why do it? Why make the gameplay loop involve dropping a backpack and then going back to get it? Or having to rest every time you die (in a game with difficult combat that you learn by trial and error). Why not make the game's gameplay loop the best the game has to offer, which are the times you're exploring, learning the lore, getting better at combat and getting loot/upgrades? I really wish this game wasn't fighting so hard to waste my time, as it has a great worldbuilding, magic system and exploration.

While most people appreciate the expansive sandbox of GTA V, I think the same level of freedom is often missing from its missions and world interactions. The open world gives you plenty of space to explore, but the quests themselves can feel overly restrictive. For a game that presents itself as realistic and immersive, true realism should not only come from visuals, animations, or detailed NPC routines. It should also come from freedom, consistency, and meaningful reactivity.

Believability Over Strict Realism

Realism in games is a complicated topic. When we talk about it, we are usually referring to a combination of physics, biology, psychology, object proportions, character behavior, and cause-and-effect. However, focusing too much on surface-level realism can sometimes limit creativity. It is much easier to recreate how a cat looks and sounds than to imagine how a dragon might move, breathe, or behave.

This is exactly why believability matters more to me than strict realism. Something completely unrealistic, like a fantasy creature or an impossible mechanic, can still feel "real" if it follows its own internal logic. If a game introduces realistic mechanics, the rules of that world must remain consistent across gameplay, narrative, and player interaction.

The "Beautiful Museum" Problem

Rockstar games feature incredibly detailed and meticulously crafted worlds, but they are not always organic. The environments in GTA and Red Dead Redemption look alive, but the player usually cannot interact with them in a deep or lasting way. The random encounters are genuinely surprising the first time and represent some of Rockstar’s best design, but much of that reactivity feels shallow or short-term. You might help someone or witness something strange, but afterward, the world usually resets. NPCs forget, locations return to normal, and the encounter rarely leaves a permanent mark - neither on NPCs nor on open world itself

Because of this, these worlds can sometimes feel like a beautiful museum. You can admire the intricate detail and history, but you often cannot truly touch or change much. Over time, it feels like the interactivity present in older titles like GTA IV has been reduced in favor of making modern worlds more visually dense and cinematic. Lore and atmosphere are great, but if a place looks lived-in, I want to interact with it. I want the world to be more than just a beautiful backdrop.

Systemic Reactivity vs. Tedious Realism

Many games give players freedom, but that freedom means very little if the world does not react in a meaningful way. Games like Baldur’s Gate 3 through narrative choices, and Tears of the Kingdom through physics and experimentation, understand that immersion comes from how much a player can interact with the world.

In a Rockstar game, achieving this means balancing deep immersion with enjoyable gameplay. Finding treasure by reading an actual map in RDR2 is highly immersive because it asks you to observe and think. On the other hand, seeing a campfire continue burning in heavy rain breaks that immersion because it contradicts the game’s own realistic presentation. If objects have physics, fire spreads, and environments look functional, players naturally expect those systems to interact. When they do not, the illusion is broken.

It would also make the world infinitely more believable if we could ask ordinary NPCs simple contextual questions, like asking for directions to a nearby shop, police station, or landmark. That is exactly what you would do if you were lost in real life.

At the same time, I want realism when it makes the world consistent, but I do not want realism just for the sake of realism. If skinning an animal, looting a drawer, or opening a door triggers a long, boring animation every single time, realism becomes tedious friction that wastes the player's time. I love RDR2, but its movement can feel clunky precisely because it prioritizes realistic animations over actual gameplay flow.

Rewarding Unintended Solutions

Many events in modern open-world games are heavily scripted and require you to follow a specific order to trigger an intended outcome. Simulation-style games often try to counter this, but they can feel half-baked when only certain parts of the world are truly interactive.

I am the kind of player who will always try to do things in unintended ways. If a game blocks a main gate with heavy security, my first instinct is not to fight through it. I might try to drop in from the sky, sneak through a back door, or blast the gate open. I remember an early Vice City mission where I planted a bomb, triggered a cutscene, and essentially finished the mission by doing almost nothing. Moments like that are memorable because they allow you to organically interact with the systems, even if it was not the strictly intended path.

Looking Ahead to GTA VI

I am not saying Rockstar’s design is bad. In fact, their worlds are among the most impressive in gaming. But there is definitely room for improvement. For GTA VI, I would love to see a stronger focus on systemic interaction, long-term consequences, and world reactivity.

I do not need every NPC to have a fully simulated life or every action to create a massive branching storyline. I just want the world to remember more, react more, and allow for more experimentation within its own rules. The next major step in open-world design should not just be making a world look real. It needs to behave in a way that feels believable, consistent, and responsive.

So I've been replaying GTA V in preparation for VI coming soon, and was struck by the torture sequence where Trevor interrogates Mr K after you kidnap him from the rival intelligence agency. I remember feeling uncomfortable with this sequence when I first played the game, but that reaction has definitely increased in the intervening years.

Back when I first played it I mostly remember it feeling edgy and excessive in the way GTA often does, if a little "too far". But replaying it now, what struck me was how tonally jarring it is to have something so brutal turned into essentially a series of minigames / quicktime prompts with achievements linked to keeping your victim from passing out.

I rewatched American Psycho recently too and my reaction to GTA V quite reminds me of my reaction when I first read that novel. 

Both of these works made me feel queasy (an understatement: I'd quite like to permanently remove the memory of some passages from AP from my brain), but in very different ways. American Psycho is obviously horrific at points, and disturbing because you're trapped inside Bateman’s first-person perspective, but there's still an element of objective distance in reading. GTA V feels different because instead of observing the violence, you're actively performing it.

There's a lot of other parallels and in a sense both are doing the same essential thing: satirising late capitalism, consumerism, superficiality, violence as spectacle, etc. Both depict worlds where nothing seems to have depth or lasting consequence and where hyperconsumption and extreme violence exist as part of the same system and reflect back on each other.

But the medium, to me, makes a huge difference. American Psycho implicates the reader, but you're still ultimately a passive observer held at a distance and so able to make a moral judgement as you read. GTA V collapses that distance entirely by making the violence entertaining and interactive.

But what I genuinely can’t decide is whether that makes GTA V’s satire more effective or less effective. I know games like Hotline Miami very explicitly ask you to reflect on the violence and your own enjoyment of it, but is this what GTA V is doing too, with the added, AP-style layer of consumption as a juxtaposition?

Does your participation deepen the critique because it takes the extremity to a new level, and in its endless repetition allow you to experience its emptiness firsthand? Or does making violence into a fun gameplay loop basically undermine the point?

Curious what other people think.

I’ve always been interested in games in which the protagonist’s mental state can change, and this isn’t just part of the story, but something that actively influences the gameplay itself. It’s not just about ‘the character being sad’ in a narrative sense, but about games in which the protagonist’s psychological state changes, affecting gameplay, dialogue, and their perception of reality...

I find it particularly interesting when the player starts to doubt what is real, or when the mechanics themselves are linked to the character’s emotional or mental state.

Which games do you think have handled this concept particularly well?

This is probably a weird question, but I’m surprised smell never became a real gaming peripheral category. Games have spent decades improving graphics, surround sound, controller vibration, adaptive triggers, motion controls, VR, eye tracking, and even haptic suits. But smell is still stuck in “random CES demo” territory. The strange part is that smell seems like it would fit certain genres really well. Horror games could use smoke, mold, blood, wet concrete, gasoline, old wood, hospital disinfectant, etc. Fantasy games could make forests, taverns, magic labs, caves, oceans, and battlefields feel physically different. Racing games could use rubber, rain, fuel, and burnt metal. Cozy games could use tea, flowers, soil, baked food, or campfires. But somehow the idea never seems to survive contact with reality. Is smell too technically hard to control? Is it a developer support problem? Is it a cost and maintenance problem? Or is it simply that smell sounds immersive in theory, but does not actually improve gameplay enough? A bit of context: this question came to mind after watching Kaguya Hime, but I’m more interested in the practical gaming side than the movies. Games already have strong interactive visual and audio languages, but smell still feels like an unsolved design and hardware problem.

Ive noticed especially in series like resident evil where you can find diary entries scattered around a lot of the time they will have lines of dialogue. I hate this, it makes no sense at all and takes me out of the universe.

"What the hell is going on!? Monsters are crawling all over the ship!"

Yeah because if you saw a resident evil esq monster ripping people to shreds you would open your journal and write these exclamation points lmao.

I love the idea of environmental story telling but man do CERTAIN games sometimes do it so badly, like resident evil.

I’ve recently been thinking about a potential blind spot in how video game journalism works and how we interpret reviews online.

The general assumption is that professional game journalists play a huge number of games as part of their job. Because of that, they don’t have the same time constraints as most players. Gaming is their work, so they can afford to be much less selective about what they play compared to someone with a regular job who might only have a few hours a week for games.

And that’s where I wonder if a kind of bias might appear.

For example, a lot of indie games in particular tend to get very positive coverage and strong recommendations from the press. But I’ve had several experiences where I’ve played those same games based on reviews and ended up thinking: “this is fine, but it’s not nearly as special as it was made out to be.”

It makes me think that maybe these games feel more impressive or worthwhile in a professional context, where you’ve already played all the major releases and are constantly moving through new games, but not necessarily in the context of an average player who has to be selective and decide what’s actually worth their limited time.

From that perspective, I wonder if the press is sometimes missing a kind of “time-value filter.” Not just “is this a good game?” but “is this one of the few games you should realistically spend your limited time on?”

And maybe the issue is that reviewers can’t fully step into the mindset of someone who only has a small amount of time to play games, or who has to choose carefully between a huge backlog. Even the most independent or well-meaning outlets might still be shaped by the fact that they’re constantly playing games as a job.

On top of that, there are of course the well-known biases, publisher relationships, review copies, marketing access, etc., but this particular one feels less discussed and maybe more structural.

So I’m curious what others think: is this actually a meaningful bias in games journalism, or is it just a mismatch between professional and casual perspectives?

This is something that’s been on my mind for a while but I never consciously thought about.

In our modern media-saturated age, it’s entirely possible for someone to be exploded to dozens, if not hundreds of more video games (alongside shows, movies etc) they’d never a fault play themselves. For instance, I have a pretty good idea of what ARC Raiders, Pragmata, Subnautica etc is about, despite never having actually played those games myself.

So I got curious, and basically started wondering, how much personal hands-on experience do you need to have with a game or game franchise in order to have properly “experienced” the gameplay/story/lore yourself?

Take Halo 1 for instance. Growing up I never had an Xbox, but one of my parent’s friends did, so I managed to play parts of it a few times as a kid. It still forms part of my core “gaming memory”, despite never having actually beaten the game myself (I managed to buy the Master Chief collection a few years ago but I’ve never gotten around to playing through it all.) Does that make me an “OG Halo fan”? Plus as I got older I managed to read a bit more about the lore, I played a bit of Halo 3 in high school, etc. But again, I’ve never beaten any of the games entirely and despite having a solid grasp of the story a lot of the more intimate details I wouldn’t get (such as character quotes from parts of the games I haven’t played.)

But then AGAIN again, I still really love the whole Halo mythos, the characters, the backstory, etc.

So this is where I’m left confused. Can I say I’m a fan of Resident Evil, despite not playing the older games? What about Zelda? I was more of a Mario kid growing up, but Zelda (through friends, gaming references etc) has always been “there” as part of my life and again I know what it’s all about, despite me having almost no actual experience with the games themselves.

I’m not really sure what I’m asking, I guess it’s just, what’s the difference between a “fan” / someone part of a gaming community and just, a casual observer? How important is it to get into a game’s universe fully to truly experience the “spirit” of that franchise? Because I can see arguments on both sides.

Just kind of spitballing here. What do you guys think?

With mixtape coming out and the buzz of supposed controversy around it i've been lamenting the way games get discussed and how IMO a lot of people seem to fundamentally miss what exactly a critic's role is in media.

I have no attachment to mixtape, from what i've seen it seems like a solid interactive experience, but its kinda the first example to mind of this particular outrage cycle that seems to have formed around gaming news media. When something that goes against the grain of the "standard" notion of a video game and gets decent reviews you see people wriggling out of the woodwork consistently that seem to think positive opinions have been bought and/or that the review isnt "objective" because it doesn't meet their expectations.

And i know the short answer to a degree is that a lot of this ire is a mix of gamergate priming people to see game journalists are the devil, and the genuinely sleazy practices a lot of outlets use like running adverts for games they're actively reviewing. That latter part is a far bigger reason than the former of why a lot of major outlets suck but people are hesitant to ever really acknowledge that because instead the kind of channels that perpetuate this kind of gatekeepy stance instead would rather continue their performative rage because pretending to be angry at games you haven't played can pay your mortgage if you do it right.

But the thing at the heart of this that bothers me is the notion that a critic must be an objective reflection of quality who must reflect my opinion. Obviously this is kinda ridiculous, games are art and like all art, the experience of playing one is a subjective and often deeply personal thing and a review can only capture what a single person experiences from it. With this position stated you see why i brush up against the notion of objectivity in art so profoundly frustrating in how its utilised to dismiss experiences people don't engage with, and by the same notion treat review numbers as objective arbiters of quality and not just a reflection of common consensus.

To me the relation you should have to a critic is that they are someone for whom you make an assessment of your enjoyment of a bit of media based on what they say about it in relation to your tastes. To can see why going to the most common denominator and being upset that it doesn't reflect your personal experience is foolish, it expects the most generic version of a take on something to bend to your specific opinions.

I recently spoke to an indie developer working on a game that combines RTS and Tower Defense mechanics, and it made me think about why this blend appears surprisingly rarely despite the historical overlap between both genres.

A lot of older RTS communities, especially around Warcraft III custom maps, naturally gravitated toward Tower Defense modes. In some ways, TD games simplified the macro-management and multitasking aspects of RTS games while still preserving strategic planning, positioning, and resource optimization. For many players, they became a more accessible form of strategy gaming.

Yet modern RTS/TD hybrids remain relatively uncommon, and I wonder if part of the reason is that both genres often demand opposite forms of player attention.

RTS games typically rely on:

• multitasking
• map awareness
• active unit control
• adapting quickly under pressure

Tower Defense games, meanwhile, tend to emphasize:

• planning ahead
• optimization
• pattern recognition
• slower decision-making

When combined, these design philosophies can either complement each other or completely undermine one another. If the RTS layer becomes too demanding, the TD aspect may feel secondary. But if the Tower Defense systems dominate, the RTS mechanics can end up feeling shallow or unnecessary.

What I find interesting is that many players still seem nostalgic for Warcraft III custom maps and older strategy communities, yet very few modern games successfully recreate that feeling.

So I’m curious:
Do RTS and Tower Defense fundamentally clash as genres, or do developers simply struggle to balance the pacing and player attention between them?

When you know you've collected 1 / X objects you assume two things: they'll be hidden everywhere, you'll get a cool reward for finding them all.

If you like collecting them, you're not playing the game wrong. You're playing two games in one. One's a game of collecting things the other's the game where the fantasy takes place.

Aside from collectathons, these two games compete. Some players don't mind. For those who do mind, I hope this post can help you articulate why they get exhausting.

Because of collectibles, you move the camera all over the place to find them, not because of a cool sculpture or beautiful mountain in the distance. Your exploration is collectible-mediated and many collectibles just sit somewhere for no coherent reason.

A vault may hint at a treasure. But when collectibles are involved, a weird hole in the ceiling rewrites the scale of importance of props in the level. A vault now is as relevant as the nook between a rock and a wall.

Exploration becomes non-diagetic, you obsessively explore dead ends because you've gone 5 rooms without finding any new collectible so you assume another one is due already.

If the game's all about getting those collectibles and the level is built around finding hidden places, then you get a nice collectathon. Which works best when the level are atomized, you teleport to them, they have boundaries. Collectibles and the world are built for one another.

But when collectibles are thrown in as a side-quest beside the main adventure, now the collectibles start to choke out the real quest.

You're look at strange corners instead of looking at the scenery, you jump to your death down a hole that looked like a secret path, you spot a precocious collectible and spend 10 minutes trying to reach it only to much later the actual path that was much easier.

When you commit to finding them, they'll side track you and break pacing. That's because they could be anywhere.

Even if you choose to ignore them, every now and then they remind you that they exist when you find one by accident and you're reminded that there must be a point to them, something you'll miss out.

If Outer Wilds had them they'd compete with the authentic curiosity of exploring the solar system, they'd make you wonder if a place exists for lore reasons or if there's supposed to be a collectible there you didn't find, they'd lead you down a path that only serves the collectible and not the story.

Maybe you thought Outer Wilds needed collectibles, that it was too basic without them. Maybe you'd have enjoyed finding them all. But I doubt the world would have felt as magical as it did with collectibles.

Hey, all!

In this thread, the rules are more relaxed. The idea is that this megathread will provide a space for otherwise rule-breaking content, as well as allowing for a slightly more conversational tone rather than every post and comment needing to be an essay.

Top-level comments on this post should aim to follow the rules for submitting threads. However, the following rules are relaxed:

• 3. Specificity, Clarity, and Detail
• 4. No Advice
• 5. No List Posts
• 8. No topics that belong in other subreddits
• 9. No Retired Topics
• 11. Reviews must follow these guidelines

So feel free to talk about what you've been playing lately or ask for suggestions. Feel free to discuss gaming fatigue, FOMO, backlogs, etc, from the retired topics list. Feel free to take your half-baked idea for a post to the subreddit and discuss it here (you can still post it as its own thread later on if you want). Just keep things civil!

Also, as a reminder, we have a Discord server where you can have much more casual, free-form conversations! https://discord.gg/truegaming

The recent release of Mixtape has brought on a flurry of discussions about the nature of games, value, and criticism. Some of it is unfortunate. Much of it is messy. All of it is a little unexpected since titles like Mixtape are hardly uncommon, and it doesn't seem to be more celebrated than other recent examples. Perhaps a perfect storm. Part of these discussions centers around whether Mixtape could or should be classified as a game.

For many, this will bring them back to the early 2010s and passionate discussions around "art games," walking sims, and a strong impulse to explain/defend the status of video games as a legitimate art form and expressive medium. Perhaps the only consensus that was reached is that consensus itself is difficult, if not impossible, to reach on such matters. This little flare-up will likely not resolve the matter any further. Still, I have continued to think about it since those halcyon days. The recent discourse gives me an opportunity to share my solution to the classification problem.

I propose that what we call "video games" actually belong to at least two distinct but in practice commonly overlapping kinds of experiences. I will call the first video games and the second digital adventures. Instead of narrowly defining both from the outset, I decided to start with a Venn diagram that includes a few basic examples, sorted intuitively. So what can we say about them? Video games are an extension of traditional games outside of the digital space, activities with goals, rules, challenges, etc. Digital adventures are more comparable to media like books, movies, comics, etc., not in the sense that they are necessarily story-focused (though many of them are), but they offer a more curated or authored experience that has a narrative-like structure to it. I have chosen the word 'adventure' as an expansion on the adventure genre, but I do mean something broader than what is typically referred to by 'adventure game' or 'action-adventure.'

As seen in the diagram, video games and digital adventures are not mutually exclusive. In fact, arguably most of the mainstream gaming landscape, at least the sort that is the most discussed in dedicated gaming spaces on the internet, is covered by both the 'video game' and 'digital adventure' categories. Almost all high-profile games, AAA and indie, would seem to fall into the overlap. Looking at and comparing the areas outside of overlap is especially instructive for our purposes. How we think about, talk about, evaluate, and engage with the experiences on the edges are incommensurable to a degree that I feel goes beyond merely a difference of genre.

The "pure" adventure side, where I have placed Mixtape, has minimal or no traditional gameplay elements. These are what are sometimes referred to as "story games" and include a variety of their own genres like walking sims, choose-your-own-adventures, visual novels, etc. Most of these are single-player experiences, though cooperative/social ones do exist. The "pure" video game side includes a lot of classic arcade-y genres, games with a high level of mechanical abstraction, and competitive multiplayer games. Story elements are usually minimal to non-existent.

This framework has a few advantages. The first is that it sidesteps the whole "interactivity" criterion. How interactive an example is has no bearing on how it is categorized. Many digital adventures, both inside and outside the overlap, are highly interactive, while others are minimally so. The second is that it provides different lenses of evaluation. We can talk about how successful, say, Grand Theft Auto is as a digital adventure or as a video game and get different results. Conversely, this makes applying certain lenses to examples outside of the overlap simply inappropriate. We recognize that it would be inappropriate to judge Mixtape as a video game, and any complaints about review scores would clear up when we recognize it is being judged not as a video game, but as a digital adventure. The third is that we do not need to worry about any institutional ghettoization by labeling things as not games since the adventure/game distinction recognizes that much of what we have been talking about for the entire history of interactive digital media is both. Therefore, there is no reason to separate them now or privilege one over the other.

Of course, I do not actually expect anyone to adopt this framework. I have been at this for too long not to understand that you can't really control how people use words. It's an uphill battle. Still, it's fun to think about and categorize things (at least I find it to be) and perhaps some will find clarity in what I am offering. This is merely a suggestion. Additionally, I do not think my categorization is complete. I think we could speak of at least one more type of interactive digital media that is also quite overlapping with the others: digital sandboxes/sims. But this post is long enough and such considerations aren't especially germane to the Mixtape conversation.