Its so hard to find intellectual mtg content that isn't commander and isn't just streaming gameplay of other formats verses discussing them. This channel is a gem.
Check out Rhystic Studies and Magic Mics for great Magic content that isn't commander focused or gameplay focused. Honestly this channel is either all commander hating or barely talks about Magic at all.
I think you may be creating a false dichotomy here between challenge and chore. You even started on that path with power wash simulator. That is not a challenge, there is no uncertainty in outcome, but it is still compelling. I think you may need to expand the discussion to things like, "does this game offer a sense of discovery. Be that discovery of outcome, mechanics, strategies, lore, etc." Or, "does this game offer a means of expression." And ultimately as Tom Sawyer noted ages ago, what may be a chore to one could be an engaging means of play to another.
it's all a matter of understand the motivation of your player and understating you the designer is the one that sets it. whatever you expect the player to want to do at any given moment is the intrinsic motivation, challenge or not. chore is everything you force them to do against that. but it is the design of the whole experience and the moment to moment gameplay that defines that motivation by setting the player's expectation, based on what you told them to expect. power wash simulator has no challenge because that was never set up between player and designer. the "agreement" was always about doing this single activity the whole game, all the way to the marketing and PR so that is the motivation the player is gonna have, and anything you ask them to do that goes against it is automatically a chore, challenging or not. BotW has a lot of chore gameplay because the promise was always freedom. you tell the player to do whatever they want and mediate their own fun so don't be surprised if they find it a chore to be forced to kill 4 almost identical, boring bosses in order to progress the narrative. that was never in the agreement of "find your own fun, tell your own story"
Very well said. No person is the same as the next and I can give so many examples of something that's either fun or a chore depending on who does it. Gamification is not the only way to create fun. Sometimes you just need to know who your audience is and market your game towards them more effectively.
A "chore" is something that you are more or less required to do that you don't particularly want to do. When a player feels pressured to do something that they would otherwise avoid, that's a chore. Beating bosses leading up to the end-game boss isn't seen as a chore, because boss fights are generally considered highlights of a game.
Although there have been poorly implemented boss fights that feel like chores, particularly when the boss is a side-villain you've not been persuaded to care about and who is just gatekeeping the progression of the story you are interested in.
I think you guys were close but missed the key point: it’s about the EMOTIONAL reward, not the gameplay reward. Powerwash simulator can not be a chore if I have a relaxing time doing it and get a lil bit of dopamine at the end from seeing everything clean. At the end, you can’t design something to be absolutely a chore vs challenge because it all depends on the players context and state of mind; you can just design towards a particular type of player
I have a hypothesis that the feeling of exploration in a game comes from having a goal in mind, but making the conscious choice to put that goal on hold to pursue something else that happened to catch your interest. Or, to put it another way, choosing to prioritize an intrinsically-motivated action over an extrinsically-motivated one. Under that lens, Gannon and the Divine Beasts are a necessary part of Breath of the Wild’s feeling of exploration, because they give you an extrinsic goal that you can choose to ignore in favor of whatever intrinsic goal happens to strike you. The other key element of that feeling is putting lots of things between the player and their extrinsic goal that they might or might not choose to pursue instead.
This idea lines up with what I call “hiking trail design”. Usually, a hiking trail has an end goal in mind, a vista, waterfall, etc, but along the way there are other surprises to be found, wild life, bridges, etc.
I've been thinking a lot about chore/challenge with regard to resource management mechanics. For example, in Path of Exile 1, there is an optimization challenge with mana where you can enable passive buffs by "reserving" a percentage of your mana. These buffs are strong enough, and there are enough ways to invest in lowering reservation requirements, that players reserve 90+% of their mana for buffs and then check a few boxes that will enable infinite mana sustain for their abilities (a couple cost reduction mods on items and a single mana leech node on the passive tree, etc.) Which passive buffs you choose, what you do to lower their reservation requirements, etc. feels like an optimization challenge to me, whereas solving mana sustain is nearly automatic and feels like more of a chore--but it's relatively straightforward to complete. In PoE 2, passive buffs no longer reserve your mana, which gave designers the space to make mana matter more. Abilities now scale into very prohibitive mana costs at higher levels, which means players have to invest more in increasing their total mana pool and mana regeneration, they have to actually use a mana flask in the middle of combat situations, etc. And it seems like players are unhappy with this. They feel like they could easily solve the problem of mana in PoE1, but now they have this extensive mana chore to solve in PoE2 which requires a lot more power investment. My instinct is that the designers are doing the right thing in trying to make mana matter more, but I'm not sure how you design a system like that so that players feel intrinsic motivation to solve it and see it as a compelling challenge, vice feeling like this is an arbitrary extrinsic motivator imposed upon them by designers. When and how often do you want players to care about managing their resources? Only when they run out (Ooops, oom, gotta teleport and will brb)? Only when building a character or deck (what's the correct mana base for an Abzan EDH deck)? Do you want it to be a constant calculation in the primary game loop (I can only afford 3 heavy strikes and then I need to use my weaker resource-generator primary skill 6 times)? Anyway, cool video, lots of food for thought
As someone with no knowledge of either game, instinctively I feel more inclined to play the game that has mana reservation and mana sustain optimisation. That sounds really interesting. "High level spells cost more mana so increase your mana stat and make some consumables" is something that I'm making the assumption feels pretty similar to Skyrim, or any of the other similar RPGs, and so doesn't make me expect anything I haven't seen before.
I think it's more than just about the certainty or the reward, but also whether the mechanics are actually fun enough that players willingly engage with them and also whether the task you're given is obstructive to what you're trying to actually do at a given time. There's a reason why even if people praise the combat in an open world game or ARPG they will probably find it to be a chore, because combat in those type of games tends to be a distraction to the exploration or storytelling, and also because of the nature of those games the combat needs to be relatively less deep than it would be in a dedicated action game. Another example, imagine if you're trying to sell a platformer and you say, "The player will have to beat each level 4-5 times simply to clear the game." Some people might say, "That's asinine, people will find that really tedious" but I'm referring to Mario 64 - people still don't find it tedious because it's just asking them to engage with what they actually bought the game for. In the 6th console gen it was common for platformers to include combat systems which a lot of platformer fans would view as a chore because all it really amounts to is stopping the platforming in a platformer to focus on a shallow battle system. And the inverse is true - there are action games that might include platforming segments that a lot of action game fans really don't like because it's stopping the action for a segment that's trying to do something the game system was not built for. I think that it's more common in more recent AAA games because the AAA games are trying to be products "for everyone" which means that no matter what your priority is, no matter what parts of a specific game you might find are its strongest points, due to the scope of the game's focus it's usually going to include portions that are not what you want the game to be. Tears of the Kingdom has open world exploration, puzzle challenges, a crafting sandbox game, and a very primitive hack and slash combat system and more mechanics that all are trying to share the spotlight.
I believe the term for stuff like power wash simulator is "activity" Also, sudoku is a nice activity, but it would be a chore if you had to do it to get something.
There is also something satisfying about just doing a good job. I never checked out power wash simulator, but I'd consider hardspace shipbreaker to be in a similar genre (though you have a lot more to explore in the beginning). At some point though, you have seen it all and it is still satisfying to dissect a ship efficiently.
I think that was nail on the head, it's about not knowing the outcome. And it's actually a deeply philosophical or psychological point because we engage in things where we "kind of" know the outcome all the time and then we have these two camps of opinion: Did you just waste your time or was it worth it to feel that comfort of certainty again? Great vid!
Constructive criticism: I really enjoyed listening to you work out the answers to these problem as opposed to your usual speaking with certainty. It makes us smooth brained people feel like we came to the conclusion at the same time as you. Love your longer form content too. Thanks for everything!
I think you're right about uncertainty, but you almost always tie it to "outcome" as in "winning or not". Don't forget that exploration is also a pleasurable experience. Might be literal exploration of a new area or exploration of a different strategy or approach, as in "I know I can beat this level this way, but what about that way?".
The powerwash simulator discussion touched on something interesting. Where you guys plotted it on the Simulation Game spectrum, I wanted to offer an alternative view on this same idea. I give you the "Toy Game Spectrum". Hear me out... Toys are intrinsically fun. They are interactive, they illustrate cause and effect. They are designed for satisfying interactions. Most games involve toys in some way, but toys are not games in and of themselves. A ball is a toy. Basketball, Baseball - those are games. Chess/Go are on the far end of that spectrum. The pieces are minimally toy-like and most of the experience is largely engaging with the game itself. You can replace chess pieces with ascii characters and lose almost nothing of the overall experience. If all you're doing is shooting a gun in a void, the gun is a toy. It's satisfying to shoot, it interacts with the environment, it makes a satisfying sound and just feels interesting to play with... for a while. Powerwash simulator lies on the toy side of this spectrum. The water spray is an intrinsically fun tool/toy. Blasting mud off of shiny surfaces is a fun toy interaction. Having said that I think the point about uncertainty is extremely important here. How much fun you can have with a ball without making it into a game correlates directly to how much experience you have playing with balls. Children are far more likely to spend an extended amount of time just rolling a ball around than someone that knows what the outcome of those interactions will be. My running hypothesis is that games on the toy side of the Toy Game spectrum appeal much more to people new to (video)games in general. While experienced gamers are far more likely to seek out more game focused experiences.
This this this! I have the same thoughts and felt the need to make a reply and this one is a lot clearer and more well-thought out than what I could do. I'd think toys are more about the tactile experience of interaction than in any choices or goals. A game might be a ruleset that makes use of the toys-- like without the rules of Magic, a deck of cards may still be a pleasant toy to shuffle in the hands. In this way we might arrive closer to refining our description/definition of a game as a ruleset that provides a goal for playing with toys. (aside: it's why I like to snap cards when we play magic and I encourage others to do it too. imo it's an important part of the game to enjoy the feeling of playing with the card-toys in your hand and you can't do it with the digital form) Thank you for helping solidify my own thoughts with this post, I'd love to see more Distraction Makers conversations about this topic.
Maybr I'm missing some context for this discussion butI think this discussion is a bit confused. The dichotomy of chore or challenge is odd. Many chores are challenging (just ask a farmer). The certainty/uncertainty of reward as some criteria for chore vs non-chore is odd. Parents my give their kids chores with a surprise reward. The same is true with certainty/uncertainty of outcome if that is spelled out in terms of success vs failure. I have certainty about the outcome of many games I play but the activity is still play because it's fun (the central concept is fun but I haven't heard yall mention it). Also, people can be uncertain about the outcome of a chore as when someone tries to fix whatever is wrong with their car. So uncertainty of outcome doesn't seem relevant to whether an activity is a chore or not. A meaningful decision isn't relevant either. Some chores are forced upon children but many chores are chosen (meaningfully) by adults. Honestly, the topic of what is a game and what is a chore is going to be extremely difficult to answer. One of the most famous philosophers (Wittgenstein) tried to define what a game was and he kind of gave up and settled on some vague definition involving the concept of play and family resemblance relationships. Many games just are fun activities but fun isn't a property of the activity so much as what the actor feels while doing the activity. Chores are often unfun (though not always like chainsawing 😊) jobs (chosen or not) that are a means to something else a person desires (even if the end isn't a reward as when a child just desires their parents to be satisfied so they can do something else) and so not usually an activity one would just go out and do for no other end/goal. But even that definition probably has problems. Who knows what a job is or what fun is or things as basic as means and ends and desires are! Therefore, activities in games or a game itself can feel like a chore because it isn't fun but it's not an actual job so it can't be a chore unless you're working in QA or something.
A possible answer is in the correlation between the meaningful decisions and the unpredictable outcome. Fetch quests in mmo, for example are notably a chore because no matter what you do, the prize is usually the same. Imagine a fetch quest that instead of asking you to take 20 pelt, it gives you 10 minutes to take as many pelt as you can, now every decision you make during the activity can improve the outcome, and that outcome is also not predictable because of so many factor besides merely Win/lose condition. I think at the end of the day players want to express themselves while playing a game in multiple ways, they want to test their reflexes, their tactic, thier strategies, their deduction skills and their social skills too. Everytime this expressivity do not inluence the outcome, that can be classified as a chore or a tax, as i usually define them.
I love how unscripted this one felt. You could witness you all working through the problem as you talked. Great discussion. I'd add that many games that could easily feel like a chore can get by on not feeling like a chore because or their storytelling and/or art direction. You touched on storytelling briefly, but I think that can carry a game pretty far by being compelling even if the gameplay loop itself isn't very novel.
The d6 example is interesting to me because my initial reaction was that just rolling a die by itself sounds boring, then I remembered at the start of every D&D session I'll roll all my dice until they hit a max roll.
BOTW is a good example actually, for me the entire game just felt like a chore because it all revolved around resource systems - weapon durability and food - that were poorly integrated into the experience and felt like obstacles designed to demand fetch-thing busywork, rather than a true natural incentive to make new discoveries. My key goal was to get the master sword, which was solely because I read that it didn't break. Which meant I needed to increase stamina beyond an arbitrary threshold to unlock it. Which meant I had to clear a particular number of shrines to get the stamina. Which meant I had to clear a particular number of puzzles. A game like BOTW should be all about bottom-up motivation; the player naturally wants to do the small things and that results in doing the big things. BOTW itself was for me all top-down; I was playing solely to get one particular thing that I hoped would make the game fun.
Strangely, all of "BotW" felt like a chore because it was *too* open for me, and I felt burdened by having to curate my entire experience from start to finish. In contrast, more typical Action RPGs (Assassin's Creeds, Red Dead Redemption, Cyberpunk 2077) do a really nice job of balancing extrinsic and intrinsic motivation which lets me flow between the two when I get my fill of one or the other.
The slot-machine challenge vs. chore is very interesting. It seems to me that there's a meaningful difference between uncertainty and a lack of knowledge about the possible outcomes. A slot machine without real money could still be exciting if the range of possible outcomes remains unknown (maybe it flashes lights, makes sounds, etc.). However, once you have a better sense of what the possible outcomes are, the uncertainty over which specific outcome will occur is generally not compelling. Uncertainty becomes more about managing the player's understanding of what the range of outcome could be from the task
this was an interestingly timed upload for me because I just started Balatro, and applying this conversation to that game feels like a missed opportunity.
I have always considered chance based gambling (slots specifically) to be a chore. But I know plenty of people who don't consider it a challenge, but still consider it compelling as a "game".
I think you're on the right track by evaluating the uncertainty of a choice. In the example of gambling/slot machines, I wouldn't say it's either a chore or a challenge. If you were assured to win the big prize, sooner or later, it could be considered a chore; but in gambling you don't have a guarantee, or rather, you might lose more than you win so you need to choose when you'll stop. At the same time, the decision to stop isn't challenging at all, you can stop any time and nothing will prevent it.
"A casino where I'm winning, I must be in heaven! A casino where I always win, this must really be hell!" - A paraphrased quote that comes to you courtesy of... the scary door.
One of the MANY issues with TotK is the repetition. Making food/potions requires each material to be selected every time something is made and starting up the animation every time. Making a vehicle is largely slow and requires either going through the same creation process or farming zonite in large quantities. And there's no real reward for these tasks psychologically. If they were undertaken to take out a Gleeock to free a path for people to travel, thee Gleeock comes back on the next red moon. Nothing feels final. I started the game the week it came out and haven't beaten it yet because it's just so slow and tedious.
in a game of chance, talking about the roll a d6 example, its interesting how "skill" is prescribed to a dice if it rolls well in ttrpgs. There is a thing called dice jail, a little container that you put your dice that has been rolling bad. The the existence of dice jails dont show that skill is attributed to dice rolls then what is? Now if everything is balanced then it is still a game of chance and can easily be viewed as a chore, but the prescribed skill seems to be a big factor in keeping the game fun.
Not really though, dice jail is a meme, everyone really knows that dice when rolled properly are for human purposes just plain random. Now, say "because your character has 12 Strength, you add +1 to your die result", and it *does* start to feel like your choices matter, even if the game is balanced around making that +1 break even.
@yurisei6732 but there is a great power that comes from pattern recognition. Psychology getting involved creates an unconscious thought of "dice skill". But in only a functional reality, you are completely correct.
Would love to see the concept of Novelty discussed in this context, especially as it intersects with Uncertainty. Uncertainty in a slot machine subgame might have initial novelty, but that novelty could drop off hard and fast, whereas power washing has a largely constant, near-zero uncertainty, but the incentive of graduating to more complex...things to power wash (?) is a kind of novelty that has some uncertainty built in. I dunno, seems like some more nuance is needed in this case.
Ultimately you pursue goals because of some sort of intrinsic motivation, so there is no actual dichotomy between "intrinsic" and "extrinsic" motivation. Which causes the whole framing of the conversation to be off from the beginning. Most of the time when people talk about it it's "intrinsic motivation is when I think something is emotionally rewarding, extrinsic motivation is when it's something I don't find emotionally rewarding." I didn't find the exploration in BotW rewarding, so exploring the nooks and crannies of it is a chore to me. If I believed that I would fulfill my intrinsic desires for social belonging and acceptance then I might find myself "extrinsically" motivated to do more exploration in the game in the hopes I might actually stumble on something that changes my opinion and allows me to fit in better with the seemingly large majority of people who like the game. So if "explore every nook and cranny of BotW" is a goal that, for me, would require what we call "extrinsic" motivation to accomplish, but many people find it enjoyable to do so and did so because it fulfilled their "intrinsic" motivation, then how can there be any meaningful or objective way to describe one vs the other? Exploring Zelda is a skinner box, in that you do a chore (pull a lever) by exploring somewhere and then see if you get to see something cool or experience something novel or fun. Whether the skinner box is rewarding is entirely subjective. I'm intrinsically motivated to experience good pacing, game design, and level design, so I find open world games awful - Elden Ring would have been a much better game with a much smaller, more refined (and interconnected) world. They already had perfected the "this is hard, I'll go try somewhere else" formula with Demons' Souls, making it an open world just put a bunch of padding and repeated content in the way of the fun stuff. Killing Asylum Demon #8 or clearing Catacomb #20 is a chore now, but I was still initially intrinsically motivated to do so because I historically have found it rewarding to experience everything From Software games have to offer.
On one hand I think the BotW vs TotK comparison was good since BotW certainly on boarded players better. On the other hand, I couldn't finish either of these games because they both just felt like a chore. TotK just felt like a chore much faster. And really I sort of feel that way about most AAA games that come out now. It is just a bunch mini games layered on top of each other and padded out with a bunch of tutorials, slow walking exposition scenes, and other bloat to hit an arbitrary game length goal.
I think 21:14 is why when slot machines get included in broader video games, like the bonus games in Yoshi's Island or the Final Fantasy characters who use slot machines for their Limit Breaks, they often give you a bit more control over the slots, like letting the player manually stop each individual slot, because it's not really a game (or minigame as it were).
This is like really good, informative funny, engaging and I love that it has expanded past just mtg into like core game design topics, 10/10 but also like is there a way to have an hourish long video? I would love that
It seems like the bro on the left was focusing his argument on the pivot that, skill mandates challenge - but the less skillful you are, the less that matters. People download slot games on their phone all the time. I believe chore vs entertainment is based on what a person finds compelling - challenge, novelty, exploration, comfort, pride, catharsis ... many different answers. If it's intrinsic, it won't feel like a chore, and there can be a lot of different intrinsic answers.
The major aspects that makes something a chore, in my mind, is an arbitrary requirement to repeat the same, or essentially the same, piece of content over and over. In tasks like grinding for resources or doing dailies there's no appreciable sense of progression beyond getting a number to tick up. These tasks are generally quite immersion breaking and take you away from what you want to be doing. A stronger game doesn't waste your time and stays on track with whatever it's main theme is. Consider if you were reading a book but before you could go to the next chapter you had to reread the last page of the current chapter 150 times, or once a day for twenty days. Is it reading sure, is it fun, nope.
Here's a thought about simulation "games". They can still suffer from chores. Recently I picked up Star Trucker, which is basically marketed as American Tuck Simulator, but in space. Which on paper should be one of my favourite sims - I have hundreds of hours in various truck simulators, I love flying space ships, I really liked the art style and music. And yet I really couldn't get into it. The issue was, they tried too hard to make it a "good game". They probably felt, that just flying around delivering cargo was not enough, so they started adding on mechanics. They made it so that the truck can get damaged and you have to get out and repair it, they made every system in it (gravity, oxygen, etc.) run on literal batteries which run out constantly and you have to keep replacing them and so on. But all these mechanics just felt like chores, which is funny because the whole game is in principle a chore - that's the whole genre. But the difference is that the whole driving/piloting part is intrinsically what motivates fans of the genre to play these games, and none of the other mechanics added anything to that experience, in fact they just gotten in the way because you had to stop and go do something unrelated every couple of minutes. The lens of intrinsic/extrinsic motivation still applies to "chore games".
@@distractionmakers I'd say not enough, it was definitely more game-y than something like ATS, but it made it a worse sim. The battery minigame did add uncertainty of outcome and meaningful decisions, but it also distracted from the core simulation. Simulators have different set of requirements that make them good. I'd say main thing for a sim is that the action they have you perform is intrinsically enjoyable (at least for the target audience, which is why sims are more niche than games).
I think a chore are those quest in WoW where they told me to go fetch 10 lions heads and I knew I could take them on a 1 on 1 but after killing ten lions I only get 2 hearts and now I have to wait for those to respawn in like 5 to 10 minutes. Not knowing if I'm gonna get the loot doesn't make it fun or interesting.
Breath of the wild felt like a chore all the way down. Because weapons broke so often so quickly I didn't fight. Because I didn't fight. I didn't get good at fighting. Because I didn't get good at fighting fighting, the required fight was tedious and frustrating. The Divine beast was bad. Finding the master swords was tedious. It just waste your time a lot
What's fun for one person isn't fun for another. What's fun now may not be fun later. What's not fun now may be fun later. And so forth. Some norms have been established in gaming, but ultimately what's "fun" is rarely set in stone. It's subjective, it depends on the context and it often changes over time. For me most turn-based games used to not be fun for most of my life. Recently I started playing BG3 and I'm enjoying it - not just in spite of it being turn-based but often because of that.
1. I don’t care if it’s a game but 2. Power wash simulator can be a game. It has a goal. It can provide challenge, do I get it perfectly clean, how long does it take me? Did I clean more things or clean things faster than my friends.
I think you should be careful accounting for replay-ability when considering the uncertain outcome criteria, because many games can quickly fail that test on the second playthrough. Skyrim’s dungeons and enemy spawns, for example, would be uncertain to new players, but an experienced player would know precisely where both are. Yet other things, like enemy or chest loot, can have a degree of randomness and therefore uncertainty.
A chore is any task that a person does not want to do. You can take a job task and turn it from a chore by gamifying it but also by simply making it fun. People can enjoy grinding because its fun for them. Its not a chore for them. A challenge is not opposite of a chore. Challenge is one *aspect* of a task that affects how much people enjoy it. But some people do not enjoy a challenge and others enjoy a higher level of challenge. Level of challenge only relates to a chore by helping to define fun. Some users might find something to be a chore because it being too easy makes it not fun. A chore can be a game by your definition or not a game by your definition. That does not matter. There are only the below requirements: 1. It is a task 2. Person does not want to do it 3. Person feels obligated to do it.
The problem here is that you are desperately trying to tie your definition of game to this question when chore does not have to be a game task. A movie can be fun and watching an HR training video game be a chore. Chore, challenge and game are all mindsets in this situation.
I disagree with uncertainty as the right requirement. If a can choose to flip a coin 1000 times and if I get 700 heads I win…. That’s uncertain. It’s also ‘hard’ to do… it I bet it feels like a chore.
"When does something you are being told become a chore or when is it engaging?" The big one is to ensure there are consequences, risks, rewards to the paths and choices made or ignored, inaction has consequences just as much as actions take. I'll site Lautrec from dark souls, whether you want to free him or not, he will kill the fire keeper, but if you kill him you gain an advantage. So let's look at skyrim, the game would feel much different if there was a time limit between when world actions would happen. The world needs to progress without player input for large worlds to give players that anxiety of wasting time. Why aren't you just going to sit for 24 hours and get your shout and powers back, or fast traveling on foot rather than a carriage, time in the world is a knob many people either have lost or just don't really factor in anymore
My grandma plays mobile slots with no money. Just, so many plays per day, pull the lever, get points. I've asked what she can exchange the points for, but she doesn't seem to register the total chance based "gameplay" and the essentially unearned and useless points reward as non-meaningful, as I do.
I think Gavin has a point about randomness making something cease to be a chore. In my mind, a chore has to be something that's a forgone conclusion. I have X that must be achieved, I do Y to achieve it. If doing Y only achieves X sometimes, it isn't exactly a chore anymore. I'd call it more of an activity maybe? Like the dice toy game example is very good. Is it a game? not really, at least not a very good one, but it could be a form entertainment, a decision making tool, etc. But I guess if doing Y enough times guarantees X, it is still a chore? It's an interesting question. I guess if you're *allowed* to do Y as many times as you want, it's maybe a chore, but if I only get to roll the die 10 times it's... something else.
I feel like you guys missed the mark on intrinsic vs extrinsic games. You compared BOTW to TOTK which I think was a mistake because the two games are so similar, and in my opinion, are heavily intrinsic based. Extrinsic actions are "I want to do action A so that I get B." Intrinsic actions are "I want to do A because I enjoy doing A." In BOTW, a lot of players will slide down hills on their shield or jump off cliffs and glide because it's fun. That's intrinsic. If they are doing it so they can reach a location faster to complete an objective that's extrinsic. BOTW offers little reward for defeating enemies around the map, and so there is little extrinsic value for fighting them, and yet they are there for the players who want to fight monsters because fighting monsters is fun. In most other games, the player is given EXP and gold and permanent item upgrades to extrinsically motivate them to kill enemies.
4:20 I didn’t think the Divine Beasts were a chore, but I did think having to go meet the people near them was a chore. I’m tryna save the princess not the people 😆
I know I have a problem with games when they do the "do mundane task over and over to get your reward", especially when there is no unique challenge involved with them. Games like Starfield come to mind, with their "challenges" to get the next perk level ("kill 50 ships in space combat" or "kill 100 guys with a shotgun"), as it doesn't necessarily feel like you are improving while doing those things skill-wise, and you need to do them to progress, as well as being excessive amounts of them. Not only that, but they feel outside the actual immersion of the game itself, making them stand out as a chore, rather than a challenge you want to complete. Honestly, nearly everything about that game is the definition of a chore, rather than an interesting game, heh. MMOs are pretty terrible with this as well, with their "kill 5 bears" or "collect 20 wolf skins", as the experience of doing it beyond the first never really changes, and feels more like padding, than actual interesting gameplay.
I might be in be in the minority here, but TOTK felt WAY more like a chore compared to BOTW. I don't ever remember getting bored in BOTW because there was a satisfying loop of seeing a place I thought looked interesting and then getting rewarded for exploring that place. There was a lot more intrinsically motivated exploration, as the game pushed you towards going off the beaten path to check out that cool thing in the distance. TOTK **really** doesn't reward exploration. A lot of times I would do the BOTW "check out the cool thing in the distance" to be met with absolutely nothing. Instead, TOTK just kinda slams you in the face with a bunch of busy work side quests. I felt really bored in the mid game with TOTK in a way that I never did with BOTW. It's weird because technically there is *more* stuff to do, but because a lot of that stuff was boring as hell it really felt like checking off a list of chores. BOTW focus on intrinsically motivated exploration I think vastly outpaces TOTK's chore list design.
Hiii! Love your podcast! So...following the chore // challange argument...Warhammer could be a huge chore and gambling game with a layer of art and strategy? I found really interesting how much it weight the perception of the subject in contrast with the real object. Example: when people in w40k get a lot of 6s in rolls usually celebrate as they made it, but it was just luck and probability. They feel they "made it". Interesting 🤔
I think one thing you missed with uncertainty of reward part, is the kind of uncertainty involved. Do I know what rewards are or not? I might be more excited to repeat a task until I've exhausted possible rewards, so even though next reward is uncertain it's quite certain what it might be. Also how you powerwash is a meaningful decision, even if quite small, since just randomly spraying might not be as effective.
This conversation feels weird to me, because I grew up on JRPGs... like, the only uncertainty was usually in the story. To this day I prefer gathering and crafting in games where I can just endlessly see numbers go up - Disgaea is basically my bottomless well of entertainment. I also enjoy games where I can find ways to break the systems and become super powerful early on, so there's clearly value in power fantasy. Collecting, as well - that's where gacha games get most people.
Interesting discussion, as usual. Instead of formulating things in terms of "uncertainty," have you considered instead treating *information* as a reward in itself?
I think this one could have benefitted from either a recap with finalized thoughts (or a subsequent episode that presents final thoughts and conclusions) or more planning upfront. I personally though the discussion was interesting, but felt the conclusions were not easy to parse and didn't seem firm. Questions were answered, but answers didn't seem to be well identified.
Two things : 1. I think you're butting against the fact that games are a form of art, so their meaning is up to the audience. Yes, there are things the author can do to turn something from 'boring' to 'fun' but some of that distinction comes down to the player's gut feeling of what is or isn't cool. Also there's no catch-all for this, some players will respond positively to extreme challenge while others will roll their eyes and quit. 2. I think with this Powerwash Simulator (and most simulators with little to no gamefication) you're looking at the 'toyness' of a game. My understanding is that a Toy is an aspect of the game that has little to no meaning in itself but for some reason (usually juicy feedback) compels to player to engage with it for its own sake. For instance, flipping a coin can be fun in and off itself, regardless of the result and what it means for the game as a whole.
1 minute in and I'll finish the vid obv but Ultima Online felt very intrinsic in its nature...maybe that's why it gripped me so hard and why I'm always chasing that feeling and it's never fulfilled... (also, holy shit didn't realize there's a Trinsic pun to be had here)
Souls games have a mastery element. The combat is fast enough that engaging the threats in the setting, including bosses, leads to developing your skill and as that improves, your mastery itself is its own reward. This is different from testing your skill. The two things, development vs testing flow back and fourth even.
21:42 the thing you guys keep dancimg around but not quite land on is your investment in the decision. Gambling games or random chance games can be quite enjoyable of the perceoved risk reward is worth it, how much time am i investing in each outcome? A slot machine that only asks for a quarter and hand crank is often very low investment for each outcome which makes the chance for the reward more appealing and the risk of losing less detrimental. Think about a hard boss battle with an insanely long unskippable intro cutscene before the battle, each time you die you have to sit through the same unskippable cutscene before you can try again. The investment is higher and therefore affects a players enjoyment if they have to retry for a better outcome.
I feel like trying to create a binary (whether you were intentionally tying to, I don't know, but that seems like the result) between "challenge or chore", is counterproductive. The premise is kinda faulty, because it's probably not a binary: something can be a challenge and feel like a chore; something can be a chore but still satisfying or fun. You just kind of dismissed PowerWash Simulator (maybe fairly) without exploring why maybe it works. You mention "toy" games, and that's kinda it, I think. A good toy may have no challenge and often relies on certain outcome---in fact the expected outcome is what is often satisfying---but can still be fun. It's those popping fidget toys. There's a certain kinesthetic or aethetic quality that makes those things satisfying.
@@distractionmakers I just mean, specifically, that everything in Factorio feels like a chore. You never feel like you *cant* do anything. Its such a strange game.
As a korean mmo nerd i love doing repetitive tasks with friends its my favorite thing xD. Grind baby grind. Its especially fun when a new one releases and you get to speed run progress trying to hit the upper limits of whats possible.
I think you guys were close but missed the key point: it’s about the EMOTIONAL reward, not the gameplay reward. Powerwash simulator can not be a chore if I have a relaxing time doing it and get a lil bit of dopamine at the end from seeing everything clean. At the end, you can’t design something to be absolutely a chore vs challenge because it all depends on the players context and state of mind; you can just design towards a particular type of player
Its so hard to find intellectual mtg content that isn't commander and isn't just streaming gameplay of other formats verses discussing them. This channel is a gem.
yes, they rarely even bring commander up
Eternal Durdles and Eternal Glory talk about the legacy format a lot. There are often intellectual topics brought up.
Rhystic Studies is my favorite
Check out Rhystic Studies and Magic Mics for great Magic content that isn't commander focused or gameplay focused.
Honestly this channel is either all commander hating or barely talks about Magic at all.
it's because smart people don't play pay-to-win games.
AS much as I love magic and trashing commander, I'm really enjoying these broader videogame related discussions.
I think you may be creating a false dichotomy here between challenge and chore. You even started on that path with power wash simulator. That is not a challenge, there is no uncertainty in outcome, but it is still compelling. I think you may need to expand the discussion to things like, "does this game offer a sense of discovery. Be that discovery of outcome, mechanics, strategies, lore, etc." Or, "does this game offer a means of expression." And ultimately as Tom Sawyer noted ages ago, what may be a chore to one could be an engaging means of play to another.
This is definitely a topic that could use some further discussion!
it's all a matter of understand the motivation of your player and understating you the designer is the one that sets it.
whatever you expect the player to want to do at any given moment is the intrinsic motivation, challenge or not.
chore is everything you force them to do against that.
but it is the design of the whole experience and the moment to moment gameplay that defines that motivation by setting the player's expectation, based on what you told them to expect.
power wash simulator has no challenge because that was never set up between player and designer. the "agreement" was always about doing this single activity the whole game, all the way to the marketing and PR so that is the motivation the player is gonna have, and anything you ask them to do that goes against it is automatically a chore, challenging or not.
BotW has a lot of chore gameplay because the promise was always freedom. you tell the player to do whatever they want and mediate their own fun so don't be surprised if they find it a chore to be forced to kill 4 almost identical, boring bosses in order to progress the narrative. that was never in the agreement of "find your own fun, tell your own story"
"Expression" was definitely something I was thinking about when they talked about what makes an activity compelling
Very well said. No person is the same as the next and I can give so many examples of something that's either fun or a chore depending on who does it.
Gamification is not the only way to create fun. Sometimes you just need to know who your audience is and market your game towards them more effectively.
Game vs Activity
All games are activities.
Not all activities are games.
A "chore" is something that you are more or less required to do that you don't particularly want to do.
When a player feels pressured to do something that they would otherwise avoid, that's a chore.
Beating bosses leading up to the end-game boss isn't seen as a chore, because boss fights are generally considered highlights of a game.
Although there have been poorly implemented boss fights that feel like chores, particularly when the boss is a side-villain you've not been persuaded to care about and who is just gatekeeping the progression of the story you are interested in.
I think you guys were close but missed the key point: it’s about the EMOTIONAL reward, not the gameplay reward. Powerwash simulator can not be a chore if I have a relaxing time doing it and get a lil bit of dopamine at the end from seeing everything clean. At the end, you can’t design something to be absolutely a chore vs challenge because it all depends on the players context and state of mind; you can just design towards a particular type of player
I have a hypothesis that the feeling of exploration in a game comes from having a goal in mind, but making the conscious choice to put that goal on hold to pursue something else that happened to catch your interest. Or, to put it another way, choosing to prioritize an intrinsically-motivated action over an extrinsically-motivated one. Under that lens, Gannon and the Divine Beasts are a necessary part of Breath of the Wild’s feeling of exploration, because they give you an extrinsic goal that you can choose to ignore in favor of whatever intrinsic goal happens to strike you. The other key element of that feeling is putting lots of things between the player and their extrinsic goal that they might or might not choose to pursue instead.
This idea lines up with what I call “hiking trail design”. Usually, a hiking trail has an end goal in mind, a vista, waterfall, etc, but along the way there are other surprises to be found, wild life, bridges, etc.
I've been thinking a lot about chore/challenge with regard to resource management mechanics.
For example, in Path of Exile 1, there is an optimization challenge with mana where you can enable passive buffs by "reserving" a percentage of your mana. These buffs are strong enough, and there are enough ways to invest in lowering reservation requirements, that players reserve 90+% of their mana for buffs and then check a few boxes that will enable infinite mana sustain for their abilities (a couple cost reduction mods on items and a single mana leech node on the passive tree, etc.) Which passive buffs you choose, what you do to lower their reservation requirements, etc. feels like an optimization challenge to me, whereas solving mana sustain is nearly automatic and feels like more of a chore--but it's relatively straightforward to complete.
In PoE 2, passive buffs no longer reserve your mana, which gave designers the space to make mana matter more. Abilities now scale into very prohibitive mana costs at higher levels, which means players have to invest more in increasing their total mana pool and mana regeneration, they have to actually use a mana flask in the middle of combat situations, etc. And it seems like players are unhappy with this. They feel like they could easily solve the problem of mana in PoE1, but now they have this extensive mana chore to solve in PoE2 which requires a lot more power investment.
My instinct is that the designers are doing the right thing in trying to make mana matter more, but I'm not sure how you design a system like that so that players feel intrinsic motivation to solve it and see it as a compelling challenge, vice feeling like this is an arbitrary extrinsic motivator imposed upon them by designers.
When and how often do you want players to care about managing their resources? Only when they run out (Ooops, oom, gotta teleport and will brb)? Only when building a character or deck (what's the correct mana base for an Abzan EDH deck)? Do you want it to be a constant calculation in the primary game loop (I can only afford 3 heavy strikes and then I need to use my weaker resource-generator primary skill 6 times)?
Anyway, cool video, lots of food for thought
As someone with no knowledge of either game, instinctively I feel more inclined to play the game that has mana reservation and mana sustain optimisation. That sounds really interesting. "High level spells cost more mana so increase your mana stat and make some consumables" is something that I'm making the assumption feels pretty similar to Skyrim, or any of the other similar RPGs, and so doesn't make me expect anything I haven't seen before.
funny that your example of a metaphorical carrot was a literal celery
I think it's more than just about the certainty or the reward, but also whether the mechanics are actually fun enough that players willingly engage with them and also whether the task you're given is obstructive to what you're trying to actually do at a given time.
There's a reason why even if people praise the combat in an open world game or ARPG they will probably find it to be a chore, because combat in those type of games tends to be a distraction to the exploration or storytelling, and also because of the nature of those games the combat needs to be relatively less deep than it would be in a dedicated action game.
Another example, imagine if you're trying to sell a platformer and you say, "The player will have to beat each level 4-5 times simply to clear the game." Some people might say, "That's asinine, people will find that really tedious" but I'm referring to Mario 64 - people still don't find it tedious because it's just asking them to engage with what they actually bought the game for.
In the 6th console gen it was common for platformers to include combat systems which a lot of platformer fans would view as a chore because all it really amounts to is stopping the platforming in a platformer to focus on a shallow battle system. And the inverse is true - there are action games that might include platforming segments that a lot of action game fans really don't like because it's stopping the action for a segment that's trying to do something the game system was not built for.
I think that it's more common in more recent AAA games because the AAA games are trying to be products "for everyone" which means that no matter what your priority is, no matter what parts of a specific game you might find are its strongest points, due to the scope of the game's focus it's usually going to include portions that are not what you want the game to be. Tears of the Kingdom has open world exploration, puzzle challenges, a crafting sandbox game, and a very primitive hack and slash combat system and more mechanics that all are trying to share the spotlight.
the "skill" in gambling games is persistence - that's why it's so addictive
I believe the term for stuff like power wash simulator is "activity"
Also, sudoku is a nice activity, but it would be a chore if you had to do it to get something.
There is also something satisfying about just doing a good job. I never checked out power wash simulator, but I'd consider hardspace shipbreaker to be in a similar genre (though you have a lot more to explore in the beginning). At some point though, you have seen it all and it is still satisfying to dissect a ship efficiently.
Idk about that, I can think of quite a few parts of games that are "do challenge to get reward" that would have been much more fun as sudoku puzzles.
I think that was nail on the head, it's about not knowing the outcome. And it's actually a deeply philosophical or psychological point because we engage in things where we "kind of" know the outcome all the time and then we have these two camps of opinion: Did you just waste your time or was it worth it to feel that comfort of certainty again? Great vid!
Constructive criticism: I really enjoyed listening to you work out the answers to these problem as opposed to your usual speaking with certainty. It makes us smooth brained people feel like we came to the conclusion at the same time as you. Love your longer form content too. Thanks for everything!
lol I actually didn't like it. Like to me it felt like they were just spitballing
I think you're right about uncertainty, but you almost always tie it to "outcome" as in "winning or not". Don't forget that exploration is also a pleasurable experience. Might be literal exploration of a new area or exploration of a different strategy or approach, as in "I know I can beat this level this way, but what about that way?".
The powerwash simulator discussion touched on something interesting. Where you guys plotted it on the Simulation Game spectrum, I wanted to offer an alternative view on this same idea.
I give you the "Toy Game Spectrum". Hear me out... Toys are intrinsically fun. They are interactive, they illustrate cause and effect. They are designed for satisfying interactions.
Most games involve toys in some way, but toys are not games in and of themselves. A ball is a toy. Basketball, Baseball - those are games. Chess/Go are on the far end of that spectrum. The pieces are minimally toy-like and most of the experience is largely engaging with the game itself. You can replace chess pieces with ascii characters and lose almost nothing of the overall experience. If all you're doing is shooting a gun in a void, the gun is a toy. It's satisfying to shoot, it interacts with the environment, it makes a satisfying sound and just feels interesting to play with... for a while.
Powerwash simulator lies on the toy side of this spectrum. The water spray is an intrinsically fun tool/toy. Blasting mud off of shiny surfaces is a fun toy interaction. Having said that I think the point about uncertainty is extremely important here. How much fun you can have with a ball without making it into a game correlates directly to how much experience you have playing with balls. Children are far more likely to spend an extended amount of time just rolling a ball around than someone that knows what the outcome of those interactions will be.
My running hypothesis is that games on the toy side of the Toy Game spectrum appeal much more to people new to (video)games in general. While experienced gamers are far more likely to seek out more game focused experiences.
This this this! I have the same thoughts and felt the need to make a reply and this one is a lot clearer and more well-thought out than what I could do.
I'd think toys are more about the tactile experience of interaction than in any choices or goals. A game might be a ruleset that makes use of the toys-- like without the rules of Magic, a deck of cards may still be a pleasant toy to shuffle in the hands.
In this way we might arrive closer to refining our description/definition of a game as a ruleset that provides a goal for playing with toys.
(aside: it's why I like to snap cards when we play magic and I encourage others to do it too. imo it's an important part of the game to enjoy the feeling of playing with the card-toys in your hand and you can't do it with the digital form)
Thank you for helping solidify my own thoughts with this post, I'd love to see more Distraction Makers conversations about this topic.
Beating a boss in Elden Ring. The motivation could also include the discovery of the mystery beyond them too.
Or the shear spectacle when it's a good one. Like 'oh this is gonna be an epic fight'. However that fades after you get whomped 10 times in a row.
Great talk fellas. Very compelling stuff. Every aspiring game designer should watch all your Vids
Maybr I'm missing some context for this discussion butI think this discussion is a bit confused. The dichotomy of chore or challenge is odd. Many chores are challenging (just ask a farmer). The certainty/uncertainty of reward as some criteria for chore vs non-chore is odd. Parents my give their kids chores with a surprise reward. The same is true with certainty/uncertainty of outcome if that is spelled out in terms of success vs failure. I have certainty about the outcome of many games I play but the activity is still play because it's fun (the central concept is fun but I haven't heard yall mention it). Also, people can be uncertain about the outcome of a chore as when someone tries to fix whatever is wrong with their car. So uncertainty of outcome doesn't seem relevant to whether an activity is a chore or not. A meaningful decision isn't relevant either. Some chores are forced upon children but many chores are chosen (meaningfully) by adults. Honestly, the topic of what is a game and what is a chore is going to be extremely difficult to answer. One of the most famous philosophers (Wittgenstein) tried to define what a game was and he kind of gave up and settled on some vague definition involving the concept of play and family resemblance relationships. Many games just are fun activities but fun isn't a property of the activity so much as what the actor feels while doing the activity. Chores are often unfun (though not always like chainsawing 😊) jobs (chosen or not) that are a means to something else a person desires (even if the end isn't a reward as when a child just desires their parents to be satisfied so they can do something else) and so not usually an activity one would just go out and do for no other end/goal. But even that definition probably has problems. Who knows what a job is or what fun is or things as basic as means and ends and desires are!
Therefore, activities in games or a game itself can feel like a chore because it isn't fun but it's not an actual job so it can't be a chore unless you're working in QA or something.
Where do you get your Counterspell Tshirt?
This was a fantastic episode! The whole power wash simulator discusion cracked me up.
Like Grinding mobs to get Ivan's best sword in Golden Sun!
The two of you said “result” and “outcome” Sooo many times, unironically as if they aren’t synonyms, that it made me giggle.
A possible answer is in the correlation between the meaningful decisions and the unpredictable outcome.
Fetch quests in mmo, for example are notably a chore because no matter what you do, the prize is usually the same. Imagine a fetch quest that instead of asking you to take 20 pelt, it gives you 10 minutes to take as many pelt as you can, now every decision you make during the activity can improve the outcome, and that outcome is also not predictable because of so many factor besides merely Win/lose condition.
I think at the end of the day players want to express themselves while playing a game in multiple ways, they want to test their reflexes, their tactic, thier strategies, their deduction skills and their social skills too. Everytime this expressivity do not inluence the outcome, that can be classified as a chore or a tax, as i usually define them.
Ngl these videos getting kinda good…
always has been
TENZI is a surprisingly popular 'game' that is definitely a chore. I think a really valid question is why are some chores fun for some people?
I love how unscripted this one felt. You could witness you all working through the problem as you talked. Great discussion. I'd add that many games that could easily feel like a chore can get by on not feeling like a chore because or their storytelling and/or art direction. You touched on storytelling briefly, but I think that can carry a game pretty far by being compelling even if the gameplay loop itself isn't very novel.
The d6 example is interesting to me because my initial reaction was that just rolling a die by itself sounds boring, then I remembered at the start of every D&D session I'll roll all my dice until they hit a max roll.
BOTW is a good example actually, for me the entire game just felt like a chore because it all revolved around resource systems - weapon durability and food - that were poorly integrated into the experience and felt like obstacles designed to demand fetch-thing busywork, rather than a true natural incentive to make new discoveries. My key goal was to get the master sword, which was solely because I read that it didn't break. Which meant I needed to increase stamina beyond an arbitrary threshold to unlock it. Which meant I had to clear a particular number of shrines to get the stamina. Which meant I had to clear a particular number of puzzles. A game like BOTW should be all about bottom-up motivation; the player naturally wants to do the small things and that results in doing the big things. BOTW itself was for me all top-down; I was playing solely to get one particular thing that I hoped would make the game fun.
Strangely, all of "BotW" felt like a chore because it was *too* open for me, and I felt burdened by having to curate my entire experience from start to finish. In contrast, more typical Action RPGs (Assassin's Creeds, Red Dead Redemption, Cyberpunk 2077) do a really nice job of balancing extrinsic and intrinsic motivation which lets me flow between the two when I get my fill of one or the other.
The slot-machine challenge vs. chore is very interesting. It seems to me that there's a meaningful difference between uncertainty and a lack of knowledge about the possible outcomes.
A slot machine without real money could still be exciting if the range of possible outcomes remains unknown (maybe it flashes lights, makes sounds, etc.). However, once you have a better sense of what the possible outcomes are, the uncertainty over which specific outcome will occur is generally not compelling.
Uncertainty becomes more about managing the player's understanding of what the range of outcome could be from the task
this was an interestingly timed upload for me because I just started Balatro, and applying this conversation to that game feels like a missed opportunity.
I have always considered chance based gambling (slots specifically) to be a chore. But I know plenty of people who don't consider it a challenge, but still consider it compelling as a "game".
I think you're on the right track by evaluating the uncertainty of a choice. In the example of gambling/slot machines, I wouldn't say it's either a chore or a challenge.
If you were assured to win the big prize, sooner or later, it could be considered a chore; but in gambling you don't have a guarantee, or rather, you might lose more than you win so you need to choose when you'll stop. At the same time, the decision to stop isn't challenging at all, you can stop any time and nothing will prevent it.
"A casino where I'm winning, I must be in heaven! A casino where I always win, this must really be hell!" - A paraphrased quote that comes to you courtesy of... the scary door.
One of the MANY issues with TotK is the repetition. Making food/potions requires each material to be selected every time something is made and starting up the animation every time. Making a vehicle is largely slow and requires either going through the same creation process or farming zonite in large quantities. And there's no real reward for these tasks psychologically. If they were undertaken to take out a Gleeock to free a path for people to travel, thee Gleeock comes back on the next red moon. Nothing feels final. I started the game the week it came out and haven't beaten it yet because it's just so slow and tedious.
I didn't play Breath of the Wild, but I own Tears of the Kingdom, and I couldn't stay engaged enough to finish the tutorial.
in a game of chance, talking about the roll a d6 example, its interesting how "skill" is prescribed to a dice if it rolls well in ttrpgs. There is a thing called dice jail, a little container that you put your dice that has been rolling bad. The the existence of dice jails dont show that skill is attributed to dice rolls then what is? Now if everything is balanced then it is still a game of chance and can easily be viewed as a chore, but the prescribed skill seems to be a big factor in keeping the game fun.
Not really though, dice jail is a meme, everyone really knows that dice when rolled properly are for human purposes just plain random. Now, say "because your character has 12 Strength, you add +1 to your die result", and it *does* start to feel like your choices matter, even if the game is balanced around making that +1 break even.
@yurisei6732 but there is a great power that comes from pattern recognition. Psychology getting involved creates an unconscious thought of "dice skill". But in only a functional reality, you are completely correct.
Would love to see the concept of Novelty discussed in this context, especially as it intersects with Uncertainty. Uncertainty in a slot machine subgame might have initial novelty, but that novelty could drop off hard and fast, whereas power washing has a largely constant, near-zero uncertainty, but the incentive of graduating to more complex...things to power wash (?) is a kind of novelty that has some uncertainty built in. I dunno, seems like some more nuance is needed in this case.
Ultimately you pursue goals because of some sort of intrinsic motivation, so there is no actual dichotomy between "intrinsic" and "extrinsic" motivation. Which causes the whole framing of the conversation to be off from the beginning. Most of the time when people talk about it it's "intrinsic motivation is when I think something is emotionally rewarding, extrinsic motivation is when it's something I don't find emotionally rewarding."
I didn't find the exploration in BotW rewarding, so exploring the nooks and crannies of it is a chore to me. If I believed that I would fulfill my intrinsic desires for social belonging and acceptance then I might find myself "extrinsically" motivated to do more exploration in the game in the hopes I might actually stumble on something that changes my opinion and allows me to fit in better with the seemingly large majority of people who like the game. So if "explore every nook and cranny of BotW" is a goal that, for me, would require what we call "extrinsic" motivation to accomplish, but many people find it enjoyable to do so and did so because it fulfilled their "intrinsic" motivation, then how can there be any meaningful or objective way to describe one vs the other?
Exploring Zelda is a skinner box, in that you do a chore (pull a lever) by exploring somewhere and then see if you get to see something cool or experience something novel or fun. Whether the skinner box is rewarding is entirely subjective.
I'm intrinsically motivated to experience good pacing, game design, and level design, so I find open world games awful - Elden Ring would have been a much better game with a much smaller, more refined (and interconnected) world. They already had perfected the "this is hard, I'll go try somewhere else" formula with Demons' Souls, making it an open world just put a bunch of padding and repeated content in the way of the fun stuff. Killing Asylum Demon #8 or clearing Catacomb #20 is a chore now, but I was still initially intrinsically motivated to do so because I historically have found it rewarding to experience everything From Software games have to offer.
On one hand I think the BotW vs TotK comparison was good since BotW certainly on boarded players better. On the other hand, I couldn't finish either of these games because they both just felt like a chore. TotK just felt like a chore much faster. And really I sort of feel that way about most AAA games that come out now. It is just a bunch mini games layered on top of each other and padded out with a bunch of tutorials, slow walking exposition scenes, and other bloat to hit an arbitrary game length goal.
Please just upload these to Spotify 🥲
We could consider powerwash simulator to be more of a TOY than a game, because it's much more focused on the tactile experience than choices or goals.
I think 21:14 is why when slot machines get included in broader video games, like the bonus games in Yoshi's Island or the Final Fantasy characters who use slot machines for their Limit Breaks, they often give you a bit more control over the slots, like letting the player manually stop each individual slot, because it's not really a game (or minigame as it were).
This is like really good, informative funny, engaging and I love that it has expanded past just mtg into like core game design topics, 10/10 but also like is there a way to have an hourish long video? I would love that
Thanks for the kind words! We’re actually discussing how to approach longer videos. We should have something figured out soon. 😄
It seems like the bro on the left was focusing his argument on the pivot that, skill mandates challenge - but the less skillful you are, the less that matters. People download slot games on their phone all the time.
I believe chore vs entertainment is based on what a person finds compelling - challenge, novelty, exploration, comfort, pride, catharsis ... many different answers.
If it's intrinsic, it won't feel like a chore, and there can be a lot of different intrinsic answers.
The major aspects that makes something a chore, in my mind, is an arbitrary requirement to repeat the same, or essentially the same, piece of content over and over. In tasks like grinding for resources or doing dailies there's no appreciable sense of progression beyond getting a number to tick up. These tasks are generally quite immersion breaking and take you away from what you want to be doing. A stronger game doesn't waste your time and stays on track with whatever it's main theme is.
Consider if you were reading a book but before you could go to the next chapter you had to reread the last page of the current chapter 150 times, or once a day for twenty days. Is it reading sure, is it fun, nope.
Here's a thought about simulation "games". They can still suffer from chores. Recently I picked up Star Trucker, which is basically marketed as American Tuck Simulator, but in space. Which on paper should be one of my favourite sims - I have hundreds of hours in various truck simulators, I love flying space ships, I really liked the art style and music. And yet I really couldn't get into it. The issue was, they tried too hard to make it a "good game". They probably felt, that just flying around delivering cargo was not enough, so they started adding on mechanics. They made it so that the truck can get damaged and you have to get out and repair it, they made every system in it (gravity, oxygen, etc.) run on literal batteries which run out constantly and you have to keep replacing them and so on. But all these mechanics just felt like chores, which is funny because the whole game is in principle a chore - that's the whole genre. But the difference is that the whole driving/piloting part is intrinsically what motivates fans of the genre to play these games, and none of the other mechanics added anything to that experience, in fact they just gotten in the way because you had to stop and go do something unrelated every couple of minutes. The lens of intrinsic/extrinsic motivation still applies to "chore games".
Hmm that is interesting. Sounds like it was too much of a simulator.
@@distractionmakers I'd say not enough, it was definitely more game-y than something like ATS, but it made it a worse sim. The battery minigame did add uncertainty of outcome and meaningful decisions, but it also distracted from the core simulation. Simulators have different set of requirements that make them good. I'd say main thing for a sim is that the action they have you perform is intrinsically enjoyable (at least for the target audience, which is why sims are more niche than games).
Challenge can come in the form of "how persistent will you be to get the outcome?"
I think a chore are those quest in WoW where they told me to go fetch 10 lions heads and I knew I could take them on a 1 on 1 but after killing ten lions I only get 2 hearts and now I have to wait for those to respawn in like 5 to 10 minutes. Not knowing if I'm gonna get the loot doesn't make it fun or interesting.
Breath of the wild felt like a chore all the way down. Because weapons broke so often so quickly I didn't fight. Because I didn't fight. I didn't get good at fighting. Because I didn't get good at fighting fighting, the required fight was tedious and frustrating. The Divine beast was bad. Finding the master swords was tedious. It just waste your time a lot
What's fun for one person isn't fun for another. What's fun now may not be fun later. What's not fun now may be fun later. And so forth. Some norms have been established in gaming, but ultimately what's "fun" is rarely set in stone. It's subjective, it depends on the context and it often changes over time.
For me most turn-based games used to not be fun for most of my life. Recently I started playing BG3 and I'm enjoying it - not just in spite of it being turn-based but often because of that.
1. I don’t care if it’s a game but 2. Power wash simulator can be a game. It has a goal. It can provide challenge, do I get it perfectly clean, how long does it take me? Did I clean more things or clean things faster than my friends.
I think you should be careful accounting for replay-ability when considering the uncertain outcome criteria, because many games can quickly fail that test on the second playthrough. Skyrim’s dungeons and enemy spawns, for example, would be uncertain to new players, but an experienced player would know precisely where both are. Yet other things, like enemy or chest loot, can have a degree of randomness and therefore uncertainty.
A chore is any task that a person does not want to do. You can take a job task and turn it from a chore by gamifying it but also by simply making it fun.
People can enjoy grinding because its fun for them. Its not a chore for them.
A challenge is not opposite of a chore. Challenge is one *aspect* of a task that affects how much people enjoy it. But some people do not enjoy a challenge and others enjoy a higher level of challenge.
Level of challenge only relates to a chore by helping to define fun. Some users might find something to be a chore because it being too easy makes it not fun.
A chore can be a game by your definition or not a game by your definition. That does not matter. There are only the below requirements:
1. It is a task
2. Person does not want to do it
3. Person feels obligated to do it.
The problem here is that you are desperately trying to tie your definition of game to this question when chore does not have to be a game task.
A movie can be fun and watching an HR training video game be a chore.
Chore, challenge and game are all mindsets in this situation.
I disagree with uncertainty as the right requirement. If a can choose to flip a coin 1000 times and if I get 700 heads I win…. That’s uncertain. It’s also ‘hard’ to do… it I bet it feels like a chore.
"When does something you are being told become a chore or when is it engaging?" The big one is to ensure there are consequences, risks, rewards to the paths and choices made or ignored, inaction has consequences just as much as actions take. I'll site Lautrec from dark souls, whether you want to free him or not, he will kill the fire keeper, but if you kill him you gain an advantage. So let's look at skyrim, the game would feel much different if there was a time limit between when world actions would happen. The world needs to progress without player input for large worlds to give players that anxiety of wasting time. Why aren't you just going to sit for 24 hours and get your shout and powers back, or fast traveling on foot rather than a carriage, time in the world is a knob many people either have lost or just don't really factor in anymore
My grandma plays mobile slots with no money. Just, so many plays per day, pull the lever, get points. I've asked what she can exchange the points for, but she doesn't seem to register the total chance based "gameplay" and the essentially unearned and useless points reward as non-meaningful, as I do.
Big number go up
I think Gavin has a point about randomness making something cease to be a chore.
In my mind, a chore has to be something that's a forgone conclusion. I have X that must be achieved, I do Y to achieve it. If doing Y only achieves X sometimes, it isn't exactly a chore anymore. I'd call it more of an activity maybe?
Like the dice toy game example is very good. Is it a game? not really, at least not a very good one, but it could be a form entertainment, a decision making tool, etc.
But I guess if doing Y enough times guarantees X, it is still a chore? It's an interesting question. I guess if you're *allowed* to do Y as many times as you want, it's maybe a chore, but if I only get to roll the die 10 times it's... something else.
I feel like you guys missed the mark on intrinsic vs extrinsic games. You compared BOTW to TOTK which I think was a mistake because the two games are so similar, and in my opinion, are heavily intrinsic based.
Extrinsic actions are "I want to do action A so that I get B."
Intrinsic actions are "I want to do A because I enjoy doing A."
In BOTW, a lot of players will slide down hills on their shield or jump off cliffs and glide because it's fun. That's intrinsic. If they are doing it so they can reach a location faster to complete an objective that's extrinsic.
BOTW offers little reward for defeating enemies around the map, and so there is little extrinsic value for fighting them, and yet they are there for the players who want to fight monsters because fighting monsters is fun. In most other games, the player is given EXP and gold and permanent item upgrades to extrinsically motivate them to kill enemies.
4:20 I didn’t think the Divine Beasts were a chore, but I did think having to go meet the people near them was a chore. I’m tryna save the princess not the people 😆
I know I have a problem with games when they do the "do mundane task over and over to get your reward", especially when there is no unique challenge involved with them. Games like Starfield come to mind, with their "challenges" to get the next perk level ("kill 50 ships in space combat" or "kill 100 guys with a shotgun"), as it doesn't necessarily feel like you are improving while doing those things skill-wise, and you need to do them to progress, as well as being excessive amounts of them. Not only that, but they feel outside the actual immersion of the game itself, making them stand out as a chore, rather than a challenge you want to complete. Honestly, nearly everything about that game is the definition of a chore, rather than an interesting game, heh.
MMOs are pretty terrible with this as well, with their "kill 5 bears" or "collect 20 wolf skins", as the experience of doing it beyond the first never really changes, and feels more like padding, than actual interesting gameplay.
I might be in be in the minority here, but TOTK felt WAY more like a chore compared to BOTW. I don't ever remember getting bored in BOTW because there was a satisfying loop of seeing a place I thought looked interesting and then getting rewarded for exploring that place. There was a lot more intrinsically motivated exploration, as the game pushed you towards going off the beaten path to check out that cool thing in the distance. TOTK **really** doesn't reward exploration. A lot of times I would do the BOTW "check out the cool thing in the distance" to be met with absolutely nothing. Instead, TOTK just kinda slams you in the face with a bunch of busy work side quests. I felt really bored in the mid game with TOTK in a way that I never did with BOTW. It's weird because technically there is *more* stuff to do, but because a lot of that stuff was boring as hell it really felt like checking off a list of chores. BOTW focus on intrinsically motivated exploration I think vastly outpaces TOTK's chore list design.
We agree. 👍
Hiii! Love your podcast!
So...following the chore // challange argument...Warhammer could be a huge chore and gambling game with a layer of art and strategy? I found really interesting how much it weight the perception of the subject in contrast with the real object. Example: when people in w40k get a lot of 6s in rolls usually celebrate as they made it, but it was just luck and probability. They feel they "made it". Interesting 🤔
I think one thing you missed with uncertainty of reward part, is the kind of uncertainty involved. Do I know what rewards are or not? I might be more excited to repeat a task until I've exhausted possible rewards, so even though next reward is uncertain it's quite certain what it might be.
Also how you powerwash is a meaningful decision, even if quite small, since just randomly spraying might not be as effective.
For sure. Powerwash Sim definitely fits into the optimization player profile.
This conversation feels weird to me, because I grew up on JRPGs... like, the only uncertainty was usually in the story.
To this day I prefer gathering and crafting in games where I can just endlessly see numbers go up - Disgaea is basically my bottomless well of entertainment. I also enjoy games where I can find ways to break the systems and become super powerful early on, so there's clearly value in power fantasy. Collecting, as well - that's where gacha games get most people.
Interesting discussion, as usual. Instead of formulating things in terms of "uncertainty," have you considered instead treating *information* as a reward in itself?
I think this one could have benefitted from either a recap with finalized thoughts (or a subsequent episode that presents final thoughts and conclusions) or more planning upfront.
I personally though the discussion was interesting, but felt the conclusions were not easy to parse and didn't seem firm. Questions were answered, but answers didn't seem to be well identified.
Played slot machine-esque games in Star Wars: The Old Republic with small chances for rare drops, and I can tell you that it was definitely a chore.
Two things :
1. I think you're butting against the fact that games are a form of art, so their meaning is up to the audience. Yes, there are things the author can do to turn something from 'boring' to 'fun' but some of that distinction comes down to the player's gut feeling of what is or isn't cool. Also there's no catch-all for this, some players will respond positively to extreme challenge while others will roll their eyes and quit.
2. I think with this Powerwash Simulator (and most simulators with little to no gamefication) you're looking at the 'toyness' of a game. My understanding is that a Toy is an aspect of the game that has little to no meaning in itself but for some reason (usually juicy feedback) compels to player to engage with it for its own sake. For instance, flipping a coin can be fun in and off itself, regardless of the result and what it means for the game as a whole.
I gotta boot up Destiny 2 to do my Wizard Chores
1 minute in and I'll finish the vid obv but Ultima Online felt very intrinsic in its nature...maybe that's why it gripped me so hard and why I'm always chasing that feeling and it's never fulfilled... (also, holy shit didn't realize there's a Trinsic pun to be had here)
Souls games have a mastery element. The combat is fast enough that engaging the threats in the setting, including bosses, leads to developing your skill and as that improves, your mastery itself is its own reward. This is different from testing your skill. The two things, development vs testing flow back and fourth even.
Good insight. Might fit into the thinking fast vs slow idea, but in a different way than most game systems create.
21:42 the thing you guys keep dancimg around but not quite land on is your investment in the decision. Gambling games or random chance games can be quite enjoyable of the perceoved risk reward is worth it, how much time am i investing in each outcome? A slot machine that only asks for a quarter and hand crank is often very low investment for each outcome which makes the chance for the reward more appealing and the risk of losing less detrimental. Think about a hard boss battle with an insanely long unskippable intro cutscene before the battle, each time you die you have to sit through the same unskippable cutscene before you can try again. The investment is higher and therefore affects a players enjoyment if they have to retry for a better outcome.
I feel like trying to create a binary (whether you were intentionally tying to, I don't know, but that seems like the result) between "challenge or chore", is counterproductive. The premise is kinda faulty, because it's probably not a binary: something can be a challenge and feel like a chore; something can be a chore but still satisfying or fun. You just kind of dismissed PowerWash Simulator (maybe fairly) without exploring why maybe it works. You mention "toy" games, and that's kinda it, I think. A good toy may have no challenge and often relies on certain outcome---in fact the expected outcome is what is often satisfying---but can still be fun. It's those popping fidget toys. There's a certain kinesthetic or aethetic quality that makes those things satisfying.
We used chore vs challenge as a catchy way to anchor the conversation around the idea of actions in a game moving between engaging and boring.
When the rat hits the cocaine button is it a game?
And heres me over here with, like, 500 hours on Factorio.
Ain’t nothing wrong with that. 😄
@@distractionmakers I just mean, specifically, that everything in Factorio feels like a chore. You never feel like you *cant* do anything. Its such a strange game.
"... of the choice..?!"
y'all been studying the Grand Unified Theory?
As a korean mmo nerd i love doing repetitive tasks with friends its my favorite thing xD. Grind baby grind. Its especially fun when a new one releases and you get to speed run progress trying to hit the upper limits of whats possible.
Overcooked 2 lol
Animal Crossing
Worth noting that souls games are challenging but fair. The being fair part is essential.
10,000
can you please make better titles. im 6 minutes in and havent a clue where youre going with this.
Botw is the most over rated game in history
I don't know, Tears of the Kingdom gives it a run for its money.
Yeah tears was anticipated for years and became a nothingburger of a game.
Botw actually revolutionized the world.
4 minutes ago!
I think you guys were close but missed the key point: it’s about the EMOTIONAL reward, not the gameplay reward. Powerwash simulator can not be a chore if I have a relaxing time doing it and get a lil bit of dopamine at the end from seeing everything clean. At the end, you can’t design something to be absolutely a chore vs challenge because it all depends on the players context and state of mind; you can just design towards a particular type of player