How Videogames Keep You Playing Forever
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 21 ธ.ค. 2021
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You probably already know this, but video games are LONG - we pour hour after hour into not just our favorite videogames, but also ones we don't even like that much - and there is no better example of the sheer compulsive, time-sucking power of games than Roguelikes. Ever since their inception at the dawn of interactive entertainment, rogue and its spawn have demanded millions of hours of our collective time... but how?
The Architect has plundered basements, raided ancient castles and delved into realms of anime as yet undreamed of to fiind out what it is about roguelikes, and by extension all videogames that is so damn compelling... that is unless they get distracted with another Isaac run.
You Saw:
Breath of the Wild (2017)
Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)
Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (2003)
Shadow of War (2017)
Monster Hunter: World (2018)
Persona 5 (2016)
Portal (2007)
It Takes 2 (2021)
Fortnite (2017)
Troll 2 (1990)
Tales of Maj'eyal (2012)
Spelunky 2 (2020)
The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth (2014)
FTL: Faster than Light (2012)
Genshin Impact (2020)
World of Warcraft (2004)
Runescape (2001)
Final Fantasy 14 (2010)
Super Mario Odyssey (2017)
Dota 2 (2013)
Dishonored 2 (2016)
Minecraft (2011)
Descenders (2019)
Dead Cells (2018)
Halo Infinite (2021)
Sea of Theives (2018)
Potioncraft (Not out yet)
Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 (2017)
Xenoblade Chronicles: DE (2020)
Animal Crossing: New Horizons (2020)
Inside (2016)
Undertale (2015)
A Short Hike (2019)
The Longing (2020)
Dark Souls 2 (2014)
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (2019)
The Colonists (2020)
Satisfactory (Early Access)
Factorio (2020)
Spelunky Classic (2008)
Caves of Qud (early Access)
Hades (2020)
Going Under (2020)
Enter the Gungeon (2017)
Monster Train (2020)
Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup (2006)
Inscryption (2021)
Slay The Spire (2017)
Gunfire Reborn (2021)
Rogue Legacy (2013)
Immortal Redneck (2016)
Spelunky (2012)
Psychonauts 2 (2021)
Destiny 2 (2017)
Hearthstone (2014)
Splitgate (2019) - เกม
Really wish this was the end of the year video? me too! you can get earlier access to all my sweet sweet recommendations right here! (no joke this time I'm being really serious): www.patreon.com/ArchitectofGames
Twitter is the most insidiously compulsive thing of them all - quick! run! escape whilst you can!... after you've followed me of course!(ok fine you get one joke): twitter.com/Thefearalcarrot
Enjoy upcoming holydays and have a nice and peacefull new year.
12:03 worth noting that Hades's 'skill tree' offers its biggest improvements right away, while the skills you unlock later are more slight and/or require more game knowledge in order to be used well.
It feels less rewarding, but it helps solve the issue of progression being extrinsically motivated.
300+h into Hades and i still learn something new about why this game is so gad damn brilliant :)
I feel like it's also good to note that some of the later upgrades are basically "Skip to the good stuff" so you get the rarer boons and stuff once you've gotten to a point where small statistical differences really matter
@@kearbillings5719 I think this is very important. The later upgrades mainly focus on "you will get good options almost every run" (as opposed to "a lot of runs might not give you anything you need"). You can get exactly the same run with or without these, but instead of having to go 5-10 runs for the same progression, you just need 2-3. It's not helping you achieve something you're not able to achieve otherwise, it's achieving what you can more quickly.
What is also important is the 2 sides of the mirror, the ability to switch up your bonuses for some other ones. along with the keepsakes, you can somewhat start to control the luck element. not to a point that ruins the mistery of your run, but so far that you can actually make plans.
9:58 "You'd never ... defeat Leshy on your first playthrough"
yeah, because the game throws a wall of bears at you, if you go too far too soon!
All games can be improved with the addition of a wall of bears
Technically you can get past it
Get scissors, or a hour glass, and this wall is naught... Check bob Lennon, the guy won against leshy on his first try, no death card, no ourobouros
To be fair I beat the bears first time. Had a good set of cards by accident. I got really confused when I talks about the trader attacking you, as I'd gotten passed the fight without the trader. Made more sense when I found out I wasn't meant to have!
@@snakehorde Seen it from Bob Lennon too, the dude was incredibily lucky and the good items and good cards at the right time, unknowingly haha
Really great video, self control over impulses is really important when it comes to games and trying to figure out why you are keeping playing something . It can sometomes help to take a break from a game for a week and if you didnt miss playing it that much you might have been doing it out of habit instead of for fun.
Damn, you could of just called me out.... but yea. There are some games I just kind of play out of habit. Witch doesn't help me try new games.
i have this problem big time, most recent game i did with was Outward. put about 30 hours into it and part of me really wants to finish but at the same time i haven’t launched it in 2 weeks
Not missing it during a break is not always a good indicator. Some of the most long-term fulfilling activities often do not have that cheap emotional "hook" that is supposed to keep you coming back.
And I'm not necessarily talking about games, act of learning is a good example. Sometimes you need to push yourself into it to achieve something to be proud of
Thinking about it like Darksouls, although it's not a rogue-like, I think rogue-likes should be able to be beaten without upgrades if you're good enough. Hades is actually once again a good example of this as the devs clearly thought of this and actually give you a little bit of payoff for it as well because when you beat the game with no boons, the rogue-like upgrades in the game, you get a neat little bit of unique dialogue.
Yeah, but Hades gives you a neat little bit of unique dialogue for e v e r y t h i n g .
It also does so if you beat it first try, technically. It changes the line about killing you over and over to "Mustered a bunch of incompetent wretches to try and kill me"
Most roguelikes can, its roguelites that have this problem due to metaprogression
I'm pretty sure thats the difference between rogueLIKEs and rogueLITES
“Greatest artistic works of the last century”
Never change, Adam.
3:25 As someone with 2.9k hours in Sea of Thieves this is spot on. The game doesn't give you any goal and this leads to, as you said, players struggling to find a reason to play. But for me, and I imagine for most who keeps playing, it allows me to set my own goals. The game's commendation system is great for this. While I play I know roughly what commendations I want to achieve and their requirements. That way if I find myself in a situation where I can gain progression in one I usually am aware and can take advantage of it.
Another big reason for why I enjoy this game is that when playing with other people it's an absolute blast(literally!). The game is great when played with friends and often leads to hilarious moments when one of us messes up in some way or we do something really cool. I literally have over 350 video clips from the last 2 years of playing where I capture the highlights of some playsessions.
I don't really know where I wanted this to go, I guess I just wanted to share some of my thoughts on the game.
Like i said in my own comment, a lot of people go into the game think MMO RPG, but it's not an RPG at all. Furthermore, not every game need RPG mechanics
Honestly without even realizing it over the years roguelikes became my favorite game genre. And it all started with enter the gungeon, which is such an addicting and fun game.
when you are over 30 and not a 'gamer' you start to dream about good games not longer than just a few hours.
fr man, short and sweet games so good
Gunpoint is a fun little puzzle-stealth game that's pretty short. I recommend it.
I second the Gunpoint recommendation.
(And if anyone's looking for another rogue-like, Gunpoint's dev/designer also made Heat Signature, which has some pretty neat systemic play)
gotta love people giving you some great recommendations in the comments
Short hike it's our stop, my friend!
Here's the funny thing for me: I can dedicate myself to even the longest RPGs start to finish... but when it comes to these "play it forever" games such as roguelikes, I always tire of them _extremely quickly._ I think it's because of my huge aversion to repetitive things. ... But then again... for short games that bank on replayability rather than continuousness, such as 2D Sonic games - well, let's say I have _FAR_ over 1,000 hours into Sonic 3 across my 29 years of living. So... I don't know. xD
I am the exact opposite
As someone with absolutely no idea of what they're talking about, it could just be a dislike of repetition, but it also sounds like you might prefer experiences with a concrete progression and conclusion over ones where you can theoretically keep progressing incrementally forever.
Same! I tried some roguelikes but never came far. I really love enter the gungeon (No i am not good at it) but still, i i am Not good at this kind of games and improving my skills in them is really Not worth it for me.
Or in sea of thiefes. I loove sailing around, chilling etc. But if i get killed all the time its not fun. I want to play 2h every now in a while. And people tell me to just get gud. But i cant and don't want to invest in learning PvP.
I too do strongly second that.
@@asdfasdf-xb6bv That's a good point. Something that replayable games like Sonic have that continuous roguelikes generally don't have (or at least much less so)... is _indeed_ the fact that you very concretely progress and finish them, instead of incrementally progressing forever.
Yes, that's probably part of it. Good point!
I love the topic of weaving intrinsic and extrinsic motivation together. They are too often presented as completely seperate, and antonomous replacements for eachother
i put in over 200 hours on The Binding of Isaac: Repentance just so i could get a damned checkmark and i don't regret a thing
addiction
that game has eaten a large amount of my time too and in large chunks. I should have stopped playing the harder challenges a lot earlier
@@lukamagicc if he have addiction he will regret all his time spent. Looks like someone who just enjoyed the game.
I have 670 still not done
My switch says I've spent over 800 hours and I'm still grinding out the new Challenges and Jacob+Esau.
I LOVE meta progression in roguelikes. It makes me feel that each run, even a bad run, is worth it. Especially because sometimes bad luck plays a roll. Like if I land on a bad fight in FTL and die. There isn't always something to learn there. With meta progression, at least I'm growing a bit stronger to undue those non educational random setbacks.
That's what makes conversations on these designs so difficult. What you described as a less effective form of progression, I found as a more effective progression. And it was less enjoyable for me to listen to the video about it, as it didn't feel like you acknowledged preference in these statement, rather described it as "for the struggling player".
"Preference" is also a crucial part of observable game design :).
Hey, that's cool! I HATE meta progression in roguelikes. It makes me feel that the gaming skills I've built over the decades are meaningless, when it's clear you can't beat the game unless you grind some meta progression.
However I see your point in meta progression lessening the bitter feeling of losing due to bad RNG, with no lesson to be learned there, which has made me quit games.
@@EconaelGaminga veteran player starting any roguelite on a new save would still beat it faster than a veteran rpg player starting the Witcher 3 or any similar RPG on a fresh save. Assuming they aren't speedrunners.
@@DefinitelANonymous Mainly because the witcher 3 is story oriented and has dozens (hundreds?) of hours of dialogue.
Huh. For me, Halo infinite was an excellent example of keeping me playing for intrinsic rewards. I couldn't really care about the story or the upgrades but going from dying to simple mobs to being able to pull cool tricks with the grapple and learning how to be a better and more efficient player I find to be be very rewarding.
As someone who despises how many rogue likes there are and can't find fun in any of them this was really interesting to listen to. The available aspects of fun and ideas these games can show, yet I can't seem to grasp any of it. Extremely interesting though.
To put it in terms of the video's psychobabble, the problem with delayed gratification is that if gratification is delayed too long, people stop seeking it at all - they eat the sunk time and walk away to do something else. The reason you can't get into roguelikes is the same reason other people can't get into games like Dark Souls.
The best rogue like is Noita.
Try Hades if you haven´t already. I used to hate rouglike/rougelites until that game came along.
I still don´t like the genre very much, but I´m now more incentivized to try new things in the hope of finding another Hades.
@@EriesAston For real. I didn't even know what rogue-likes really were the first time I played Hades. When I realised I had to start over from the beginning every time and I didn't get to keep cool boons I was so disappointed. I thought there's no way I make it through an entire run. But I ended up beating Hades the first time I fought him, and I've been hooked ever since
Please try Spelunky 2. It’s nice to play a game where choices and mechanic interactions are most important, not just fighting. Incredibly rewarding game that is brutally hard for a long time but each time you feel a little bit better. Plus the rng is never bad enough to ruin a run, (Faster Than Light I feel is guilty of this at times) just enough to keep you on your toes.
There he is! It's that guy that got me addicted to Wildermyth! Get him!
(by which I mean subscribe to him and have a great day)
You'll never take me alive!!!
Just wanna say I'm so glad someone else feels that way about sea of thieves. I loved the ship combat and the general feeling of sailing the seas, but there was literally no progression and most of the quests felt like they were just puzzles for 10 year olds
I somehow managed to find this less than a minute it came out, and even weirder I actually own a good few of these games.
Big brother is watching
Weird, happend to me as well.
Ive noticed that games that keep me playing have a good balance of short term action with long term planning. So games like Xcom, rougelikes, and 4x games really draw me in
An interesting note about Into the Breach:
I intrinsically enjoyed trying to figure out different strategies for each of the mech teams. Which is why it annoyed me that the game required you to purchase those teams using coins that you could get (essentially) for beating the game. They attached extrinsic rewards to beating the game when they didn't have to. I wanted to replay it anyway!
Those extra teams are essentially new game modes though. You can still play with the default team and not have any buffs stacked onto yourself. Into the Breach is a really good example of blending these elements together. You can do things to make the game easier if you want to.
I loved getting the new squads through coins but I hate that you need EVERY coin including one which is so rare through rng that you can only really get it if you knew the circumstances of getting it when you first started, to get the last secret squad. Still missing that one coin after 180h playtime.
@@thomase640 I did not even know that squad existed! Haha
Not a fan of that particular design choice. Seems like padding the runtime more than anything else.
Rouge-like's are some of my favourite games I almost never play
I found rogue-light city-builder "Against the Storm" on the EGS. I haven't played much else lately. You get to make cities and as you make more successful cities you unlock persistent rewards that feed back into more impressive efficient colonies.
rogue-light city-builder? -> Sounds interesting . thx for the tip! :-)
I think this is the first time I've seen someone address the whole thing of roguelites being impossible on a fresh save. I find that incredibly discouraging, but it's such a popular feature, I don't understand why. I want effort to be rewarded, I want my improvement as a player to matter.
That's why The Binding of Isaac is a great game.
I think there are definitely games that do it right though, usually by having the meta progression be nice to have but not overpowered. The Last Spell is my current roguelite, and it's a ton of fun working out what's going to benefit me most in each run. Granted, some of its meta upgrades are really strong, like the ones that give you extra actions each turn, but the game also demands that your tactics be airtight, lest the swarms of zombies find a gap and destroy you. Now, if there was an upgrade that was like "buy this and the first night will play itself," I wouldn't enjoy that at all because it wouldn't actually test me.
@@abderianagelast7868 I think for me there just isn't a "right", because any buff makes the subsequent progress hollow. Oh, I didn't overcome my limitations, I just got a powerful bonus. It doesn't matter to me if the game is still hard after the unlock tree, because the unlock tree cheapens all of those little moments of personal growth along the way.
@vipertooth Binding of Isaac has exactly the problem I'm talking about. Not only do you unlock more powerful items, it also just straight up denies you the first time you beat Mom/Mom's Heart.
@@SpriteGuard Isaac prevents you from progressing too far before you’re ready, essentially ensuring you are ready for the challenge of later stages. The items are typical rogue like unlocks, what do you want, no new items? Or all items on startup?
Can't you just consider the early parts of the game a drawn out tutorial?
Cheers for the video, it was good fun. I also found myself getting really into roguelikes the last few years and I think your point of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation summed it up pretty well. Have a nice christmas!
My favourite meta progression is unlocking characters with many of the ones that are harder to unlock be weaker, as you can still keep the easier gameplay of the starting characters but get both unique gameplay and in the cases weaker characters get an extra challenge.
What I really don't like is when a game has a no meta progression mode locked behind beating the game, like is in the case of the game Undermine, because when a play a roguelike I don't want to grind for meta resources.
13:26 "All art is psychological manipulation." Damn man that is a key thing to know if you want to make good art.
The whole “using your brain’s evolutionary reward mechanisms to convince you you’re having fun when you aren’t” is exactly my relationship with idle games. I can’t articulate why I’m so addicted to them when it’s pretty much just staring at a screen, waiting until you can press an upgrade button. But oh the happy chemicals do come rushing out once you press that button. And then I think “oh I’ve sunk so much time into this, I might as well keep going for a while. Definitely not a logical fallacy there.”
Idk if anyone else plays idle games like this, when they’re often supposed to be checked in every once in a while and not continuously played (although I think some devs DO know people play like this and that’s why there are microtransactions lol).
I actually played a pretty interesting idle game once that had like, a fantasy adventure story. Which would have been great if it wasn’t so completely mind numbing and the wait was so arbitrarily long between each story progression. Didn’t stop me from sinking an ungodly amount of hours into it. And I was still only halfway through my second run when I quit (and there were five runs to complete the story!!!)
There are definitely incremental games out there that go more more active play than idle games do most of the time. I tend to enjoy that more than spending a minute or two checking in and the leaving it for hours again, even if that is the reality of those same games sometimes, just not as often. The idle ones work a lot better when you're legitimately focused on something else for hours at a time instead of being addicted and wanting to check in every 5 minutes.
Gacha games and their unnecessary stamina systems so you either wait until later or buy some more lol
Just for a counterpoint, as a dad-gamer, I've only recently gotten into Idle Games. It's really nice to be able to feel like I'm actually making a little progress on a game while I am, for example, feeding my kids or whatever. And then I just check in at the end of the day and make, like, 5 decisions, and then move on with my life and play a more engaging game. But I look forward to those 5 decisions a surprising amount.
I despise idle games so much. Anything with auto attack that can't be turned off is a huge no for me.
@@rick30521 Whenever I played a game with stamina system I ended up just doing my dailies, spending my stamina and forget the game until the next day and repeat. This makes gaming a chore instead of fun.
I just love your channel, captivating analysis of video game topics i hardly thought about and i can't stop listening, even videos where the main topic is a game i never played or watched have me feel satisfied at the end because of all the information i just received as well as examples from usually all different sorts of genres makes anything you put out worthwhile, and here is a video that touches both of the genres i play most: roguelikes an gacha games.
Amazing video as always and i gotta thank you for everything i learned and realized, as well as maybe dump one or another gacha for more time spent on the better of the two genres i mentioned.
4:37 xenoblade chronicles x was one of my favourite games. man the overdrive mechanic is SO SATISFYING and you can see how powerful you are as before you were just pressing and seeing ur attack happen then waiting for it to recharge, but with overdrive you hear the "click" of when your attack happens, then you can use it again. click after click after click and mmmm feels so good
I quite enjoy rogue likes myself! They're a genre favorite because they reward mastery and let you keep playing even after the credits roll with enough of a remix to reward new playstyles and teach you new gimmicks.
watching this video while gaming and hearing you shoutout FD Signifier feels so surreal but im really glad to hear it
Just found your channel and I'm going through all your videos. The quality is amazing 👏
this video covers a lot of ground, vut I want to add that different people respond to different motivations at different levels. I for one require a games systems to push me to improve if I'm going to play it more than once, or finish it at all if its long. under a similar token, I need some depth in the games mechanics to master, or I'll master the game too quickly and drop it soon after. for some people, story telling is a greater motivator, getting invested in the characters and the conflicts they get bundled up in. and these motivations come in all shapes, sizes, and quirks for each person, and they mean different things as well for different people. "challenge" might mean enemies can one shot you to others, while for me it refers more to mastering every inch of an enemy. random chance one shot I cant dodge doesnt count as challenge for me, but for others it does. this really only further complicates making a great game for devs because of how different every person can be even in the same demographic. probably the reason most big devs settle for trying to pull all your money. probably a lot easier to do, and reliably, thinking about it.
6:23 - I feel it's worth mentioning that dopamine is arguably an even more important neurotransmitter than endorphine when it comes to the brain's reward system, especially when it comes to the *anticipation* of reward specifically. Dopamine generally creates the feeling of "wanting" something and is therefore very heavily related to addiction.
The feeling of "liking" something (i.e. reward gratification) is very complex however and can come from multiple different sources/neurotransmitters. It's possible it might include endorphines, but it can also be serotonine, endocannabinoid or even cortisol (stress) neurotransmitters, etc. And sometimes its actually the *lack* of "liking"/ gratifcation neurotransmitters that makes the addictiveness of a reward even stronger.
Anyway, it's all super complicated and don't expect a lecture in neurochemistry for a quick remark in a video. I just wanted to give some food for thought and perhaps a reason to dive into the rabbit hole of neuroanatomy and reward systems even deeper.
Love the video as always, keep it up!
I think cortisol works on MOBAs, especifically League of Legends, the system will often put you on matches that are easy wins, or terrible losses, and some in between where your skill actually has an effect on the game, because even if you're good, you can't win every match, the stress of every play possibly going wrong enhances the experience for sure. Also, the stress of playing a game where shit could go wrong because of your decision-making (like DS games) or even something out of your control (Darkest Dungeon and every other RNG-based game) also make every positive outcome feel like pure bliss.
So for example, a frustrating game that is sometimes gratifying (but not most of the time) can be a good motivator ?
@@Shriukan1 Look up "schedules of reinforcement". Basically, it says that the most addictive type of reinforcement is the one when you get a reward randomly after performing an act. You can apply that to gambling (sometimes you win, but most times you lose) or you can apply that to rogue likes (sometimes you get a great combination of upgrades and items and sometimes you get shit).
While on topic of reinforcement schedules, the part where I have to disagree with the video is when he claims that delayed gratification makes us want to play more. Actually, it's the other way around when it comes to addictiveness. The more you have to wait for a reward after performing an act, the less addictive it is
You are describing the Incentive-Sensitization Theory of Addiction.
@@P-diddykong Exactly! Lootboxes are also a great example of this. It utilizes the same random reward mechanism as traditional gambling, which makes it so addictive (and profitable for companies)
And yeah, it's often the other way around with delayed gratification. The drug intake methods with the quickest gratification onset (e.g. smoking/injecting) are generally more addictive than methods with slow gratification onset (e.g. swallowing a pill). In fact, delayed gratification is often related to *impuls control* (the opposite of addictive compulsion).
That being said, you could argue, that a longer anticipation period means more time for dopamine to increase and thus possibly reach higher levels. But I'm pretty sure we're talking about a few very complex interaction effects, which doesn't just come down to a simple "delayed gratification = more addictive statement (which the video suggests). So I would agree with you, the link between instant gratification and addiction are a lot stronger in the literature than with delayed gratification.
This is why I love noita, it’s like every feature of a good roguelike taken to the nth level, and with a world chock full of secrets. If you never look for other zones and just play through the main area, heck if you never look up information outside of the game, you will miss like 90% of the content. It’s so well put together that you can spend hundreds of runs trying to get to what you think is the main goal and have an amazing experience, and never even know about more until you look into it.
This is also the games main weakness, though. The devs have a hatred of anything that is too simple, and some of the puzzles and content are so obscure and complex that they absolutely require looking up externally. Some of them the community as a whole has yet to solve, like the eye glyphs or the cauldron room.
But you can still have a blast playing because the game is ridiculously hard, and what makes it so addictive is that all the blame is placed on the player. That might seem degrading, but that’s only really true for people who don’t like a little bit of challenge. Every death and every failure is a learning moment. Care to experiment with a dangerous spell combo? It kills you instantly by summoning a massive sawblade or detonating 40 tons of dynamite. Better luck next time! Through trial and error, and more error, you learn what works and what doesn’t, and which enemies are manageable and which aren’t. Over time as this knowledge builds you always feel deaths are your fault, because you nearly always could have made a better choice. Noita balances your patience very well, punishing you for playing too aggressively when you don’t have the skill to back it up. You absolutely have to gain a sense for risk and reward, and noita is a game where the risk is real and immediate. If you choose to go into a dangerous zone to find good wands, you have a very good chance of dying to the exotic enemies or chemicals there. By placing everything on you, the game is addictive because you always feel you can do a little better next time.
I was just trying to explain my love for Isaac to someone the other day. I’ve been playing since Wrath of the Lamb hit on Flash Isaac and this did an amazing job of articulating what I’ve struggled to for a decade.
Roguelikes rules, and nobody can convince me otherwise :D
Man your videos are so insightful and well thought out, thank you
That FD shoutout made me fall in love with you. The best crossover!
i really struggle to stay motivated to play any game. even the games i love. though i think that's from 'depression' rather than any fault of the game itself
These type of games get me so much I play them over and over again it may not be all in one go but I will defiantly come back to them
Another great video! And wooo for that little potion craft spot!^~^
WOW knowing you appreciate F.D is major love, that's dope
Great vid, as always. I always click them as soon as they drop :D
Nice shout out for FD signifier too!! He's great 👍
This video comes at the right time. It explains why I enjoyed Forager but recently Archvale so so much and couldn't stop playing. Those short term rewards are lovely :D
Thank you Adam, Always love your videos. Merry Christmas!
Love F.D. Signifier!
What a surprise recommendation on a gaming channel.
Loved it!
I actually _did_ make it to The Orb on my first playthrough...then promptly got locked in place in corridor after corridor after corridor by the spawns on my way back out and eventually died to smites and hellfire.
...minotaur berserkers were honestly kinda OP back in 15.2 when evocations was so incredibly strong.
What a pleasant surprise to see FD Signifier getting a shoutout here. Great show Adam.
As a beginner game developer I absolutely love and look forward to your videos. And thanks for recommending F.D Signifier! More videos for me listen to while I do game dev :)
Been watching FD Signifier for a while now. Super underrated channel.
I've had a lot of conversations about intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation with a friend who is way into fighting games, and I think it's worth noting that different people are motivated in different ways (and learn in different ways, for that matter), and that's... kinda how we end up with all these different kinds of games in the first place! I find fighting games to be almost wholly intrinsic, but for me and how I'm wired that mostly just means I see a lot of struggle and failure and don't really get any satisfaction when I accomplish some improvement so much as feel frustrated it was even hard for me at all (real healthy mental situation I've got here, clearly). Inversely, games that rely on almost any level of narrative or checklisty goals lose her entirely; she's almost entirely extrinsicly motivated and cannot even begin to enjoy the kind of games I do (JRPGs mainly but also really anything that gives me a nice checklist of shit to do I can look at and pretend I'm in control of my life.)
Regarding the learning, I think Crypt of the Necrodancer and maybe Rogue Legacy are the only rougelikes I've encountered that really work with my way of actually improving at something, which boils down largely to "if the iteration time is more than a couple minutes, I will not retain a fucking thing." I wish more of these games had Necrodancer's practice areas so I'd have less situations like "I have been trying to get past floor 3 of the Gungeon for years and routinely die the second I walk in the door, thanks." I can explain a lot of why my intrinsic motivation with games is broken to hell, but this one... man, iunno. Throw me a bone tho, game devs! Let me practice things. :|
You good, man?
I love the shoutout to FD Signifier, he's makes amazing videos.
Adam, I got invited by some friends to guest star on a gaming podcast (because I'm free and they probably couldn't afford you) but I just hope you know my prep for said activity is just to watch all your videos and pretend I'm half as competent at game design as you are XD
For real tho I'll be tagging you at the end for credit and linking them here in the liner notes too, so if any of those listeners are here from the future: you're welcome. Please pay this man money so we can talk more about his work.
Great video! One thing I’d note though is that the idea that having extrinsic motivations inherently cheapens the experience feels a bit off to me as someone who 100% would not have beaten Hades without the mirror rewards. I personally think it’s just rewarding in a different way, and which is better depends largely on how an individual player values rewards.
I have an energy limiting disability which also causes me a lot of chronic pain. I know full well that there are games that no amount of intrinsic motivation will make worthwhile because the cost of grinding to gradually get better at a game is way higher for me than most players. I adored my time with Hollow Knight … until I encountered a boss that I couldn’t beat and couldn’t grind without getting a migraine and had to quit game, honestly making it end as a game I can’t even watch content about without getting sad. I actively avoid pure rogue games because I don’t want to have that experience again. For me, buying new death defiances in Hades wasn’t rewarding solely because “oooh new power up,” but because it gave the game a structure that made me feel like my intrinsic motivation might actually be rewarded.
Hello, I, too, have a chronic (illness, in my case) that limits my energy. And I have an injury in my wrists that starts hurting a lot when I play for a long time, so similar case here. I love Hollow Knight too, and I've found that, in order to keep enjoying during times that I encountered a rough boss, what helped me was put the game down for a while, like a week, or a month, or a couple months playing other things, and then returning. And also, tips by a friend or the internet about which charms or which strategy I should use. I don't know if this will help you, because of the differences in our condition, but I believe it's worth trying so you could enjoy the cool game again :D Have a nice day!
Also, edit: do you recommend Hades? I am scared about the fact that each run is "the same" in regard to the bosses you have to kill, is it not boring after a while?
@@NairaMB hey! So sorry I didn’t respond sooner (hope you still see this). I did try looking up watcher knight tutorials when I first quit, but it’s been a few months so maybe I’ll go back and try again! That’s what I ended up doing during my run through the City of Tears (teleporting bosses are also not my forte lol).
As for Hades, I personally really enjoy it. It’s like my 5th most played switch game iirc. I was also hesitant about the repetition. It was my first rogue game. Personally I found that the different weapons and god-Boon builds make the amount of playthroughs you need to 1) escape the underworld, and 2) finish the main story pretty fun. I found myself getting into a groove with my fave weapon + gods partway through so researched some other recommended builds, which teaches you a lot about the boons and how they synergize and stuff which makes it more fun to come up with new things on your own. If you’re a completionist, though, it can definitely get tedious. I’m on run like 120 or something and since post game involves a lot of difficulty challenges (the bane of my experience lmao) I’ve been using pretty repetitive builds which definitely gets tedious. You also unlock more story every run through and death, so if story is something that you enjoy in games it’s a good incentive to keep going. I’d personally recommend it, but obviously you know you’re game taste wayyyy more than I do.
If you have any other questions I can try to answer them!
There's a natural tension between mastery and incremental mechanics that's hard to resolve.
Dude. The F. D. Signifier recommendation was awesome. Already watched several in a row, thank you!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Very interesting video,
finally allowed me to put a concept and words on the reason why I never managed to get invested in games like Slay the spire, rogue legacy, etc. while I have sunk many MANY hours into games more like Noita where you _are_ able to finish the game on the first ever run you have if you are very skillful and don't have to grind for updates in order to progress.
well.... in the case of Noita, the wand building has a lot to do with with the way I saw it being re-playable. I knew that every run could potentially teach me something (a new spell, a new interaction of spells, new enemies, new perks, etc.). it was never about having a run just to grind currency to unlock the next skill in the tree.
You can beat your first run of Slay the Spire if you can learn the game quickly, much in the same way as with Noita. The only unlocks in Slay the Spire are new cards which will appear during runs. Although these cards open up new strategies, they also dilute the card pool. If they do make you stronger, it's only by a tiny amount and only because you understand the game well enough to exploit the new cards.
15:06 had me laughing out loud, which happens rarely but I so love it when it does
Noita is suffering incarnate… one of my favorite roguelikes
I really enjoy rouglikes especially the hard ones. Playing the game over and over again just getting better. It feels great to get further. To take less damage to go faster. Beating dead cells no damage is one of my greatest achievements in gaming and I don't think I'm going to be able to beat it. I also love the variety that all the good rouglikes provide. I still play runs in for example dead cells that I have never had before. Getting affixes that synergize in a new way seeing everything. Thats why I like games to complete to get better at. I don't write too well but thanks for reading.
Love seeing FD Signifier getting shoutouts
As someone who is too slow to improve for most rogue-likes, I haven't been able to get to the end of a single one I've played so far even after pouring dozens of hours into them. I get bored of the gameplay before I'm good enough to do so, so I personally like the idea of in-game power level improvements if it would allow me to actually reach a satisfying conclusion with the game. Haven't played one that implements it yet but I'll probably be picking up Hades soon.
Hades godmode increases dmg resistance every time u die, you can reach 80% resistance, so youll definitely beat it eventually
@@devilvocano420 And it gives you the option to turn it off when you do get better at the gameplay. Hades really is the perfect balance between skill and upgrades.
If there is one roguelike that I think you could enjoy, it's Hades. Not only is the design just that good, there is a pure, raw joy in the gameplay, at least for me. It just feels good to play. The combat is super fast, and tight, and hard, but also simultaneously surprisingly forgiving. It's amazing.
Nice, a short little 18 minutes of high quality AoG content in between my 17th and 18th hour of Synthetik this week :x
Baby, the video's been posted for 5 minutes tops. You can't possibly have even watched half of it, how can you gauge its quality ? :')
Enjoy Synthetik, though !
@@imrane5595 reread
@@imrane5595 It's easy to gauge the quality, as it's made by Adam Millard - The Architect of Games. Therefore, it can only be a great video or an excellent video :p
15:03 LOL @ the shade thrown at Hearthstone
The algorithm really likes iceberg explanations right now, huh? I just watched this and I'm checking out your other videos now. They sound good so I pre-emptively subscribed.
Heh this was the perfect video to watch when trying to get up from the holiday coma :D
Did anyone else notice that the music at the end is a piano version of the Two Best Friends/sw1tcher theme song?
YES! it's Green Greens from the Kirby series
but which version tho? I needs it
Great video !!!
Hey Adam - Love the videos, hopefully you see this! I'd appreciate it if you had the game title when you show clips of games. You always have interesting looking ones and I wonder what they are!
Great vid as always adam :) whats your spelunky 2 deepest run?
Great video. Commenting to help engage with the cool videogame that TH-cam designed where pressing buttons makes some people see great analysis like this and other people see videos that are just nitpicking and biased.
Hopefully in the future we can see more videogames that are designed to empower their players rather than exploit them.
Great to see Tales of maj'eyal footage, a great free games that deserves more attention
I love the puns when you put BoW in the background 😂
I think this insight about motivation and emotional manipulation is analogous to real life interactions: people should remain cogniscent of how others try to motivate them to do a particular job, sell them an item, or even doing favours for them, as there could be underlying emotional manipulation. Fantastic vid!
You should try From the Depths, it is a voxel builder much alike Trailmakers, but with vehicle combat put on the front seat as you try to conquer a huge map from 8 different factions. It's main flaw, the huge learning curve, is also an interesting idea for a video in how some extremely deep games (Paradox titles, Dwarf Fortress, Kerbal Space Program, Command: Modern Operations, DOTA 2, and Children of a Dead Earth just to name a few) often suffer with huge complexity barriers that scare many pontential players off, while other titles (like Civilization, Factorio, Heroes of the Storm and Total War: Warhammer) can offer similar depth while easing new players in. This is often spoken to in your videos, but i find it a topic worth the dedication of an entire video.
Learning curve? Don't you mean learning cliff? On fire? Covered in bears?
Thanks for reminding how garsh darn good the kirby soundtracks are :D
I just bought spelunky 2 I'm already addicted
yessss, join usssss
@@ArchitectofGames unfortunately, i do not have access to it today i am having withdrawal symptoms
this is me with deep rock galactic, and roguelikes to a lesser extent.
I've owned DRG for 4 years and have almost 900 hours in it, and even though I've unlocked basically everything, I still play it every so often.
nice shout out to FD!
Elden Ring got me hard guys. Cant stop playing. Dropped all other games I played, never played a souls game before. Seems like this game perfected the balance between extrinsic and intrinsic motivations for me (though I never heard those 2 words before). I even started a personal journal for this game to keep track where I have to go and where I have to go back when I am better prepared, or about locations I still have to explore. Something I didnt do for a long time for a game. Last game I had to make a journal for was gothic 2 I think. I try to play without guides as much as possible, and try to figure stuff out on my own and this really started to bring back fun in video games for me. Elden Ring might not be for everyone, but for people who kinda miss the old games feeling, where you have no markers on a map or a gps minimap that shows you the path where you have to go, this game is perfectly for you and I really can recommend it. But just from the start make a journal and write things down what npcs tell you and where chests are you still have no keys for, or you forget it, because the content is kinda huge. I am about 200 hours in the game, had to restart because I didnt made a journal in my first run and after like 60 or 70 hours I remembered this and that, and thought ok, maybe I should have written some things down. Then I created another character and went for another run and started taking notes, and its just awesome. I am still not done exploring in the first area, and somehow, instead of following the main route to another location, I just ended up going in the wrong way. Sometimes I feel like there is so much to do, when I look at my journal, and it doesnt stop coming, and when looking things up sometimes guides, I get overwhelmed. But still, I cant stop playing. This game really brought back fun in games for me. Before that, as a passionate gamer, i really was thinking about stopping gaming at all, since nothing out there really kept me playing. It was just boring and felt like work in some games, to find every questionmark and what not. Now it feels more like an adventure instead of work. I hope it keeps that way, but for now, this game is one of the best that came out since a long time in my opinion. Right now, if someone would ask me how I would rank that game, I would say 10/10. Definitly a great game.
I would argue that Halo's Infinite might be bland in the general open world game industry but it's not really that different than other halos in terms of gameplay loop and story progression...
The open world is there exactly for exploration, and just that exploring and doing some side quests... You're not obliged to do the side quests... Only the main ones.
Doing side quests only allow you to explore with more weapons and vehicles, and if you're interested you would look in TH-cam what people do in the campaign, it's more of search your own fun and play with the sandbox kind of game, and if you want plot there's the main missions...
Perhaps you burnt yourself out because you don't enjoy Halo's gameplay loop, and that's fair... Just wanted you to see stuff from another lense, idk.
Funnily enough, for me Sea of Thieves became more Extrinsic than Intrinsic when I started focusing on the in-game commendation system like a completionist to get the rarer late game cosmetic unlocks and titles. Ship cosmetics, pirate outfits and weapons, and titles all let both friendly and enemy players know how much time you've spent in the game (and therefore how much of a threat you are) at a moments notice.
Thanks for this video! I've been thinking about instrinsic vs. extrinsic rewards in games and it's helped me understand better the reasons why I enjoy certain games.
For example, in The Witness I genuinely enjoyed the puzzles and the sense of epiphany from trying to solve them (intrinsic rewards). But the mystery behind the island really motivated me to keep playing. What happened here? What's going on on the mountain? You can only find out if you keep playing. So that extrinsic reward really motivated me to continue the game. Without it, I might have gone "man this is a looooot of puzzles" and stopped halfway through.
Thanks for the vid
In the games that I really love, I try to master the mechanics of it, aftermath, things that seems very tedious or really hard in the past become a walk in the park for me, and of course, find one or two exploits that I could use never hurt nobody, never the less, sometimes not matter how much time I spend on a game, I always find something new.
An interesting topic to touch on now that youve mentioned rougelikes are fighting games and what motivates players to play casually or seriously.
Never would I have thought I’d see a Treasure reference in a game video essay.
Thank you!
The games in which I have more hours on average are the ones that have something I've built over hundreds of hours that have persisted in the game or even beyond it.
I have over 800 hours in Super Mega Baseball 3 because playing a game or two makes the perfect weeknight wind-down after work, and those hours add up. But every single one of those over 1500 games played have been with the same franchise mode save, using a team I created in the game's robust create-a-team mode. I love the Beavers, my in-game 9-MLB-length-seasons franchise, more than I love the real-life MLB Boston Red Sox, the team I grew up rooting for.
I have 1300 hours in The Sims 4. All on one neighborhood save built over the course of years. Generation after generation of great stories and little people living in my computer. Every time I turn the game on, that world is waiting for me to add more to it.
200 hours in My Time At Sandrock since the Early Access launch, all once again on one save, building my workshop out as the game gets each successive update on its way to v1.0.
And back in the old days, Cities XL offered not just the ability to build a city but to build multiple interconnected cities around the game's planet and create a global economy.
When I've seen a movie, I've seen the movie. Ditto TV shows (even binge-watching every episode of Deep Space Nine only takes 100 hours or so, which if it were a video game wouldn't crack the top 30 for hours played on my Steam account or the top 100 if games from before 2009 could be formally quantified.) Or books. Or any other form of single-serving media.
Regarding MMOs, the video only really touches on dailies, but some MMOs actually have a fairly unique advantage for intrinsic reward. Since you know the game's been out for years with content being pumped into it and presumably has numerous more years to come, you have a pretty good guarantee that you'll be rewarded for your investment. The last couple MMOs I started playing, I put a lot of effort into really learning everything I could and trying to be effective in combat, synergizing abilities well, keeping uptime, all that jazz. By the time you get to challenging fights, you're rewarded for the effort you put in and it just feels damn good to learn and overcome them. If you clear them all, there's always more in the future. And combat is really just one aspect. You can delve into lore or more casual-oriented content and it also pays continued dividends for the effort you put in. Games vary in these aspects of course. Taking one example per game, GW2 has its renowned jump puzzles and other exploration that you can sink a lot of time into. WoW is generally consistent with quality difficult raids. FF14 has its extensive gathering and crafting subgame. Runescape has an extraordinarily unique quest+skill dependency web that can leave you planning your goals 10 layers deep. The expectation of a total playtime in the hundreds or thousands of hours really provides a unique intrinsic reward opportunity wheresoever the developers put them.
And just again to emphasize for the inevitable fan wars, the things I listed are not necessarily unique to those games. WoW isn't the only game out there with raid bosses that people enjoy for their own sake for example. Also, yes, all of the games mentioned also have grinds that are excessive to most people and can keep a person playing while waiting for more content. Some of those grinds feel more optional than others, even within the same game. (And I realize my name isn't exactly helping my case here, but I'm trying to be fair to all the games listed here. Each of them has a lot more to it than can be expressed in one comment about one particular point.)
New sub here. Great video and also wanted to say great choice for the channel shoutout! FDSig is great
Sunk a lot of time into a roguelike called Runers. At its core, It plays like a top down shooter with a small amount of physics interactions. The loot is runes and combiners, with runes being used to craft spells which function as most of your abilities and combiners being required to craft spells you never crafted before. Learning what spell each combination of runes makes is an intrinsic reward, but it is also an extrinsic reward since it fills in a page in an in-game reference book while also allowing you to craft spells in that book without combiners.
The studio that made Runers unfortunately seems to have vanished, leaving a crash related to a special room, a few typos, and minor bugs forever unfixed unless the game miraculously gets big enough for somebody to figure out what causes the issues and make an unofficial patch. In spite of these flaws, I still enjoyed the game enough to make all 275 spells that use more than a single rune, document every spell in the game in a Steam guide because I get dopamine from working with information relevant to whatever my current obsession is, and continue playing hours after.
He forgot the fear of loosing what you accomplished. Like creepers of Minecraft, giving you motivation to get more light or build mob traps to deal with that danger. That in addition to the rewarded work of getting something that is worth protecting.
With rouguelikes and the rewards that carry over and stats you can buy and such i like it when it’s something that really only takes in effect to help you get back to where you were easier but is just as hard later on
Lets say a certain boss has a certain element or type of challenge but the item or skill that makes the boss easier is only after beating the boss or doing something just as difficult so that you still feel accomplished for doing that one thing because it was still kept it’s difficulty until your second time through were its just annoying if you get stuck on the 3rd boss when you were previously on the 20th and most of the time its just because you are getting so frustrated with that boss that you can no longer get to the boss to try and beat it making you feel like your skill is just getting worse instead of better so being able to beat the bosses before pretty consistently without making them easy is better at least in my opinion up until you get to where you got stuck and then it should just a be a wall you have to overcome not some glass that you have to break through that continuously get denser and thicker while giving you ways to break it easier by grinding
I've played too much Sevtech, I immediately recognized it as soon as I saw it being used as B-roll
My favourite game is terraria. It has a lot of grind but I would say it's a good type of it. It's really rewarding: almost every enemy has several drops and as of 1.4 some of them can also drop a food item which is a really neat addition. You have already made a video about this game so I won't go that deep into it but just like you said it makes you feel powrefull with each upgrade acquired. There's also just so much to do, I am currently completing my bestiary ( along with gathering all info about enemies which sometimes requires killing 50 of them )
I love your video on Spelunky 2. I often rewatch it, and show it to my friends. The one thing that I can’t agree with, is the whole “you’ll never finish the game” bit. So, I decided I WOULD finish the game. And I did. Now it’s my favorite game of all time. Thank you.
UPDATE: I am now aiming to beat the special ending without getting hit. Almost halfway there :)
It took me 1500 runs to beat Tiamat. Now, I can do it in every 3-5 runs (assuming I’m not trying for the Sunken City or any other special ending stuff). Incredibly rewarding game.
Understanding what I wanted from videogames and what and HOW games do what I like them to do for me was the start of the best gaming years that will never end until, well, I end XD
Man! I just keep playing this game....cause it's soooo long!
As a Black viewer/fan of your videos, I really appreciate you shouting out FD Signifier! People aren't often willing to just say that part out loud (about the video essay space on YT being fairly homogenous). Your content is great, keep up the good work!