[Music] ages ago back before we all escaped from a certain online magazine that won't be identified but which in retrospect had a pretty appropriate name I did an extra punctuation video Simply titled do games have to be fun the eventual conclusion being not necessarily a game can induce fear anxiety disgust and sadness none of which one could call fun but can still be enriching and as long as it's never boring you're probably good to go but as I thought about those words further thoughts began to extru from it and rubbage around like questing hands beneath a marital bedspread wait should a game never be boring are there not circumstances under which being boring can be part of the intended enrichment and that led me to the question now running through this rambly video essay when should a game be deliberately boring they can be unintentionally boring quite easily but that's pretty subjective I find most real-time strategy boring because my brain doesn't seem like having to worry about multiple things simultaneously I'm very single-minded that's probably why I write novels so I just get overwhelmed and disengaged when I'm asked to fight battles on multiple fronts that's just me I'm sure there are lots of things I enjoy that other people find boring some people probably find Return of the opra din boring I wouldn't think less of them for that I just wouldn't ask them to join a pub quiz team I'm talking about when it's appropriate for games to deliberately strive to be objectively dull it was reviewing the crush house that got me thinking about this a game about filming a reality TV show featuring en larg l l catering to frivolous Pricks that game got pretty boring when the interactions between the housemates became more and more repetitive and meaningless and in order to succeed I was having to abuse the audience satiation mechanics so I'd be filming static shots of a toilet for prolonged periods cuz the plumbers Union was tuning in that day but as detailed in my fully romatic review I eventually concluded that the game becoming boring was intentional the actual path to beating the game lies in Breaking the cycle if you do nothing but what the voice of The Producers tells you to do you will end up repeating an endless cycle of filming cheesy emotional drama and pot plants for the rest of Eternity it's by defying your instructions and interacting with the cast members under the table that the story progresses and besides it's a game about making reality television around the turn of the Millennium if that experience had been anything other than boring frivolous and soul crushing it would have been going against the theme so I'd be standing in a corner filming a static shot of a hot dog sitting on a drinks machine and I'd be thinking what the hell kind of [ __ ] would be watching this and then I'd glance at the text appearing on the social media feed in the corner of the screen and go oh right that kind carry on so here we have a scenario in which it made valid artistic sense to be boring and while the momentto moment gameplay was a dull grind in retrospect I appreciated the experience as a whole maybe you disagree maybe the game being boring would turn you off playing it and presumably that wasn't the intention of crush House's creators so that would be a failure if you think the intention of the Creator counts for much in a post death of the author Wild West in crush house boring gameplay is used to wordlessly direct the player to the actual point of the game in that respect it's a sort of much subtler version of that one bit in Super Paper Mario where Mario is obliged to pay off a debt by running in a hamster wheel for hours on end you're free to do so but the fact that it's incredibly boring is intended as a hint that you're supposed to be looking for a better solution not quite the same thing you are intended to be playing the dull parts of crush house but definitely birthed from the same philosophy so sometimes a game might want to be boring as a form of reverse psychology but there are also cases where a dull repetitive task is 100% the intended core gameplay and that gets us to the ever expanding world of work simulators and grinder Thorns that I used to call podcast games but which are now commonly referred to as second screen experiences like many vibrant young people my brain is Twitchy and addled from overwork and living in the age of 24-hour free entertainment and so I can't just listen to things anymore listening to a podcast or video essay by itself swiftly has my hands fidgeting and reaching for my smartphone and a nice simple meditative task is just the thing to keep my hands occupied while my higher brain is engaged by my listening material so we have what I tend to think of as the wholesome second screen games that make no bones about being fairly mindless and calming power wash simulator leaps to mind and then we have games like Destiny and World of Warcraft and all the other live service number crunching grinder Thorns the less wholesome side of things games that deliberately lure us into repetitive Loops for the sake of suckering in whales and hypnotizing us into keeping our eyeballs from drifting away I've said before that there are two kinds of games games that make you feel and games that make you numb some games try to engage you with interesting story or exciting gameplay challenges and others try to break your spirit with grind until your brain turns to Mush and I've got nothing against turning your brain to Mush if that's what you choose to to do there are many very popular narcotics that will do the job quite efficiently I suppose my objection to live service Shooters like Destiny is that they're an example of the second kind of game masquerading as one of the first it turns your brain to Mush while framing it like you're doing something important beside digress I suppose it's worth noting that even in the deliberately dull games cited above I personally need there to be moments of excitement because knowing that I'm working towards something sustains me through the grind whether it be the simple satisfaction of seeing a completed level in power wash simulator or the joy of hearing the level up effect in World of Warcraft there has to be the carrot hanging over us to draw us through the oceans of half-dried concrete mix and that ties back in with the crush house and Super Paper Mario examples the connection being that dullness in a game is in almost all cases used as a measure to highlight or intensify the interesting Parts I've long been a believer in the Peaks and troughs model being the ideal way to Pace a game dullness from start to finish isn't desirable obviously but neither is unwavering non-stop high energy like most modern warfare shooters or that aura's wrath thing I find that very mentally exhausting I can't go straight from L Gigante to The Siege house sequence in Resident Evil 4 I need to have that little downtime in between where you run through the rain and have a quick chat with the merchant but what's interesting is that while I need non-stop action to be regularly broken up with breather moments there doesn't seem to be an upper limit on how much boring gameplay I'll tolerate as long as it gets interrupted at some point with an interesting bit hell even the potential for an interesting moment will keep me going I can do boring delivery missions in Elite dangerous all day long if I know there's a chance a pirate might might show up and blow off my undercarriage gosh this is why I find talking about video games so interesting you know just when you think you've come up with a completely solid Universal rule like games have to be fun or a game at least shouldn't be boring you immediately find examples that defy it well let's see if we can do better a game should at no point physically murder its player by shooting razor blades out of the disc tray there show me a game that defies that rule [ __ ] then see if Microsoft would be interested in publishing it [Music] [Applause] [Music] he [Music] a [Music] [Applause] [Music]