Ico, disruptive game design, and experiences that live forever.
100 updates later. Why we enjoy games, why we stop, and how live game design might bring us back.
This writing is not a review of ICO, but it still describes the plot in its entirety. It also talks about some plot points of Shadow of the Colossus and The Last Guardian — spoiler warning.
Some games just stay with you. You don’t simply turn off the game and move on when the credits roll: they change you, and they change the way you see other games, forever. And once you’ve encountered them, you become restless for being able to experience this feeling again.
This is the story of the game that changed me, changed my entire view of games, what they could be, and made me want to become a game designer in the first place. This is also the story of how I now try to bring this feeling back as well on the games I work on.
Ico was this game for me. Ico is about being locked together in a castle and trying to find a way out. But escaping seems impossible. The game opens in the densest, deepest, and darkest of forests, and takes what seems like hours to reach the fortress by horse, then by boat, and finally by foot. When you finally enter the castle, as imposing as one can be, you’re then sealed inside an urn, and the game locks the door behind you without looking back. Even the game's very first moments make no secret about the fact that there is no such thing as a way back. Not unchanged.
Another thing the game is very direct about is…
Games are conversations
From pen and paper and tabletop games to their evolution as text-based adventure games to their modern incarnations, at its core, the basic relationship between player and game has remained the same: the game presents the player with a situation it describes with clues of what can be done and how. The player then proposes an answer to the situation, before the game describes the consequences of this action. Video games no longer require a game master to express themselves or even a text-based interface; the situations and consequences simply appear on the screen. But the challenge at the heart of the relationship is still the same. For the player, it is understanding what the game expects and responding accordingly. And for the game, it is to give enough indications and to be clear to the player about what happens and why. Because despite all games being conversations, players and games do not speak the same language.
Few games, however, are as transparently conversations as the ones from Team Ico. Silent conversations; apart from the occasional narration, those games rarely have dialogs or even text at all. But they are, unequivocally, conversations. Like gods descending from their pedestals and disguising themselves as humans, those games inhabit their own world; they hide among players. They mascarade as characters you interact with and talk to, and when you do, they answer back to you, but in their own language.
Despite the game being named Ico: the name of the boy you play as; Yorda is the real avatar of the game. She’s your companion for the game, a young girl trapped in a cage of her own. After managing to free her, you try and talk to her, but you speak different languages. Dialogs are subtitled and display cuneiform symbols, highlighting the fact that you don’t understand each other, yet. Understanding Ico is understanding Yorda and learning to trust each other.
“Kids are playing everywhere, all the time, and often playing games we do not quite understand. They play and learn at a ferocious rate. We see the statistics on how many words kids absorb in a day […] Many believe this shows language is built into the brain and that there’s something in our wiring that guides us inexorably toward language.”
- Raph Koster
Game designer Raph Koster speaks about this relationship between game and player in his book A Theory of Fun. A topic he analyses through his experience working on games like Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, and Everquest II, or even watching his own children play and learn new games. He describes evolution as the player identifies and decodes the patterns of the game, like kids learning to identify new words and their meaning as they encounter them.
“Games are puzzles, they are about cognition, and learning to analyse patterns.”
But first conversations are hard; the first few words you say to another are critical and often run the risk of being clumsy and leading to misunderstanding. You know what you want to say, but you need to say it in a way that will speak to your interlocutor so it resonates with what they told you before. And when it fails, your attention wanders, you stop listening, and words fade into the background noise of the room.
Ico is often described as a “weird” game and walks a difficult line; its sharpest shard of poetry is also its less friendly aspect. Its characters do not react like systems: they behave like, well, like people, kids even. Even when you precisely know what you’re supposed to do and you do everything you can to execute it, characters take time to understand, to react, to move. The animation absolutely sells it too. The hazardous climbing of the chain, the light stumble when you grab Yorda’s hand and start running without warning, the exhausted fall of their heads when you finally find a bench on which you can rest and save your progression. It all feels so real and alive.
But at times, this lack of direct control over what you’re trying to achieve can feel like you’re sitting next to the person holding the controller telling them what to do. And this can be one of the most frustrating experiences ever. Engaging with a new game is always a risk: you can never be sure that you’re gonna get enjoyment out of the efforts you’re putting in through what is arguably the most demanding part of the experience, the initial learning gap.
You need to work together to survive and escape, but working together is only possible when you understand each other. Like Yorda, the game won’t simply give you the answer and tell you what you’re supposed to do, not in your own language, at least; that’s a journey you have to take for yourself, and when I first experienced the game myself at the time, I couldn’t. Maybe I was too young to understand. Surely I wasn’t paying enough attention. Signs and words faded, and I got submerged by the noise.
“When we meet noise, and fail to see a pattern in it, we get frustrated, and give up. […] Noise is any pattern we don’t understand.”
I sealed Ico back in its box, locked the door behind it without looking back, and left it on the shelf for the next eight years.
Holding On
Being left alone doesn’t initially seem like it would be a struggle in Ico. The boy has all of the capacities that make a video game character able to survive on his own. He can run, jump, climb, and of course, fight. The one thing he cannot do is open the doors of the fortress. That is an ability only Yorda possesses; this is, after all, her world, not yours. The castle recognizes her as a part of itself. She was born within those walls, but you are a stranger here. Navigating the corridors, solving the puzzles of the different rooms, fighting, none of it is particularly difficult, but you need to do it together.
The shadows guarding the castle cannot kill you, and they don’t even attempt to; they merely push you to the side to get to your companion and take her away. Apart from the occasional lethal falls, this is the only way to really get a game over, to get separated from one another. You’re locked together, and you have no other option but to both escape.
That is the reason why the most unique and important of Ico’s abilities is to call Yorda and hold her hand when she’s close. Once you’ve experienced this loss, R1 gets carved into your right index, and it feels like your skin gets torn off when you have to let go of the button and of her hand. Even just entering a room where Yorda cannot follow fills you with dread as it is taking the risk of attracting shadows, and you’ll count every second until you’re back together. That is what makes the game so compelling, caring for those characters as you discover and get closer to them. This isn’t an easy experience to grasp, but this is the part of the game that is still unmatched to this day.
“Noise is any pattern we don’t understand.
But once we see a pattern, we delight in tracing and seeing it reoccur.”
This is where the idea of enjoyment of the game, of “fun”, depending on and even resulting from the comprehension of the game, comes from. The pleasure of the experience comes from the decoding of its patterns and its language, resulting in a progressive gain of mastery over it. And this is not a groundbreaking idea either.
“Fun is the emotional response to learning.”
– Chris Crawford
Ten years after its original writing, Raph Koster goes back to A Theory of Fun and summarizes the original lessons as such, as he proceeds to cite many psychologists, philosophers, and designers who came to the same conclusion.
“The idea was, games are systems built to help us learn patterns. And fun is a neurochemical reward to encourage us keep trying.
This was not a new idea.”
This is where the magic of Ico lies, this rhythm, this synergy between the characters, how they don’t react like systems, but like humans, imperfectly, and so you have to pay attention, look for signs and learn to work with the game. But it feels so much more rewarding to be able to seamlessly converse with the game, to achieve what you want, together. It creates a beautiful dialog, poetry that carries the entire experience; at times, it feels like a dance, player, and game, in perfect harmony, progressing alongside one another.
It took eight years, and also being locked inside during a thunderstorm with nothing but my old PS2 and the game, for me to be able to finally get over my initial struggle and experience the true potential of the game. But once I did, I couldn’t let go of it anymore. I felt so wrong about misjudging the game on my first attempt that I decided right there and then to become a game designer myself to explore the types of experiences games could create. I devoured the game content until I ultimately reached the ending and the point upon which the game left me wanting more, despite having nothing more to learn from it.
Drifting apart
Games of Team Ico are rarely remembered for how they end; they’re remembered for how they play. Those games understand that this is about the journey, about the process of learning, getting better, and progressing. They know that once arrived, there is nothing left to be said. All those games end, with some form of separation, between the player and the game’s avatar. A rupture of the link between the two which is all too relevant at the end of those stories.
Ico is no exception, of course. At the moment when you finally see the land on the other side of the bridge, after spending so much time making your way out of the castle together, when you believe there could be a way back… everything is ripped away from you. You’re separated, definitively separated. Yorda is turned to stone. And though you can still escape, you’re left to wander the final levels of the game on your own. Leaving a part of you forever trapped within the walls of the castle. Never to be freed.
It’s a feeling that, like a lot of players, I know too well. It is inevitable, with every game I love, there’s inescapably a drift. You fall in love with a game, you play it, and get better at it, so much that you inevitably reach a point where the game has nothing new to offer to challenge you, or you don’t feel like you can get any better at it anymore.
“Noise is any pattern we don’t understand. But once we see a pattern, we delight in tracing and seeing it reoccur. […] But you’ll only play until you master the pattern.”
Just like not understanding the language of the game will deprive you of enjoying it; so will knowing it so well you already know what to answer without having to think about it.
Because at the core…
Games are about making choices
Analyzing, thinking, doubting, and trying, are fundamental components of the enjoyment of the experience. All this is lost when you know the game so well that there is no doubt left about what choices to make in which situation and what the correct answer is. Dominant strategies, or Meta, describe those models of optimal decisions identified and used by competitive players of a game. Developers of competitive games often try to disrupt those dominant strategies when they become predominant among players. Because games are more interesting when they’re not simply about applying a pre-determined series of choices, but when the player has to think about the decisions they’re making.
In the field of decision-making, psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman advanced the idea that the human brain makes choices using two systems: Fast and Slow.
Slow is conscious and approaches problems that are unusual and require careful thought; it is, as the name implies, a process that requires a lot of time and energy. It comes from intense focus where the world outside the task at hand seems to fade to maximize learning and efficiency on a specific activity.
Fast is unconscious and responsible for intuition and comes up with quick but often imperfect responses for routine situations we’re used to. It is the source of our assumptions, right or wrong. It is the reason for our cognitive biases and stereotypical views. It works to reduce the situations and choices it encounters to simple and predictive systems to come up with easy right or wrong answers.
The two systems are not entirely separated, of course, and they have to work together. Fast can do a lot of things by itself; walking or driving are some of the activities we can do entirely without thinking about it. Some types of games are almost exclusively played in Fast state as well. FPS, Fighting, or Racing games, for example, are mostly based on twitch reflexes and instinctive reactions. Actively thinking about whether to shoot or when to dodge in those games would mean wasting precious seconds we cannot afford to waste. This is not to say that this is a bad thing; knowing where to aim, when to shoot, when to slow down to take a sharp turn, or when to block and how to counter, it all feels great.
Fast can walk, run, jump, and fight. The one thing it cannot do is open doors to new, unusual situations or difficult choices. That is an ability only Slow possesses. Even in those games, some situations require cautious thinking about what to do and how to do it.
And I would argue those can be the most powerful moments the games can offer. The mind game, as it is sometimes referred to, happens when a player deliberately does something that goes contrary to what the intuitive (or Fast) response is in a situation. A player makes their way behind enemy lines but doesn’t shoot an opponent in his range to lure the entire enemy team into a false sense of security and wait for the perfect timing to take them all out; a player repeats the exact same move three times in a row in a fighting game to prey on their opponent expectation that no one would take such a risk so many times; there are many examples of this. And they make for incredibly memorable moments.
But just like Slow is still required, although less frequently in Fast games; it would be wrong to assume that only action-based games are played in Fast state. In his studies, Daniel Kahneman describes chess grandmasters observed planning their next moves in Fast state, when they meet board patterns they’ve encountered enough times before. We analyze and become better at identifying patterns in all the games we play. Pattern recognition is improved and perfected each time we practice an activity; it is the process of learning and getting better at it. Eventually, after enough practice, we can do it entirely on autopilot. And we barely, if ever, need to think about it again.
Deep enough competitive games like chess are virtually immortal because new patterns are based on opponents’ behavior and, thus, theoretically infinite. And still, we can only get so good at any game. Every time we get better, less potential for improvements remains, and thus, getting even better is every time a slower process. Eventually, we feel like we are not evolving anymore, like we’re not learning and not getting better anymore.
We keep applying the same quick responses to the same situations and stop coming up with new and different reactions; we stop thinking about it, and do it entirely on autopilot.
Games die in this state. Once we’re able to play without thinking about the game, something is irremediably lost. We stop listening to the game, we already know everything the game has to say. We apply the same method again and again, it stops being play, and it becomes a tedious process, at best a boring experience, at worst, work.
“But you’ll only play until you master the pattern. Once you’ve mastered it — or realized you can’t get any better — the games becomes boring. […] Game makers are fighting a losing battle againt the human brain.”
This is why, I believe, the most enjoyable moments with a game come from the intrinsic feeling of increased mastery, of actively getting better. And we’re only able to get better as we still have things to learn and explore. Thus, learning is a necessary component of “fun”. Just like Raph Koster describing his children moving on from tic-tac-toe after all games end in draws because they know all the possible actions and outcomes, after reaching a certain point, all plays of any game inevitably turn into grinding. A slow, repetitive process whose outcome is predictable and unchanged.
This happens even to games we love, we inevitably split apart eventually because our brain is programmed to do so.
Moving on and playing new games isn’t a bad thing, of course, and it can feel petty to only stick with the kind of experiences you know, but some games just stay with you, and you can’t help but go back.
Even after Yorda is turned to stone and you end up at the deepest point you’ve ever been, you go back. You can’t help but go back. You just can’t let go of this feeling. You can no longer save your progress but you don’t really need to; you find ways to unlock doors on your own, there are no enemies, no feeling of tension, of uncertainty, the only thing left is the hope that you might be reunited ultimately.
Still, you go back.
Going back
After completing Ico, you can play it again in some kind of “game+” mode. What it does is, this time, the dialogs of Yorda are translated. The subtitles no longer display weird symbols but appear in the language of the player. The dialogs do not reveal any particularly useful information, nor do they majorly recontextualize any part of the game. Most of it you can more or less guess during your first play-through. What it does is acknowledge how the characters changed during the first play-through, and the fact they now understand each other. But what it also means is you have nothing more to learn; there is no mystery left, no unspoken part left to explore. There is nothing left to say. The game is still here, and you can still play it, but it’s not the same thing anymore; you start to look for a similar experience elsewhere, look at similar titles, mods, and expansions, for something the original game can simply no longer provide because you know it too well.
One of my design teachers used to compare it to drug addiction: “You always keep looking for this one first shot that you’ll never reach again, but still you pump your veins with more and more poison searching for it.”
This is an all too familiar feeling. And this is not limited to games, or to me either. It sometimes feels like current culture is almost entirely fueled by nostalgia. New trilogies, remasters, remakes, selling not just additions to something we loved, but the endearing promise that we can experience this thing we loved for the first time again. The same thing, just different enough.
I do not want to do that here. I don’t want to make grandiose claims that game design is the magic word that can wipe your memory clean so you can replay your favorite game with no previous recollection of it.
But as a game designer, I wonder, what if there was a way to unlearn what we’ve learned? To move the players back down the progression curve, extend the progression curve so that they have new things to learn. Disrupt their automatism, and force them to take it Slow again, to make them think about the choices and questions the game asks, to listen once again.
Time has passed since Ico, since I rediscovered it, and it convinced me to change my career plan to become a game designer. I have been doing this for some time now and specialized in Live Game Design, which is to say I do not create new games, I create expansions and additional content for existing games. To keep them alive for players who keep going back, players who, like me, cannot let go. At the time of writing these lines, I have worked on nearly a hundred live releases and DLCs, and I’ve started to notice, well… recurring patterns.
This is what I want to talk about. Experiences I’ve had with games, expansions, what worked, what didn’t, and how it impacted the players and their experience. Ultimately, and most importantly, how pattern disruption sometimes seems to be able to bring the players back.
Unexpected consequences
Fire beats plant, plant beats water, and water beats… one of the three. Everyone knows that. That’s one of the most basic and unchallenged trinity in the history of gaming as it makes for easy-to-grasp tactical and strategic decisions on the part of the player. Mobile game Dungeon Monsters uses this trinity and the team composition of Pokemon and combines it with old-school dungeon-crawler and quick turn-based combat.
The game is fairly intuitive, and it doesn’t take long for players to understand that the best way to complete a dungeon is to constitute a team of monsters of the dominant element against the creatures they’re gonna face in this particular dungeon. The challenge over time resides more in obtaining and training the creatures the player requires for each dungeon, and the choices and strategy, while still present, take on a secondary role.
The game saw the addition of much content after its initial release. We designed a lot of new monsters and new dungeons, increasing in difficulty, becoming longer and more maze-like. But we didn’t change previously introduced rules and, in particular, not the well-known element trinity. This all changed, however, with Athena’s Garden.
Added one year after the game's initial release, Athena’s Garden was a dungeon of a new kind. Every time they were the target of an attack, enemy creatures’ element would change to become dominant against the monster which attacked them. Constitute a team of water monsters, attack the enemy fire creatures, and you’re now facing plant types creatures that will wreck your team the next time they attack.
This not only forces the player to have a team composed of all the different types to face all situations but also means every attack now has the potential for devastating consequences down the line. Attacking an enemy is no longer a simple question of “which enemy do you want to deal damages to?” but you now also have to consider “which type do you want this enemy to be when it will be attacking you?”.
The dungeon was the most difficult we ever released. Even while designing and iterating on it, it remains the only dungeon I never managed to complete myself. It was simply too mean and asked too much. The change of rule was a significant cognitive load increase and a serious spike in difficulty. I was worried that we might have pushed things too far this time.
And then…
“Out he goes. Cold. Athena next. One critical damage hit. Massive. She hits me back. Even bigger. My healer is two charges away. Chip. Chip. Big hit Massive hit. She clobbers me again with a God-fearing smack. I’m not dead. I’m down to a slither of life. The team strikes out. Unbelievable hit, 20,000 and she’s still there, but only just. I’ve got one more. It’s got to count.”
This is an excerpt of the 456 words long review left by a player after finally completing Athena’s garden. Players were telling the stories of their experiences with the dungeon, their successes, as much as their failures; they were definitely paying attention and thinking about what they were doing. This update saw a lot more praise and overall a lot more reaction than any other before it, despite being a significant peak in difficulty.
Through, honestly, complete random experimentations at the time, we managed to recapture the initial excitement of the game, especially among the most experienced players. But this came at a cost; as I said, this event is probably the hardest, meanest, most complicated, and heavy in cognitive charge of the entire game. To experienced players, it was a challenge they were ready and happy to take on. But for less experienced players, this was a piece of content that was simply inaccessible.
Adding new rules or complexifying existing ones can easily result in increased difficulty and cognitive load, but I do believe it is not the only way to achieve this.
Cutting to the essential
If I ask you to think about nearly 20 years old MMO games that are still up and running today, still being updated and receiving new content regularly, you probably think about World of Warcraft, maybe Eve Online, or… Dofus if you’re one of the cool kids.
Howrse is among those great-old-ones, gods from a previous world having survived in ours, whose existence is not always known, but whose cult is still very much alive. In the current environment of games, Howrse is an anomaly. It is technically part of the Ubisoft portfolio, by far the oldest live game in it, but it doesn’t feel like it. It is one of those web-browser-based games that came and went around the year 2000. Except… Howrse never went anywhere. It didn’t change platform, or model, it remains where it has always been, unwavering, for the last 17 years.
Howrse is a game about, well… horses. It is an MMO in the most direct sense of the word, a persistent world with a massive amount of players having almost complete control over its economy, resources, and evolution. The reason you almost certainly never heard of it is it is not a mmoRPG, it is a Management Simulation Sandbox where players buy, sell, train, and breed horses. Contrary to what its overly cute aesthetics would suggest, it is a ruthless and cutthroat player-controlled economy about making profits and driving your competitors off business.
This game is an endless source of fascination to me.
The game owes this longevity, among other things, to continuous live support, in the form of new content, balancing patches, and temporary events, presenting the players with new activities and gameplay mechanics they can take part in for special rewards and items for a limited time before the event is removed and internally reworked, fine-tuned, and readjusted, before its next iteration.
One of the events, which was originally very well received by the community, grew more and more ignored through each iteration. Players became more used to it and grew tired of it until it eventually granted a complete rework.
The Plant event had players gathered seeds and the resources to farm and harvest them in order to craft different items, and seeds of higher levels, they then repeated the cycle with the seeds of higher levels and so on, until they got to the items they wanted. In total, with all seeds and variations, resources to grow the plants, and collect them, the players had to jungle many different resources, and commit a lot of time and efforts to get what they wanted.
In its last iteration, the feature was ranked fairly low by players, pointing to tedious gameplay and low returns on investment for their efforts. A decision was made to rework the feature entirely. The design team decided to keep the main theme and idea of harvesting resources to craft items, but to cut a lot of the parts players were complaining about to only focus on the core experience: The choices of what items players wanted to craft.
In the reworked edition, players collect one and only resources. On the same principle as 2048 puzzle game, fusing two resources of the same level result in a resource of a higher level. Players now have to fuse resources of different levels to craft the items they want. The trick is, their inventory is limited to 9 slots, and the most valuable item requires two level 8 resources to be combined. This means players have to choose between obtaining many low-level items quickly or holding their resources for higher-level items later. Thus restraining their ability to fill their inventory and gather more resources until they could craft the desired items. This faces the player with some difficult decisions, but apart from this, the complexity of the feature was reduced to a minimum.
The new version was an instant hit, ranking #1 most appreciated players feature, and showing signs of engagement by the players rarely matched. The feature was iterated on again and soon occupied #1, #2, and #3 favorite features across the different iterations. Noted by the players was the simplicity of interacting with the feature, and the fact the choice they had to make was the central point. The core of the gameplay was demanding players to evaluate their options, carefully think about what they wanted, and then offered little resistance in execution, but the fact the feature required players to make difficult choices was enough to create tension and to have players feel engaged.
This kind of tough choices and difficult resource management actually works really well in other genres as well.
Changing the rules
“Wounded villagers are as good as dead. Worse in fact, because they still require food.”
This is one of the first and most recurrent pieces of advice I’d been given about how to play Northgard. A game about Viking clans at war against one another and the environment for the control of an unexplored island. Winters in Northgard are harsh, and the players quickly learn they need to optimize their colony production in order to survive. Villagers are critical during the year as they produce all the resources the player needs. But when the first snows fall, they consume more food and firewood than they can gather, and so a villager wounded by a wolf — producing even less — is a dead weight for the clan. And so, no matter how harsh this can seem to outside observers, this is why players who are very familiar with the game have developed an automatic response to try and get rid of wounded units as soon as they can.
Or at least it was, until we introduced the 13th clan of the game: the clan of the Rat. A clan entirely built on the idea of making players play with wounded units rather than around them. The clan of Dodsvagr, as it is more formally referred to, starts with only wounded villagers, which can then be healed by the Shamans of the clan. But the player can at any moment increase the units’ production at the cost of their entire population's health. But the more the clan population is hurt, the quicker new units are generated to compensate. And so, the player has to make good use of wounded units and treat health as an entirely new resource to manage in their strategy in order to bring the clan to its full potential: A relentless army of workers swarming the land with wounded but numerous units.
It is one of the most unforgiving and punitive clans during the first few plays because it is so counterintuitive to what players spent hours learning with every other clans. But after players understood how the clan could be played, and they started to master it, it received one of the most positive receptions of any clan. And this is because it was so unique and so different from the others. Players couldn’t rely on automatic responses they had learned about wounded units and had to consciously, and slowly, think about the choices they were making again.
Like Athena’s Gardens before it, this new content asked of the players to go back and learn new fundamentals than the ones they had previously learned. It was a significant increase in difficulty for the players, but got a particularly good reception from players that knew the game the most. And if you’ve stuck with this writing until this point, you probably understand by now that, to me, it is precisely because they forced the players to basically learn the game again, that they’ve got such positive reactions.
I’ve been able to identify those patterns in various games I’ve worked on, and they were the starting point for this reflection. But it is not my intention to claim that I am the first one to encounter those or that they are limited to my games, and I think we can already observe similar effects in much more well-known games.
Closing doors, opening windows
Dark Souls creative director Hidetaka Miyazaki cited Ico as a major inspiration and even the reason he even decided to make games in the first place (this game seems to do that with a lot of people). But where Ico was a quiet and slow conversation, Dark Souls is more akin to trying to get out of police control by screaming that you know your rights. In the middle of a shoutout. While a dog is biting your leg.
But despite this barely noticeable difference, Dark Souls inherits its deliberateness from Ico, animations are detailed, actions are slow, and crafted to look alive rather than to facilitate the player’s intention. Enjoyment from both games comes from decoding and mastering the game despite their apparent unfriendliness.
It is from this interaction that a common sentiment emerged among players:
“The real Dark Souls starts here.”
This sentiment exists within all games of the Soulsborn series (similar games from studio FromSoftware) and is often used to describe difficulty peaks when playing the game, particularly punitive and difficult, at a moment when the player hasn’t mastered the game yet. When the character you play still feels weak enough that defeating the enemies and situations the game throws at you feels like epic victories: Success against all odds, snatched from the jaws of defeat just one or two hits away from death.
But like all things, no matter how mean or unfair the game and situations seem, the human brain is designed to decode and grow past them. Soon, Fast kicks in, and a boss that seemed like an impossible opponent just becomes a set of intuitive inputs and predictable timings. In his video essay, Bloodborne is Genius, youtuber Hbomberguy describes learning Dark Souls in a way that echoes the evolution from system Slow to Fast.
«The soulsgame get into you, inside your head. […] You stop doing the maths about how quickly your attack goes off, and trying to figure out an opening to move, and you start to just know the right time. Because all this stuff is so deep inside your head that you don’t even have to think about it, it becomes like an instinct.»
Mastering the game is part of the experience and is a desirable outcome, of course. But once the player knows the game well enough, has memorized every patterns, every levels, this sense of fear, tension, and uncertainty, which is the core of Dark Souls ambiance and experience, is lost. Contrary to Ico, Dark Souls can be played several times and has some ways to renew the experience. There are different types of weapons and classes to try and master. But the enemies, the levels, the optimal paths, all this knowledge remains from one run to the next, as they still remain the same. And players who’ve reached this point keep seeking this pain again.
Scholar of the First Sin, like Daughter of Ash, are additional content that attempts to bring the real Dark Souls back for players who’ve grown past it. Those expansions, one official and released by the developers of the game themselves, the other, modded in by players, similarly approach this search. They break patterns. Shuffle things around. And disrupt introduced rules.
Levels contain monsters that originally never ventured here, paths are closed, others are opened, forcing the player to find new routes, new ways to achieve what they previously knew how to do. It brings back the sensation of uncertainty and of being lost. The player has to be alert again, to think, to listen.
In his essay The beautiful Pain of Daughter of Ash, Jacob Geller talks about his experience with the expansion.
«Dark Souls demands patience, and pattern recognition. […] I’ve run out of save slots on my PS3 and my PC, I’ve messed with the game sequencing, I’ve made Lordran look like a joke. […]
I thought I was good at this game, but Daughters of Ash dragged me right back to reality. I had to rewire my brain in so many ways […],
the real dark souls starts here.»
Once again, and at the cost of a significant increase in difficulty, those additions seem to be able to bring the player back to this place where uncertainty, doubt, progress, and thus, fun, live.
Moving on
At the very end of Ico you can make your way up to the top of the castle again, find Yorda. But she is still petrified, and she’s surrounded by shadows. In a somewhat dark twist, it is revealed in this instance that the shadows that have been chasing you during the entire game come from the same urns you escaped from at the beginning of the game. They are the ones that didn’t get away.
Shadows of its siblings are the ultimate downfall of Ico. Both in and outside of the game, they are oblivion that absorbed a lot of what remained from it and tainted its legacy. The most destructive of those shadows may be the one of its younger sibling, for lack of a less obvious pun. Gathering more success than Ico could ever dream of getting, Shadow of the Colossus — the following game of Team Ico — relayed Ico to the spot of the lesser game. Where SotC spawned many imitations and homages, and even got an entire remake made for PS4, Ico remained, just Ico.
I was finally able to experience The Last Guardian after many years of wait, and found many of the qualities of Ico in Journey, but there will never be another Ico. And I am left trying to find ways to go back and experience the same game again.
To be clear, I’m not saying Ico would have been a better game if it had a dozen DLCs and live support; I don’t think that’s true. But this type of experience is rare enough that you won’t encounter new ones often. And nowadays, developers seem eager to capitalize on their game success, and offer more and longer support than they ever had before. And in this context I think we should strive to think about how to make the most out of those types of additions, to build upon, and extend the potential of the game itself as much as possible.
Although all types of additional content will hypothetically create novelty and renew the play experience for the players, not all additional contents are equal. Just adding more and more levels to a game until it reaches thousands of levels is what some mobile games do. And it technically works! It keeps players occupied, but it requires a constant stream of new stuff to be relevant because the player mash their way through this new content so fast, and it rarely leads to particularly memorable experiences for the players. On the other hand, adding entirely new and different gameplay to learn will surely create a new learning curve for the player to engage in. But they also represent the risk of striving too far away from what the players enjoy about the game by presenting something radically different. They also often are of a lesser quality because they are not part of the main gameplay, and thus cannot see the same level of investment and polish from the developers.
I think there are better ways of doing this. Both for developers who cannot afford to add 20 new levels to their game each week or create entirely new and separate features; and for players who expect meaningful and challenging addition to the games they love. The ideal addition is one that let players engage with the same gameplay they fell in love with, but from a different angle, with different rules, or variations, enough that they can discover and get better at it again.
This doesn’t seem limited to certain games, players, models, or platforms. I’ve worked on very different projects through the years, and I’ve never encountered a project where the idea of disrupting players' previous knowledge and automatism seemed impossible. As fun comes partly from the intrinsic reward of learning and getting better at all games; disruptive design seems to be applicable to every type of game.
It is my sincere belief that breaking patterns the player learned and pushing the player to learn and make difficult choices again can be among the best experiences we can offer. I would argue it even has the chance to be stronger than the initial discovery of the game, as it is one made with the assurance that the player already enjoys the overall experience; the player knows the efforts they put in will be rewarded, for they know they enjoy the experience of mastering the game already. And they can engage with this new content without this sense of risk.
Ultimately, the important thing is not to be hard but to make the player think. Making decisions seem challenging to solve, for as long as possible, until the player's mind inevitably finds a way, then an optimal way, and finally knows the paths with their eyes closed.
In the final moments of Ico, with no way to bring Yorda back, the only thing you can do, is to confront the reason she is gone. Fight the dark queen, destroy the castle, end it, turn everything to ashes. After you’ve succeeded but the fight left you unconscious, she eventually wakes up, but even then, there is no way back. Not for her. You can exist outside of those walls, but she cannot. In the last moments of the game, as credits roll, music swings, and the castle crumbles, she carries you to a boat, and pushes you back to the outside world. Only your journey goes on beyond the game, hers is the game.
Only in the very last seconds of the game, in a post-credit scene after you‘ve landed on a shore, is it revealed that a part of her has survived and has managed to escape. And she will remain with you, forever. The game lets you, even for just an instant, go back, and I hope to one day be able to do that for players myself, to help those experiences live forever. Because some games just stay with you, and you can’t help but to go back.
