Games That Last

design choices meant to ‘obscure’ at the meta level are chiefly constrained by the notion that games are “built” - i.e. that the dialogue between the developer and the player is, temporally, one-way: that the developer creates a finished product of some shape, and the player consumes it. conversely, that once a game is done, then a player can “finish” or “100%” it; by hunting, by picking things apart, by decompiling its scraps, they can eventually understand All There Is about the game itself - even if some developer choices remain forever inscrutable (what was fez’s final heart piece all about, anyway?).

games like stanley parable deluxe have gestured at this by soft-linking against a backend (the dev’s servers) which can remote-control in real-time; used chiefly to troll streamers, but still extending the surface of the dialogue past a developer who is simply frozen in time.

(obviously it’s a false dichotomy in the first place. after all, plenty of games outside the indie sphere tend towards live service, where that linkage is maid mandatory by the existence of servers on which other players exist; and where new content is continually pushed out, so the game feels “alive” by virtue of an ever-shifting ‘end’. but let’s talk about games whose gameplay live on your hard drive.)

many games reach for randomness as a tool here: deliberately sacrificing developer agency to, well, entropy. creating a scenario where the player can never quite understand the game itself deterministically; summoning a god from the (p)rng. roguelikes stake themselves on these gods - no two runs the same. many other games tap these gods less dramatically on these: hit rolls, crit chances, loot tables. once-in-a-lifetime deus ex xoshiroes.

still, all code paths will generally lead to a closed set of choices. whether you roll crits or not, whether you pull a SSR weapon or a simple uncommon, the player can understand, symbolically, the extent of the place the game wants to go; and understand, statistically, how to navigate the waters of randomness. for every unconditional one-in-a-million drop rate, there’s a player who’ll build a farm and kill the several million slimes for it. no depth will be left unplumbed.

even so, the urge to try to attain a true “infinite rabbithole” of interpretation - a game whose secrets may never be fully plumbed - is a damn tempting one. and depth may be plumbed from even fixed sources! source games, after all, are still finding weird glitches and game mechanics in the name of speedrunning, even decades after their releases.

one of the ways to attain this obscuration of mechanics, this immortality of the developer - is simply through complexity! tactical nexus, for example, is a game that requires ten thousand hours of investment to even consider yourself mildly skilled at the game, simply just because of how many absurd mechanics have been bolted onto a genuinely titanic aberration of a turn-based dungeon(well, tower)crawler.

for the lazier: the question of automation arises. can you make a game engine which generates not only its own numbers, but its own mechanics? …is what i would say, if i were more inclined towards pie-in-the-sky synthesis problems. maybe you could build a genetic system to tack on mechanics from a set of primitives, say, an RPG. and maybe a metagenetic system to generate interesting fitness functions, so the player doesn’t get bored of the “style” of a particular genetic system’s outputs. but at some point, the trail will run cold. (maybe we’ll solve this when we figure out “AI,” for real this time. i’m not hopeful.)

other than raw complexity, though, many games like to layer their puzzles with metapuzzles: traditionally defined as “puzzles whose questions are obscured by other puzzles’ answers”. these are nothing new in, say, the hunt sphere, but many releases have gone all-in on these. games like fez, tunic, animal well add secret languages and layers beyond the veneer of a more action/platforming-based surface layer; whereas baba is you and patrick’s parabox take “meta” more literally, by reifying things like levels and level selects into actual game mechanics which can be manipulated.

but these puzzles, obscured by intentional design, only add so much finite complexity. true, the layers make the game more than a single layer, but once the language is solved, the hexahedron completed, the 100% meter filled, there’s nothing left. (well, except for mods. but let’s keep discussion to the developer itself.) you’re left to wander a “completed” world to see if you can pick up any straggling easter-eggs. (animal well’s developer left a final voice-memo whose access path he hoped would take months to solve - it in fact took days!)

contrast this with the new frontier: obscure the bottom of your bottomless pit via paratextuality! link a C&C server into the source code. put important lore docs in your Necrodancer collab. keep your game alive by spinning a thread to the land of the living.

it’s difficult to speak on these. even as we give our games life, we starve them of their limbs by placing their contexts outside their bodies. it’s perhaps too soon to tell if this is a worthy tradeoff, but i’m not hopeful.

a couple of final thoughts: game development is still quite a young genre, and one rather unmoored from narrative at present. perhaps the depths of a game’s longevity aren’t simply in its raw mechanical depth, but in having enough intent that its interpretation can be debated. we still debate michaelangelos, after all. perhaps the shakespeare of game design is yet to appear.

games are hard to make. why not go play cave story again?