• Mister_Feeny@fedia.io
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        1 year ago

        One of the best ways to drain people’s energy nowadays, is via video game design.

        I like to open my games with a long segment of walking while your character is injured, so they really just kind of slog along at a slow pace. Having them be injured at the start is good, because they can really get used to pressing a single button to move forward without having to worry about any other buttons. Since they’re stuck going slow this is also a good time to have a narrator or other npc explain convoluted lore of the world that you won’t really care about, but it’ll be mildly important if you put in over 100 hours into the game, so we can include that unskippable dialogue here.

        Then after 8 or 9 minutes of injured walking, we’ll have a 3 minute unskippable cutscene in which our character gets healed, but then also gets thrown into their first combat. And me, I like a challenge, so the first enemy is a boss fight, but since the player probably doesn’t know the buttons yet, it should probably take most players at least 3 tries. The fun part is, you can’t save until after beating that first boss, so if you fail, you have to go through the 9 minute slow walking segment and 3 minute unskippable cutscene again.

        At this point a lot of gamers go onto the internet to complain about stuff like this, and I just respond that all that stuff is unskippable to protect the narrative vision of our game. Even though really most of the story is just lifted from “A Good Day to Die Hard.”

        It’s not as powerful a drain as you can get in person, but you can get little bits from a lot of angry nerds on the internet at once.

  • tabris@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I mean, this isn’t that dissimilar to a Persona game: normal school kid by day, with requirements on time; superhero badass at night delving into the digital world to fight bad guys.

    • Baggie@lemmy.zip
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      1 year ago

      Reminds me of how Castle super best was saying how some find it refreshing to see metaphor tackle rascism, but it’s not uncommon to see it in western gaming. They just never played games from that end of the pond.