Kirun
Buzzfeed Editor
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Wow. Thought provoking stuff.. truly.
"You're never going to have thrilling highs without bad feelings."
Thanks, Plato. The problem is that you've immediately jumped from "negative experiences can enhance positive experiences" to "therefore any negative experience is valuable!" Those are not remotely the same thing. By this logic, we should make loot randomly disappear from inventories. We should force players to re-enter their password every ten minutes. We should randomly disconnect people during boss fights. After all, the frustration would make the good moments feel even better, right?! Obviously not.
Because the details are entirely relevant. The entire discipline of game design is figuring out which negative experiences create meaningful tension and which ones are simply annoying. A difficult boss creates tension. A risky pull creates tension. The possibility of losing a rare drop creates tension. Having to suddenly leave because your kid got hurt and then getting punished by the game for it creates nothing. That's not an emotional low that enhances a future high. That's just real life colliding with a video game. And that's where this argument always falls apart.
People start speaking in these sweeping abstractions about "highs and lows" because the moment you start examining the actual mechanics individually, actually start using your fucking brain, start thinking critically and not just living in a memory, the defense gets much harder.
Was corpse recovery in EQ memorable? Sometimes. Was it also frequently annoying, time-consuming, and the reason people logged off for the night? Also yes. Were contested camps memorable? Sometimes. Did they also create monopolization, toxicity, and soft PvP behavior? Absolutely. Were long travel times immersive? Sometimes. Were they also often just dead time spent staring at a screen? Of course.
The details are literally the entire discussion. Because if details are irrelevant, then every bad mechanic can be justified by claiming it contributes to some larger emotional contrast. It's not "design", you're just rationalizing.
The reality is that successful game design isn't about maximizing bad feelings. It's about creating the right kinds of tension - this is precisely why the Souls games were so successful they literally invented a genre of video game. Because games can be difficult, challenging, ball-busting, frustrating, filled with tension, and yet still be great fucking games - because you design for the right kinds of friction for the player. Not "tension" from administrative inconvenience, real-life scheduling conflicts, systems that consume time without creating interesting decisions, etc.
The funniest thing about this argument that you're too fucking dense to realize is that it accidentally proves the opposite of what you're trying to prove. If the details truly "don't matter" and all that matters is creating lows to support highs, then every negative mechanic is equally valid. But nobody actually believes that. Which means the details matter enormously. In fact, they're the only thing that matters.
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