I thought this was gonna be about Rimworld.
Inside Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator’s deliberately designed friction
21–30 of 62 posts
Re: Inside Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator’s deliberately designed friction
#22The way he describes friction reminds of the book Anathem by Neal Stephenson. Good book with a giant obstacle of tons of made up vocabulary. I read that a long time ago, and now I'm not sure how much I enjoyed the story/characters and how much of it was just a different level of immersion and satisfaction from getting through the friction.
If you liked Anathem, I'd recommend reading Gene Wolfe's series, The Book of the New Sun [1]. I didn't quite like it the first time, but decided to reread the series because I kept thinking about it a year later. The world is deep, and Wolfe does a great job of revealing parts of it, bit by bit. The use of vocabulary in the series is so unique that someone produced a companion dictionary called the Lexicon Urthus [2]…
As an additional data point - I've read Anathem multiple times and have loved it every time but I read The Book of the New Sun series and really disliked it (though to be fair, I only read TBotNS series once). But I know that TBotNS gets great reviews. So as always with books, your mileage may vary.
Re: Inside Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator’s deliberately designed friction
#23Reminds me of the intentional friction in Red Dead Redemption 2. When you go through a house to take things, you have to literally see your character pick things up before it can be placed in your inventory. There is no auto-collection in this game.
The result is a slower-paced game where you really feel like some guy in the outdoors cooking skinned rabbits on a stove and picking your way through an abandoned cottage in the countryside.
R* could have easily not designed this friction into the game but it adds to the ambiance. To contrast this would feel very out of place in GTA, which thrives on a frenetic, chaotic experience.
Re: Inside Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator’s deliberately designed friction
#24Some thoughts; note it's not my intention if some sound mildly antagonistic:
What other examples of "friction" are there in this game besides that some organs in your inventory may eat other organs? That's just a single example but I don't see anything else mentioned.
What's the difference between "friction" and just challenges in a game (or good old plain "difficulty"). I understand many casual click-and-wait games in the last decade essentially autoplay, and there's no way to lose: you just click, and wait (or expedite the wait by making a micropayment), and that's all there is to them. Has this become so much the norm that the concept of a game that can be difficult, or requires skill, or where you can lose, is surprising?
Are UI limitations themselves a sort of friction? That's a concept I can get behind: one of my absolute favorite games is "Papers, Please!", which effectively deploys cumbersome UI as a gameplay element. You are bureaucrat and most of your game area is your desktop, which is tiny, and you must shuffle papers and overlapping game elements in that limited space under stress and with a time limit -- and the experience is great, if frustrating. So if friction is this -- a conscious way to limit the player's interaction with the game, in ways that enhance and add challenge to the gameplay experience -- then I'm ok with the term!
Re: Inside Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator’s deliberately designed friction
#25By the way, this game made the rounds recently for actually having Kinect 2.0 support[0]. And of course within a month someone actually recently beat the game this way[1]. Much to the surprise of the developers who did not at all design the game around it and basically hacked the support together in the span of five hours.
[0] https://steamcommunity.com/app/1507780/discussions/0/3192486...
Re: Inside Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator’s deliberately designed friction
#26Some thoughts; note it's not my intention if some sound mildly antagonistic: What other examples of "friction" are there in this game besides that some organs in your inventory may eat other organs? That's just a single example but I don't see anything else mentioned. What's the difference between "friction" and just challenges in a game (or good old plain "difficulty"). I understand many casual click-and-wait games…
Here’s a twitter thread from Xalavier Nelson Jr. about this in more detail: https://twitter.com/WritNelson/status/1470118973580664834?s=...
Re: Inside Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator’s deliberately designed friction
#27I haven't played this game, but I'll definitely add it to my watchlist from this insightful conversation. I had an interesting experience with friction playing the Retro Bowl (football) and Retro Goal (soccer) games on my iPhone. I don't usually play sports titles, but they build an interesting feeling where you just can't win 'em all. If you are building a franchise, some matches will be impossible to win, so you ju…
I'm guessing they're a step up in complexity, but the Football Manager series might be up your alley. Especially starting in the lower leagues, there's going to be a similar dynamic, where your semi-pro team just isn't going to be able to win everything out of the gates.
Re: Inside Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator’s deliberately designed friction
#28I haven't played this game, but I'll definitely add it to my watchlist from this insightful conversation. I had an interesting experience with friction playing the Retro Bowl (football) and Retro Goal (soccer) games on my iPhone. I don't usually play sports titles, but they build an interesting feeling where you just can't win 'em all. If you are building a franchise, some matches will be impossible to win, so you ju…
> and roguelikes will bring you back to the beginning I think the best roguelikes are the ones who let you fail and then proceed limping. Or maybe the best games in general, since I'm not sure if Rimworld counts as a roguelike. Either way, to start from the beginning in a good roguelike means to have made a chain of bad decisions.
That's more a quality of the "rogue lite" subgenre, no? Which I do personally prefer to the traditional kind. Though "fail but keep going" can go very wrong, in the case of something like FTL, where you can easily have "lost" by the end of the first or second area due to a bad roll, but still manage to limp all the way to the end (with no hope whatsoever of winning). An early "game over" would be preferable there to keep new players from wasting their time on doomed-in-the-first-15-minutes attempts that won't even be good for learning purposes (the way you have to play when you're already dead but don't know it yet and are just trying to maintain forward movement, is very different from what you do when you're on anything resembling the path to victory, in that game).
Re: Inside Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator’s deliberately designed friction
#29I thought this was gonna be about Rimworld.
I'm so glad it wasn't just me.
Re: Inside Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator’s deliberately designed friction
#30Some thoughts; note it's not my intention if some sound mildly antagonistic: What other examples of "friction" are there in this game besides that some organs in your inventory may eat other organs? That's just a single example but I don't see anything else mentioned. What's the difference between "friction" and just challenges in a game (or good old plain "difficulty"). I understand many casual click-and-wait games…
Here’s a twitter thread from Xalavier Nelson Jr. about this in more detail: https://twitter.com/WritNelson/status/1470118973580664834?s=...
Thanks, it indeed adds more detail!
I'm not convinced every bit of frustrating UI is good "friction". The author mentions many old games, but to be honest, even as a retrogamer I find going back to some clunky UI decisions of old games so frustrating it impedes my enjoyment of those games.
I think some "friction" is indeed useful, and that the convenience of a modern UI is sometimes detrimental to the gameplay experience. To name another example, also from Lukas Pope (hey, fanboy here!) in "Return of the Obra Dinn", the player is an insurance inspector unravelling the mystery of a merchant ship that returned without crew. There is no way of teleporting between spots in the ship, even if it would be a modern and convenient UI: the author has said he wanted to recreate the feeling of walking inside a medium size ship, and teleporting would have destroyed that feeling.
However, the extreme of "sometimes the UI makes you misclick or doesn't respond accurately" would be frustrating for no good gameplay role. It seems the issue described in that twitter thread, of clicking on an item but it got sold so it got swapped with another one at the last second, and you end up buying the wrong one, is borderline frustrating for no good reason.
A player could accuse the author of being lazy, e.g. "you just didn't think this through and now you want to claim bugs are features", whereas the limited UI in a game like "Papers, Please!" -- like it or hate it -- is evidently intentional, and there's no mistaking that.