Played a couple levels in Mario 3D World to cleanse my palate and hopped back in. And, hmmm...
Anand said:You seem to prefer games that have a sense of place and atmosphere.
Going between 3D World and Monster Hunter has made me realize something. I really
do value games that have a sense of place.
In 3D World, everything is immediate, and the game teaches you through play. There is a specific canonical experience that Nintendo designed for you to have. You turn the game on and enter its universe. Everything is beautiful, everything is narratively justified, and you never stop playing.
I've always taken this type of design as self-evidently good, which is why I really dislike games that are overly chatty and have too many tutorials and options. Every little external
thing is detracting from the purity of the experience. This is where I'm coming from when I argue against easy modes or alternate graphical settings; the second you add those sorts of user-defined parameters, well, you're now a product that uses the term "user-defined parameter." You're not a portal into a consistent universe anymore. You're
software.
And Monster Hunter goes
so far in the software direction that I'm just now for the first time realizing that developers who can't capture the magic of Mario 3D World aren't
incompetent, they're just... not even trying to optimize for magic at all. When you join a new social network or learn a new programming language, you aren't taken by the hand and shown the beauty of a new world. You're just kinda onboarded with some text boxes, and then you figure out the rest feature-by-feature as you need to. The software itself isn't meant to be beautiful, it's just a vehicle for Doing Things.
This seems to be Monster Hunter's design philosophy, where Doing Things in this case is Hunting Monsters. This is Monster Hunting Software. It's more of a tool than a universe.
Of course there's an instruction manual to read. What, did you think learning what to do here was gonna be
fun?
And I do think this is a mistake. We should prioritize magic and beauty more in life. I believe that those are moral goods.
But I also understand that, for a lot of people, these types of games really are more like platforms than stories. Fortnite is the most innovative social network of the past ten years. Is it beautiful? Not really. It's filled with menus and microtransactions and XP, which is why I've always avoided it. But as a vehicle for social interaction, I get it. Even for single player games, a lot of people play "on" them rather than "in" them. That's the otaku mindset; you spend 100 hours learning Monster Hunter so that you can spend a thousand more hours "using" it as a platform for Monster Hunting.
I'm not intending to describe this mindset in a judgmental way, but I don't have the language to distinguish the two types of games I'm talking about from each other very well, and as I go back and re-read my post, I find that I don't really disagree with its mildly judgmental tone. I feel like David Lynch struggling to articulate why he needs more time to film. "We never get to go dreamy with it. It's
sick, this fuckin' way to do it... you don't get a chance to sink into anything."
...anyway, haha. I get where the Monster Hunter "games as software" mindset is coming from. But one of my big theses guiding the work I'd like to do in life is that all software should feel as magical to use as a Nintendo game does. (
Bret Victor's work in this area is excellent.) So if there are games out there that are optimizing more for being a Platform than for being Magical, well, that's not the worst thing in the world, it's just the same misguided mindset that all software is made with. And I've learned to deal with using bad software every day in order to get stuff done, so a game being bad too doesn't have to stop me from deriving some utility from it.
What I'm trying to say is, it's not like Monster Hunter is any more of an abomination than Visual Studio.