Boring means 'unengaging' to me, not 'serene' or 'low-key.' A game focused on menial repetitive tasks is not by definition 'boring' if the mechanics or gameplay loop is satisfying enough to engage you: it would be boring if the mechanics were half-baked or unsatisfying in a way that made the menial tasks not feel worth bothering with. For instance: Voices of the Void and Shadows of Doubt have plenty of downtime between cases, but I would call neither 'boring' but rather compelling in a mundane sense, since you have to occupy yourself in a very atmospheric world. In fact, I sometimes find Power Wash Simulator can get _actually_ boring because of tedium, where once the satisfaction fades and you're searching for that last annoying grimy spot, the dopamine kick isn't always enough to make up for the frustration.
I was thinking the same thing. If the game has some "low key" or "down time" or is entirely "low key" but you're still engaged then it's not really boring.
Indeed, and while those 'low-key' games can be or get boring so can the high octane action all the time games - there must be some variety in the gameplay loops or you will get bored no matter how good the action is. Personally I really struggle to get into low-key games as a rule, I want a more engaging mental challenge in a game personally as otherwise I'd rather read a book, watch TV, listen to music - so for instance I still like Elite Dangerous, even if I've not played in a year or so now as the joysticks got put away - without them turning on all the assists required to make playing with a keyboard possible it just immediately bores me too much, its more like watching a really bad episode of Trek than gaming... Where with joysticks and flight assist off it remains mentally stimulating enough even in the quiet moments.
Voices of the Void my beloved paranoia in the woods simulator. On one hand the idea of just, finding and processing a signal is boring, but on the other game gives you so much downtime and freedom to do whatever the hell you want to both during processing a signal and between daily quotas with potential for random spooky nonsense or funny stuff to happen, that it becomes interesting.
Yeah, I feel like his argument here is on shaky ground because it relies on a loose definition of a key term. Like, the whole reason people play horror games or games that tug at their heartstrings is because they derive enjoyment (i.e., fun) from being made to feel fear or sadness, so you can in fact say that those games are fun.
If he awards games that are Good, Bad and Bland, he should have a category for Interesting games. Games that didn’t light his pants on fire, but had enough interesting ideas competently put together to warrant attention.
Those are the ones I feel myself drawn to. Not so much exciting or thrilling, but more "wow, that is a cool idea". Obra Dinn, A Hand With Many Fingers, Pawnbarian, Balatro, Umurangi... All of these are novel and unique in a way. I bet this is how people felt about Portal, too.
@@tretretre1111 I think you are missing the point, those games you listed are novel but more importantly good well polished experiences, not the apropiate use for a "the interesting 5" ranking which should be for games that arent good (their ideas might not come together, bugs prevent you from enjoying the full design, they lack polish and feedback needed for satisfying gameplay. Etc) But the ideas that those game brought to the table are interesting enough to keep in memory, even if its just for some other developer to say "I can do it better"
@@tomasavendanozacarias5205 So, being well done makes a novel concept less interesting? Most of the games I listed are small projects without a lot of polish, anyway, but I'm not really getting what you're trying to say.
@@tretretre1111 The point is that you walk away from those games going 'damn, that was a good game', not 'damn, that game had some really cool ideas but I really wish it was [x/y/z]'. Less indie darling, more slavjank.
The thing I will always respect about Yahtzee is his willingness and propensity to challenge his previous opinions and statements; it's one thing to commit to your gut instinct and merely let your thoughts be known, but it's another thing entirely to interrogate *other* options. It shows an awareness of one's self in the context of a wider discussion, and indeed keeps said discussion alive I'll never get tired of these videos
A game made to be dull, that becomes an endurance challenge. I think the logic is pretty simple there, but I'd still love to discuss it for, say, the length of a ride from Tuscon to Las Vegas.
When the “boring” game is being made as such because it’s making a statement, and that statement is so interesting that a massive community comes to watch and play that game every year… is it actually boring?
not every good "boring" game is "serene" or "chill" pathologic's core gameplay loop is 90% dull walking, it's still one of the best games i've ever played in my life and nothing about it is serene or chill this is cope
I love the boring part of Super Paper Mario to bits. The villain's idea is that the only conceivable way to stop Mario is to get the player to stop playing. That's brilliant.
Kinda like when you fight Sans! When he realizes he can't beat you enough to frustrate you into leaving, he just refuses to end his turn. Figuring if nothing happens for long enough you'll get bored and leave.
I absolutely hated that level in Super Paper Mario. Actually I didn't like that game in general. I found the levels tedious to go through, with lots of unnecessary backtracking.
Yahtzee's ruminations about gaming are the most interesting among the Second Wind team because A) he's taken the time to establish his own clear standards and expectations for what attributes serve the player's experience, whether you agree or disagree, and B) he outwardly explores his own understanding of the medium instead of didactically spoon-feeding answers to questions us viewers aren't necessarily asking. I'm all for learning how games work, and I'm all for discussing what constitutes what works when comparing certain games, but there's a big difference between contributing to a larger discussion with a single complete thought and merely thinking out loud. Yahtzee and the bloke from Design Delve do the former, while too many do the latter.
You're honestly telling me you don't think Kojima wouldn't have someone's who's schtick is knowing that he's in a video game, and fights the player themselves by firign Razor Blades from the console? If the technology were around, he would use it.
One of my favorite games right now, Voices of the Void, spends a significant amount of it's early game being boring and suspenseful in equal measure. It lulls you into a nice work flow routine that almost becomes relaxing, before it slowly starts to strip back the veil and play it's hand. If it didn't let you spent upwards of 3-8 hours only being moderately spooked by it's alone in remote radio satellite base in the mountains vibe, it would not hit nearly as hard. It makes even small spooks land. A pine cone falling in the woods as you walk down the paths becomes a frequent but inescapable small jolt. Which then makes you ignore the real sounds of threats for half a second when THOSE start because you assume its a pine cone.
Kerfus will scare you way more than any alien monster. He's done with the reports and is now beelining towards you at full speed to appear behind you after just as you forgot about him. That or you've locked him out and he is waiting to jump you as soon as you open the door.
It took me an embarrassing number of hours to even figure out what those random thumps I kept hearing in the woods were, until I finally saw a pinecone rolling downhill past me. Which was, of course, a tiny jumpscare all its own. I'm supposed to be alone out here, what just shifted by my ankle?!
Tho at the moment besides the [balls of light my beloathed] there's not much threat, it's all psychological if you go in blind into the game leaving you to learn about the fact that there's genuinely no real threat at your own pace.
especially since there isn't any *notification* that things are happening (besides jolting awake with a bad vibe in the middle of the night), all the events just HAPPENING in the world around you whether you're conscious of them or not makes a lot of the actual horror way more effective for how naturally it dawns on you
pathologic is the best argument for games being boring, most of pathologic is just walking around and I actually enjoyed using the down time to reflect on my experiences with the game
Pathologic was what popped into my head as well. It's a game I'll never personally play but I find fascinating on a conceptual level. It's utterly fascinating to me how the game uses 'boring' to force you into analyzing your own decision making process. You do something and there's probably no reward. And it was boring. So why did you do it?
But that's not boring, is it? If you are enjoying it, no matter what you are doing in-game, you are engaged in the experience. The game made it so the walking itself isn't boring by providing you other elements for you to reflect on during the downtime. It's like when in Portal you are walking and looking around the chamber. You're not shooting portals, but you are engaged because the game is giving you something to think about in the shape of trying to figure out the puzzle. Pathologic is giving you an engaging narrative and mystery for you to think about while you walk around the town. It's giving you the tools to not be bored.
@@carcosian I think its definitely very boring lol, you could argue that waiting at the dentists office isn't boring if you're thinking about an interesting book you read yesterday but the dentists office is still boring
@@carcosian I get your point but I think that part of the point of the game was too make you make that decision yourself. With many games you are motivated to do things because the gameplay is engaging or because you are seeking a reward. Pathologic (again I haven't played it, I'm going off of what I've seen in hbomberguy and MandloreGaming videos) seems to provide you with many options that you can do just because you can do them. There's no reward, there's no engaging activity - and often times spending time on these activities make the rest of the game actively harder because you spent less time on the bits that will actually progress the game. It's not that the game itself isn't fun (though I think it looks boring as hell) - it's that it provides you with a lot of freedom to bore yourself. It wants you to bore yourself - and then when you ask, "Why did I do that?" the game responds with, "Yeah, why did you do that stuff that you found boring?"
A bit of his point from the original video got lost unfortunately. While you don't need to use the wheel to pay off the full debt, you do need to earn 10k to get the secret code for the safe, a process which takes about six minutes. Six minutes of nothing but running in one direction. Unless you had already looked up the code online or something, there's no alternate way to get the required money, outside of some glitch probably, or going back to the other room where you can make money, but that's even slower.
I do think there is some argument about what boring means in this context. A power-wash cleaning simulator at least provides some satisfaction and can be a calming experience if somebody has the correct mindset. The dull moments between action in more exciting games can allow a mental reset, but should probably get back to the action before it gets boring.
There is a place for everything, but there's also expectations from the genres and kinds of games. No one's gonna expect bombastic action from a colony sim, but also barely anyone would like to think about logistics in a fast paced fps shooter.
Half-Life 1 nailed the "dull moments between action" thing you're talking about. You think you're only halfway through We've Got Hostiles when it dumps you into a bunch of vents, crawling away from the thumping music, tough fights and artillery strikes.
Feels appropriate that I happened to be playing Powerwash Simulator when this started playing 😂 As for the rule about games not spitting razorblades at the player, I once had a CD drive cut loose and overspin a CD to the point of literally exploding, spewing shrapnel hard enough that it blew through the closed drive door and hit me in the face - thankfully having been slowed enough by that point to cause no actual harm. I can't say it improved the gaming experience in any way.
There generally has to be quiet moments in the action games for the same reason music isn't just a single loud note held for three or four minutes. It's the Queue part of the Ghost Train Ride, the block-pushing puzzles in God of War, etc.
No, they'd hire EA to make a game about firing razors at the player, then get surprised when there was a backlash and blame EA for ruining their brand.
@@PlehAP It's deeper than that. Legal eagle did a good video on the subject and what disney did wasn't really out of pocket or out of the realm of sense.
The skill to make boring parts is what separates professional game designers and amateur map editors. A professional game designer knows how to set up the setpieces, build the settings, graduate ramp up the challenges. People don't remember the boring parts, but they make the setpieces more memorable
As like seemingly every Semi-Ramblomatic's topic, Undertale is a good example. The genocide route is probably deliberately boring and grinding to make you go "what am I even getting out of this?"
I would argue that, while Undertale tries to pull this off, it fails spectacularly. What you get out of the genocide route is the opportunity to fight Undyne the Undying and Sans, which are arguably the most engaging parts of the whole game. Players (unless they haven't been spoiled, which I guess is a far more feasible thing now than it was 8 years ago) know that they have something really fun waiting for them at the end of all the monotony, which means that they'll push through it anyway even though the narrative thinks they shouldn't. The game, by putting those incredible fights in the genocide route, is telling the player that they should do it, which I think makes the grind feel like something the game is forcing you to do rather than a clue towards the supposed pointlessness of your efforts.
I find it strange that Undertale put its best, or at least most climactic, fights and music in the genocide route. Especially because the rest of the game understood so well that gamers will ignore roleplaying in the service of gameplay.
@Edgy_Shrek The fact that I kept on dying to Undyne was what made me end up going full genocide on everything up to that point - it was dull, but it felt like that was what the game expected me to do. So while there's a lot I like about Undertale, the message fell bloody flat for me.
@@conorskerritt-morgan4045 Same. I was bad at the fights so I leveled up to get better. The emotional message fell completely flat because I was bad at the gameplay lmao. I managed to not kill enough stuff that I still got a 'neutral' route but if I had plateu'd sooner then I would have killed more.
This is actually a very good explanation of why I like the late 90s/early 2000s turn-based RPGs like Xenogears, Skies of Arcadia, and certain Final Fantasies. People often complain that they do not like grinding levels, but that is the 'calm' space between advancing the plot for me. And what I like about them is that I control when I am grinding for calm relaxation and when I am advancing the story. And the places where some of those games can take the very slight step from fun to annoying is when they take that control away from me - either by preventing me from grinding or by forcing me to. I like the freedom to control my own grind - which is why, after much reluctance, I ended up loving many Fromsoft games. Once the ability to level up is unlocked, I can grind on easy enemies to my heart's content if I like, or I can push further. Games allowing me to control the pace - to sometimes move ahead to new challenges and at other times linger and enjoy myself at my own pace - is hugely valuable to me.
It's all about contrast and variety... I've heard a lot of people complain about how Elden Ring has tons of wasted empty space between the "actual content bits" but I really enjoyed horsing around the countryside just taking in the pretty skyboxes. After a tough fight you always get a break, some time to collect your thoughts before going to the next dungeon.
In Stars and Time comes to mind. You (Siffrin) have to repeat the time loop several times over, going through the same floors of the mansion, fighting the same enemies, completing the same pathway of key hunting, listening to the same lines of dialogue, etc. It puts you and the MC, Siffrin, on the same wavelength as they slowly lose patience. It also makes every new breadcrumb really engaging, as a result of uncovering more mysteries or advance more into any of the sidequest routes you can take.
This game came to mind as soon as I read the video title. One of only two games I've ever played that I felt did this well (the other being spoilers for the game in question). I won't ever replay it, but I greatly appreciate it and would recommend trying it out.
Yeah ISAT was also where my mind first went. I find that it also kinda uses its boredom as a cattle prod, but it also doesn’t have an easily accessible alternate path like Paper Mario, meaning you have to actually sit with it in a more meaningful sense. It’s also Not a second screen game, so that’s another layer on top of it
Glad I decided to check if someone else had brought this up before doing my own mild gushing about this game. I've never before (or since) felt the idea of a deliberately boring game ever worked in a way that didn't just make the game worse. But in this case in a weird way it remarkably enhanced it, and made the twists that disrupted the routine you've fallen into more jarring.
This argument makes me think of the sequence from Uncharted 3, where you find yourself stranded in the middle of the desert with no landmarks in any direction, and the only thing you can do is just wander blindly forward. It goes on for several minutes of you just holding forward while grand and oppressive music plays occasionally broken up by mild hallucinations or mirages. I’m sure a lot of people found that part immensely boring but I was very surprised and impressed by it. It did an incredible job of making you feel the desperation and hopelessness that comes with being stranded in such a brutal and merciless environment, and made for a very pleasant change of pace after the high octane thrill ride of the plane crash. Uncharted 3 is a bit of mixed bag but there are moments in that game that are absolutely breathtaking
When I first played that sequence I had no idea what The Waste Land was, so I was mostly entertained by the narrator's enthusiasm about "this red rock"
"In Stars and Time" also briefly had me in a stretch of monotony and it was beginning to get to me, but at the same time it was amazing because I'd become so in sync with the main character that most of the time my emotions were matching the one they had and indeed the monotony were getting to them too.
Great timing. Just last night I watched a video of someone discussing their hands-on preview of Metamorphosis Refantazio (or whatever the hell it's name is) and the person said something I disagreed with strictly from a personal taste point of view. He said he thought the fusing demons system in Persona killed the pacing of the game. I find it an enjoyable break from the standard gameplay loop. I actually enjoy spending time in menus within JRPGs. It can be rewarding to map out builds and so on. On paper, menu diving is very boring but in practice, it CAN be fun. ('can' being hugely important here)
There's a bunch of factors that plays into this - the power boost you get from the menuing needs to be so big you can feel it, the choices you make must be interesting, and of course the menu has to not be an absolute slog to go through. I've seen some games where the menuing is so boring and pointless I'd hold off on it until absolutely necessary, games with a menu that's so annoying it actively makes common tasks harder (Pokémon has a bunch of REALLY slow menu transitions, for instance) and other games where I've happily minmaxed things for 30 minutes without realizing.
@@GameDevYal Yeah, I think "interesting choices" is the main way MegaTen games stand out among JRPGs. They almost always give the player more interesting choices than standard RPGs. Like how demon conversations make random encounters far more tolerable. Fight? Recruit? Haggle? Flirt? You have real options, every time. Same with the demon fusions. You have so many options in how to build your party, and it's never a totally straightforward choice. Even if you are making a more powerful demon, you're still sacrificing two other demons to accomplish it, and not all their powers can carry over. There's risk/reward to consider in every single fusion.
The amount of decisions a single fusion adds is crazy, the cost, resummoning one of the old monsters, not even knowing if the new one is good, or possible to find in the next dungeon or later in the dungeon you're already in, Accidents potentially screwing things up or giving you a deity, along with other things in games like the itemizer or gallows in persona 5 or the essences in SMT 5, even without fusing, there's still stuff you can do, the guy that unlocks a area in Nocturne, in exchange for a demons life, is it worth going to find a random weak demon or should you use one you have you don't like Its absurd the amount of things you can do with a single demon or two, and it makes it enjoyable.
In a similar vein, I actually liked the monster training part of Tales of Symphonia 2, as much as that game has been pretty widely reviled. Did it fit well in a Tales game? Arguably not. Did it kind of undermine the whole point of having a sequel because it rendered all of the returning characters for whom players were nostalgic useless? 100% (though the returning characters were also just all significantly weaker than the player characters, so it was more than just the monsters being stronger than them). But I had quite a bit of fun with it, in a game that otherwise didn't have much going for it.
this concept of "boringness as a motivator" reminded me of the early game in factorio, boring manual labor with the intention of giving you the thought "boy this mining/handfeeding/crafting is boring, I should make a machine to do this for me" which leads you into the actual gameplay mechanics of automation and logistics.
I feel like this is what made battle royale so big in the first place. That and it was a unique experience at the time. With the downtime that you get, each firefight feels like a peak, combined with the fact that when you die, you're out of the game.
Engaging is the key word. It's okay for games to have boring/unenergetic downtime between moments of peak play, we like those and we have them in real life as well. But it needs to be engaging for a player to do. A sisyphean struggle against an unbreachable barrier get boring, a groundhog day style of repetitiveness with little stimuli or change from the work also gets boring, and it's extremely bad when it's both of those together. Even playing powerwash simulator, you're not just going to do the same level the same way each time. In a roguelike you're not going to run the same build with the same goal every time.
I was trying to come up with a game that is boring or is "not fun" that I like and I'm really struggling to think of any, its a case of if your engaged you're not bored, and if you aren't bored you are probably having fun. Fun isn't just having that dopamine button constantly tickled I guess.
I think that part of the reason why I didn't mind grinding in alot of games. Sure it can definitely be tedious and at times your just listening your podcast or audio book. However it can give a way for you to interacting with your party and exploring the maps and the mechanics. I mean yakzua games even have slow moments in the stories where low key saying "do the side quests and mini-games". As yatzhee said, you need those slow moments for breathing room
In Stars and Time uses boredom really well. It's an RPG about the party's rogue getting stuck in a time loop encompassing the final dungeon and boss, and the day immediately before that. It does an incredible job of making the player emphasize with the player character as they slowly get driven mad, going through the dungeon and fighting the same enemies over and over again to find clues to understand and escape the time loop. Skipping ahead in the loop requires a resource that is literally your boring memories of fighting monsters repeatedly. There's a sequence you can do on the first day to make each your party members really powerful, but only if you do those sequences and all the lengthy dialogue at the start of the loop. I've never felt so in the head of a player character, and boredom played a big part of that.
This makes me think of a moment in the beginning of Mafia 2 where you get a job moving big heavy boxes between two trucks at a snail’s pace for pocket change. The game is nudging you to find a higher paying, but illicit gig
The phrase I generally think of is "provides a worthwhile experience". That can take a wide range of forms, such as (and I make no claims to this being a complete list, nor that every good game only does one at a time) - Being fun - Making you think, refine your beliefs, and broaden your worldview - Teaching useful skills or information in a way that's easier to stick with than traditional instruction - Giving your brain a workout - Offering a source of pride in accomplishing a challenging task - Allowing you to confront negativity you face in your life outside the game, in a controlled circumstance where you can process it more safely - Being soothing - Occupying lower mental functions while you focus on something else And while it isn't a worthwhile experience by itself, boredom can still be a useful tool in creating one. But what isn't, in my opinion, is the sort of checked-out fugue state that I think a lot of AAA games, especially live services, seem to be shooting for. They aren't really there to give you an experience at all, they're there to keep you playing while experiencing as little as possible.
The 2nd screen thing hit home, I was doing something else while listening to this, and despite being a 7ish minute presentation I stretched watching it over 3 days. Too much going on, and I'm here for it!
Something really interesting I heard when listening to a podcast on Edge of Tomorrow is that as humans, boredom and repetition is probably the scariest concept we can imagine. We are slaves to avoiding boredom. Humans have absolutely insane levels of intelligence. Even before the industrial revolution, humans weren't even considered an apex predator, we are considered SUPER predators, but after we hunted every animal and built enough huts to cater to our tribe, we quickly realized we have almost nothing to do with our brains. Almost every time loop media has to be a comedy to a certain extent because if we can't laugh about it, the concept of repetition is SOUL-CRUSHING. Games like Powerwash Simulator aren't what I'd call boring, I'd call them Boredom Repellent. There's media that is thought-provoking, challenging, it makes you think about it days after, and then there's Boredom Repellent. It's less that it gives you a positive emotion, moreso that it is the absence of a negative one. There's not really like, a point to this? I just thought it was interesting to think about.
I feel like another way you can frame it is like the spaces between notes in a song, or the silence between the build up and the drop - it not only helps the high points have more impact it also helps to separate and distinguish them, it creates a rhythm. In that metaphor something like Powerwash Simulator might be like a minimalist ost like the one in Breath of the Wild, generally absent but showing up to punctuate certain moments
In most of the real-time strategy games I used to play, I usually didn't really play the game. I certainly wouldn't play against anyone else. I'd usually boot up big games with comfortable conditions with a team of AI players to do most of the actual playing. Then I'd just build up and occasionally send a few units into the fray and watch. Fun at the time.
This episode’s a great example of when an argument is tested against its inverse: fun vs. boring vs. not fun vs. not boring. The previous series’ episode about fun talked about fun vs. not fun (horror, anxiety, frustration), and this talks about boring vs. not boring (downtime, directing the player). As for a game shooting razorblades, not sure if there are any exceptions there.
Tazer challenges, or at the very least things that are physically painful/mentally exausting. Ultimately they seem to really only be fun when 1) youre getting paid to do it, or 2) you are not the only one experiencing the pain. Ive noticed playing overwatch 2 for the first time that the game really is only ever engaging when you have friends to play it with, not in the "oh no this game is missing something important when you dont have someone with you" like DRG or left 4 dead, or hell even Counterstrike and R6. Its legitamately an awful experience to play the game entirely, even when you are playing a character you know you enjoy both in theory and in practice, even when you pretend the other players are bots, and even when youre winning. This only changes when you have someone you enjoy being with experiencing the bullshit with you. its that "ew this tastes awful have a try" behavior. The tazer challenge is a similar issue. Noone is ever willingly being shocked unless they are specifically getting something out of it, typically if its someone they enjoy the company of. Why do you think the only one ever doing something like that is Michael Reeves or a streamer who coded it into a game like mario maker? Honestly any "challenge" like cinnamon is typically only done on camera, for social media points, or best case scenario in front of people you trust as a group activity when someone is bored, its simply more fun to watch than it is to actually do and "fun to watch" makes money.
you will probably never read this yahtzee but thank you for making starstruck vagabond its been a great distraction while dealing with my mums mental decline. everyday i sit down and watch movies with her while playing your game on my laptop this game has helped me emotionally handle a rough time in my life thank you.
That sounds like a hard time. Good luck, and I hope there are also support resources that you can access as needed. I can see this probably coming up in my near future too.
I saw another video were someone used the phrase “boring (non-pejorative)” to describe a kind of slower, down-to-earth, detail-focused zen-like experience you’d get from something like powerwash simulator. Granted, she was using the video to talk about the experience viewing some slice-of-life anime, but I think the point still applies. I’d argue “boring” is only used here because we lack a better term for that type of engagement.
I never actually thought of the idea that lacking a boring part actually made a game worse, but now that you said it I understand completely. Dead Space wouldn't be so good if it didn't have the calm parts, like in the tram where you know you can't be attacked, because it both gives you relief when you reach it after escaping the hunter and helps build up tension again when you leave it as you know that you are venturing back into hostile territory.
Should a game have a player physically emulate dangerous behavior is an interesting question. I loved Super Hot VR before its update, but I also understand maybe having a game end *SPOILER* by having the player physically mime shooting themselves in the head while alone in their bedroom might not be the best vibes to be sending during this day and age, especially as an American who's always one 15 minute trip to Walmart away from doing so.
I mean if a game is all high time and no down time then the high times are less special or interesting. I think you need those boring moments to make the big ones you want people to remember shine more.
I recently watched a video about pre-iron stoneworking and it was absolutely spellbinding. So spellbinding, in fact, that I wanted everyone I know to watch it too. I recommended it to them with the words "It was so interesting that it made me actually pause my game and fully focus on just watching the video." Which every single person recognized as the highest of praise. So yeah, I think Yahtz is onto something here about the second monitor thing.
The Sims 2 on the DS was a hotel simulator with a real time 24 hour clock. It does have a story but after I beat it I found my absorbed into it, trying to earn a million bucks (or the Sims equivalent) and getting kinda absorbed by how dull it is. Every now and then you have to fight some robots or rescue someone or calm down/check in/check out a guest but usually it's just about doing random shit like painting, collecting space parts, randomly tipping cows, or just sitting in a jazz lounge having drinks. The tiny desert town as a setting just adds to this kinda rhythmic dullness where turning on the game for 30 mins just to do everything you can feels both rewarding yet existential. I imagined drink slowly consuming my character until one day he got up, bought a car, and drove away leaving the hotel to slowly fall into disrepair until some sad soul found it and with nothing else in life, took over until they eventually left as well.
Maybe it was not " injury by razors", but back in the 90's if you've had pirated your Gamecube, so that it'd use bootleg copies of games, it was cheaper to burn your game on regular-size CDs instead of the miniature ones, that Gamecube originally used. However in order to play them, you'd have to remove the console's case, which in the end, turned it into the potential launcher of spinning disk od death, flying through your room in cases when that "slightly teared down" illegal copy of Resident Evil, you've borrowed from your friend, finally get's loose and decides to fly through your face mid-game.
Any time I hear someone say that the purpose of a game is to be fun, I'm reminded of a line from my favorite episode of On Cinema At The Cinema. To paraphrase: "Jesus, you're some critic. The movie was 'fun, yet painful'?" Any halfwit can code a Skinner Box that caresses the player's ego for being such a clever and talented boy. If you actually believe that video games are an artform (and most gamers don't, they only want the prestige associated with terms like "art" and "masterpiece" but refuse to stomach any of the critical analysis), you must necessarily believe that they're capable of eliciting more than a single emotional response.
A lot of it comes down to what gameplay you are willing to tolerate or perhaps a better way of putting it is “What gameplay resonates with you?” For example, I’m addicted to Diablo 4 and lately World of Warcraft which Yahtz frames up as making you a mindless husk grinding for gear & numbers. Which… is fun to me for some reason. I don’t mind killing endless waves of skeletons if it means I have a shot at getting the shiny loot. I could easily understand why this isn’t someone else’s cup of tea. Another example is I’m having a hard time getting through Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. The gameplay is very tedious spending hours and hours playing mini games & activating towers for Chadley. I am very bored when I play that game. But I guess it’s fun for someone because that game got rave reviews (which continues to baffle me but you get the point).
Something else to consider is that in a game where the player can make choices in terms of weapons, gear, bonuses, abilities etc, they will often optimize the fun out of a system if it means greater efficiency. You don't want it so the best way to play a game is the most boring way. Ideally, the most powerful way to play a game should be the most fun. Like keeping to the beat in Hi Fi Rush. IT reminds me of Nier Automata. With how varied your build can be, a lot of people would just take health regen and defence upgrades and make the combat pretty boring for themselves. But that build isn't the best build by a long shot, if you want the most powerful build you need to invest in attack, crit chance, evade distance etc. The most effective way to play the game is both the most enjoyable and the most difficult. Which a lot of people would tout as a perfect combat system.
As someone who enjoys 4X RTS over any other category of game I think part of what I enjoy about them is what you mention disliking. Keeping track of multiple things at once while handling a rapidly shifting prioritry list makes me feel engaged like few things can. Add into that how some of those games allow you to craft your own narrative to an extent not seen outside of 4x games and I just don't get much out of any other games anymore.
I absolutely agree about the RTS thing, I love playing them co-op because it means I can actually focus on one front while someone else focuses on another.
Lately I've been modding a version of the Star Wars Galaxies Emulator code to make it more single player friendly for private servers of one (NPC vendors, NPC buyers for crafted goods, hirelings, etc.). I've found that the crafting professions make for a surprisingly cozy experience, Star Wars Dew Valley, if you will. I realized that some of the magic of the game was the boring parts, like long speeder journeys across huge planets occasionally broken up by running for your life from hostile mobs. In comparison to the modern era's dopamine assaults in video games, it feels somewhat meditative.
Back during covid I started playing elite dangerous specifically for the boring travel, I found myself missing the commute home from the office. The time the commute took and boredom it involved gave me the necessary time & mental space to decompress and be able to leave work behind for the day. I wonder if that's the part of the appeal of boring gameplay / games, it gives the time & mental capacity to decompress and unpack
the game where boredom really hit me as an artistic choice is Silent Hunter 3. Spending time patrolling quad and praying to spot anything, get a message about a convoy, being attacked - this is one side of submarine experience, completed with moments of fighting for your life when this convoy you've been so excited for starts being not so kind to your boat. Pretty much 1:1 experience with Das Boot.
those type of "work simulator" games always feel like the game is tricking me into thinking im being productive when im not. i could get the same neurochemical response from actually cleaning my room or doing chores
I feel like 'boring' is a loaded term. When I think of 'boring' I don't think of moments that are tedious or repetitive grindathons. I think of the genuinely negative moments where I'm not being engaged on any level and the pacing is straight-up dead in the water--either because I'm not allowed to progress forward due to some time-gating element or there's an excess of unskippable fluff. There are also boring moments where I'm spinning my wheels for hours because the core game's puzzles are convoluted and maliciously counter-intuitive, sending me on my third passthrough of a sprawling map where I gotta click every square inch of every wall just to find the random candelabra or ceiling tile that'll allow me to progress the story. No context clues. No storytelling. Nothing to learn from the experience. Just the game devs padding for time with an easter egg hunt that you didn't know you were in. The latter was especially prominent in the text-based/point-and-click era. 'Return to Zork' was the most infamous example of this. Every puzzle in that game makes you feel like a janitor on his first day. Every time you find a locked door you must first spend an hour trying all 100 unlabeled keys on your key ring. Eventually you discover that the key you needed was not on your key ring at all. It was a super secret hidden key that could only be acquired by feeding a glowing rock to a hamster that was then shoved up the butt of an NPC while you gave him a reacharound and furthered the conversation four times in esperanto as he screamed about moonshine. Context clues? What context clues? You'll get pain and suffering instead. Finishing the game gives the sense of relief that one might feel after manually cracking a safe by trying every possible number combination in existence... and it's empty. You feel worse for having tried.
All these years later and I’m still chuckling about how Yahtz actually did the hamster wheel grind in SPM. I mean I did too on my first playthrough but I have the excuse of having been 10 years old at the time.
My go to second screen games recently have been jigsaw puzzles, they're purely visual in gameplay and don't require constant attention so they're ideal for podcasts and video essays, definitely a type of game that I wouldn't describe as neither fun nor boring nor exciting, they're just this almost perfectly flat line of minimal engagement that trigger my sense of satisfaction out of correctly assembling a thing. They also made me realize that I'm rapidly approaching the point in my life when I'll be considered middle-aged by every single metric.
Most recent case of a game being boring in a way in a sense that felt honestly almost crucial to it for me was in stars and time. Without giving too much away it's a time loop game which in a sense focuses on the monotony and sameyness of a time loop in a way that plays into its themes and story. It is definitely worth playing so i don't feel like outright spoiling it but for me the repetition made it strangely gripping in a way i don't see much, even if it's the kind of thing that will likely not work for everyone.
Honestly, this is part of why I started replaying RDR2 over this past week.... just been having some days where I don't really want to think or strategize or worry about doing story stuff, so I'm just going to ride around and go hunting or fishing or play poker for a bit.
Probably the best example of this principle can be found in Red Dead Redemption. After all the shooty-shooty bang-bang, John finally gets the chance to hang up the proverbial spurs and enjoy a bit of the quiet life. The proceeding events can be just boiled down to, “housework.” However, these seemingly boring chores stand to emphasize the final act in RDR. I imagine the pacing of kill Dutch and immediately face off against the army wouldn’t have had as much of an emotional impact had we not had that brief reprieve.
I think an interesting use for boredom as a toon in games is brought up by Camwing in his video about Satisfactory. Using early game boredom to incentivise learning more difficult but interesting mechanics.
Seeing Yahtzee talking about a game with actual gameplay in the backround was actually better than his usual videos with animated characters. I think I would prefer this format much more for full reviews.
5:18 I find this concept of "dullness breaking up the high intensity" appropriate akin to listening to an album. I review metal albums for a small site for fun, and I'm constantly reminded that some of the best albums are either A. things that break the heavier songs every once in a while with a soft thing or two or B. a super speedy album that knows when to cut the drums and guitar off for a second or two to make a different part of the song stand out. If an album sounds the same the whole way through, it better be something super high quality from start to finish. Otherwise, it's just going to be very samey and uninteresting and that little nitpick turns from boring to frustrating as time goes on. The same is true in video games. If everything was the openings to FF7 or Persona 5, then you're always exploding things. You're always trying to fight something. I would never have the time to spend wandering around Sector 7 to learn about how shitty everything is in Midgar or do Social Links to learn about my teammates's lives and care about them. There needs to be a context to what someone is doing. The "goal" that Yahtzee was talking about. The goal can always be different. But mind-numbing excitement can be a thing. It can be cathartic to spend 10-15 minutes sitting and chatting with someone if they have an interesting story to tell.
It's entirely alright, that games should fit any mental space we can be in. There needs to be a large variety of games for that. I can see myself craving a slower, calm game to relieve anxiety, for example. Or to provide a relaxing context in which to comfortably think. Or to consume other media without being so inactive as to *build up* anxiety. Games are stimulants and sedatives, as you've basically said.
Reminded me of Postal 2, where many problems and violence can be be avoided but just patiently waiting in line and not doing anything crazy. I'm not trying to make any point really
3:46 I can't play "Second screen games" because all games that aren't 100% verbal dialogue at all times are second screen games to me (Yes I am being screened for ADHD as we speak) so the actual second screen games make me want to bite off my fingers if I play for more than an hour
Half-Life 2 was very good at managing its pacing, segueing desperate fire-fights to puzzles, or even migrating from shooting multiple similarly-armed foes in tight alleyways to trying to handle an alien or robotic threat in a more open environment. And it managed to do so without ever being, to my mind at least, "boring". I think that's the gold standard, most of the time. Conversely, Duke Nukem Forever had among its many afflictions: "Uh-oh, we've been doing a puzzle for two minutes! Better get in some of that 'keep spawning in two monsters, lather, rinse, and repeat' action the kids love so much!"
The way view it that being "boring" isn't a bad thing. But I wouldn't describe the activities that he is describing as boring in the context of those games. To me they would be something else.
Awesome vid! I personally feel like a game should never be boring. I'm 100% for the escalation and release of dramatic tension in certain games, and those "breather moments" are really important, otherwise the game just feels like an arcade adrenaline hit like Doom.
Funny that Yahtzee brought up The Escapist, since with the departure of Cold Take this has become Escapist 2.0 for me; a channel where I wade through a sea of guff to get to Yahtzee's reviews and longer ramble-videos.
No More Heroes did this great in my opinion. The part of the game you want to actually play is the combat and the bosses, but in between each level you have to do a bunch of monotonous chores. It effectively puts you in Travis's shoes, desperate to escape the monotony of daily life by becoming an assassin on a whim.
I suppose it comes down to, how does one define boring. Because to me, boring means: "I'd rather be doing something else," which is not the best emotion to elicit. But if we define it has periods that are low-stakes, very calm or similar, then yeah, games should have moment like that. And as demonstrated, the feeling of wanting to do something else can be used to drive players in the right direction.
I think - once again - it all highly depends on how good the game is designed. Finding the game boring is no indication that there is a better route because sometimes there is none. I just watched a review of Deja Vu on the NES, for example. You have to load your gun one bullet at a time using a point-and-click interface without a mouse. Podcast/Second-screen games - which could also be cozy games - are usually tedious but in a calming, satisfying way. I played House Flipper and enjoyed designing room layouts but when the game was over, I would chuck furniture in a room and mark the job done. Also, this whole topic lends itself to games as an artform. However, I don't appreciate games that don't respect your time that intentionally make things drawn-out. I heard The Witness makes you wait for 20 minutes. That's not a game.
I seem to recall one of the Boktai games having a mechanic where you could borrow sunshine but there was some seriously boring grind required to pay it back.
I do think contrast is important to actually keep fun and other emotional peaks and game quality overall in perspective so the occasional boring bit or even just playing outright mediocre overall games can sort of act as a pallete cleanser that makes the next standout moment feel more impactful after all if everything is fun then nothing is. Good example most real gamers can understand overcoming challenge real challenge that truly aggravates and stresses isn't fun in the moment but without that frustration the sense of glorious accomplishment once overcome would not exist, the contrast is what makes it meaningful.
My personal "universal rule" is that a game has to have decision-making. Maybe it's fast-paced decisions like in a Souls-like or shooter, or trying to predict and counter your opponent 10 turns in advance in an RPG or strategy game or something. Giving me interesting core mechanics and managing various resources (mana, stamina, cooldown timers, etc.) is what makes a game fun to me. When a game is completely solved and has been boiled down to a sequence of buttons to memorize, it stops being a video game. If all you're doing is hitting a solved sequence so you can get to a cutscene, you're not playing a video game, you're playing a DVD menu.
i thought of the ending of red dead 2 where you are building the homestead and the beginning of uncharted 4 as examples of games being intentionally boring to advance a story/thematic element. in one instance you kind of get sucked into the daily grind of john working to build a new home only to remember at the very end that he’s essentially building his grave, and in the other you’re connected with nathan drake who’s become bored by his daily life and missses adventure. idk kind of an interesting concept. also maybe this is why death stranding works lol
You can tell a lot about a person when they start telling you about the things they find boring. More often than not, "boring" for some people is code for "I refuse to let some work of art / media / what-have-you force me to do any sort of introspection whatsoever or do any sort of mental work at all to engage with it on any level."
While I don't necessarily have much to contribute to the argument of whether or not games should be boring, about games not trying to murder you, there was an art exhibition about two decades ago called the PainStation that was Pong but with a point lost causing one of three pain methods (burn, shock, or whipping) to happen to you. Then there's also lose/lose, where it's Space Invaders, but shooting things deletes stuff from your drive in a digital form of Russian Roulette. Granted, both of those were free and made as art pieces to my knowledge, so maybe some entrepreneurial board of directors can make some totally insane thing that will literally kill you directly and asked to get paid for the privilege.
A game for suicidal, Saw movie enthusiasts would probably enjoy the added drama of having razor blades flung at the player. Would be an interesting test to see just how strong ToS are in various countries, too.
There was an arcade game from the late 80s that was rather infamous for being so stressful it allegedly killed two people via cardiac arrest when the final boss said it's introduction line, "beware! I live!"
This kind of reminds me of the bit in Mafia 2 where you're supposed to stack boxes for money. After three, main characters says it's dumb work and you have the option to leave or keep going. I honestly thought that was cool, like the game was asking us, "Do you want to be the guy who jumps straight into crime, or will you at least try to be a model citizen?" I did find it annoying that after a few more boxes, the game simply chooses for you and the protagonist says, "Forget this, I'm gone."
What about that one game where you have to wait 400 IRL days for the game to be completed, and you get to very slowly do menial hikes through the cave you're in just to pass the time and make the coming of the end a bit more pleasant. I havent played it myself, but l remember seeing it in a indie-world showcase, and it kinda intrigued me because the whole game is built around the concept of being dull/boring but at the same time building anticipation towards some ultimate goal that may or may not be effected at all by what you manage to slowly accomplish during the span of those 400 days... Edit: Googled it, the game is called The Longing
Anyone else excited for "Ejecting Razor Blades From the Disk Drive of a PS5"? I had the pleasure of playing a demo at PAX and my doctor says I should be all healed for the full release.
Funnily enough, talking about second screen/podcast games, one of my podcast games is Factorio, which is definitly not just mindless hand work, and if anything is more high function than listening to a podcast.
You know, Microsoft probably won’t release a console that shoots razor blades out of its disk drive, but I can easily imagine some shadowy entity has workshopped a controller that shocks the player if they’re too slow on QTEs or something like that. I mean, you could theoretically work something like that into gameplay for some excruciatingly contrived reason.
When I think of game that has boring parts, No More Heroes's side jobs were for me very memorable because in comparison to rest of this bombastic game filled with blood... Part timer job were very ordinary and conceptually boring but it allow game to have very sinus wave in enjoyment which made the boss fights, high point of the wave, made so much intersting.
When he started talking about the concept of second screen games....I stopped the sudoku I was doing to actually watch the video
I guess the Nintendo DS would be VERY different if it was released today
@@silkdust8069 Underrated comment.
Gamer Pippin: "Second screen yes, but what about third screen games?"
Hey, that’s my life. And the premise of my entire channel. ❤
Well, I continued to build my gunpla.
Boring means 'unengaging' to me, not 'serene' or 'low-key.' A game focused on menial repetitive tasks is not by definition 'boring' if the mechanics or gameplay loop is satisfying enough to engage you: it would be boring if the mechanics were half-baked or unsatisfying in a way that made the menial tasks not feel worth bothering with.
For instance: Voices of the Void and Shadows of Doubt have plenty of downtime between cases, but I would call neither 'boring' but rather compelling in a mundane sense, since you have to occupy yourself in a very atmospheric world. In fact, I sometimes find Power Wash Simulator can get _actually_ boring because of tedium, where once the satisfaction fades and you're searching for that last annoying grimy spot, the dopamine kick isn't always enough to make up for the frustration.
Yeah I think "low key" "down time" "chill time" is a munch better term then boring.
I was thinking the same thing. If the game has some "low key" or "down time" or is entirely "low key" but you're still engaged then it's not really boring.
Indeed, and while those 'low-key' games can be or get boring so can the high octane action all the time games - there must be some variety in the gameplay loops or you will get bored no matter how good the action is. Personally I really struggle to get into low-key games as a rule, I want a more engaging mental challenge in a game personally as otherwise I'd rather read a book, watch TV, listen to music - so for instance I still like Elite Dangerous, even if I've not played in a year or so now as the joysticks got put away - without them turning on all the assists required to make playing with a keyboard possible it just immediately bores me too much, its more like watching a really bad episode of Trek than gaming... Where with joysticks and flight assist off it remains mentally stimulating enough even in the quiet moments.
Voices of the Void my beloved paranoia in the woods simulator.
On one hand the idea of just, finding and processing a signal is boring, but on the other game gives you so much downtime and freedom to do whatever the hell you want to both during processing a signal and between daily quotas with potential for random spooky nonsense or funny stuff to happen, that it becomes interesting.
Yeah, I feel like his argument here is on shaky ground because it relies on a loose definition of a key term. Like, the whole reason people play horror games or games that tug at their heartstrings is because they derive enjoyment (i.e., fun) from being made to feel fear or sadness, so you can in fact say that those games are fun.
If he awards games that are Good, Bad and Bland, he should have a category for Interesting games. Games that didn’t light his pants on fire, but had enough interesting ideas competently put together to warrant attention.
Those are the ones I feel myself drawn to. Not so much exciting or thrilling, but more "wow, that is a cool idea". Obra Dinn, A Hand With Many Fingers, Pawnbarian, Balatro, Umurangi... All of these are novel and unique in a way. I bet this is how people felt about Portal, too.
@@tretretre1111 I think you are missing the point, those games you listed are novel but more importantly good well polished experiences, not the apropiate use for a "the interesting 5" ranking which should be for games that arent good (their ideas might not come together, bugs prevent you from enjoying the full design, they lack polish and feedback needed for satisfying gameplay. Etc)
But the ideas that those game brought to the table are interesting enough to keep in memory, even if its just for some other developer to say "I can do it better"
@@tomasavendanozacarias5205 So, being well done makes a novel concept less interesting? Most of the games I listed are small projects without a lot of polish, anyway, but I'm not really getting what you're trying to say.
@@tretretre1111 The point is that you walk away from those games going 'damn, that was a good game', not 'damn, that game had some really cool ideas but I really wish it was [x/y/z]'. Less indie darling, more slavjank.
I've been believing this in my head for years now
The thing I will always respect about Yahtzee is his willingness and propensity to challenge his previous opinions and statements; it's one thing to commit to your gut instinct and merely let your thoughts be known, but it's another thing entirely to interrogate *other* options. It shows an awareness of one's self in the context of a wider discussion, and indeed keeps said discussion alive
I'll never get tired of these videos
Desert Bus.
Your Honor, the defense rests.
but that will be more of a troll game, the intencion is to annoy
A game made to be dull, that becomes an endurance challenge. I think the logic is pretty simple there, but I'd still love to discuss it for, say, the length of a ride from Tuscon to Las Vegas.
When the “boring” game is being made as such because it’s making a statement, and that statement is so interesting that a massive community comes to watch and play that game every year… is it actually boring?
To be clear, my point here was that the boredom in this game was a deliberate artistic choice.
How is that game by the way?
I feel there’s a difference between being “boring” and “Serene” or “Chill”
not every good "boring" game is "serene" or "chill"
pathologic's core gameplay loop is 90% dull walking, it's still one of the best games i've ever played in my life and nothing about it is serene or chill
this is cope
Yeah I think yazthee is talking about down time more then anything
Absolutely. A boring game is one that you could walk away from at any point, with no regrets.
I love the boring part of Super Paper Mario to bits. The villain's idea is that the only conceivable way to stop Mario is to get the player to stop playing. That's brilliant.
Kinda like when you fight Sans! When he realizes he can't beat you enough to frustrate you into leaving, he just refuses to end his turn. Figuring if nothing happens for long enough you'll get bored and leave.
I absolutely hated that level in Super Paper Mario. Actually I didn't like that game in general. I found the levels tedious to go through, with lots of unnecessary backtracking.
Yahtzee's ruminations about gaming are the most interesting among the Second Wind team because A) he's taken the time to establish his own clear standards and expectations for what attributes serve the player's experience, whether you agree or disagree, and B) he outwardly explores his own understanding of the medium instead of didactically spoon-feeding answers to questions us viewers aren't necessarily asking.
I'm all for learning how games work, and I'm all for discussing what constitutes what works when comparing certain games, but there's a big difference between contributing to a larger discussion with a single complete thought and merely thinking out loud. Yahtzee and the bloke from Design Delve do the former, while too many do the latter.
Or something worse that his peers do. Propose questions that they never answer or even elaborate on
have you at least tried to listen to cold takes?
Cold takes are more about the gaming industry, though.I think OP is talking about game design discourse@@Sir_Bucket
I like other SW creators' perspectives on games too, but I guess I won't write an essay to suck up to them ;)
@@Sir_Bucketnot an SW thing anymore;)
You're honestly telling me you don't think Kojima wouldn't have someone's who's schtick is knowing that he's in a video game, and fights the player themselves by firign Razor Blades from the console? If the technology were around, he would use it.
Psycho Mantis would totally zap you through the controller if Kojima could've done it.
One of my favorite games right now, Voices of the Void, spends a significant amount of it's early game being boring and suspenseful in equal measure. It lulls you into a nice work flow routine that almost becomes relaxing, before it slowly starts to strip back the veil and play it's hand. If it didn't let you spent upwards of 3-8 hours only being moderately spooked by it's alone in remote radio satellite base in the mountains vibe, it would not hit nearly as hard. It makes even small spooks land. A pine cone falling in the woods as you walk down the paths becomes a frequent but inescapable small jolt. Which then makes you ignore the real sounds of threats for half a second when THOSE start because you assume its a pine cone.
Another Voices of the Void fan!
Kerfus will scare you way more than any alien monster. He's done with the reports and is now beelining towards you at full speed to appear behind you after just as you forgot about him. That or you've locked him out and he is waiting to jump you as soon as you open the door.
It took me an embarrassing number of hours to even figure out what those random thumps I kept hearing in the woods were, until I finally saw a pinecone rolling downhill past me. Which was, of course, a tiny jumpscare all its own. I'm supposed to be alone out here, what just shifted by my ankle?!
Tho at the moment besides the [balls of light my beloathed] there's not much threat, it's all psychological if you go in blind into the game leaving you to learn about the fact that there's genuinely no real threat at your own pace.
especially since there isn't any *notification* that things are happening (besides jolting awake with a bad vibe in the middle of the night), all the events just HAPPENING in the world around you whether you're conscious of them or not makes a lot of the actual horror way more effective for how naturally it dawns on you
pathologic is the best argument for games being boring, most of pathologic is just walking around and I actually enjoyed using the down time to reflect on my experiences with the game
Pathologic was what popped into my head as well. It's a game I'll never personally play but I find fascinating on a conceptual level.
It's utterly fascinating to me how the game uses 'boring' to force you into analyzing your own decision making process. You do something and there's probably no reward. And it was boring. So why did you do it?
But that's not boring, is it? If you are enjoying it, no matter what you are doing in-game, you are engaged in the experience. The game made it so the walking itself isn't boring by providing you other elements for you to reflect on during the downtime. It's like when in Portal you are walking and looking around the chamber. You're not shooting portals, but you are engaged because the game is giving you something to think about in the shape of trying to figure out the puzzle. Pathologic is giving you an engaging narrative and mystery for you to think about while you walk around the town. It's giving you the tools to not be bored.
@@carcosian I think its definitely very boring lol, you could argue that waiting at the dentists office isn't boring if you're thinking about an interesting book you read yesterday but the dentists office is still boring
@@carcosian I get your point but I think that part of the point of the game was too make you make that decision yourself. With many games you are motivated to do things because the gameplay is engaging or because you are seeking a reward. Pathologic (again I haven't played it, I'm going off of what I've seen in hbomberguy and MandloreGaming videos) seems to provide you with many options that you can do just because you can do them. There's no reward, there's no engaging activity - and often times spending time on these activities make the rest of the game actively harder because you spent less time on the bits that will actually progress the game.
It's not that the game itself isn't fun (though I think it looks boring as hell) - it's that it provides you with a lot of freedom to bore yourself. It wants you to bore yourself - and then when you ask, "Why did I do that?" the game responds with, "Yeah, why did you do that stuff that you found boring?"
@@daanstrik4293Pathologic 2 is way less boring, way more popular, and way better
I have been waiting 13 years for yahtzee to acknowledge super paper mario's wheel was not the only way through that puzzle.
@@gracehopper9549 yahtzee did not actually grind the million rupees, that would take around 10 hours lol
A bit of his point from the original video got lost unfortunately. While you don't need to use the wheel to pay off the full debt, you do need to earn 10k to get the secret code for the safe, a process which takes about six minutes. Six minutes of nothing but running in one direction. Unless you had already looked up the code online or something, there's no alternate way to get the required money, outside of some glitch probably, or going back to the other room where you can make money, but that's even slower.
I do think there is some argument about what boring means in this context. A power-wash cleaning simulator at least provides some satisfaction and can be a calming experience if somebody has the correct mindset. The dull moments between action in more exciting games can allow a mental reset, but should probably get back to the action before it gets boring.
There is a place for everything, but there's also expectations from the genres and kinds of games.
No one's gonna expect bombastic action from a colony sim, but also barely anyone would like to think about logistics in a fast paced fps shooter.
Half-Life 1 nailed the "dull moments between action" thing you're talking about. You think you're only halfway through We've Got Hostiles when it dumps you into a bunch of vents, crawling away from the thumping music, tough fights and artillery strikes.
Feels appropriate that I happened to be playing Powerwash Simulator when this started playing 😂
As for the rule about games not spitting razorblades at the player, I once had a CD drive cut loose and overspin a CD to the point of literally exploding, spewing shrapnel hard enough that it blew through the closed drive door and hit me in the face - thankfully having been slowed enough by that point to cause no actual harm. I can't say it improved the gaming experience in any way.
There generally has to be quiet moments in the action games for the same reason music isn't just a single loud note held for three or four minutes. It's the Queue part of the Ghost Train Ride, the block-pushing puzzles in God of War, etc.
I think we all know that if any company were to make a game that shoots razor blades at you, it'd be Disney.
Yeah, they bury that in the ToS when you sign up for Disney+.
No, they'd hire EA to make a game about firing razors at the player, then get surprised when there was a backlash and blame EA for ruining their brand.
Then they'd argue you can't sue them because you agreed to abritration in the game's ToS
@@PlehAP It's deeper than that. Legal eagle did a good video on the subject and what disney did wasn't really out of pocket or out of the realm of sense.
The skill to make boring parts is what separates professional game designers and amateur map editors. A professional game designer knows how to set up the setpieces, build the settings, graduate ramp up the challenges. People don't remember the boring parts, but they make the setpieces more memorable
Man i love Semi Ramblomatic so much. As someone new to solo gamedev i watch these and similar videos a lot. So much to learn.
Awesome! What else do you watch?
Some that I follow:
• Matt Barton (Matt Chats)
• Timothy Cain (Cain on Games)
• Pirate Software
@@ashuggtube Not the person you responded to but Architect of Games is another good one.
@@Taladar2003 thank you, I will have a look
As like seemingly every Semi-Ramblomatic's topic, Undertale is a good example. The genocide route is probably deliberately boring and grinding to make you go "what am I even getting out of this?"
I would argue that, while Undertale tries to pull this off, it fails spectacularly. What you get out of the genocide route is the opportunity to fight Undyne the Undying and Sans, which are arguably the most engaging parts of the whole game. Players (unless they haven't been spoiled, which I guess is a far more feasible thing now than it was 8 years ago) know that they have something really fun waiting for them at the end of all the monotony, which means that they'll push through it anyway even though the narrative thinks they shouldn't. The game, by putting those incredible fights in the genocide route, is telling the player that they should do it, which I think makes the grind feel like something the game is forcing you to do rather than a clue towards the supposed pointlessness of your efforts.
I find it strange that Undertale put its best, or at least most climactic, fights and music in the genocide route. Especially because the rest of the game understood so well that gamers will ignore roleplaying in the service of gameplay.
@Edgy_Shrek The fact that I kept on dying to Undyne was what made me end up going full genocide on everything up to that point - it was dull, but it felt like that was what the game expected me to do. So while there's a lot I like about Undertale, the message fell bloody flat for me.
@@conorskerritt-morgan4045 Same. I was bad at the fights so I leveled up to get better. The emotional message fell completely flat because I was bad at the gameplay lmao. I managed to not kill enough stuff that I still got a 'neutral' route but if I had plateu'd sooner then I would have killed more.
This is actually a very good explanation of why I like the late 90s/early 2000s turn-based RPGs like Xenogears, Skies of Arcadia, and certain Final Fantasies. People often complain that they do not like grinding levels, but that is the 'calm' space between advancing the plot for me. And what I like about them is that I control when I am grinding for calm relaxation and when I am advancing the story. And the places where some of those games can take the very slight step from fun to annoying is when they take that control away from me - either by preventing me from grinding or by forcing me to. I like the freedom to control my own grind - which is why, after much reluctance, I ended up loving many Fromsoft games. Once the ability to level up is unlocked, I can grind on easy enemies to my heart's content if I like, or I can push further. Games allowing me to control the pace - to sometimes move ahead to new challenges and at other times linger and enjoy myself at my own pace - is hugely valuable to me.
It's all about contrast and variety... I've heard a lot of people complain about how Elden Ring has tons of wasted empty space between the "actual content bits" but I really enjoyed horsing around the countryside just taking in the pretty skyboxes. After a tough fight you always get a break, some time to collect your thoughts before going to the next dungeon.
In Stars and Time comes to mind. You (Siffrin) have to repeat the time loop several times over, going through the same floors of the mansion, fighting the same enemies, completing the same pathway of key hunting, listening to the same lines of dialogue, etc. It puts you and the MC, Siffrin, on the same wavelength as they slowly lose patience. It also makes every new breadcrumb really engaging, as a result of uncovering more mysteries or advance more into any of the sidequest routes you can take.
This game came to mind as soon as I read the video title. One of only two games I've ever played that I felt did this well (the other being spoilers for the game in question). I won't ever replay it, but I greatly appreciate it and would recommend trying it out.
The loops being so similar make the final loop where everything goes tits up so much more engaging
Yeah ISAT was also where my mind first went. I find that it also kinda uses its boredom as a cattle prod, but it also doesn’t have an easily accessible alternate path like Paper Mario, meaning you have to actually sit with it in a more meaningful sense. It’s also Not a second screen game, so that’s another layer on top of it
GRAHHH I WAS JUST ABOUT TO COMMENT ABOUT IT
Glad I decided to check if someone else had brought this up before doing my own mild gushing about this game. I've never before (or since) felt the idea of a deliberately boring game ever worked in a way that didn't just make the game worse. But in this case in a weird way it remarkably enhanced it, and made the twists that disrupted the routine you've fallen into more jarring.
This argument makes me think of the sequence from Uncharted 3, where you find yourself stranded in the middle of the desert with no landmarks in any direction, and the only thing you can do is just wander blindly forward. It goes on for several minutes of you just holding forward while grand and oppressive music plays occasionally broken up by mild hallucinations or mirages. I’m sure a lot of people found that part immensely boring but I was very surprised and impressed by it. It did an incredible job of making you feel the desperation and hopelessness that comes with being stranded in such a brutal and merciless environment, and made for a very pleasant change of pace after the high octane thrill ride of the plane crash. Uncharted 3 is a bit of mixed bag but there are moments in that game that are absolutely breathtaking
When I first played that sequence I had no idea what The Waste Land was, so I was mostly entertained by the narrator's enthusiasm about "this red rock"
"In Stars and Time" also briefly had me in a stretch of monotony and it was beginning to get to me, but at the same time it was amazing because I'd become so in sync with the main character that most of the time my emotions were matching the one they had and indeed the monotony were getting to them too.
Great timing. Just last night I watched a video of someone discussing their hands-on preview of Metamorphosis Refantazio (or whatever the hell it's name is) and the person said something I disagreed with strictly from a personal taste point of view. He said he thought the fusing demons system in Persona killed the pacing of the game. I find it an enjoyable break from the standard gameplay loop. I actually enjoy spending time in menus within JRPGs. It can be rewarding to map out builds and so on. On paper, menu diving is very boring but in practice, it CAN be fun. ('can' being hugely important here)
There's a bunch of factors that plays into this - the power boost you get from the menuing needs to be so big you can feel it, the choices you make must be interesting, and of course the menu has to not be an absolute slog to go through. I've seen some games where the menuing is so boring and pointless I'd hold off on it until absolutely necessary, games with a menu that's so annoying it actively makes common tasks harder (Pokémon has a bunch of REALLY slow menu transitions, for instance) and other games where I've happily minmaxed things for 30 minutes without realizing.
@@GameDevYal Yeah, I think "interesting choices" is the main way MegaTen games stand out among JRPGs. They almost always give the player more interesting choices than standard RPGs. Like how demon conversations make random encounters far more tolerable. Fight? Recruit? Haggle? Flirt? You have real options, every time.
Same with the demon fusions. You have so many options in how to build your party, and it's never a totally straightforward choice. Even if you are making a more powerful demon, you're still sacrificing two other demons to accomplish it, and not all their powers can carry over. There's risk/reward to consider in every single fusion.
The amount of decisions a single fusion adds is crazy, the cost, resummoning one of the old monsters, not even knowing if the new one is good, or possible to find in the next dungeon or later in the dungeon you're already in, Accidents potentially screwing things up or giving you a deity, along with other things in games like the itemizer or gallows in persona 5 or the essences in SMT 5, even without fusing, there's still stuff you can do, the guy that unlocks a area in Nocturne, in exchange for a demons life, is it worth going to find a random weak demon or should you use one you have you don't like
Its absurd the amount of things you can do with a single demon or two, and it makes it enjoyable.
In a similar vein, I actually liked the monster training part of Tales of Symphonia 2, as much as that game has been pretty widely reviled. Did it fit well in a Tales game? Arguably not. Did it kind of undermine the whole point of having a sequel because it rendered all of the returning characters for whom players were nostalgic useless? 100% (though the returning characters were also just all significantly weaker than the player characters, so it was more than just the monsters being stronger than them). But I had quite a bit of fun with it, in a game that otherwise didn't have much going for it.
this concept of "boringness as a motivator" reminded me of the early game in factorio, boring manual labor with the intention of giving you the thought "boy this mining/handfeeding/crafting is boring, I should make a machine to do this for me" which leads you into the actual gameplay mechanics of automation and logistics.
I feel like this is what made battle royale so big in the first place. That and it was a unique experience at the time.
With the downtime that you get, each firefight feels like a peak, combined with the fact that when you die, you're out of the game.
Engaging is the key word. It's okay for games to have boring/unenergetic downtime between moments of peak play, we like those and we have them in real life as well. But it needs to be engaging for a player to do. A sisyphean struggle against an unbreachable barrier get boring, a groundhog day style of repetitiveness with little stimuli or change from the work also gets boring, and it's extremely bad when it's both of those together.
Even playing powerwash simulator, you're not just going to do the same level the same way each time. In a roguelike you're not going to run the same build with the same goal every time.
I was trying to come up with a game that is boring or is "not fun" that I like and I'm really struggling to think of any, its a case of if your engaged you're not bored, and if you aren't bored you are probably having fun. Fun isn't just having that dopamine button constantly tickled I guess.
Minecraft. Legos. 90% of Table Top Board Games.
I think that part of the reason why I didn't mind grinding in alot of games. Sure it can definitely be tedious and at times your just listening your podcast or audio book. However it can give a way for you to interacting with your party and exploring the maps and the mechanics. I mean yakzua games even have slow moments in the stories where low key saying "do the side quests and mini-games". As yatzhee said, you need those slow moments for breathing room
3:31 Oh my god, this use of the word 'vibrant' is genius. Whoever did the visuals, thumbs up to you.
Pretty sure it's still Yahtzee doing the visuals, at least all the characters and props.
In Stars and Time uses boredom really well. It's an RPG about the party's rogue getting stuck in a time loop encompassing the final dungeon and boss, and the day immediately before that. It does an incredible job of making the player emphasize with the player character as they slowly get driven mad, going through the dungeon and fighting the same enemies over and over again to find clues to understand and escape the time loop.
Skipping ahead in the loop requires a resource that is literally your boring memories of fighting monsters repeatedly. There's a sequence you can do on the first day to make each your party members really powerful, but only if you do those sequences and all the lengthy dialogue at the start of the loop. I've never felt so in the head of a player character, and boredom played a big part of that.
This makes me think of a moment in the beginning of Mafia 2 where you get a job moving big heavy boxes between two trucks at a snail’s pace for pocket change.
The game is nudging you to find a higher paying, but illicit gig
The phrase I generally think of is "provides a worthwhile experience". That can take a wide range of forms, such as (and I make no claims to this being a complete list, nor that every good game only does one at a time)
- Being fun
- Making you think, refine your beliefs, and broaden your worldview
- Teaching useful skills or information in a way that's easier to stick with than traditional instruction
- Giving your brain a workout
- Offering a source of pride in accomplishing a challenging task
- Allowing you to confront negativity you face in your life outside the game, in a controlled circumstance where you can process it more safely
- Being soothing
- Occupying lower mental functions while you focus on something else
And while it isn't a worthwhile experience by itself, boredom can still be a useful tool in creating one. But what isn't, in my opinion, is the sort of checked-out fugue state that I think a lot of AAA games, especially live services, seem to be shooting for. They aren't really there to give you an experience at all, they're there to keep you playing while experiencing as little as possible.
That last bit sounds like a cool mod for buckshot roulette
The 2nd screen thing hit home, I was doing something else while listening to this, and despite being a 7ish minute presentation I stretched watching it over 3 days. Too much going on, and I'm here for it!
Something really interesting I heard when listening to a podcast on Edge of Tomorrow is that as humans, boredom and repetition is probably the scariest concept we can imagine. We are slaves to avoiding boredom. Humans have absolutely insane levels of intelligence. Even before the industrial revolution, humans weren't even considered an apex predator, we are considered SUPER predators, but after we hunted every animal and built enough huts to cater to our tribe, we quickly realized we have almost nothing to do with our brains. Almost every time loop media has to be a comedy to a certain extent because if we can't laugh about it, the concept of repetition is SOUL-CRUSHING. Games like Powerwash Simulator aren't what I'd call boring, I'd call them Boredom Repellent. There's media that is thought-provoking, challenging, it makes you think about it days after, and then there's Boredom Repellent. It's less that it gives you a positive emotion, moreso that it is the absence of a negative one. There's not really like, a point to this? I just thought it was interesting to think about.
I feel like another way you can frame it is like the spaces between notes in a song, or the silence between the build up and the drop - it not only helps the high points have more impact it also helps to separate and distinguish them, it creates a rhythm. In that metaphor something like Powerwash Simulator might be like a minimalist ost like the one in Breath of the Wild, generally absent but showing up to punctuate certain moments
Frankly I'm happy to hear more about second sceeen games or podcast games. Giving consideration to HOW people play games us a really good idea.
In most of the real-time strategy games I used to play, I usually didn't really play the game. I certainly wouldn't play against anyone else. I'd usually boot up big games with comfortable conditions with a team of AI players to do most of the actual playing. Then I'd just build up and occasionally send a few units into the fray and watch. Fun at the time.
This episode’s a great example of when an argument is tested against its inverse: fun vs. boring vs. not fun vs. not boring. The previous series’ episode about fun talked about fun vs. not fun (horror, anxiety, frustration), and this talks about boring vs. not boring (downtime, directing the player).
As for a game shooting razorblades, not sure if there are any exceptions there.
Tazer challenges, or at the very least things that are physically painful/mentally exausting.
Ultimately they seem to really only be fun when 1) youre getting paid to do it, or 2) you are not the only one experiencing the pain.
Ive noticed playing overwatch 2 for the first time that the game really is only ever engaging when you have friends to play it with, not in the "oh no this game is missing something important when you dont have someone with you" like DRG or left 4 dead, or hell even Counterstrike and R6. Its legitamately an awful experience to play the game entirely, even when you are playing a character you know you enjoy both in theory and in practice, even when you pretend the other players are bots, and even when youre winning. This only changes when you have someone you enjoy being with experiencing the bullshit with you. its that "ew this tastes awful have a try" behavior.
The tazer challenge is a similar issue. Noone is ever willingly being shocked unless they are specifically getting something out of it, typically if its someone they enjoy the company of. Why do you think the only one ever doing something like that is Michael Reeves or a streamer who coded it into a game like mario maker?
Honestly any "challenge" like cinnamon is typically only done on camera, for social media points, or best case scenario in front of people you trust as a group activity when someone is bored, its simply more fun to watch than it is to actually do and "fun to watch" makes money.
you will probably never read this yahtzee but thank you for making starstruck vagabond its been a great distraction while dealing with my mums mental decline. everyday i sit down and watch movies with her while playing your game on my laptop this game has helped me emotionally handle a rough time in my life thank you.
That sounds like a hard time. Good luck, and I hope there are also support resources that you can access as needed. I can see this probably coming up in my near future too.
I saw another video were someone used the phrase “boring (non-pejorative)” to describe a kind of slower, down-to-earth, detail-focused zen-like experience you’d get from something like powerwash simulator.
Granted, she was using the video to talk about the experience viewing some slice-of-life anime, but I think the point still applies. I’d argue “boring” is only used here because we lack a better term for that type of engagement.
I never actually thought of the idea that lacking a boring part actually made a game worse, but now that you said it I understand completely. Dead Space wouldn't be so good if it didn't have the calm parts, like in the tram where you know you can't be attacked, because it both gives you relief when you reach it after escaping the hunter and helps build up tension again when you leave it as you know that you are venturing back into hostile territory.
Should a game have a player physically emulate dangerous behavior is an interesting question. I loved Super Hot VR before its update, but I also understand maybe having a game end *SPOILER* by having the player physically mime shooting themselves in the head while alone in their bedroom might not be the best vibes to be sending during this day and age, especially as an American who's always one 15 minute trip to Walmart away from doing so.
3:04 We still remember the Super Paper Mario review, Yahtzee...
That game had a lot of crazy ideas.
I was very happy to see Super Paper Mario brought up again! Love that game
I mean if a game is all high time and no down time then the high times are less special or interesting. I think you need those boring moments to make the big ones you want people to remember shine more.
I recently watched a video about pre-iron stoneworking and it was absolutely spellbinding. So spellbinding, in fact, that I wanted everyone I know to watch it too. I recommended it to them with the words "It was so interesting that it made me actually pause my game and fully focus on just watching the video." Which every single person recognized as the highest of praise. So yeah, I think Yahtz is onto something here about the second monitor thing.
The Sims 2 on the DS was a hotel simulator with a real time 24 hour clock. It does have a story but after I beat it I found my absorbed into it, trying to earn a million bucks (or the Sims equivalent) and getting kinda absorbed by how dull it is. Every now and then you have to fight some robots or rescue someone or calm down/check in/check out a guest but usually it's just about doing random shit like painting, collecting space parts, randomly tipping cows, or just sitting in a jazz lounge having drinks. The tiny desert town as a setting just adds to this kinda rhythmic dullness where turning on the game for 30 mins just to do everything you can feels both rewarding yet existential. I imagined drink slowly consuming my character until one day he got up, bought a car, and drove away leaving the hotel to slowly fall into disrepair until some sad soul found it and with nothing else in life, took over until they eventually left as well.
Maybe it was not " injury by razors", but back in the 90's if you've had pirated your Gamecube, so that it'd use bootleg copies of games, it was cheaper to burn your game on regular-size CDs instead of the miniature ones, that Gamecube originally used. However in order to play them, you'd have to remove the console's case, which in the end, turned it into the potential launcher of spinning disk od death, flying through your room in cases when that "slightly teared down" illegal copy of Resident Evil, you've borrowed from your friend, finally get's loose and decides to fly through your face mid-game.
Any time I hear someone say that the purpose of a game is to be fun, I'm reminded of a line from my favorite episode of On Cinema At The Cinema. To paraphrase:
"Jesus, you're some critic. The movie was 'fun, yet painful'?"
Any halfwit can code a Skinner Box that caresses the player's ego for being such a clever and talented boy. If you actually believe that video games are an artform (and most gamers don't, they only want the prestige associated with terms like "art" and "masterpiece" but refuse to stomach any of the critical analysis), you must necessarily believe that they're capable of eliciting more than a single emotional response.
A lot of it comes down to what gameplay you are willing to tolerate or perhaps a better way of putting it is “What gameplay resonates with you?” For example, I’m addicted to Diablo 4 and lately World of Warcraft which Yahtz frames up as making you a mindless husk grinding for gear & numbers. Which… is fun to me for some reason. I don’t mind killing endless waves of skeletons if it means I have a shot at getting the shiny loot. I could easily understand why this isn’t someone else’s cup of tea. Another example is I’m having a hard time getting through Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. The gameplay is very tedious spending hours and hours playing mini games & activating towers for Chadley. I am very bored when I play that game. But I guess it’s fun for someone because that game got rave reviews (which continues to baffle me but you get the point).
Something else to consider is that in a game where the player can make choices in terms of weapons, gear, bonuses, abilities etc, they will often optimize the fun out of a system if it means greater efficiency. You don't want it so the best way to play a game is the most boring way. Ideally, the most powerful way to play a game should be the most fun. Like keeping to the beat in Hi Fi Rush.
IT reminds me of Nier Automata. With how varied your build can be, a lot of people would just take health regen and defence upgrades and make the combat pretty boring for themselves. But that build isn't the best build by a long shot, if you want the most powerful build you need to invest in attack, crit chance, evade distance etc. The most effective way to play the game is both the most enjoyable and the most difficult. Which a lot of people would tout as a perfect combat system.
As someone who enjoys 4X RTS over any other category of game I think part of what I enjoy about them is what you mention disliking. Keeping track of multiple things at once while handling a rapidly shifting prioritry list makes me feel engaged like few things can. Add into that how some of those games allow you to craft your own narrative to an extent not seen outside of 4x games and I just don't get much out of any other games anymore.
I absolutely agree about the RTS thing, I love playing them co-op because it means I can actually focus on one front while someone else focuses on another.
Lately I've been modding a version of the Star Wars Galaxies Emulator code to make it more single player friendly for private servers of one (NPC vendors, NPC buyers for crafted goods, hirelings, etc.). I've found that the crafting professions make for a surprisingly cozy experience, Star Wars Dew Valley, if you will. I realized that some of the magic of the game was the boring parts, like long speeder journeys across huge planets occasionally broken up by running for your life from hostile mobs. In comparison to the modern era's dopamine assaults in video games, it feels somewhat meditative.
Back during covid I started playing elite dangerous specifically for the boring travel, I found myself missing the commute home from the office. The time the commute took and boredom it involved gave me the necessary time & mental space to decompress and be able to leave work behind for the day. I wonder if that's the part of the appeal of boring gameplay / games, it gives the time & mental capacity to decompress and unpack
the game where boredom really hit me as an artistic choice is Silent Hunter 3. Spending time patrolling quad and praying to spot anything, get a message about a convoy, being attacked - this is one side of submarine experience, completed with moments of fighting for your life when this convoy you've been so excited for starts being not so kind to your boat.
Pretty much 1:1 experience with Das Boot.
I believe he meant to say "Show me a FULFILLING game that defies that rule!" 😱🙂
those type of "work simulator" games always feel like the game is tricking me into thinking im being productive when im not. i could get the same neurochemical response from actually cleaning my room or doing chores
I feel like 'boring' is a loaded term. When I think of 'boring' I don't think of moments that are tedious or repetitive grindathons. I think of the genuinely negative moments where I'm not being engaged on any level and the pacing is straight-up dead in the water--either because I'm not allowed to progress forward due to some time-gating element or there's an excess of unskippable fluff. There are also boring moments where I'm spinning my wheels for hours because the core game's puzzles are convoluted and maliciously counter-intuitive, sending me on my third passthrough of a sprawling map where I gotta click every square inch of every wall just to find the random candelabra or ceiling tile that'll allow me to progress the story. No context clues. No storytelling. Nothing to learn from the experience. Just the game devs padding for time with an easter egg hunt that you didn't know you were in.
The latter was especially prominent in the text-based/point-and-click era. 'Return to Zork' was the most infamous example of this. Every puzzle in that game makes you feel like a janitor on his first day. Every time you find a locked door you must first spend an hour trying all 100 unlabeled keys on your key ring. Eventually you discover that the key you needed was not on your key ring at all. It was a super secret hidden key that could only be acquired by feeding a glowing rock to a hamster that was then shoved up the butt of an NPC while you gave him a reacharound and furthered the conversation four times in esperanto as he screamed about moonshine. Context clues? What context clues? You'll get pain and suffering instead. Finishing the game gives the sense of relief that one might feel after manually cracking a safe by trying every possible number combination in existence... and it's empty. You feel worse for having tried.
All these years later and I’m still chuckling about how Yahtz actually did the hamster wheel grind in SPM.
I mean I did too on my first playthrough but I have the excuse of having been 10 years old at the time.
That dig at a CERTAIN UNSPECIFIED ONLINE MAGAZINE THAT I WILL NOT NAME BUT HAS A SHOCKINGLY APPROPRIATE NAME was hilarious
My go to second screen games recently have been jigsaw puzzles, they're purely visual in gameplay and don't require constant attention so they're ideal for podcasts and video essays, definitely a type of game that I wouldn't describe as neither fun nor boring nor exciting, they're just this almost perfectly flat line of minimal engagement that trigger my sense of satisfaction out of correctly assembling a thing. They also made me realize that I'm rapidly approaching the point in my life when I'll be considered middle-aged by every single metric.
Most recent case of a game being boring in a way in a sense that felt honestly almost crucial to it for me was in stars and time. Without giving too much away it's a time loop game which in a sense focuses on the monotony and sameyness of a time loop in a way that plays into its themes and story. It is definitely worth playing so i don't feel like outright spoiling it but for me the repetition made it strangely gripping in a way i don't see much, even if it's the kind of thing that will likely not work for everyone.
Honestly, this is part of why I started replaying RDR2 over this past week.... just been having some days where I don't really want to think or strategize or worry about doing story stuff, so I'm just going to ride around and go hunting or fishing or play poker for a bit.
Probably the best example of this principle can be found in Red Dead Redemption. After all the shooty-shooty bang-bang, John finally gets the chance to hang up the proverbial spurs and enjoy a bit of the quiet life. The proceeding events can be just boiled down to, “housework.” However, these seemingly boring chores stand to emphasize the final act in RDR. I imagine the pacing of kill Dutch and immediately face off against the army wouldn’t have had as much of an emotional impact had we not had that brief reprieve.
6:16 this rule explains the shift to digital-only content
I think an interesting use for boredom as a toon in games is brought up by Camwing in his video about Satisfactory. Using early game boredom to incentivise learning more difficult but interesting mechanics.
Seeing Yahtzee talking about a game with actual gameplay in the backround was actually better than his usual videos with animated characters. I think I would prefer this format much more for full reviews.
5:18 I find this concept of "dullness breaking up the high intensity" appropriate akin to listening to an album. I review metal albums for a small site for fun, and I'm constantly reminded that some of the best albums are either A. things that break the heavier songs every once in a while with a soft thing or two or B. a super speedy album that knows when to cut the drums and guitar off for a second or two to make a different part of the song stand out.
If an album sounds the same the whole way through, it better be something super high quality from start to finish. Otherwise, it's just going to be very samey and uninteresting and that little nitpick turns from boring to frustrating as time goes on.
The same is true in video games. If everything was the openings to FF7 or Persona 5, then you're always exploding things. You're always trying to fight something. I would never have the time to spend wandering around Sector 7 to learn about how shitty everything is in Midgar or do Social Links to learn about my teammates's lives and care about them.
There needs to be a context to what someone is doing. The "goal" that Yahtzee was talking about. The goal can always be different. But mind-numbing excitement can be a thing. It can be cathartic to spend 10-15 minutes sitting and chatting with someone if they have an interesting story to tell.
It's entirely alright, that games should fit any mental space we can be in. There needs to be a large variety of games for that. I can see myself craving a slower, calm game to relieve anxiety, for example. Or to provide a relaxing context in which to comfortably think. Or to consume other media without being so inactive as to *build up* anxiety. Games are stimulants and sedatives, as you've basically said.
Reminded me of Postal 2, where many problems and violence can be be avoided but just patiently waiting in line and not doing anything crazy. I'm not trying to make any point really
3:46 I can't play "Second screen games" because all games that aren't 100% verbal dialogue at all times are second screen games to me (Yes I am being screened for ADHD as we speak) so the actual second screen games make me want to bite off my fingers if I play for more than an hour
Half-Life 2 was very good at managing its pacing, segueing desperate fire-fights to puzzles, or even migrating from shooting multiple similarly-armed foes in tight alleyways to trying to handle an alien or robotic threat in a more open environment. And it managed to do so without ever being, to my mind at least, "boring". I think that's the gold standard, most of the time. Conversely, Duke Nukem Forever had among its many afflictions: "Uh-oh, we've been doing a puzzle for two minutes! Better get in some of that 'keep spawning in two monsters, lather, rinse, and repeat' action the kids love so much!"
The way view it that being "boring" isn't a bad thing. But I wouldn't describe the activities that he is describing as boring in the context of those games. To me they would be something else.
Awesome vid! I personally feel like a game should never be boring. I'm 100% for the escalation and release of dramatic tension in certain games, and those "breather moments" are really important, otherwise the game just feels like an arcade adrenaline hit like Doom.
the irony is that I'm listening to this while doing the salvage gig in the Hardspace Shipbreaker game
Funny that Yahtzee brought up The Escapist, since with the departure of Cold Take this has become Escapist 2.0 for me; a channel where I wade through a sea of guff to get to Yahtzee's reviews and longer ramble-videos.
No More Heroes did this great in my opinion. The part of the game you want to actually play is the combat and the bosses, but in between each level you have to do a bunch of monotonous chores. It effectively puts you in Travis's shoes, desperate to escape the monotony of daily life by becoming an assassin on a whim.
I suppose it comes down to, how does one define boring. Because to me, boring means: "I'd rather be doing something else," which is not the best emotion to elicit. But if we define it has periods that are low-stakes, very calm or similar, then yeah, games should have moment like that. And as demonstrated, the feeling of wanting to do something else can be used to drive players in the right direction.
I think - once again - it all highly depends on how good the game is designed. Finding the game boring is no indication that there is a better route because sometimes there is none. I just watched a review of Deja Vu on the NES, for example. You have to load your gun one bullet at a time using a point-and-click interface without a mouse.
Podcast/Second-screen games - which could also be cozy games - are usually tedious but in a calming, satisfying way. I played House Flipper and enjoyed designing room layouts but when the game was over, I would chuck furniture in a room and mark the job done.
Also, this whole topic lends itself to games as an artform. However, I don't appreciate games that don't respect your time that intentionally make things drawn-out. I heard The Witness makes you wait for 20 minutes. That's not a game.
I seem to recall one of the Boktai games having a mechanic where you could borrow sunshine but there was some seriously boring grind required to pay it back.
I do think contrast is important to actually keep fun and other emotional peaks and game quality overall in perspective so the occasional boring bit or even just playing outright mediocre overall games can sort of act as a pallete cleanser that makes the next standout moment feel more impactful after all if everything is fun then nothing is. Good example most real gamers can understand overcoming challenge real challenge that truly aggravates and stresses isn't fun in the moment but without that frustration the sense of glorious accomplishment once overcome would not exist, the contrast is what makes it meaningful.
My personal "universal rule" is that a game has to have decision-making. Maybe it's fast-paced decisions like in a Souls-like or shooter, or trying to predict and counter your opponent 10 turns in advance in an RPG or strategy game or something. Giving me interesting core mechanics and managing various resources (mana, stamina, cooldown timers, etc.) is what makes a game fun to me.
When a game is completely solved and has been boiled down to a sequence of buttons to memorize, it stops being a video game. If all you're doing is hitting a solved sequence so you can get to a cutscene, you're not playing a video game, you're playing a DVD menu.
i thought of the ending of red dead 2 where you are building the homestead and the beginning of uncharted 4 as examples of games being intentionally boring to advance a story/thematic element. in one instance you kind of get sucked into the daily grind of john working to build a new home only to remember at the very end that he’s essentially building his grave, and in the other you’re connected with nathan drake who’s become bored by his daily life and missses adventure. idk kind of an interesting concept.
also maybe this is why death stranding works lol
You can tell a lot about a person when they start telling you about the things they find boring. More often than not, "boring" for some people is code for "I refuse to let some work of art / media / what-have-you force me to do any sort of introspection whatsoever or do any sort of mental work at all to engage with it on any level."
I believe there was a Beavis and Butthead thing in the 90s where they said "the dull bits make the cool bits cooler"
While I don't necessarily have much to contribute to the argument of whether or not games should be boring, about games not trying to murder you, there was an art exhibition about two decades ago called the PainStation that was Pong but with a point lost causing one of three pain methods (burn, shock, or whipping) to happen to you.
Then there's also lose/lose, where it's Space Invaders, but shooting things deletes stuff from your drive in a digital form of Russian Roulette.
Granted, both of those were free and made as art pieces to my knowledge, so maybe some entrepreneurial board of directors can make some totally insane thing that will literally kill you directly and asked to get paid for the privilege.
A game for suicidal, Saw movie enthusiasts would probably enjoy the added drama of having razor blades flung at the player. Would be an interesting test to see just how strong ToS are in various countries, too.
There was an arcade game from the late 80s that was rather infamous for being so stressful it allegedly killed two people via cardiac arrest when the final boss said it's introduction line, "beware! I live!"
I think the giga disk projectile in Noita comes pretty close, regarding the last rule. And its perfect
This kind of reminds me of the bit in Mafia 2 where you're supposed to stack boxes for money. After three, main characters says it's dumb work and you have the option to leave or keep going. I honestly thought that was cool, like the game was asking us, "Do you want to be the guy who jumps straight into crime, or will you at least try to be a model citizen?"
I did find it annoying that after a few more boxes, the game simply chooses for you and the protagonist says, "Forget this, I'm gone."
What about that one game where you have to wait 400 IRL days for the game to be completed, and you get to very slowly do menial hikes through the cave you're in just to pass the time and make the coming of the end a bit more pleasant. I havent played it myself, but l remember seeing it in a indie-world showcase, and it kinda intrigued me because the whole game is built around the concept of being dull/boring but at the same time building anticipation towards some ultimate goal that may or may not be effected at all by what you manage to slowly accomplish during the span of those 400 days...
Edit: Googled it, the game is called The Longing
Anyone else excited for "Ejecting Razor Blades From the Disk Drive of a PS5"? I had the pleasure of playing a demo at PAX and my doctor says I should be all healed for the full release.
Funnily enough, talking about second screen/podcast games, one of my podcast games is Factorio, which is definitly not just mindless hand work, and if anything is more high function than listening to a podcast.
Some people consider the chill moments in games as boring so this point will be very ramblomatic
You know, Microsoft probably won’t release a console that shoots razor blades out of its disk drive, but I can easily imagine some shadowy entity has workshopped a controller that shocks the player if they’re too slow on QTEs or something like that. I mean, you could theoretically work something like that into gameplay for some excruciatingly contrived reason.
now that I think about it, button mashing torture scenes in Metal Gear Solid 1 and 2 are meant to tire you out and hurt your thumbs in a similar way
When I think of game that has boring parts, No More Heroes's side jobs were for me very memorable because in comparison to rest of this bombastic game filled with blood... Part timer job were very ordinary and conceptually boring but it allow game to have very sinus wave in enjoyment which made the boss fights, high point of the wave, made so much intersting.
I mean, there's some games that feel like they may as well be firing razor blades out of the disc tray.
The carrot holds no sway over those who prefer the whip