Something that helped me think about games personally is stopping treating any mechanics as inherent parts of the medium and starting to think why they exist and where they came from. Even stuff that seems obvious/intuitive can have a very particular history, a direct point a to point b line - ThreadSky

boghogstg.bsky.social • 1 day ago

Something that helped me think about games personally is stopping treating any mechanics as inherent parts of the medium and starting to think why they exist and where they came from. Even stuff that seems obvious/intuitive can have a very particular history, a direct point a to point b line

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boghogstg.bsky.social•1 day ago

The most obvious example would be stuff like power ups in action games - people just assume they sprung up "naturally" cuz the concepts so simple. But in many games like Gradius they were a direct reaction to the popularity of character building in RPGs

boghogstg.bsky.social•1 day ago

The best part about this is that you don't truly lose anything by always looking into the history of mechanics & thinking about why they were implemented. Worst that can happen is youll make a wild leap - might be a problem if ur talking about real world events, but 100% harmless in art

xxgr1llmast3rxx.bsky.social•1 day ago

and the genre labels we like to use can be actively misleading, like calling Resi 4 a third person shooter (not entirely inaccurate in a literal sense) buries the lede on it's relationship with beat em ups

boghogstg.bsky.social•1 day ago

Yeah exactly, and to figure it out you either need firsthand experience with beat em ups, OR you need to look into Shinji Mikami's history. Assuming that everything in RE4 was a deliberate choice inspired by something else/had a clear logic to it would be really good for getting ppl to dig

ashwednesday.bsky.social•1 day ago

This is less mechanical but I think sometimes about how a few of our most ubiquitous ideas got that way by happenstance

Like what is a real life reference point for a "dungeon crawl"? One of the main activities in videogames only exists cause of basically a pop cultural chain reaction from Tolkien

boghogstg.bsky.social•1 day ago

Exactly, if you zoom out too much its really easy to miss all this iteration and slow advancement cuz everything becomes cold abstract stats that dont reflect the humans deeply involved in creative communities trying their best underneath it all

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