How Much Is Enough?

I was very amused to hear Tobold complaining that after playing Palworld for fifty hours he'd run out of interesting things to do. I almost wish I had his problem. It continues to be a busy time around Chez Bhagpuss and finding the time both to play the game and compose thoughtful, detailed posts about it is proving difficult. 

Steam now tells me I've played for just over sixteen hours, which I can assure you is as much as I've been able to fit in since I bought the game a week ago. If I could have played for fifty hours I certainly would.

Tobold is right to make it clear that "The lack of content problem is a subjective one." I suspect it isn't even so much a mater of interpretation as one of taste, playstyle and personality. I also don't believe the issues he highlights are specific, let alone unique to Palworld. They seem to me to be more like generic, intrinsic problems - or perhaps we should say features - of the Survival genre itself.

When he says "...the higher level content often doesn't introduce something new... less novelty, more grind at higher levels... the rewards I get for exploration and leveling are mostly just stronger versions of stuff I already have..." he seems to me to describing all Survival games. Indeed, he could just as well be describing most MMORPGS and a very large proportion of all video games, so I'm not sure that, as a complaint, it boils down to much more than "video games tend to be very repetitive."

In fact, the more I think about it, the more concerned I am that Tobold has teased out a thread we probably ought to be very wary about tugging on any harder. It raises some very pointed and potentially uncomfortable questions about productive use of time and the value and purpose of the kinds of video games a lot of us choose to play.

For at least a decade and a half, I played MMORPGs almost exclusively. The mere fact of their endlessness, that it was literally impossible to finish them, seemed to me to be a recommendation and a justification all of its own. In more recent times, however, I've branched out somewhat. I've played a lot more narrative-focused games with novelistic or film-like storylines; three act structures; a beginning a middle and an end.

That is a very different experience. Self-evidently, it's much closer to more traditional forms of entertainment or even to literature and art. There's a much clearer purpose to the activity. It's not simply a means of passing time. 

Pastimes, entertainments and games have similarities but they are not the same. For years, I railed against the use of the word "Game" in the acronym MMORPG. It feels like an archaic argument now. Modern MMORPGs are far more game than anything else, with much clearer "win" conditions than anything seen in Ultima Online, EverQuest or Asheron's Call at the turn of the millennium.

Back then, I often chose to think of the kind of virtual world exploration I engaged in as more of a hobby than a game. I sometimes referred to it as "virtual tourism" but my go-to analogy was "virtual whittling".  I used to imagine myself whittling away at my characters, starting with a block of plain, undiferentiated wood, slowly teasing out a recogniseable shape and form, often over hundreds or even thousands of hours. 

There was no purpose to it other than the pleasant sensation of doing it and the steady satisfacion of watching the figure come into focus under the endless strokes of my keyboard and mouse. I had scores of characters in multiple games and at that time I could name and describe most of them. Even now, I remember quite a few.

I don't regret any of the very many hours I spent doing that. It was the right thing for the right time. I certainly took a lot longer than Tobold's fifty hours to tire of it. More than a decade, for sure. Maybe two decades.

After a quarter of a century, though, I do feel as though I may be largely over it. I still love to develop the characters I play but I no longer feel the same desire to play dozens of them and keep them all happy. I used to complain quite bitterly about MMORPGs that made it plain they preferred you to play just one character but now I rarely make more than one character in any new game and if I do make more, I still only play one.

Of course, one of the big reasons MMORPGs were so successful, for a time, was the infamous application of the Skinner Box of tricks. Playing virtual Barbies, now frequently seen, unironically, as the genre's endgame, has always been a big part of the attraction but the deep clawhold of addictive behavior comes from something much less fanciful - those dopamine hits supplied by a relentless drip-feed of incremental rewards.

Survival games, I find, take much of what was addictive about those practices and reduce it down to a much simpler, more elegant gameplay loop. You begin with nothing, you get something, it makes you able to get more, you get more and it never stops. That's basically all it is.

As a reductive analysis, it doesn't only apply to pure Survival games, either. It works just as well for so-called "Cosy" games like poor old Palia (Anyone remember Palia? Anyone still play Palia?). I haven't played Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing but from all the accounts I've read by people who have, I imagine it applies there, too.

All of these games - and by now there are plenty of them - arguably, more than anyone could realistically want, let alone need, to play - differ mostly in the context of their aesthetics and their narratives. The ones with more story-driven content feel more purposeful, although the quality of the stories may not stand up to gentle, let alone rigorous examination. The ones with more creative options feel more toy-like, more playful, perhaps even more artistically satisfying.

No matter the trappings, though, underneath the paint there's always that same engine, the one Tobold singles out for gentle criticism in Palworld. If he's correct in observing "One of the attractions of any game with any sort of resources is to find out how the economy of the game works, and then to optimize it ", then he's predicting the exact problem I've read so many bloggers complain about: the better you get at playing these kinds of games, the less fun they are.

What Tobold describes there isn't a game at all. Neither is it a story. It's a puzzle. Here are some pieces. Figure out how to put them together so they make a machine that works in the most efficient way possible. When it's done, it's done. Congratulations You solved the puzzle. Now start another.

Is that a sustainable model for a Live Service game? No, it's not, but I think that may be where perception and expectation run up against intention. Are Survival games even meant to be ongoing, open-ended endeavors like MMORPGs? Does anyone expect Valheim or ARK to last twenty years, continually adding new biomes, new ores, new monsters? Is that anything anyone really wants?

Wilhelm, after a lengthy search for a new game like Valheim to play, decided to return to Valheim, astutely observing that Iron Gate have a set number of biomes in mind for the game and that, when the final one is added, that will "... complete the set to appease Odin, prove our worth, and win the game." In other words, Valheim is designed to reach a complete, finishable state and then stop.

This is perhaps why it's okay for survival games to do no more than offer better versions of the things you already have as a reward for playing. Eventually you will have all the things, the game will be complete and you can stop. 

That's an offer no MMORPG can ever dare to make. Once, I would have taken it as a threat. Now it feels more like a promise.