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How would you design your game to destroy/demean it's quality from becoming a classic

author=Craze
You seem to think that people can design or force the creation of a classic/legacy, I think? Like, I have no idea what you're saying because your posts are just some sort of fapping about having read some dictionaries and famous quotations about literature and trying to apply them to a small, niche community of game-related people who have better things to do than read articles about fucking sabotaging your own game.

I'm going to go with LockeZ here on "this is incomprehensible." It's also pointless and absurd.

I really hope that you feel so goddamn intelligent about this constant stream of terrible, overly lengthy and haughty posts so that my disapproval hurts your ego immensely and you stop mucking up RMN further.

I actually feel better believe it or not. Aside from part about Lockez and the rest, the statements you issued above actually made me feel relieved in the same way someone feels relieved that they had the opposite opinion of a bad judge.

First sentence alone, total opposite of what I mean unlike say someone who is wondering what I'm writing. It shows that you personally harbor ill will against me so much that instead of being confused by my words, you wrote the exact opposite of it and all you had to do was to reverse your entire post to get my premise but because deep down you yourself harbor high and mighty attitude towards others who make you feel bad, instead of weighing upon your own words and just flipping them around to understand mine, you end showing your own hypocrisy and you even fail at something like a basic grammar check when referencing to one quote and talking as if there were quotations. The best part was you bringing up literature as if you need to have read tons of literature to know someone like Mark Twain.

You even indirectly insulted the contents of kentona's post because that's what he was trying to convey when he wrote this:

trying to apply them to a small, niche community of game-related people who have better things to do than read articles about fucking sabotaging your own game. (with the exception that he was using movies of course)

...and my reply did the opposite of agreeing with that. You are the type of poster whom I'm glad I can't communicate well with because I worry that if you somehow got how close you are to understanding my threads, you'll just ruin it with your own high and mighty hypocritical contents that are guaranteed to not lead to anything helpful at all as far as contributing to the pursuit of better game design goes. This isn't to say you aren't a great game designer, I certainly know little about you, but you are the type to guarantee unhelpful posts but thank god you understood my writing. You understood it and reject it. Thank god. Hopefully that means I get less of your types in my thread from now on.

How would you design your game to destroy/demean it's quality from becoming a classic

I wasn't talking about sabotage that's why I said this:

Of course for the great game developers, there's little reason for them to even consider this. After all, who the fuck cares what your audience thinks if you have the capability and the name recognition to always get and pierce through the art of your work for art's sake?

The problem with notoriety is that: (and this is a major reason why I emphasized "great game developers" above)

1) How many actual rpg maker devs have names at all outside the rpg maker community? Hell even within the community does anyone really know the Stephen King of Rpg Maker games or the Jenna Jameson of rpg maker Sprites or the Zuckerberg of script making? ...and even if you do, how big are their actual skills? This isn't to demean the community but there's a huge hump between cult fanbase and mainstream fanbase

2) Even for the mainstream guys, this is vastly different for them each time and each arc of their lives. For example Stephen King and the Coen Brothers are so above the stratosphere, the comparisons can't even work as simplified analogies because even setting aside resources, the stuff like culture and timing and pleasing producers and the pressure of hitting it big blows any problem an rpg maker dev would have even for ones who are doing it professionally.

At the very maximum, at least based on my vastly limited idea of Hollywood, the closest thing to equate this to the film making industry is like producing a limited TV movie DVD where the game developer asks themselves which part they will include for the director's cut and which aren't with the reverse intention that you will show the director's cut in your game and the original version would be used as a padding point plot hub so that when people actually talk about it, they do so in two things.

Some reviewers would overly focus on the optional side quests that the game ends up looking better.

Some reviewers would overly focus on the main plot, even though they only love it thanks to the side quest, and the game ends up being talked as if it was an epic classic.

Even this isn't very good at being an analogy but I've seen hints of it being done in games such as the Final Fantasy series, the recent Mortal Kombat (although I haven't played it but the plot was said to be a copy of the horrible MK 2 movie but because of the model, the recent MK got praises for it's story), Infinity Engine games like Baldur's Gate 2/Throne of Bhaal/Planescape Torment and some of the indie games to see how this may be possible.

I consider this very poor analogy though because often times the examples are tantamount to just asking "What left-over stuff do you save up for to insert into the sequel?" where as the more subtle stuff like say comedy shows always having some straight guy as a lead to extend the length of a TV show by delaying character development or how some more plot oriented TV series are known for resetting the development of the characters or replacing a fired/released staff with a semi-clone but one played by a different actress are all removed from the topic because they appear as sabotage.

The worse part about that question is that the less we talk about a player not sabotaging the work and the less subtle the game designs are shared the more useless it becomes both due to the example becoming more specific that it can't apply to any other games and also because it's more politically correct and it is rarely that clean during the actual production process.

If all these simply feels like they jump all over the place, just look at your example and try to dissect it.

How can the strategy of absorbing the blowback apply to rpg maker game designers especially the newbie ones even when you chop it up?

How can releasing stinkpiles not come off as sabotage anyway to a game designer who has no name, little fanbase and a small chance of having their game hype go viral?

Then you add that they to have to deal with notoriety once they go public when (at least to my impression) rpg maker game designers gain notoriety because a public game they released, whether future or present, finally gained notoriety even after they have made several games. Even for guys like Stephen King, they weren't releasing instant hits and once they had that notoriety, it came first and foremost because he kept releasing great books which then gets made to the movie before the strategy a comparable analogical attempt of demeaning comes in but wrongly executed as most Hollywood producers tend to botch it up. King's movies then end up sabotaging themselves and the whole sequence becomes incomparable. Greatness of their magnitude brings too many layers to simply amount to much decent advice applicable to game design. Only rpg maker developers IMO can share a close enough account of such game designs.

Morality: What do you do to design around it when designing for it?

First off, you do not want me to submit an article if you've seen me blog before. I even have one person on plurk say (this is from a comment I submitted to someone else's blog) "Wow, a blog post underneath a blog post" (I can't remember if they even added the last line of "underneath a blog post that's actually longer than the blog post"

I don't say this to brag more like elipswich got it right and also because the last thing I want to do is try to collect data and I'd rather get on with planting a thread and letting others share it. A horrible conversationalist like me wouldn't get far interviewing others. They'd be turned off and alienated unless I slowly stalk them but at that point the quality of the answers would defeat the value except if I myself was a savant which obviously I'm not or else I'd be showing you a game rather than making a topic like this.

author=Large
I don't... understand the intention if this topic, though... can you explain it to me in simple words? I mean, you want us to tell you that we create games to leave a moral example or lesson? Or... what?

Hopefully rabitZ answered your doubt (I was afraid I needed to zoom up to a general topic just to explain it to you) but just so there's no misunderstanding he didn't sum it up. Believe me I'm not replacing my OP because I can't accept if someone can sum up my post. I've been searching for people who can summarize my post all the time. This just isn't it.

What rabitZ explanation encompasses this part, "What do you do to design games for morality?"

The problem here is that such summation is non-notable to game design without the other sentence which is "designing around it" and Marrend highlights one major example for why it is.

If you pattern a question like this, you will mostly get people who wants to stray away from morality because moral ambiguity is simply more appealing.

A deep but closer to valid analogy to this is King of the Hill vs. The Simpsons. King of the Hill has more moral lesson episodes so when the characters do off-beat stuff, you will sometimes read people saying they are crazy or horrible characters. Worse comes when they simply become rednecks because once they get that tag, even if the viewer empathizes with the lessom, the depth of the moral perspective loses it's meaning (and KoH is still 99% moral ambiguity, the writers are simply designing for the concept in almost all episode). In contrast the Simpsons and even Family Guy don't have these problems. The result is that sometimes shows like American Dad can both have a moral lesson and be even more entertaining and leave a lasting impact in terms of that particular episode's intellectual quality but then leave no emotional impact at all.

Even rabbitZ in his attempt to answer half of the question was forced to do this.

I quote his words:

I *believe* he means how do you design games to leave deep moral statements on issues WHEN you actually intend for them to do that.

Notice how he only was able to cut this sentence short because he leaves you to figure out what "deep" is.

I'd refer to a political comment about Obama that doesn't have anything to do with the actual politics but I fear that would leave some of you once again confused and thinking I'm bringing in politics again. For those curious hopefully it should be obvious how rabitZ's "deep" is comparable to Obama's "Hope" and "Change" that's why it's way way shorter.

Yet moral depth isn't this way and so is game designing for morality.

For many, deep morality could simply be about having a choice of good and evil. Giving the option to keep a cannibal alive. Leaving a person who has raped many people to be raped themselves. Even being trapped in a psychological rpg.

Yet these aren't games whose game designs are designing for morality.

...or at least if they are, these are the types that won't get controversy or hate not like a blatant simulation of how to make the best Nazi Concentration Camp in an actual accurate place. Not just some references to killing Jews and controversial themes.

Finally, slashphoenix indirectly explained this best. If you are making a game with taboo subjects, it's best to not beat around the bush. Why? Because chances are people are drawn to the curiosity of how the game handles that taboo.

This doesn't work with morality because now you are designing a game with the intent that maybe that taboo would CONVINCE the player that what they thought of is not what it really appears to be.

In the conceptual stage alone, there's two major problems:

1) What if the game flies over the head of your players too much? Think complicated scientific games or educational games where the players get so addicted that they miss the point.

For example FreeRice.com, on paper, was supposed to be a game that finally designed well enough to both be an addictive game as well as a game promoting charity on paper and it became massively popular but then it forgot to design around the behaviour mechanism of human psychology and instead of promoting an attitude change towards more people being concerned about giving away rice to the needy it became a haven for bleeding hearts people to create bots and hacks http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0g33tGRQXA because the moral lesson that reached them wasn't that rice was important but that freerice.com usage = more free rice for everyone else.

2) Something freerice.com would never be is that it will never tackle the depths because the depth of the morality is charity. When you do things like that, people generally accept it and find things good.

It's not on par with something like Mcdonald's or hell even "recycling".

If you were to make an rpg (especially on rpgmaker) based around convincing (and not just informing others) of how recycling doesn't work and still come away making it seem like a game designed for morality rather than designed around anti-morality, you have to find a way to bypass the initial bias people have. This is something that even pure entertainment short TV shows like Penn & Teller have a difficulty of showing. Imagine how you would pull this off in an rpg game that's not only containing a set of events that would at least make pro-recycling people doubt their beliefs but doesn't contain the stuff of propaganda.

...and this is just on paper. These are basic stuff. They only come off deep sometimes in games because the great storytellers and designers and artists can make it seem magnanimous even though they are just shallow on the surface moral lessons. Anti-recycling's basic moral lesson is that one should actually do an act that actually matters and doesn't just feel good.

In fact personally the easiest litmus test when I doubt myself whether what I'm seeing is deep or shallow morality especially when it's affecting my emotions is to do what rabitZ wrote. What if I was intending to leave that moral statement in my game? What would be the message?

Many of those don't even get near what I would consider the moralities worth designing a game around morality for. The ones that actually do, I found that even I'm scared to fully touch them even the simple ones.

Take a game concept where you have a choice of using your partner as a shield and leaving them to die. Lots of games have these but not many games (I don't even know of one actually) where the partner is actually slowly losing body parts. Imagine if you were designing something as basic as that but with the intention of leaving behind a deep as opposed to normal moral statement. Even if you were a great game maker, how many of you would actually dwelve into that issue and how many of you would cop out and subconsciously make things more morally ambiguous plot-wise, more morally straight forward design-wise and more pure shock design art-wise and how many of you would even pick up that subconsciously you are designing around those issues?

It's why what rabitZ said can't even come close to summarizing anything and why it's important to read from actual game designers who have managed to not just get past this dilemma but actually have ideas that clearly address these issues especially within the game design perspective because game design is the most neutral. Everything like art, you need to worry about body part details. Writing you have to do your research. Game design can convey a message by simply changing the background and have sprites saying a particular dialogue. Sharing game design tips can also be the most ambiguous. A trauma bar and a health bar, explanation-wise, are pretty much clones. You just share it and done. The only time you even need to address the controversiality is when you're like me, trying to explain some basic stuff but I, being the OP, have that responsibility and pressure to convey a message. You just share your game designs/theories.

Stats are for Sissies: Alternatives to Traditional Growth Mechanics

The flaw with achievement based level-up systems is that game designers are afraid that it would take away the feel of level-up system all while they have to do all the additional hard work for creating each level-up point.

It's actually the simplest to implement because you basically shut off one aspect of rpg maker at the price of adding more events/switches which you have to do anyway but that's the only thing I can come up as to why many rpgs avoid that kind of thing like the plague.

What would you do to increase the legacy of your game design?

author=Fallen-Griever
Make game, hope people like it. Erm, there's not much more to it than that. If I were to say that I put much thought into making games besides, "Hey, that'd be cool!", I'd probably be lying.


That's kind of the reason why this is in a sub-forum called game design. If it were for all people especially ones who prefer not to think about these subjects, then there would be no point to trying to come up with a theory.

How would you design your game to destroy/demean it's quality from becoming a classic

Obviously I don't mean intentionally making your game design worse.

Think of it like the opposite of my other thread "What would you do to increase the legacy of your game design?"

For those who might be confused as to what's wrong about having a game that's like a classic I refer to this quote by Mark Twain:

"A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read."

Obviously Twain didn't mean for one to destroy their work and this doesn't apply to all videogames but with Rpg Maker games there's always a twofold problem:

-Make a great free rpg maker game and suddenly the audience considers it a standard rather than an outlier and it becomes so difficult for newbies to make and get their games judged correctly

-Make something so much of a classic and suddenly people end up tuning out to the name of the game. This is even more worrisome when it comes to famous indy developers. There's a rock band effect at first but then everyone sorts of tune out when they think it's made by that name. Instead of playing the games, they end up bookmarking it instead unless the developer manages to get past this hump or manages to deceive visitors

Of course for the great game developers, there's little reason for them to even consider this. After all, who the fuck cares what your audience thinks if you have the capability and the name recognition to always get and pierce through the art of your work for art's sake?

I see this as more of a problem for people who aren't so good. For example, since I'm totally new at everything from coding to scripting to understanding RpgMaker game, if I wanted to make a Rpg Maker game where the sprite is on horseback and has an animation to get down - I would have to request it, find a script for it or hope a humorous take of a player referencing to an invisible horse would come off as an intelligent metaphor rather than a lack of resources especially if I was aiming for a more serious type game.

This isn't to say that I should think I could make a classic game from my first game but that's the difficulty of this thread and it once again relies on game makers sharing their own experiences because it's so difficult to just chance upon this if you are a player. No sane game maker I assume would want to reveal the horridness of their game design until they reach a certain level of capability and they can put little clues in interviews or threads like what horrible mistakes they did to their games but it's such an easily ignored topic.

What would you do to increase the legacy of your game design?

author=papasan96
That's it, I give up. As far as I can make out I didn't answer the OP correctly, and my brain has started to protest at trying to read your posts. Sorry. I won't reply to any more of your threads until I can see an improvement in coherency.

Last thing...it doesn't help using foreign language terms that most readers probably won't be familiar with, especially when they are terms particular to the culture they came from. You are not a hikkikomori (recluse) because you are not Japanese nor live in Japan, and are not therefore part of the culture that has created the hikkikomori phenomenon. Ditto honne and tatemae (true feelings and public facade). I agree that sometimes foreign words can give a far closer meaning to what you want to say than any words in your native language. But I would never use these words with other English speakers without coming across as pretentious.

Good luck on the site and if you ever make your own game.

Believe me my usage of them can come off pretentious to fellow Hikikomoris too. As far as the English ones I spoken to. It doesn't bother me.

The key is to understand those words and see how accurate they are to your own setting. Also anyone can come off as pretentious, the true question is whether a person is actually being pretentious or whether it's the opposite party being pretentious.

In this case, I know I'm not being pretentious because I don't idolize those terms nor do I simply look at it like a blanket system. As I said to someone who said you have to be a Japanese to be a hikikomori, "No, even among the Japanese it is a mystery that's why the media can demonize and sensationalize the issue. That's like saying a middle class American who lives in the suburbs knows the culture of an African American guy living in the ghetto and therefore any wannabe white thug can claim to be from the streets just cause they are American but any non-American who lives in their own hell hole can't relate to them. It's all in the culture not in the nationality."

I do know that someone is being pretentious though when they are too lazy to look up the dictionary of a word and yet they are the ones who raise the issue of why I use such a term. It's like asking a question for the sake of asking a question or for the sake of looking to insult someone once they give the answer. I don't mean to say you did this consciously but like I said, pretentious is one of those concepts where given the right sets of situation, everyone can come off pretentious but it takes a specific attitude towards a specific situation to be truly pretentious.

To link this to game designs that up legacy, it's why again the specific little details matter. One of the most pretentious thing we humans do is to rely on memory especially nostalgia. When you do that, you rip away what made the design worked in favor of what impression that design left. It's way way worse when it comes to just naming the games even if you made them. You can intend a game to leave behind something but sometimes only looking at a tile or a piece of music in an area or a pattern do you realize what in fact it was you were truly trying to leave behind in those games and how your fans spotted something you didn't although they misjudged the actual depth of what you designed.

Morality: What do you do to design around it when designing for it?

author=slashphoenix
The Binding of Isaac is a good example of a game with a story directly tied to Christian subject matter, including morals and values (like Abraham being willing to kill his own son to please God). It doesn't speak outright against religion, but it doesn't sugarcoat anything, and I think it handles it well - although I'm sure tons of people have been offended by it as well.

Concerning capitalism and economics... one of my first major RPG Maker projects was about free market and economics - the final villain was a rival of yours that you had driven out of business by releasing a better product, and with that he had given up on life and sworn revenge. There was quite a bit of moral ambiguity, and frankly even the hero came off as kind of a dick at points.

Wish I had finished it... I think I'll revisit the story someday soon, especially now that I've recognized the idea of "scope".


EDIT: When you're young, sometimes those things are too big and weird for you to understand, so a game that approaches a more serious topic might seem "bad". But the best games usually don't shy away from these sorts of topics, and embracing them can be very interesting. Take a look at Final Fantasy 7... you spend half the game as an eco-terrorist, blowing up reactors and killing workers in the name of environmentalism, fighting against money-hungry tyrants.

That was the first game I remember that addressed such a down-to-earth issue... it was so fascinating.


I haven't played The Binding of Isaac but that's an example where it sounds like it was well designed for morality but it was only mediocre in designing around it. I get the sense that if it were more mainstream or caught the right radar, you'd have tons of controversy. I don't mean to imply that it should change anything. Just that this is an example for why it's important to not only discuss but be more specific about this.

The title alone means that even if it were not trying to speak outright against religion, the hint is strongly there.

Could you expand more on what you meant by now you have a better idea of "scope"?

I get the point about youth but truth be told, FF7 is a poor example. You're implied as a terrorist but you never really get to experience it face first. There were even non-terrorist reasons for why the PC fell into that group. It's not like he chose to. Even the reactors, it was all in metaphors. Good if you are looking for meanings but horrible as far as reaching out to the average player. Even the money hungry tyrants were the typical movie big bads as opposed to fleshed out characters.

Morality: What do you do to design around it when designing for it?

author=Liberty
I try to present characters that are in the grey areas. They're 'good' people who have to make hard choices and sometimes what looks like a good choice ends up being the bad one.

Morality... well personally I feel people have gone a bit too far with censorship in some areas. If a game is set in a time period where there was racism abundant and your character deals with that by pretending it doesn't exist, then that's a problem. It's not a realistic portrayal of character.

People have the capacity to do both good and evil in great abundance, contrary to what they did the day before. To quote an awesome game: "But just as some things can be right and useless at the same time, can't something be wrong...and priceless?"

That is how I want to/try to portray Morality in my games, when the issue is raised at all.

(I may be totally missing the mark here but it's 4am and I'm tired.)

So what's your overall intent when you design such characters?

That is to say, do you do these because you want people to realize that good people can do evil or do you do these because it's a cool choice or do you do these because you want to show the depths a person can unnecessarily sink into unconsciously?

I ask this because your premise is nearly the same as Large but certain sentence structures you make hint that maybe you are designing a game where you clearly want people to feel a certain moral dilemma but then you mentioned grey areas and starting off with 'good' people which are contradictory when it comes to designing for moral games as then you are sending the message to the players to handle a choice rather than live and breathe in through the horror once the realization sinks in.

A more specific example of this may be found in your latter point about racism. Games like the NWN mod for Revolution who's designed for morality (actually cultural education) gives players multiple characters from different races and gender to as to show the morality of those times. Where as games that simply make racist characters actually racist without censoring them simply asks the players to handle the racist in the appropriate manner they feel like (assuming there's actually a choice to do so)

The difference in structures means you also do different things to work around them. You could easily design around creating controversy with the racist character by simply creating dialogue that expresses a path where your PC can be disgusted. It won't shed any insight to the player but it would be easier to work around as you don't have a moral agenda that you want them to think about on.

...and the word designing for morality does imply that you are raising such an issue. There's no portrayal. You want your players to live through and feel through the moral message of your game. Feel it deep to their core whether they like to or not. Fill it in such a manner that they may downright have to live with the responsibility with interacting with such moralities.

For example, in Excrutio Eternum, the game isn't designed for morality although it portrays morality. However there is one puzzle where an npc literally asks you (with the boy in front of you) that he has put a key you need to pass into the boy's stomach. The boy is an assassin so he has been trained to die. In order to get the key, you have to kill him. There's a non-violent solution because that's an option the designer wants you to make but if you chose to hint at killing the boy, then you have to kill the boy. Even with an evil option, the designer clearly intended for the player to feel bad about taking the heartless option.

Morality: What do you do to design around it when designing for it?

No I wasn't for relating those concepts specifically for if I did, I would be breaking this rule:

To avoid flamewars, just post the actual design work around without the context of which morality it is you are trying to design for except if it's vague and general like good and evil, lawful neutral or things to promote certain actions.

You are right that it is 1 concept but they fall as examples, not subjects under.

Christianity is an example of a controversial issue you can't work much around unlike sex.

Marxism is an example of attempts for a certain type of morality but designed around an ideal world. See movies such as Charlie Wilson's War and the controversial depictions behind that film. (Though it isn't about Marxism but I was trying to keep things from sounding pro- anti- a label)

Violence...not enough details here to know what it is you're talking about.

Partisanship...was an example of what behavioural economist Dan Ariely showed in his TedTalk about how the trick to looking better is to bring an ugly twin as a wingman to a bar. The 2 Party is one example of that but it's more related if it's MSM simply because the idea is an example of indirect mystification of morality as opposed to any specific party as to avoid alienating anyone and also because MSM claims to be unbiased where as voters in a partisan voting system accept rather than seek for impartiality in their candidates and even love it if said representatives would play dirty and not design around things and just clearly sling mud at the other side.

Sex depiction...um...no. Rape depiction maybe but not quite that either. Hate for 3d rape simulator games is more apt. The distinction is especially important because as someone once said, it's very hard to show what's offensive about a sex game when you need to show your audience visual novel like screens on TV that require click, click, click. It's easier to prey on stuff like Rapelay and the Hot Coffee mod and that is why such game designs can much easier attractions for raising and generating emotional hate.

Free Market...this is to show that morality can be something that can deceptively not appear to be related to morality.

Economics...again, this is to highlight the cheaper path currency has been designed even in games that claim to have more advanced currency systems.

All this revolve around making the concept of morality as well as what it means to design for and around it clearer and the implications of addressing such topics. Saying they are being blanketed is like saying game design is blanketing games. Uh... no. Game design is part and around games. They don't make games underneath them or vice versa unless maybe you're raising some form of prototype demo to show proof of concepts.