Video Games have built up a set of tropes and ideas over time that have arisen out of necessity and tradition. A lot of these ideas come out of older games, where it's hard to keep track of a lot of moving parts at once.
Occasionally I like to wander down to the bowels of the internet and see what it has in store. You can find items that are the stuff of legends on the dark web, or find yourself wondering why Elsa and Spiderman are singing the Family Finger Song. Me, I like to go to the dark place that hardly anyone would ever admit to: Japanese Hentai Games. I'm not looking to get my rocks off, it's the other side of hentai that I'm interested in. Yes, the absolutely depraved side.
This side of gaming is fascinating. There are games that take power fantasies and flip them on their head, subvert them in weird ways, or simply put the player on the receiving end of the plot. You can play as villains, side characters, legendary heroes, ordinary monsters, or even the table. Many of the traditions in gaming just don't seem to apply here... and the ones that do are the absolute foundational, cream of the crop tropes that make the game happen in the first place.
There's something to be said about the quality of these games. Almost universally, the games are either garbage heaps of bad design and fetish fuel, so specialized that the rest of the game languishes, or "If this wasn't a hentai then this would be the best game I've ever played?!". Mediocrity is not something that happens when these authors are either extremely passionate in their ideas or trying to sell to that crowd.
Why do I keep playing these games? In a word: humanity
Most video games with human characters don't really have humans in their games. If you can swap out the character with a ball and the game mechanics make just as much sense, then you're not really playing a human. That's a big reason why a lot of games in the 90's did fairly well with their animal mascots: Sonic the Hedgehog isn't a human, he's a blue fairy hedgehog thing that turns into a ball and runs like a madman. Who needs human flesh when you're made out of pure attitude?
I'm sure this is why survival games struck a chord within the gaming community as well. It's why Minecraft can justify having a 'survival' mode even though the only real survival aspect is that the main character needs is food. Getting hungry means you need something to keep going, right?
If I were to point at a game style that shows off this idea of 'humanity', then I would have to point at Dark Souls. Your character is squishy, running at a reasonably athletic pace, uses their own skills and abilities to move forward, and you as the player need to learn how the game is played before you move on. There's a special kind of harmony between the bone-crunching death of the character and your own resolve to improve yourself.
I'd like to play more games like this. Sort of. It's not the difficulty of the game that really speaks to me, it's the relatability of playing with a character that isn't just a toy. Humans have consequences for their actions. We make a lot of little We. They end up hurting ourselves or pushing their bodies too far. Even when we do that, our bodies take a couple of days to heal up and then we can do it all over again.
Some video games try to replicate that idea with the limited amount of tools they have. Have you fallen too far? Take a point of damage. Jump in lava? Well, you can move just like the air, but your life counter is going to go down rapidly. You exist in an RPG? Status effect! You now act at random. These games try to bring back some of the aspects of human biology that exist, but it's done in a way that has been oversimplified, extruded into a paste, and then smeared on the player.
Chip damage bothers me on so many levels. It's hard to justify a character blocking hit after hit, blow after blow, perfectly taking everything in the most robust stance, then suddenly exploding into meaty chunks because their health points went from 1 to 0. Likewise, the fall damage in Minecraft is infuriating. Why can I explode into an array of item drops just because I dropped from the sky a little too high?
Sure, some games prevent you from dying due to this chip damage, but if the hero walks through acid I would expect them to have a real bad time walking instead of being able to jump up 50 feet onto the ceiling. This is part of why superheroes are such fun; superman can defy physics because he is superman.
"Well well well. If it isn't the consequences of my own actions."
A common argument against this idea is that "this isn't fun". That's true, but it's the wrong argument. Stealth sections in first person shooters aren't fun because the type of experience you're having is a bombastic jaunt through enemy lines as a one-man-army blasting through everything in your way. Likewise, any game that relies entirely on stealth will be a lot less satisfying if you can just barrel through every stage with brute force. These games have a particular focus, and when that focus deviates into a gameplay style that is not complementary to its vision, the entire game suffers.
Dark Souls is the perfect counterargument to this. We can describe it as "a different type of fun", but it's really the entire game having this brutal, punishing, and overbearing experience that grinds you down and chews you up until you finally get through the boss that was in your way and now YOU are the grindmaster. The entire aesthetic and gameplay experience leans into this idea so hard that, if you enjoy this kind of thing, you won't even notice that you're not 'supposed to' be having fun.
Let's do something a little different. I want an experience where the fundamental aspect of what and where a person is, is the thing that matters most. We can keep a lot of the basic mechanics that have been built up over decades of playtesting, and then layer a few new things on top of those. I don't want to punish the player with death... only with the consequences of their own actions.
Super Metroid is definitely shaping the idea here. At the beginning of the game you move around like a kind of odd floating tank. Leaving out all of the upgrades that you get, there are a lot of mechanics that make Samus not annoying, not irritating, not clunky, but some combination of these at a lot of small levels. The best players make everything look easy, when in fact the game is doing everything it possibly can at any given time to make the way Samus moves mediocre. Not hardcore, not crazypants, and not irritating. Just... kind of bad. It's hard to describe exactly, and should be even harder to replicate without copying the entire game.
On the flipside, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is the best example of bringing humanity into an existing world. Open-world exploration, crafting, weapon durability, and a defined goal come together to make something that feels both like something that's been done so many times and still shines in its absolute quality of an experience. Despite being a Hylian from another world, that incarnation of link is one of the most human characters in all of gaming.
A man's gotta eat, after all.
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