The low-level moral panic about games as a medium seems to have subsided for the most part. People who are trying to mobilize some sort of moral-political response to media technologies are relentlessly focused on novelty, in part because they regularly make predictions about the negative social consequences of a new medium that either don’t come true at all or come true only in complicatedly ambivalent ways. That forces them to move on.
I’m sure that my unhealthy physique will stand against a claim on my part that gaming doesn’t cause me any issues, but I’m more interested in how it feels in here, inside my skull. What’s interesting is that there are a few games where I feel crummy as a result of playing. Not many, but a few.
An easy problem, you say! Don’t play them! Well, in those few cases, I really do recognize that they offer some pretty compulsive-feeling ludic loops. Just-one-more-turn is normally a feeling I enjoy having while playing, but maybe not so much in these few cases.
The game I feel the most this way about is Mount and Blade II: Battlelord.
It’s an indie game that has had a long Early Access development process. Every time I play it, I feel really hooked for a while and then I feel trapped—and the feeling of being glued to it is viscerally physical as well as mental.
That’s for two reasons.
The first is that the game’s most central form of activity is controlling your character’s avatar in massed troop battles and sieges. You’re an aristocratic commander of a variably-sized army with many different kinds of troops, but what you do individually on the field matters a great deal and is the main ludic payoff of the whole thing. Your character advances in skill through using those skills but fundamentally it’s about your own command over the controls.
The game has maybe the most compelling sword-fighting mechanics I’ve seen in decades of playing video games. It’s a really physical feeling (far more than most VR I’ve tried)—I find myself leaning left and right in the real world, tensing my mouse-moving arm as I try to swing my weapon through an enemy while galloping at high speed. I flinch when an enemy connects hard on my character. I feel a real sense of panic when I’m storming a castle and I’m in danger of being overwhelmed by a rush of enemies. I stare at the screen so hard it hurts my eyes. With many games I keep them up, pause a lot, look away, do other things, but Bannerlord demands a really draining physical investment from me when I boot it up.
It repays it in that there’s nothing more satisfying than winning a tough battle where your army was outnumbered partly through your commander’s personal acumen (e.g., your own). But this brings me to problem #2: the game has a really aggravating gameplay loop.
Once you make a key decision early in a conventional session of the game, you’re either trying to rebuild an ersatz Roman Empire or you’re trying to keep the remnants of the old empire from reforming. The game map is exquisitely designed to balance out the NPC factions in terms of keeping any of them from having strong chokepoints (or perhaps giving them all some chokepoints). You can join one of the factions or strike out on your own, but the rhythm of play quickly settles into a repetition of the same events. Unsurprisingly, since you’re the human player, you can beat the AI, including in battles where you’re substantially outnumbered. But the opposing factions tend to bounce right back—it takes hours and hours of patient repetition of raise army-defend castles-take castles-take prisoners-build up castles and towns-sell loot-ransom prisoners to make any headway against even one faction. In the meantime you also have to take care of a repeating series of somewhat dull quests designed to keep a secret conspiratorial enemy from gaining too much momentum.
There’s a thin sort of RPG stuff going on as well—your character can get married (and you can have a female character) and eventually have children. You recruit some companions who have particular personalities and skills (this mostly turns into a hunt for the optimal max-skill ones). You build relationships with allied lords and eventually some of your frequent enemies will hate you with some intensity. (You can execute them if you capture them, but it doesn’t particularly do any good.) When your own skills are high enough, you can potentially recruit enemy lords, which is pretty important to making headway overall because you need more lords overall to defend a bigger and bigger kingdom successfully. (Every army needs a noble commander.) But no matter what you do, there’s a lot of “sigh, Varagos Castle needs to be retaken for the tenth time, and then I have to get halfway across the map again to deal with the Aserai and then I have to go beat a conspiracy caravan for the fifteenth time”.
In some games, that sort of looping daily gameplay is relaxing—Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing, for example. But in this case the loop is punctuated by the physically involving battles and never has that sense of lightly whimsical collecting or socializing with NPCs in the rest of what you have to do over and over again.
It’s a very mod-friendly game so there are plenty of mods that try to address these issues—garrisons that defend your castles more effectively, improvements of various minigames like arena combat and diplomacy, even total conversions that make the map less repetition-prone and more story-rich. I’m not knocking the game overall but I am trying to think through why I go through week-long cycles of playing the damn thing in ways that ultimately don’t sum up to fun.
I think ultimately it is that every part of the gameplay loop is in some sense easy, punctuated occasionally with really hard and enjoyably challenging battles, but that making progress strategically is painfully incremental—and yet you do make progress. Two hours of gameplay can mean you’re slightly closer to knocking one of the enemy factions off the map entirely. It could take weeks and weeks of the same to really succeed even with the specific quest-related goal you’re given early on, simply because every time you’re one step closer to reforming the empire or destroying it for good, one of the enemies further away will attack and while you’re attending to that, your control of the central areas of the map often slips, partly because your NPC allies have the brain of a goldfish. The incremental progress is enough of a cheese-pellet reward to keep you hammering away on the lever—but it’s also annoying enough to keep you feeling sick at heart and sore in body for having put the time in.
That usually leads me to drop the game like a hot potato after one of those involving weeks and swearing not to touch it again. But it also makes me acknowledge that critics of gamification are on to something. It’s not games per se, I suspect, but the unpleasant compulsions involved in pursuing slight incremental improvements to something you don’t care all that much about just because the improvements are concrete, quantifiable, verifiable. Most involving gameplay loops are about maintenance of a socially-themed world or about repetition of a fast-paced gratifying game that has a finite end. Or at least about strategy games that may take a week to play but which progress measurably towards an end where each game feels different than the last one. Battlelord always feels the same and it feels as if the end is both attainable and infinitely far away. You experience something like fun, but always followed by something like regret. When gamification is infused into conventional processes of assessment in workplaces, that’s pretty much the same structure of feeling that results.