Did you know that the Church Fathers, particularly the Desert Fathers, rail against “pleasure”? I’m sure you’re not surprised. The guilty Christian isn’t exactly out of left field, is it? Bad sad little nihilistic masochistic Christians all worried about Hell and making one for themselves and everyone else, right here on Earth!
Here’s a picture of some really spicy stuff:
What stupid backwards bumpkins, right? What joyless jerks.
Yes, the rug’s about to be pulled.
Cause the word “pleasure” that’s used? In Greek it’s hedone. As in hedonism. As in chasing pleasure for its own sake, to the point of mindlessness. As in overindulgence. Addiction. Like doomscrolling. To further cement the issue, there's another word, synhedone ("syn" to combine, like synthesis), which doesn't have the negative connotations of hedone. Hedone means to be isolated.
See, the problem is that humans, if given the chance, will optimize all the fun out of their life. Half of game design is about making sure players can’t just screw themselves out of a good time in the name of inconvenience, pain, and disappointment. Half the lesson of a truly amazing game is how the unpleasant and awful make pleasure and joy all the better because they exist. “Reincorporation is one hell of a drug,” as Dave (one of my playtesters) said after a particularly amazing playtest of Crescendo, after his character Sorin had to talk a furious mountain elemental down from committing genocide, something Sorin had to be talked down from doing himself at the climax of Book One. Oh, and after killing a few people in a helpless fit of rage. Without those instances where Sorin failed himself and needed others to help him talking down the mountain wouldn’t have meant much. But now this scene was a redemption, a moment where he truly felt how someone else felt and wanted to help, because he himself had been helped. Failure makes success sweeter.
Inconvenience helps make true joy something you can actually appreciate. So yes, we're going to talk about weapon breakage in Breath of the Wild.
Not Tears of the Kingdom, because that's actually a very different beast in this regard.
No, Breath of the Wild.
"But wait" you may protest, "People can like what they like and it's fine!"
Oh please, we all know that's not true.
Don't believe me?
Go Google the TTRPG called F.A.T.A.L. I'll wait.
Whenever you're done scraping out your eyes and brain, let's talk reason, okay?
Aesthetics is the height of ethics. The only reason why someone would make something like F.A.T.A.L. is because he believes such things are okay to enjoy. It is not a question of whether or not F.A.T.A.L. is well implemented (it's not!!!), it's that to unironically celebrate rape and racism and just... look, I'm just going to say F.A.T.A.L. as entirety because it's just entirely wrong I'm afraid of missing something here.. is such a repugnant thing, that you know exactly who would enjoy that kind of thing. And yes, it is a moral issue, and anyone who says different has more than a few screws loose and we all know it.
Because, in this rather extreme example, it's very obvious what we're doing: we find objects that we are in sympathy with, and that sympathy, that synthesis, is what we find enjoyable. And it's totally possible to do this with any object (in the art sense), whether good or bad. Some objects may not be comfortable to be in sympathy with, sure, but it's not necessarily a case of bad design, but of incompatible worldviews.
So, since I'm the one throwing hot stuff like this around, we'll turn the microscope back on me, okay? It's only fair.
I can't seem to finish Dark Souls.
Now, the irony of that should be obvious to anyone, right? I mean, I'm making a game that could be called the mechanical equivalent of Dark Souls, so what the heck do you mean you can't finish Dark Souls? It's a very simple answer: because in an RPG I know there's a point. I'm talking with the people at the table, we're discussing what this means, all the time, and I can experience a whole ton of darkness, so long as I know we're all in it together. I find Dark Souls claustrophobic. It presses on all the anxieties I have about life actually being meaningless and amps up them so hard that I can barely get through a level. It's something I want to try again, but I am aware that I do not, natively, jive with the idea of Dark Souls. Maybe if I could plan online it would help, but logistically I can't do that right now; for me it is going to have to be a slog through the dark, alone. And I've never done that sorta thing terribly well.
Notice that, nowhere in there, did I call Dark Souls a bad game, or even myself a bad person for not being able to sympathize with it. I can reflect upon what that means for me as a person, I can diagnose that as being baggage that I need to keep working on, and who knows? I recounted facts and decided what I wanted to do with them. That actually frees me up to enjoy the bits of Dark Soul I do (like a two-handed Zweihander right to the face) without having to go muddy up the waters. It also allows me to develop more as a person, to allow my relaxation time to relate to the world around, and to change it from hedonism to enjoyment.
Instead of isolating myself I am able to relate even while alone, because honestly there have never been moments where you don't affect someone else. You're always doing that, it's just that they may not necessarily know what was affecting them. Such assumptions about privacy are wrong, and have always been wrong. You are always relating to those around you, even if they can't see the whole picture of what's going on with you. Such enjoyment is more work than hednomism, but life takes more effort to begin with.
Death is likened to sleep for a reason: it's profoundly easy.
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