Abstract
A majority of contemporary game design is focused on developing a hedonistic loop, a frictionless aesthetic that hinges on familiarity and comfort to promote states of flow and player satisfaction. Not disregarding the advantages of designing for the hedonistic loop, this paper questions it and develops a critique that advocates for a focus on aesthetic friction, a shift of the play experience from the prioritisation of fun to the creation of contexts for the construction of meaning.
Highlights
The idea of intentionally shifting a game’s focus away from fun so that it may promote critical reflection and the creation of new meanings by their players, eventually making it uncomfortable, is not entirely new.1Whether no-fun experiences are being problematically repackaged or overlooked, the current discourse around fun in video games is still disappointingly limited. (...) Fun itself can be deeply meaningful, but there is much more to video games than fun
Partial access happens when the player is barred from parts of the game, through rules, space, objects, etc., sometimes being forced to replay in order to access them. This can be found in Miegakure (TBR), a game where the player navigates a world of four spatial dimensions through a 2D depiction of its 3D sections at a time; in Passage (2007) where the access to certain parts of the world is restricted to the player that chooses to pair up their character with a life partner; and in One Hour One Life (2018) in which players play “small part in a much larger story”, the life of a character from birth to death
The hedonistic loop is fed by frictionless aesthetics, which limits the creativity of game designers and restricts the expressiveness of games, focusing them on a very narrow set of experiences for very specific audiences
Summary
The idea of intentionally shifting a game’s focus away from fun so that it may promote critical reflection and the creation of new meanings by their players, eventually making it uncomfortable, is not entirely new.. The Sims’ personalization potential has been used to create machinima with narratives that explore emotionally charged social circumstances, such as homelessness (Isbister 2017, p.39). This suggests that even fun-focused games can be turned into media for reflection and introspection. These stories do explore emotionally fraught social situations – bullying, weddings, breakups and even eating disorders (...). This player portrayed homelessness by using the game’s mechanics She designated park benches as the actual character’s homes and kept as much as possible to the actual in-game interactions that emerged between those characters and their neighbourhood. Many contemporary games are designed to be as comfortable and familiar as possible, and whenever they may feel uncomfortable, frustrating or confusing, they are seen as flawed because “videogame tastemakers of yore sold us the toxic myth that fun is paramount” (Holiwell, 2015), promoting what we call frictionless aesthetics
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