Postman Dan's Cheap Thoughts on Gaming 1 - How ya' playing?

I haven't been so much interested in playing video games recently, moreso exploring the feeling that gaming gives me.

For me, it's figuring out a puzzle platformer, it's understanding how to break an RPG. It's conquering a challenge you set for 5 year old you. It's visiting old friends in a new coat of paint.

Gaming has such a place in interactive entertainment, that being, anything requiring your engagement (sports, books, gambling), that it needs to come with some level of investment.

"what makes a good video game, Daniel?"

Good question.

LESSON 1) How ya' playing?

It seems simple. Rudimentary even, but the first barrier we consider when picking up a game is "how tough is it going to be to pick up?"

First and foremost, is your prototype fun to mess around in? Is your alpha a realized vertical slice of what you should EXPECT the player to do? What do you want out of an open beta? These stages make competent games stronger. Engage with your audience.

If it's even a bit standoffish in initial stages, you risk losing players that may not feel welcome by the exclusive nature of a game.

Take Street Fighter.

Street Fighter has always been a cornerstone in competitive gaming. So when you revive a dormant franchise in Street Fighter IV (4) and lean further into the successes that it accomplished in V (5), it turns out you can alienate a good number of players by producing a game dictated by the current metagame of the last game.

They fixed a lot in the long run, making V a competent game but one lacking in substance, ultimately. This changed in VI (6) where we were introduced to a tighter game, with far more movement and options that favor aggression, something largely not seen in earnest since 3rd Strike. But we're not here for a franchise we know that has legacy.

It's easy to build off of years of ideas and create something ultimately resembling Ryu and Ken. But what does it mean to do it from scratch?

Dig, Mine, Excavate, Explore, those were the simple tenents of Minecraft. Simply put, the world is your oyster and what you create in it is purely of your creativity based on your knowledge of how the world around you works.

This is why good Minecraft players are GOOD. Not speedrun-flowchart-memorization good but absolutely fluent in their craft. Pun maybe intended.

And how is this possible? Certainly not without Mojang constantly learning how to expand the game. And certainly not without player feedback.

As someone who played since Minecraft Java ALPHA...

GREAT ideas only get better upon iteration.

GOOD ideas only stagnate and fade.

A game in 2025 has also exemplified greatness through its narrative and game play. Clair Obscur Expedition 33 continues to be an interesting and engaging adaptation of turn based roleplay and either it's too much like Final Fantasy or Final Fantasy is not enough like it, but for what it's worth, what it provides to encounters is some of the freshest mechanical execution in a game.

Story has often been the weakest factor in video games. Up until recently, we largely didn't have complex narratives and nuanced characters like those in a game by Naughty Dog. We were simply told to move to your endgoal, maybe save something or somewhere. When we start to ask why we do the things we do in games, the answers are often hardly satisfying.

That's why when a narrative chooses to focus on why's and how's of a world, you get fascinating tales like Nier, told through multiple playthroughs and each one muddying the waters of your perception a little more before coming together in a bleak, yet intriguing way. More and more games opt to look at their world through a grey ending: dismal, dire, not without consequence.

Those stories help build your engagement with the mechanics at times too, sometimes being directly contributed to by the plot. Diagetic storytelling is often a strong, convincing vessel for your game to connect with players who want to engage with it. The environmental flourishes, the description of a weapon or item you happened across, anything that can tell a story without a character coming up to you and giving you lore dump for the sake of dumping lore.

All in all, games are first and foremost meant to be fun unless it is your mission statement to be wholly unfun, which is also an extremely valid school of game design, but one that requires a stronger psyche than I have. How you make that game fun though, is up to you, as long as it welcomed the player to engage with it.

Thanks. I may start just dumping these thoughts more often, edit them to be a bit more attractive, you know, the usual stuff that goes into dolling up a blog. For now though, I need sleep.

Eternally,

Postman Dan