There are a lot of properties that game mechanics can have that make people invest in games. Legible rules, clear feedback, deterministic and discrete cause and effect, clearly understandable win conditions and game states, being relatively simple to implement in code, having properties that make discrete variations and permutations of gameplay situations easy to build and easy to parse for players, setting rules up in ways that can be structured with real-time pressure, often embedded in large spatial structures to organically pace an experience...
Shooting (and combat more generally) has proven to be pretty easy to make satisfy most of these criteria. There are other core styles of actions that do as well (say, 2d Platforming, or clean puzzle mechanics like in games like Tetris).
These mechnical factors matter, because it's often the case that people who don't like violence in games would prefer games to focus on other kinds of challenges that they find more socially good in terms of morality or ideology. But then they stomp all over the mechanical styles of issues I was just listing above, and the results is predictably game designs broad masses of players don't want to play.
I've worked on both AAA hyperviolent games, as well as with educators on learning games with what they saw as pro-social game play, so this is a divide I've had front row seats to.
And to make what I hope is a productive contrast, one of the really great things about Undertale is that the designer didn't make being peaceful in the game lame. It is (or was for me) actively fun to try to figure out how to not kill enemies, because you still have to engage in bullet hell dodging while you try to psychoanalyze your opponents, and that dodging (for players who like those kinds of mechanics) still maintained a lot of the properties I just listed above.
To make a more real-world comparison, my father-in-law was an extremely successful junior college tennis coach, and he has noted in passing that he couldn't personally see how anyone could invest in Olympic sports like figure skating, just on the level of taking the competition that seriously. And his argument (he wasn't being universalizing, particularly, just tying it to his experience as an award winning coach) was that the extreme subjectivity of judge ratings was really offputting to him, as a competitor. Obviously tennis can have bad line calls and other controversial judge issues, too - all human sports can. But I think his argument ties in with my original one here; a lot of game players really like clean, legible rules with clear good and bad states so they can invest in getting good at games and take pleasure in their good play. And, as I say, shooting and combat at this point often fulfills that well.
(I'm a game designer, so I can't help but respond to this as a designer first, and not primarily a player)
I wonder how much of the issue here is the rise of the abstraction of "gameplay loop" itself as a lens that shapes what gets made.
One of the things that can keep a game fresh is players being unclear on where the border of play is, or what the range of the possible is. When I was playing Mario 64, say, I really wasn't clear on what was possible in the game, and so one of the main pleasures of playing the game was encountering new kinds of interactions and new kinds of activities embedded in specific space that I didn't know would be in the game. Same experience with Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. As a matter of fact, this was true for me when I was first playing through the original Half-Life and the original Metal Gear Solid as well, or Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. The boundaries of the possible were not clear, and I had to play to tease them out. There was something like an implicit promise (because those games were violating my expectations early) that I might see and do stuff I hadn't seen and done yet if I stuck with the game.
Refined gameplay loops with variation are certainly cool and a great and an important tool, and many games I love do rely heavily on them (like, say, Slay the Spire, or the original Doom deathmatch as a kind of competitive play, or Street Fighter 3). But my general sense is that the more designers think in terms of game play loops, the earlier the edges of a game design and limits on the realm of the possible become clear for a player in a subconscious way. In a way, this is similar to a player noticing early that they seem to have heard all the music a game is going to provide, or seem to have seen all the enemies or weapons early - they recognize they've found all the novel stuff they're going to find, and everything going forward is going to be re-combinations and permutations. But I think it's a little harder to reason about when it comes to a player discerning the limitations of what kinds of play they will ultimately encounter, because it's a bit more subtle of an issue.
There's something here about the aesthetics of open-ended discovery versus the pleasures of achievement, I think, perhaps in something like a fractal sense.
I think there's a lurking development tension here, too. Constrained variations within game play loops can often help constrain arbitrary interactions in game play code, and arbitrary interactions in game play code make systems harder to reason about, and balance, and ensure stability, and modularly farm out different tasks to different developers. So I suspect there are development reasons for preferring these kinds of designs as well.
I worked on a couple of high profile FPS games during the era when designers really started trying to make these Potemkin village spaces off in the distance of levels to suggest larger realities (especially the 2000 shooter Soldier of Fortune).
I don't have anything interesting to say about how the backrooms phenomenon has evolved in recent years, but I do find it mildly amusing that I have a very different, but equally horror-themed, reaction to seeing "players" poking around in the original backrooms. Because it immediately gives me flashbacks to the feeling that players have found spots where collusion detection has had a nasty issue (because of bad geometry, or floating point precision errors in the physics system or a NaN, or players abusing the physic system to climb to areas they weren't supposed to), and now there's some awful-to-track-down bug to be fixed during a death march crunch time... all of which actually was a somewhat common occurrence during development at the time, of course.
Obviously, that makes me a lousy target audience for this art movement. But it's been vaguely fascinating watching people enchant, essentially, spaces that were experienced, from our side, as an very brittle (but useful!) optimization hack that we were all too aware could be easily broken.
Back in the late 90s, when I first entered the video game industry to work (when it was quite scruffy, countercultural, and populated by some pretty odd people), one of the first things I encountered was a new co-worker who, next to his giant tower of used Mountain Dew cans, had a black and white TV in his cubicle. This struck me as very odd at that moment in time - as I understood things, obviously the point of work was supposed to be that it was a place where you worked, not a place where you watched TV. (Now, granted, everyone else was playing the recently released Diablo on their work PCs during lunch in network mode, and we were a game studio after all, so my reaction wasn't totally coherent). Still, no one else had a TV, and that guy was young and single with no work-life balance, he was a recent transplant, and it still seemed unusual at the time.
Fast forward 28 years later, and now everyone has an amazing TV in their pocket at all times when they commute, sit in their work space, go out for coffee or lunch, or go sit down in the bathroom, all with a near infinite collection of video via youtube, netflix, and even massive amounts of porn. How little did I know. And that's to say nothing of texting and twitter and reddit and instant messaging and discord and ...
Several years ago, I was working on a college campus, and there were giant corporate-flavored murals beside some of the city blocks students walked, full of happy multicultural clip art people and exciting innovative technological innovation, and adorned with the message, "Imagine a borderless world!" Clearly that message was meant to be rhetorical, not a call to reflection, critique, or reevaluation. There did not seem to be the suggestion that one might imagine the borderless world and then, having done so, decide it was a problem to be corrected.
I wonder a lot, these days, if we're not deep into a Chesterton's Fence situation, where we have to rediscover the hard way the older wisdom about having separate spheres with separate hard constraints and boundaries on behaviors, communities, and communication pathways to facilitate all sorts of important activities that simply don't happen otherwise - something like borders and boundaries as a crucial social technology, specifically about directing attention productively. Phones and tablets are, in their own Turing complete way, portals to a borderless world that pierces the older intentional classroom boundaries.
I really try to avoid anything about politics here, but I recall there already being a controversy about this back in May of 2024. Specifically, there were public comments from the new CEO to investors about Cracker Barrel needing to change the demographics of the customers who ate at Cracker Barrel, and, depending on your point of view, some people interpreted the way the comments were said as suggesting that there was something morally suspect about how non-diverse, non-inclusive, old-and-white-and-straight the current dining demographics at Cracker Barrel were. There was a small right-of-center online public outrage du jour about it at the time. I'm not interested in litigating what the CEO said or how justified the outrage was, just noting precedent.
So there already was a pre-existing history here for people who are sympathetic to this point of view, particularly coming as it did shortly after some similar Bud Light and Target controversies.
"But that's not how real life works at all, right?"
How real life works is always a plausible interesting goal, but it's very often at odds with a bunch of other valuable goals for players.
A particular sharp example of this is sports video games. It might well be interesting (and certainly realistic) to simulate bad referees in a sports game. Horrible blown calls by tennis line judges, or missed calls by basketball refs, or bad umpire calls on pitches. Real-life soccer makes working the refs and their inability to see everything an art form, as far as I can tell.
Perhaps that's interesting, but the irony here is that real life refs are actually bad simulations of the original perfect game code in the first place, from a certain point of view. I think debates about the use of instant replay in sports gets at the heart of this, and one could imagine using real-time AI to help refs taking this conversation much further.
I think the sports case is a particularly sharp example, but it definitely holds with all sorts of choices in games.
For Animal Crossing in particular, I remember when I finally played it, it struck me after a while how much it had in common with recent MMOs (Everquest and World of Warcraft) that I had had fellow game developer friends have their lives severely disrupted by. And when I played the original Animal Crossing, I remember noticing specifically how careful the designers were in having players use up every bit of interesting content in a day after 45 minutes or an hour, so that eventually you'd run out of things to do, and that was the game's signal to put it down and pick it up again the next day. And I remember being struck by how intentional it was, and how humane it was... particularly given their goal of wanting to make a game that was asynchronously coop (where different family members could play in the same shared space at different times of day and interact asynchronously). As a game designer myself, I really respected the care they put into that.
Anyway, that's my immediate thought on seeing this (fascinating, valuable) experiment with LLM dialogue in Animal Crossing. The actual way NPCs work in these games as they are has been honed over time to serve a very specific function. It's very similar to personal testimonials by paid actors in commercials; a human expressing an idea in personal dialogue form triggers all sorts natural human attention and reception in us as audience members, and so it's a lot more sticky... but getting across the information quickly and concisely is still the primary point. Even dialogue trees in games are often not used because of their inefficiency.
I totally think that there will be fascinating innovations from the current crop of AI in games, and I'm really looking forward to seeing and trying them. I just think it's unlikely they will be drop-in replacements for a lot of the techniques that game developers have already honed for cases like informational NPC dialogue.
A few years ago, I was feeling dispirited about being middle-aged and had come around to the conclusion that, at least when playing games, my general dissatisfaction and "meh" response to the games I was playing was probably a function of my age rather than anything about the games themselves. I was enjoying some games to an extent, but I wasn't being really grabbed by anything, and I was having a hard time sticking with much that I was playing. It seemed like a reasonable just-so story, and a particular exhausting one if you make games and theoretically are supposed to like them.
And then I picked up Hollow Knight, was utterly sucked into it in a deep way, couldn't put it down, and came out the other side doing the Principle Skinner meme - "Am I so out of touch? No, it's all those other games that have been wrong..."
So thank you Team Cherry, for helping remind me that 1) I really can love games deeply, even in my tired middle-aged-ness, and 2) sometimes the problem isn't that a person is being too judgmental, the problem is that the the lofty potential of their ideals really is, perhaps, justified, and other creative people (for a variety of understandable reasons, really - making games is a hard and costly business) mostly aren't even really aiming for such things.
Shooting (and combat more generally) has proven to be pretty easy to make satisfy most of these criteria. There are other core styles of actions that do as well (say, 2d Platforming, or clean puzzle mechanics like in games like Tetris).
These mechnical factors matter, because it's often the case that people who don't like violence in games would prefer games to focus on other kinds of challenges that they find more socially good in terms of morality or ideology. But then they stomp all over the mechanical styles of issues I was just listing above, and the results is predictably game designs broad masses of players don't want to play.
I've worked on both AAA hyperviolent games, as well as with educators on learning games with what they saw as pro-social game play, so this is a divide I've had front row seats to.
And to make what I hope is a productive contrast, one of the really great things about Undertale is that the designer didn't make being peaceful in the game lame. It is (or was for me) actively fun to try to figure out how to not kill enemies, because you still have to engage in bullet hell dodging while you try to psychoanalyze your opponents, and that dodging (for players who like those kinds of mechanics) still maintained a lot of the properties I just listed above.
To make a more real-world comparison, my father-in-law was an extremely successful junior college tennis coach, and he has noted in passing that he couldn't personally see how anyone could invest in Olympic sports like figure skating, just on the level of taking the competition that seriously. And his argument (he wasn't being universalizing, particularly, just tying it to his experience as an award winning coach) was that the extreme subjectivity of judge ratings was really offputting to him, as a competitor. Obviously tennis can have bad line calls and other controversial judge issues, too - all human sports can. But I think his argument ties in with my original one here; a lot of game players really like clean, legible rules with clear good and bad states so they can invest in getting good at games and take pleasure in their good play. And, as I say, shooting and combat at this point often fulfills that well.