White Dwarves and Red Giants

 

Hi all, 

Before what already seems to me inevitable - another post about another Argento movie - I decided to make a departure into the world of video games. 

I'll attempt to examine my own gaming habits with the aid of a most unlikely pairing of games: Outer Wilds and Genshin Impact. It is for precisely the reason that these games are mutually different in so many ways that I'm hoping to tease out some insight by comparing them. I know a few of things I want to say, but I'm mostly going into this on a whim.

Drop it like it's hard

Starting from the beginning: I assume most of you can relate to ditching a tv-show or series due to loss of interest or lack of time or whatever reason. You move on; it's not for you; there're better things out there...it's no big deal. On the other hand, my experience with video games is that it tends to sting a bit more to bail out. There's more of a nagging feeling that you could've stuck with it till the end; that you've missed what it truly had to offer.

The idea of sunk cost plays into my thinking. It is an active investment of one's effort to progress through a game's content. This investment is in some sense "wasted" when abandoning a game. Of course, how this applies to games that don't have a well-defined end or completion is a bit different. In such cases, the progression may be in skill or rank or some metric inherent to the game.

This brings me finally to my pair of games. For me, Outer Wilds is one of those games that I dropped before the end. There is a definite conclusion to the game, but I wasn't compelled to do what it takes to reach it. I believe I fell short by one sequence of tasks I needed to complete to beat the game, but after a few failed attempts I was frustrated, put it away, and never came back. It did bug me. It was a kind of guilt.

In contrast, Genshin Impact is a game that I play every day. I spend maybe 20-30 minutes playing it, sometimes a bit more. I'll miss days or even several weeks if I'm busy or on holiday or for whatever reason, but the point is that I keep coming back to it and have done so for a better part of the year that it has been out. In its current form there is no end to the game. There is a vague promise of a resolution to the main story, but the implication is that it is far off in the future.

What is slightly perverse about this situation is that, apples to oranges, I appreciate Outer Wilds more as a game than Genshin Impact. There is little I don't like about Outer Wilds. There's a lot more I don't like about Genshin. Why then don't my thoughts seem to line up with my actions? Am I stupid or something? (Spoiler: Yes, but let's move on.)

What are these games? 

Outer Wilds is an indie game by Mobius Digital, a Los Angeles -based studio of about ten people. It was initially crowdfunded for $126,000 and additional funds were provided by Annapurna Interactive buying the rights to the game. The game was completed in 2019. An expansion called "Echoes of the Eye" is scheduled to be released within days of this post.

The gameplay of Outer Wilds consists of exploring a compact solar system with a homemade rocket ship and a few gadgets. The player discovers hints and clues that they will ultimately try to use to save this solar system from destruction. Every 22 minutes the sun explodes, wiping out everything, and the game resets to the beginning. The player character retains his memories between these resets and his discoveries persist in a log.

                                                                                                      

Genshin Impact is one of the most expensive games developed on record, at an estimated cost exceeding $100 million. The Chinese developer miHoYo currently employs 2400 people, 700 of which work on Genshin. The game is free to play with in-game purchases. It is available on mobile, PC and consoles. It is hugely popular and very lucrative, having generated over a billion dollars in revenue on mobile alone by March of 2021. New content, such as new characters and areas, as well as limited-time events, are added to the game at regular intervals.

The gameplay of Genshin is sprawling. The core gameplay is heavily influenced in style and content by The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The player; a visitor from another world, explores the open world of Teyvat and fights monsters and enemies scattered out in this expanse, or within separate domains that are accessible from various locations. There are numerous quests, challenges and environmental puzzles to keep the player occupied, as well as collectible materials and items scattered about that can be used for crafting or upgrading purposes. The player can employ a team of up to four characters in combat, swapping between them on the fly, making use of their various abilities.

Game modes and features that supplement the core gameplay have been introduced over time. These include customisable player housing, hangout events, fishing, co-op minigames, tower defense...

The list goes - and will go - on.

What boxes do these games tick?

Common ground does exist: Both games scratch my itch for exploring a world that is designed for that purpose. This means that noticing details in the environment or just wandering about is something that tends to yield rewards. In Outer Wilds, the rewards relate to fleshing out the world and piecing together disparate clues relating to the apocalypse and how to prevent it. In Genshin, the rewards are more explicit: Items, materials and money - essential for leveling up your characters and upgrading their weapons and abilities.

In Genshin, leveling up is something that is transformed from a means to an end. At a certain point it becomes totally unnecessary to level up characters and their skills in order to beat enemies or complete quests and challenges. Beyond that point everything is overkill. Only an optional challenge domain called the Spiral Abyss necessitates any further investment. In spite of this, I - and likely most other players of this game - do not stop leveling up and upgrading. Watching the numbers go up is an end in itself. I could beat the enemies yesterday, but today I can do it faster.

The visual aesthetics and music of both games are laudable, for very different reasons. Outer Wilds is cozy with its DIY garden shed rocketry and campfires under starry skies. The planets are distinct, dynamically orbiting and rotating, terrain is crumbling and tornados are spinning. The whole solar system is but a stone's throw away. Genshin Impact is saturated and brimming with grand vistas, lush and colourful scenery in all directions. It shines with a meticulous and optimised polish that can only be achieved with battalions of game designers, modelers, artists, musicians, animators, voice actors etc. etc...and absolute mountains of cash. 

A cheap harmonica sounds beautiful in a different way than an expertly conducted symphony orchestra does.

But why quit Outer Wilds?

The answer I can find for this is two-fold. The tedium of having to repeat a sequence of gameplay is not something that I am sensitive to in general. However, there is an interplay of how challenging, how time-consuming and how exciting that sequence is that effects my desire to keep at it after failing. That combination of elements did not come together at this crucial stage, that's part 1. 

Part 2 is that I feel like I already know the ending. The general outline of how the story concludes exists in my mind and I'm quite satisfied to leave it so, unverified.

And what's wrong with Genshin?

Gameplay-wise, what's left for me is predominantly a daily grind. Daily quests repeat endlessly. Upgrades accumulate slowly and have no noticeable effect. Novelty is injected sparingly through updates that add new areas to explore, but these are too soon exhausted. More and more the subtle mechanics of how players are nudged towards spending money on the game reveal themselves. 

This is what a nun looks like in Teyvat.

New characters that are periodically introduced provide variety to combat and bring freshness to stale content. They are acquired through gacha; the mechanism central to why Genshin Impact is such a huge financial success. The same mechanism that leads a small, but not insignificant, proportion of players to spend thousands of dollars per month on a game that can be played for free.

Disclosure time: Personally, I have spent 30 euros on Genshin Impact. I don't see myself spending any more. Incidentally, it is comparable to what I paid for Outer Wilds, about 25 bucks. What Genshin offers for absolutely free of charge to anyone with a phone or a basic PC is hard to match. There's a lot of genuinely fun content here to be enjoyed, free of charge.

There is definitely a honeymoon period when the world of Teyvat is full of treasures and everything is new and exciting. The flipside of this - the morning after - is something I don't love to admit: I've willingly conditioned myself into playing this game, bribed by its shiny rewards. A large part of what keeps bringing me back to it is mere habit at this point. Money won't buy back the honeymoon. 

Maybe not every itch should be scratched.