Any management sim is functionally a pessimistic game in many respects, I think?
Football manager is built around treating people like entries on a spreadsheet.
Philosophical pessimism makes nihilism seem like a Saturday morning cartoon. Nihilism at least leaves an option for creating oneās own meaning. In a pessimistic game, death by self-imposed starvation would be one of the good endings.
Iām not familiar with Thacker, so maybe some of the rough edges have been sanded off, but the original philosophical pessimists were fucking bleak.
So I was thinking a long, long time ago about the idea of ānihilistic gameā, not through narratives but through systems, and kind of came to the conclusion that you canāt really construct a ātrulyā nihilistic game because everything you add to the game has been added for a reason. It has a functional purpose; games are teleological universes.
So what about pessimism? Pessimistic perspectives do ascribe values to a situation, that is, the worst values. If we were to systematize this, it would just be a positive feedback into the worst possible situation. Players would never opt into this loss, though.
Games are designed around player agency. The aesthetic code for games has very often been āagency and choice is betterā. We want our choices to matter in games. In order to make a pessimistic game, we need to strip the player of that agency. Theyāll almost always try to make it better.
In order to do that, we need to decenter the player from the experience of a game. Mattie Brice talks about this in her blog post Death of the Player. This doesnāt mean that players donāt have choices, but it means that their choices do not influence the quality of the outcome.
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So, all that being said, hereās how I feel: I donāt know if I want pessimistic games. I mean, I think they should exist, and artists should be free to make them. But Iām not sure how much I would enjoy or appreciate a ātruly pessimistic gameā. I feel like playing a pessimistic game that downplays agency would frustrate me because my agency has already been prescribed by the developer. My actions have already been predetermined and contextualized for me, so I think it might feel more like pessimism was being projected upon my actions, or enforced by my allowed actions. Of course, I might actually enjoy or appreciate these games, Iām just not sure. I think Iād have to play some to find out.
I think, though, that there is a decent amount of pessimism that can be found within games if you find the right game. People were discussing Dark Souls above, which, taken as a whole, is optimistic about playersā strength and ability. But Iād also consider you to look at some of the subplots within the original game. Solaireās and Siegmeyerās storylines are pretty pessimistic if taken to any of their ends: Solaire either is infested with a sunlight maggot and you must kill him, or he loses all hope in his search for āhis sunā. Siegmeyer, alternatively, you constantly support, but find that helping him damages his confidence, which eventually causes him to go hollow. You either leave him to die, or lead him to his death. I think if you look at individual portions of larger games, youāll discover that there is a decent amount of pessimism within sidequests and sections of stories.
Smaller games can get away with being holistically pessimistic. But larger gamesā¦ I mean, that kind of systemic and sweeping pessimism isnāt very marketable, and if youāve put ten, twenty, sixty hours into a game, it doesnāt feel great to have your effort feel empty.
Really interesting read, regardless.
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Iām maybe half way through Marvelās Spider-Man at the minute and while I canāt foresee that itāll end in anything other than hugs and kisses, bad guys in prison, etc., I feel in parts itās a game critical of heroism, maybe even one pessimistic about the ability to ādo goodā at all. MJās stealth sequences jostles alongside Spider-Manās narrative - she reads and reflects where he swings and punches. She even presents the hero as solipsistic as she browses Fiskās exhibition in the first sequence (which is apt; the dissolution of MJ and Peter Parkerās relationship was caused in part by his unchecked acceptance of her emotional labour).
In turn, most of the villains Iāve put away in the game thus far (Martin Li, Fisk) seem to threaten Spider-Man with the same fate: that he can never āsave everybodyā, no matter how many muggings he thwarts, no matter how many crime bosses he puts behind bars. J. Jonah Jamesonās crackpot ideologue broadcasts always make the same claim: yes, Spidey saves the day, but for how long? Isnāt the proliferation of cartoonish supervillains, at least in part, bred by the presence of a cartoonish superhero? Thereās a possibility there that, for as long as Spider-Man exist, crime on a grand scale also exists. That seems pessimistic to me. This is to say nothing of Peteās oversimplified view of ācops = good guys, criminals = bad guysā. Thereās plenty here that seems pessimistic.
Letās hope it sticks the landing I guess??
Reading the comments I feel thereās a mix up in the distinction between bleak vs pessimistic.
There are a lot of games that deal with values of pessimism in the moment to moment gameplay and story beats, but I donāt think that makes a game pessimistic - certainly not in relation to how Cameron was considering.
@anon91240540 your observation about Dark Souls isnāt misplaced, but Iād say the game is overall more bleak in its conceptualisation. Iād even say that pessimism isnāt given much of a look in that series.
What do people think about Shadow of the Colossus as a shoe-in for this idea?
To me SotC is a pessimistic story and game. The world is large, beautiful, and miserably barren; you can explore the lands and find evidence of a culture but you never meet another soul. Your fights are staged as man versus Goliath; a towering, hulking beast that is in between you and your mission. Every battle with one of these giants is a layered with misdirection; the swelling heroic music aided to accentuate the colossal task, the strength/stamina meter, the ability to ride a horse while shooting a bow, the alien landscape. All of it plays to the tropes of being a wandering hero, and when each beast is bested by a small human, thereās a relief and sense of accomplishment. But in these lands the colossi are the native protectors of the region and Wander is an invader, and when those black tendrils emerge and stab you, thereās no mistake that everything your doing is wrong. But thereās no way out of it, and you just have to keep slaying monster after monster, because thatās what a hero does.
To me this is a pessimistic game.
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I think I will second the person who stated the title should probably by āI need more pessimistic gamesā. I am frankly flummoxed at the notion that someone would have so much optimism as to want more pessimism, much less that there is a widespread need for it.
On the game front though, I do think pessimism is fundamentally incompatible with games. Pessimism is fundamentally passive; at its worse itās an attempt at rationalizing the lack of control in life; at its best itās simply a good way to know how things will fail. The interactive/active nature of games is fundamentally at odds with this; a passive experience is not a game. The best a game can do is remove your sense of control, or subvert notions of your own agency. But in the end, you still do have agency, and a game can only react as the creator programmed it, meaning you will eventually reach the point where you will have some measure of control (even if this control only allows negative outcomes).
