Good point. (I’m not sure that this counters the overall point of the essay – the top games all still seem pretty power-fantasy-ish to me). Many of them also involve some kind of combat that isn’t “PVP” but is still some flavor of “violence.”
But, yeah seems probably Just Wrong to say that the top games are PVP-y.
I got curious and made this spreadsheet where I attempted to estimate how much PvP was in each game in the Wikipedia best-selling-videogames. I’m not actually sure which games are PvPy so was just guessing based on some titles. Feel free to add your own columns, but by the time I got bored it did look like PvP was maybe 1/3rd of the games by sale.
I wasn’t trying to counter the overall point of the essay. I agree with a lot of it, though this isn’t quite how I usually look at things.
I think of goals and agency as being critical ingredients in games (without agency you have a movie; without goals you have a toy; sandbox-y games like Minecraft are pretty close to the game/toy boundary and reasonable people might disagree about which side they fall on).
The “power fantasy” stuff seems like it’s basically pointing towards the fact that using your agency to accomplish a goal tends to provide a feeling of power, but I have an intuition that goals & agency are more central/fundamental to games. I think that an activity with goals and agency would seem like a game to me even if I didn’t get feelings of power from it, whereas an activity that gives me feelings of power without using goals or agency would not seem like a game.
Yeah I definitely agree that goals/agency are more central to what it means to be a game. The article is more claiming “games will be more successful if they are make you feel a sense of power.”
But yeah the Bartle Taxonomy is useful/relevant. In particular I agree “games as social experience” is particularly orthogonal to power-fantasy.
I am reflecting a bit on “okay, how much work is the ‘power fantasy’ frame actually doing here?”, and whether other ways of making the same point would be as-helpful or more.
Nitpick: pvptetrisexists, is quite popular, and I think a majority of the tetris fanbase in the modern era
Though tetris definitely wasn’t designed to multiplayer and it really shows. You can be good at it without looking much at your opponent at all, and even at high levels of play it is much less interactive at high levels compared to, like, Catherine (which admittedly also wasn’t designed for pvp)
I think a majority of the tetris fanbase in the modern era [prefers PvP versions]
Why do you think so? I’m not sure that good data on this exists, but my prior is against it, and the best my Google search turned up was this article on tetris.com opining that single-player is probably the more common form.
This links to a Wikipedia page that does not currently exist.
This seems false to me. Though the article’s link to the most popular games was broken, I found these lists:
Wikipedia: List of best-selling video games - #1 is Minecraft, #2 is Grand Theft Auto V, #3 is Tetris
Wikipedia: List of best-selling PC games - #2 is Minecraft, #3 is Terraria, #4 is Diablo 3
Wikipedia: List of most-played mobile games by player count - #2 is Candy Crush Saga
Steam: Top Sellers (All Products) - #3 is Baldur’s Gate 3, #4 is Cyberpunk 2077
Board Game Geek: all board games by rank - #2 is Pandemic Legacy, #3 is Gloomhaven
Good point. (I’m not sure that this counters the overall point of the essay – the top games all still seem pretty power-fantasy-ish to me). Many of them also involve some kind of combat that isn’t “PVP” but is still some flavor of “violence.”
But, yeah seems probably Just Wrong to say that the top games are PVP-y.
I got curious and made this spreadsheet where I attempted to estimate how much PvP was in each game in the Wikipedia best-selling-videogames. I’m not actually sure which games are PvPy so was just guessing based on some titles. Feel free to add your own columns, but by the time I got bored it did look like PvP was maybe 1/3rd of the games by sale.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_Hsmxxs-ifsIdMQituYZ8huFjIVx2N5tl1aLyCMD3yI/edit#gid=0
I wasn’t trying to counter the overall point of the essay. I agree with a lot of it, though this isn’t quite how I usually look at things.
I think of goals and agency as being critical ingredients in games (without agency you have a movie; without goals you have a toy; sandbox-y games like Minecraft are pretty close to the game/toy boundary and reasonable people might disagree about which side they fall on).
The “power fantasy” stuff seems like it’s basically pointing towards the fact that using your agency to accomplish a goal tends to provide a feeling of power, but I have an intuition that goals & agency are more central/fundamental to games. I think that an activity with goals and agency would seem like a game to me even if I didn’t get feelings of power from it, whereas an activity that gives me feelings of power without using goals or agency would not seem like a game.
“Power fantasy” also feels like it is somewhat getting at player motivations, but...well. I’ve seen several proposed models for player motivations—for example Bartle’s Taxonomy or the “player types” used by the designers of Magic: the Gathering—and mostly I feel like they’re situationally useful as fake frameworks but haven’t managed to reach the “ground truth” of what’s really going on. (Not that I have a better model to give you.)
Yeah I definitely agree that goals/agency are more central to what it means to be a game. The article is more claiming “games will be more successful if they are make you feel a sense of power.”
But yeah the Bartle Taxonomy is useful/relevant. In particular I agree “games as social experience” is particularly orthogonal to power-fantasy.
I am reflecting a bit on “okay, how much work is the ‘power fantasy’ frame actually doing here?”, and whether other ways of making the same point would be as-helpful or more.
Nitpick: pvp tetris exists, is quite popular, and I think a majority of the tetris fanbase in the modern era
Though tetris definitely wasn’t designed to multiplayer and it really shows. You can be good at it without looking much at your opponent at all, and even at high levels of play it is much less interactive at high levels compared to, like, Catherine (which admittedly also wasn’t designed for pvp)
Why do you think so? I’m not sure that good data on this exists, but my prior is against it, and the best my Google search turned up was this article on tetris.com opining that single-player is probably the more common form.