I do think he’s explicitly arguing that ‘power fantasy’ applies to more things than you generally think of. And he’s specifically arguing that games which don’t give you some kind of feeling of mastery aren’t actually fun enough to sink dozens+ hours into, which has implications on what sort of product you’re building.
( also I think of the things you list, sports seems pretty explicitly a power fantasy to me in a way that exactly maps onto the things we normally think of re: ‘adolescent power fantasy’, and feels like an actively good intuition pump for ‘yeah it’s useful to notice the expansionist definition of power fantasy applies’)
That said I notice I am pretty fucking confused about what’s going on with Trucking simulators.
I think a thing that games do (and yeah this includes puzzle-boxes) is to make ‘interacting with the world’ a lot more streamlined and manageable than usual.
Like, in real like inventing a sword takes a hundred thousand years of trial and error. In Minecraft it takes about a day. In real life puzzles often stymie you for years and there’s no clear sense it’s even possible. In Baba Is You they come in bite sized manageable chunks, optimized to give you a drip of eureka spikes. And I do think this has important shared structure with ‘you can be a strong barbarian who can kill things easily’.
I do think he’s explicitly arguing that ‘power fantasy’ applies to more things than you generally think of. And he’s specifically arguing that games which don’t give you some kind of feeling of mastery aren’t actually fun enough to sink dozens+ hours into, which has implications on what sort of product you’re building.
( also I think of the things you list, sports seems pretty explicitly a power fantasy to me in a way that exactly maps onto the things we normally think of re: ‘adolescent power fantasy’, and feels like an actively good intuition pump for ‘yeah it’s useful to notice the expansionist definition of power fantasy applies’)
That said I notice I am pretty fucking confused about what’s going on with Trucking simulators.
I think a thing that games do (and yeah this includes puzzle-boxes) is to make ‘interacting with the world’ a lot more streamlined and manageable than usual.
Like, in real like inventing a sword takes a hundred thousand years of trial and error. In Minecraft it takes about a day. In real life puzzles often stymie you for years and there’s no clear sense it’s even possible. In Baba Is You they come in bite sized manageable chunks, optimized to give you a drip of eureka spikes. And I do think this has important shared structure with ‘you can be a strong barbarian who can kill things easily’.