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There's something that kind of bugs me about players who optimize for optimization with any game they play.
The game, as a piece of software, is basically just a program that is running from a start state to an end state, and the player's inputs are the one factor that determines how long, or even if it gets there. Yes, this is an obtuse oversimplificaiton. I apologize, computer science is not my forte.
Back in the day the end state was often a literal "YOU WIN" splash page before restarting from the beginning.
So by 'playing' the game, you're 'helping' the program reach a given end state. All well and dandy. But when you attempt to optimize your play to push towards that end-state as quickly as possible, you're suborning all of your other goals to that of simply 'completing' the program. The program at that point, I'd argue, no longer exists to 'serve' you, you are choosing to serve the program.
Yes, its all just math at the end of the day, and by creating a certain sequence of inputs you can make the number or the line go up more quickly pursuant to that math, and perhaps that is satisfying in its own right.
But damn, it strikes me as inverting the 'purpose' of playing games. Yes you 'win' when a given end-state is reached, but supposedly the process of reaching that end state should be fun, and/or challenging, and/or educational, and/or induce certain emotional states, and/or 'entertain' you and your friends. In fact, if the process of reaching the end state is enjoyable enough, it should be a tad dissappointing when you actually reach it!
The end state is not supposed to be the point? Unless you're in a very strictly defined 'competition' where the stakes are such that you absolutely MUST reach the end state that favors you as the 'winner' to continue.
Like, yeah, a Chess tournament is not really about 'the friends we made along the way.' Its about finding who is the absolute best at chess, which REQUIRES everyone play optimally for victory.
BUT MOST GAMES AREN'T ABOUT FINDING THE BEST POSSIBLE PLAYER! Its about helping your brain release the happy-juice or to learn something or to maybe even to kill some time... which implies that you want the game to LAST LONGER, not shorter!
At any rate, 'optimal' play, in my book, should be defined largely by what the player thinks their goals are, not inherently what the math/logic of the game itself demands to reach a point defined by the game. Its fair to say that if you do the latter, you're not playing the game, the game is playing YOU!
And yes, I realize I've called out the entire concept of "speed-running* when I say that. These are the guys who go to obscene effort to find ever bug, exploit, and corner-case possible to force the game to run from the start-state to the end-state without going through all the steps in between, and thus skipping the 'process' entirely. And they pride themselves on thus becoming so engrained with the program that they can make it run to completion in obscenely short times, by programming themselves to create the best possible set of inputs so as to achieve the endstate. Not because of their own particular goals.
It's all Progress Quest under the covers
James P. Carse's Finite and Infinite Games will make you think very differently about video games ... to the point that you may stop playing them.
This also sort of touches on the memes about "Open-World" vs. "Linear" games.
The joke is that open world games still ultimately railroad you to the same place, it just lets you wander around whatever winding path you like to end up there. The 'choice' of open world games is just when to move on to the next chapter in the story, but the story will still unfold in the same order.
And while I do think there's a distinction between a very cinematic linear game like Uncharted and, say Fallout: New Vegas or Baldur's Gate 3, there's something to the argument that a game can never do anything that wasn't programmed in, and whether it directly railroads the player to its end or it merely places boundaries on player actions and patiently waits for them to get there, the 'choices' presented by the game aren't actually producing new, surprising outcomes.
Wasn't the idea behind No Man's Sky that it was open-beyond-open in that it was procedurally generated. The game would actually shift and expand its world in a pseudo-random way based off of player actions?
IIRC, it was too successful at this and players never go to do ... anything. There was a lot of wandering around planets and zipping around space without much contact. In order to generate meaningful action, you have to have some sort of fixed and directing game mechanic. Help me out of I'm remembering this wrong.
P.S. something something we accidentally proved the existence of God through experimental video game design.
No Man's Sky got a TON of flack at launch because its procedural generation was actually far too limited and there was no interaction between players, despite implications or promises made by the publisher.
But then it improved in fits and starts over the next couple years to actually deliver on or exceed most of those promises, and now its a shining example of reputation rehabilitation. So the procedural generation is indeed impressive by any fair standard, now.
And they've released a lot of new content and upgrades to the game over the years.
Yet I think it is still running into the limits of what you can actually do with procedural generation. Only some subset of those generations will seem 'unique' and even fewer will be 'interesting' so the thrill of discovery is going to run out eventually, even if planet X-9-1-3-C-7-J is technically very different from planet X-9-1-3-C-7-Q, you won't feel like there's much difference if you can see how the lego pieces were rearranged to make each one.
I think the disappointment arises because any sort of full deterministic universe probably won't be like the Star Trek Universe, where you can run into nonstandard, unexplainable phenomena all over the place and the galaxy is just teeming with intelligent life that has abnormal powers, strange morality, and biology that defies understanding so the effort of exploring is rewarded, and there's nigh infinite novelty to be found because the rules of what is possible simply can't be pinned down.
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Hmm... I can relate to this sort of thinking. I too think something is lost in the transition between a casual game and a competitive game. But something is gained too.
Speedrunning Minecraft, is a different game than Minecraft. Even if they share most of the mechanics in theory. Letting the game play you... Is the point.
We're doing to ourselves something similar to what we do to train LLMs. Because falling into the flow of that training is pleasurable. And optimizing for something (like speed) helps us to unveil something new about the game and provides a direction for improving our own capabilities.
Those ACE bugs can be used for more than just end credit skips after all. The knowledge generalizes back to casual play. And if you don't like one category, because too much of the game has been cut out or you have grown tired of the route, you can always switch to another. Or to casual play. It's not like your free will has been entirely circumscribed.
I do think the communities get a bit overly excited about the metric of mastery over the game improving, (completion speed) when the more valuable thing to me is the understanding that has been gained regarding the game. But its alright. I won't begrudge them their records.
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