"The Heart of Gaming is the Power Fantasy", and Cohabitive Games

Commenting just to note that for anyone for whom the name “Jeff Vogel” doesn’t ring any bells, he’s the founder of… well, no. He is Spiderweb Software.^[1] And Spiderweb Software is the creator of some of the best independent CRPGs that I’ve ever played: the Exile series, the Avernum series, the Geneforge series. And Vogel’s been doing this—making a living from creating computer games, almost entirely by himself—for close to 30 years.

In short, when it comes to “what games are”, Jeff Vogel has a pretty good idea of what he’s talking about.

Players are very clear about what they want. Look at the list of the most popular games.

This links to a Wikipedia page that does not currently exist.

All the most popular games are PVP.

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

The thesis seems wrong to me. Horror games meet the same kind of need as horror movies do, and horror movies aren't a power fantasy. Puzzle games meet the same kind of need that puzzle toys do, and I never heard of anyone calling them power fantasies. Esport games meet the same kind of need as sports do, and sports doesn't work as a power fantasy for most people. Adventure games meet the same kind of need as listening to a good campfire story, which isn't always a power fantasy either. And then there are driving simulators where you just drive across the US and sightsee. You could say they provide the power fantasy of driving and sightseeing, but then you could say any game provides the power fantasy of experiencing that game, which is just vacuous.

Idle and clicker games let you gain and use power without even the indignity of actually doing anything. They are the best example of how compelling and seductive video games are: They let you feel satisfaction and accomplishment even when you aren’t doing anything at all.

That's not why I play solitaire card games on my iPad: I do it to dissociate, and dissociation is desirable because it quickly reduces mental tension and quickly removes most of my awareness of the pains and the signs of fatigue in my body. (I'm not saying its good for me: I might spend too much of my time dissociated, and there might be better ways for me to reduce mental tension that I can learn.)

The main motivation tempting me to play chess on the other hand is the experience of power as described in the quote in the OP.

With such a vague and broad definition of power fantasy, I decided to brainstorm a list of ways games can fail to be a power fantasy.

1. Mastery feels unachievable.
   1. It seems like too much effort. Cliff-shaped learning curves, thousand-hour grinds, old PvP games where every player still around will stomp a noob like you flat.
   2. The game feels unfair. Excessive RNG, "Fake Difficulty" or "pay to win".
2. The power feels unreal, success too cheaply earned.
   1. The game blatantly cheats in your favor even when you didn't need it to.
   2. Poor game balance leading to hours of trivially easy content that you have to get through to reach the good stuff.
3. Mastery doesn't feel worth trying for.
   1. Games where the gameplay isn't fun and there's no narrative or metagame hook making you want to do it.
   2. The Diablo 3 real money auction house showing you that your hard-earned loot is worth pennies.
4. There is no mastery to try for in the first place.
   1. Walking simulators, visual novels, etc. Walking simulators got a mention in the linked article. They aren't really "failing" at power fantasy, just trying to do something different.

I think there are a lot of cohabitive games that are focused on building (i.e Minecraft is one of the most popular games of all time). The thing that feels missing to me here is... gamey-ness. I think people have "criticized" Minecraft for being unclear what the point is, and being more of a toy or sandbox than a "game." 

One of the things I'm particularly interested here is games that specifically reward your choices of how to prioritize negotiation, conflict, and building, and that give you something of a measureable outcome you can improve on. Minecraft has a very vague version of this, determined entirely by what you / other-players think is cool.

There is a game that sort of does what you are looking for here: Eco. Imagine Minecraft, except: The world and resources are limited in size, players can specialize in skills and trade with each other using player-made currencies, logistics matter, and you can create a government and arbitrary laws. On top of all that, a meteor is threatening to destroy the world in 30 real-world days, unless you can progress technology enough to build lasers to shoot it down. And you need to do all that without destroying the world due to pollution and global warming.

The dynamics of the game give people different options for what kinds of goals they want to pursue. I tend to ruthlessly pursue whatever is most profitable. Most people just like getting enough resources to build neat houses and interact with the economy. Some like building a functional government, or creating infrastructure (roads, mostly). It's still basically a sandbox game, but one where it's easy to create your own varied goals and see how well you've achieved them. 

It's a game that's both utterly unique and very compelling for certain kinds of people. 

There's an equivalence between having some quantity of power and just being able to do things, so "power fantasy" is also just a paraphrasing of "games are interactive media".

In order for a game to be interesting, it has to be about a type of activity that you don't usually get to do, or else you would be able to just do it irl.

All very inescapable.

This talk about puzzles by a puzzle solving master might be interesting to you. Recommendation by Jonathan Blow (who made Braid and the Witness): https://youtu.be/oCHciE9CYfA?si=9ZtETH1_a8pM3l8e

I recommend watching the full thing but I associated the post above to this interesting idea from the beginning of the video:

(1) Eureka moments are the atoms of puzzles. Eureka: A sudden, pleasureful, fluent, confident feeling of understanding. Insights

…

(6) Interesting truths are the root of surprise.

(7) Eureka is not Fiero. Fiero: the emotion of overcoming a tough challenge

…

(9) Eureka is sharable (don’t need fiero to have eureka necessarily)

Not directly comparable to the post above but maybe relevant to the part about if competition is needed.

The explanation of PvP games as power fantasies seems quite off to me, since they are worse at giving a feeling of power than PvE games are. The vast majority of players of a PvP game will never reach the highest levels and therefore will lose half the time, which makes playing the game a humbling experience, which is why some players will blame bad luck, useless teammates, etc. to avoid having to admit that they're bad. I don't see how "I lose a lot at middling ranks because I'm never lucky" is much of a power fantasy.

A PvE game is much better at delivering a power fantasy because every player can have the experience of defeating hordes of enemies, conquering the world, or leveling up to godlike power.

Here's a followup post where Jeff Vogel explored a recent God of War game through the lens of power fantasy. Notably previous God of War games leaned heavily into the most standard power fantasy of violence, but the more recent God of War games were trying to focus on the themes of fatherhood, with mixed results. (not really related to cohabitive games but showcased an individual application of the 'power fantasy' game analysis)

I think people have "criticized" Minecraft for being unclear what the point is, and being more of a toy or sandbox than a "game."

Myself included. I can't play Minecraft; it's far too open-ended, and makes me feel anxious and overwhelmed. "Wtf am I supposed to do??" I want a game to give me two or three choices max at every decision point, not an infinite vector space of possibilities through which I cannot sort or prioritize.

This post though is about one of my big obsessions: trying to figure out how to design a game (computer or tabletop or both) which makes cooperation fun. And I mean, fun in the way Diablo is fun. Addictive, power fantasy feeling, endless sequence of dopamine hits, sexy. The problem is that the only way to produce that Diablo-flow is to enable people to act automatically, reacting to signs and triggers with preprogrammed responses so that they can sink down into the animalistic part of their brain that hunts and stalks and pounces on things to tear them apart without thought or simulation.

But learning to negotiate with others is the exact opposite of that, and is the main reason we have the effort-intensive simulation system to begin with - so the problem of making a game that is simultaneously compelling on a primal level, and centers on conflict resolution rather than just conflict... is hard.

The only thing that seems to have the same kind of flow in it to me is dance and other group rituals (such as those in religion that hasn't ossified to mere passionless false beliefs yet), which don't really help with the whole "training negotiation" thing (though they do induce people to align with one another on an emotional level) and also cannot easily be turned into video games or TTRPGs.

I think (not that anyone is saying otherwise) that the power fantasy can be expressed in a coop game just fine.

We all know the guy who brokenbirds about playing the healer in D&D, yeah? Like, the person who it is real important to that everyone knows how unselfish they are.

If you put a 'forego personal advancement to help the team win' button in a game without a solo winner people will break their fingers cuz they all tried to mash it at once. People mash these in games WITH a solo winner (kingmaker syndrome, home brew victory conditions, etc).

I was excited by mako's vision of "cohabitive games from a perspective of improving society." i.e. helping people practice openended negotation, and giving coordination theorists an empirical sandbox.

The world might have become a very different place if the coordination theorists were the ones who got the empirical sandboxes 10 years ago. Some people were thinking that legal prediction markets would be the way to dath ilan [LW · GW], and funnily enough it seems like the SBF trial/book might have brought attention to prediction markets. But very few people are aware that there exist firms and government/military agencies that have access to orders of magnitude better human behavior data than anywhere in academia, and that in the last 10 years human civilization gained vastly more powerful capability to understand the human mind than any point in the last 10,000 years of human civilization. The games and empirical sandboxes that Raemon describes already exist, but were hijacked by moloch; by default they got twisted into what we now understand as social media, which hijacks the human impulse to pursue social status in the maximally profitable way. And, unlike conventional war, information warfare [LW · GW] is winnable, but in order to outperform ineffective ads and 20th century propaganda, and actually cause overwhelming victory like in communist East Germany, they need a superior understanding of the human mind to what people had in the 20th century. And then AI got caught up in it, because AI is great for processing and utilizing data, and now AI is so thoroughly entrenched in that clusterfuck AGI alignment just gets crowded out by default because it's oversaturated with corporate executives and natsec folk who assume that it's just another power grab, when in reality it actually is the engineering problem that the fate of the universe hinges on. If this post existed 20 years ago (or even 10) then maybe things wouldn't have unfolded like this.