#peggle discourse

[digitalisnarcissus]

The big problem with the cozy games/Stardew colonialism discourse is that while it fits very nicely into a social justice lens it doesn't really understand the games industry at all.

Why are cozy games all like this? Well firstly they're not. It's dominant right now, I'll give you that, but there are certainly cozy games outside of the farming and job sim bracket, and plenty of job sim games outside of the cozy market.

But ultimately they're like that because Stardew Valley is like that, and Stardew Valley is like that because Harvest Moon is like that, and Harvest Moon is like that because uh, idk, WWII probably. The Japanese pastoral idealism that carries different overtones than when it's viewed and copied by a western audience. You can get it back to politics if you want, but at that point you're talking about an individual game and you can't make a scolding smug buzzword text post from that, that's actually interesting.

Games are immensely iterative, which is the polite way of saying there's been few substantial new ideas in the medium for several decades. 

You could easily make the same argument about the whole mass of base defense mobile games, aimed squarely at men, but if you'll step across this pink line here you'll find just as many match three games. It's industry churn, it's 100000 brand new identical romance novels every month. People want the familiar. Perhaps it says something deeper, but perhaps it's just that a Bejeweled clone is easier to make than a Peggle clone, and one guy really really liked Harvest Moon.

[captn3]

blocking out the url but my god. this is. this is fuckikng. how could you. you told us you were THE biggest peggle deluxe fan. and you dont even know bjorn's name. ghow could you. i trusted you. you were a hero to me an idol i looked up to you. you dont even know his name. sorry i cant take this

[aiki-art]

yjoure a fake fucking fan youll never understnad hmi like i do if you had any brain left in you you kwould understand that peggle deluxe is the WEAKEST of bjorns character TO DATE. you dont fucking deserve him. clearly you are causing him emotional distress. im going to need you to get the fuck away from him RIGHT NOW because you clearly dont understand him in the way i do which means he will never live to his full potential as long as you cling onto him like mud to a boot. you are scum. do you hear me. dm me NOW we need to talk about safe rehousing procedures before he collapses from the stress. dm me. dm me. bjorn would not be proud of the person you have become you BALLESS PEGGLE MASTER WANNABEE GET AWAY FROM HIM HES MINE GET AWAY FR

ive always wanted him

[captn3]

only a peggle 3 announcement could fix me after this

[sonicunleash]

peggle beat 1 is gaining notes from strangers and im just sitting here like. my god they dont know.

[cookingwithroxy]

I think the problem here is the conflation of multiple things. Like 'accessibility' in the context of games doesn't mean 'make me able to beat it' it means 'makes me able to PLAY it'.

If I can dumb down the game so that there is no challenge to it, then the gameplay sections only exist to kill time between the narrative sections. For games that are pointlessly hard, OR EVEN JUST WITH REASONABLE DIFFICULTY that just means that every bit that isn't a story section is wasting my damn time.

But making things so that people who would have difficulty PLAYING the game be able to engage with it on it's own terms are entirely different.

But then we get into the games, the very FEW games, that are designed intentionally around difficulty, and overcoming it. And those are often the ones MOST talked about when it comes to 'accessibility' discourse, because the people who are bad at games and don't WANT to be good at games want to use the hardship of others as an excuse to bludgeon people into making games easier.

But when it comes down to it, it's like saying 'I'm shit at match-3 games, can't you make Candy Crush easier?' If you're bad at card games, you shouldn't be playing Yugioh. If you're terrible at aiming things, you're not going to enjoy Peggle. And if you hate waiting around for anything to happen, I wouldn't tell you to play Crush Crush. And that's the argument when you're asking people to put an easy mode into Elden Ring. That the core gameplay mechanic needs to change... because you're bad at it.

Tho in retrospect maybe Peggle's a bad example there, they do have aim guides available as an option, but you get what I mean.

honestly as a person with a severe set of migraine triggers that means i am physically unable to play or watch the majority of 3D video games… i really don’t think ‘every game should have enough accessibility features that anyone could play it’ is quite the take people think it is. obviously i think that devs should be adding in as many accessibility features as they can. but i also think that with stuff like Videogames where the medium and the message are so deeply dependent on each other, saying “the gameplay needs to be x in order to best convey the experience this is intended to convey as a work of art” is completely legitimate.

like, it reminds me a lot of the era of this website when shitting on academia for being ‘inaccessible’ was the big thing, and, rather than focusing on the socioeconomic factors that systemically bar people from academia, the priority was mocking academic language. And yeah obviously a lot of academic texts are denser than they should be, but there really was a point in time in this website when a bunch of teens and twentysomethings were wholeheartedly convinced that if something couldn’t be read by the layman it was because the author was either elitist or incompetent. but some stuff is created for specific audiences.

i think the vast majority of video games DON’T fall into this category - off the top of my head, there are very very few video games i can think of that would lose artistic integrity if they were “”easier”” to beat. difficulty and artistic integrity are both highly subjective as well. i just think that despite it being an outlier it’s just something that’s really worth thinking of, especially if you’re advocating for video games as a Legitimate Art Form. Art as a whole need be accessible. not every individual work of art needs to be. Video games as a whole need to be accessible. not every individual game needs to be. etcetera etcetera and whatnot. 

[captn3]

you know what? FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU, ASSHOLE. in the first two fucking second of clicking the adventure mode button, it introduces you to him. are you admitting you haven't been paying attention to the smallest bits of lore popcap has been giving us? you're a terrible fucking person for this. you tricked us all. i thought you were one of the few peggers in this world that truly cared about the game, its story and its characters. you fucking asshole. this game has been discarded by the public and we take fellow peggers in so kindly because we are an endangered species. you are a fucking deceiver. an impostor. i can't believe i fell for this bullshit. i hope you suffer, 'sexo.'

dont let the other peggers know that i dont know that unicorns name

[sonicunleash]

YOU WISH HE LOOKED AT YOU THE WAY HE LOOKS AT ME

ive always wanted him