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[LasTeam]

Often on forums, gamers talked about the best game - the game of dreams.
But what do you think should be the worst game in the world? What should it look like? In what kind of genre? What gameplay features should be there? What is the story?

[vmtbits]

I know I will upset many with his but the game I consider it the worst is Solitaire (even though it is played by so many ) But for me is the most boring game that exists => which made it the worst I ever played.

[marcAKAmarc]

I think the worst game would probably look like a cookie clicker game - something that is extremely addictive, but not interesting even for a second.  Maybe it would be a game with an intense economy or resource or upgrade tree that takes maximum effort to explore, but really offers no new game play mechanics as you progress.  In this way, it is really easy to view cookie clicker style games as malicious, addictive traps.  Constantly baiting you with 'what happens when', and then only delivering more bait once you get to that when.  This leads to reviews like 'Would Not Recommend' even though the player has 80 hours logged.

I would consider No Man's Sky to be one of these games.  I'm bitter.

[muki]

I look at the mobile world with a lot of cynicism. Especially games that are designed around addiction, grinding and min-maxing player "retention" rather than actually just making a fun and compelling game. "I need to keep playing because.... because.... I need the next level on my house so I can unlock the next thing to grind". <---- HHNGNGG 

[michaelplzno]

I'm not sure this is a particularly worthwhile discussion as it is easy to create flawed works, anyone who has produced any volume of art will tell you that some days are shit and others are better. I get that you are batting around works you don't like as a way to help define the direction you want to go in, so you might want to re-frame this as "games I don't want to make" to be a bit more positive.

I get that you guys don't like cookie clicker or solitaire or mobile games and that's fine. A lot of people have argued that you need that sense of pain to make art feel real and good on you for admitting that you need the pain to feel alive. I am envious that you have had lives such that you are advocating for more pain. But to say that solitaire is the Worst game is just arbitrary and idiosyncratic.

[marcAKAmarc]

True, Michael.  I guess that in order to identify the worst hypothetical game, I first have to define how I find value in a game.  I'm glad that you brought up pain in games - I do think you are right that pain is important.  Honestly, my favorite games I have ever played seem to focus on inflicting pain on the player in one way or another. 

Minecraft on hardcore mode was quite painful, but only in the way that you lose your progress / world if you die.  For me, this elevated pain to beauty as it really makes death feel real, and made me reflect on irl mortality in a way most games do not.

Desert Golfing is also pretty painful.  What pulled me in about this game was the stark emptiness that goes beyond minimalism.  What struck me the most was the cactus I saw on like, level 800 something.  The amount of nothingness I went through to get to the cactus makes the simple cactus feel so much more important.  In fact it felt so important that I immediately had to google it to see if there is more logic to its instantiation in the game.  Whether or not there was very much information online about the cactus is moot, but what I think is important to take away is that the pain put me into such a hypnotic zone powerful enough to make me play 800 levels of the same thing, but also a hypnotic zone weak enough to be broken by a stupid cactus sprite.

Punishment (Messhof) was quite influential to me, and the formula there seems to be a solid platformer with pain sprinkled on top.  The screen can get rotated or controls flipped, making the core platforming mechanic harder and arguably more painful.  And then at a higher level, if you fall off the screen, you can potentially end up falling all the way to previous levels, or even levels that occur prior to the beginning of the game, thus serving as sort of a natural Game Over where you have to start over to a certain degree. 

So I guess I'm gonna wrap this by saying that Minecraft and Desert Golfing both used pain in such a way that made me analyze things outside the game world with the knowledge I pulled from the pain within the game.  Punishment used pain to replace otherwise 'forced' gameplay elements such as increased difficulties or sudden 'Game Over' states. 

I'm not sure why I hate cookie clicker so much.  I guess because I don't feel like the pain makes a statement beyond the game.  But I dunno, this is a real loose conclusion, and I don't really want to marry it.  But I will say that something about cookie clickers just really feel bad...

On a different note, Resident Evil had pain in the fear inflicted on the player, which was made oh so nice by the feeling of safety of the save rooms.  Maybe pain is more worth it when the player is rewarded with brief respites from it, creating a duality in the gameplay that can be carried in the player to other elements of life.  I don't think cookie clicker types accomplish this.  Again, this is a loose conclusion and I don't want to marry it.

[J-Snake]

what do you think should be the worst game in the world?

That's an oxymoron, therefore pointless to discuss. What's more insightful is to figure out why it's an oxymoron.

[michaelplzno]

@jsnake you can tell this guy cares, about what I have no idea.

@marcAKAmarc





So in THE MATRIX the fact is that what we have is a design issue: the machines that run the show have no imagination, they are incapable of creating some kind of xanadu, a prison we humans would never want to escape from, instead they focus on realism. And I admit, there are a lot of people who crave pain, its a well known phenomenon.

The thing that people want is, as Smith puts it is "evolution" not to be made subservient to some other structure, but to be prodded to grow. The structure imposed by the game system must serve the player and not the other way around. Now as the saying goes: it takes different strokes to rule the world. Some people would be more than thrilled to have a shock collar that zaps them whenever they make a mistake. Some people would love a cookie whenever they do something good. Some people just want a stone tablet of commandments they must follow, etc.

But how do we define what is good? How do we define what is growth? How do we define what is a reward, how do we define what is a punishment? Even the machines, the architects, the game designers, don't necessarily know what the player wants. Hence bad games.

That being said I'm not going to say the objectivity of what makes a game bad isn't there. Some games are truly hated by all. A lot of people, who are pain averse, love clickers and solitaire, so I wouldn't go jump on them as "bad games" other than in your subjective view as someone who enjoys getting subjected to pain.

The systems we play with have to be tailored to their audience. Some people are quite complicated and will get bored at "playing 700 painful levels to see a cactus" In fact, that description sounds like one of the worst games you could describe, from my point of view.

If you do want to focus on "bad games" you might want to nail down ones that *no one* likes, but again, making a bad game is a trivially easy endeavor, so what is the point of hating on them? Even the razzies, the Hollywood award for the worst movies of the year, has the criteria that the movies are produced by a major studio so that you don't just award it to some crappy youtube video of a picture of a toilet or something.

I think actually this gamedev is trying to make the worst game possible:

https://adriendittrick.itch.io/the-sky-is-lava

I would say that it is much worse than solitaire so maybe you are beginning to understand that even being the worst takes a bit more effort than "oh I just don't care for this"

[michaelplzno]

In summary and in conclusion, reality is the worst game ever.

[marcAKAmarc]

Makes sense - like the worst game is the game that is so bad that it doesn't even register as a game - hence reality.

I guess I also feel like there may be another approach where the game keeps telling you that it is going to be something that it never is.  But I guess that wouldn't really be the "worst game" and would be more of the "most deceptively upsetting" game or something.