Critical Switch: Republican Dad Mechanics

I was gonna go on this long tirade about Dark Souls and abuse and nihilism but honestly, I think I want to focus on something in particular, it's a design trend that Dark Souls has largely fathered and I'm concerned about where I see it going.

Dark Souls and the semi-franchise it emerges from and has helped popularize has brought on the rise of mechanics whose design intention is to get gamers to be more careful, and build skill, but also have least the potential to cause brash, irrational decision making.

These types of system designs I will designate: “Republican Dad Mechanics.” You could also probably call them “school bully mechanics” but, an election year is coming up and dammit, this country is on the line! You know how it is.

In theory, the Republican dad is someone like this: they want to teach their child how to hit a baseball, but they find that the child is swinging limply, missing, or losing grip of the bat.

Now what a sensible human being would do is give expert advice: plant your feet firmly, grip the bottom of the bat strongly in the palms of your ha- nah fuck that, what the Republican Dad does is throw the ball so hard that they might actually hurt the kid, the logic being “you're gonna swing the bat or walk away with a bloody nose.”

That is the basic root of much of a lot of Dark Souls core design, but it's probably best indicated by the Blood Stain mechanic.

A primer for the unfamiliar: in Dark Souls, when you die, you leave behind a stain of your blood, and on that stain is the Souls that you picked up before you die. Souls are extremely valuable, as they are both the currency you use to buy things from merchants and blacksmiths, but also the experience points you use to level up. Even to gamers hell bent on the ultimate challenge of beating the game at Level 1 will use souls to upgrade their weaponry.

This creates this extremely common situation: I just died to a horde of ene mies while h olding a not-insignificant amount of Souls. Given that I am likely to die if I try and combat those enemies again, based on previous results, I would like to rush in, grab my souls, and escape the room as soon as possible. Thus, I begin my bum rush back behind enemy lines and within a moment I've died to the same horde. Thus, by the rules of Dark Souls I've lost my opportunity to ever get those Souls back. This logic applies to any other type of enemy, obviously, since enemies you've died to once are almost by definition enemies you are likely to lose to again.

Thus, the game has given me something that should encourage me playing better, that is, the loss of my souls, but it's also made those things the carrot on a stick that forces me into nonsensical loops of actions. I have played at least 200 hours of these games, I cannot shake the feeling that regardless of how good I get at them, the fundamental psychology of that mechanic will not change.

Bloodborne, From Software's new game in much the same style, has actually doubled down on this parental conservatism with it's new Regain mechanic. In Bloodborne, a certain percentage of damage taken within a certain time frame can now be regained if the player quickly strikes back at their opponent. The psychological punishment is actually even more severe here. As . . . I can't believe I'm citing this man, but the quote actually is pretty good, Tim Rogers writes:

 If an enemy hits you, doing damage, you can get your health back if you hit them soon enough after they hit you. This is idiotic. This is insulting! This is a huge, dumb punch in the face of a perfect combat system. It's filthy and it's gross. Wow, it's so great; I love it a lot.

With the Regain System, Bloodborne begs you to take tiny risks. I say the risks are "tiny" because that's how it feels: just one more button press. That button press is highly likely to get you killed, because for the length of that button press — the first few dozen time s, anyway — you're not thinking about position, timing, or stamina. You're thinking, "Hey, I can get that health back, so let's see if I can get that health back." Ten seconds later, the enemy is dead, and you have half the health you had during your initial engagement with the enemy. You feel like the biggest sucker in the world. You've seen the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. The Wizard of Oz was flipping you off.

The weird part is, in case you missed it, Tim Rogers likes this part of Bloodborne which you can list off as reason number 9001 about why I don't get that guy. Or maybe he's being ironic, I don't know y'all, New Games Journalism was weird.

So again, the game is shoving this obvious carrot in your face, but the only real answer is to just let it go, man. That could be a lot of things, but for a game as ludically focused as the FromSoft games tend to be, I'm just gonna call it misguided design.

Now of course other designers are preaching the Miyazaki gospel. Lords of the Fallen, one of the first major-studio Souls-likes adds an experience multiplier so that the longer you avoid resting at a checkpoint and spending your experience the more experience you build . . . which is bizarrely reflective of modern financial economics: “You've invested in some good stocks and made some smart decisions! Now make the decision whether you want to retire early and die rich or GO FOR MORE” even though there's no real reason to do that except maybe to buy that second Bugatti.

The idea of course is simple enough: let's put in mechanics that encourages gamers to more consciously engage with the interactions at hand. But in these cases, we have system upon system built to encourage wild and often unrewarding risk-taking. So how do you avoid being a Republican Dad designer?

This is the easy part: the solutions have always existed! But in particular I want to point out the tremendously smart decisions made by Platinum games, in particular how the parries work in Metal Gear Rising.

Parrying is exceptionally important to scoring high in Revengeance, or even just surviving on the high difficulty levels.

Parrying is attached to the same keys as both movement and attack, and that makes it inherently risky, because if you screw up the parry you're swinging at an enemy or running when you need to block.

Now granted, this can still happen, but unlike Dark Souls, Revengeance has got your back. What Revengeance does to mitigate possibly misguided player risk-taking is implements two types of parries.

The better kind, the kind you want, are often referred to as “Perfect Parries”. When a parry is executed within frames of an attack landing, Raiden will riposte, for enough damage to outright kill a low level enemy, and often to do 20% or more of a bosses health.

It would've been easy for them to look at player inputting those parries too early and say “git gud scrub” and walk away, but Platinum actually wants people to enjoy their videogames so they don't do that. Instead, they offer a version of the parry that can be activated much earlier, but also doesn't offer the riposte reward, often not resulting in any player reward other than not being hit. This is on top of having an invincible dodge move as well, for moves that cannot be parried, and that you can also use instead of a parry when you really need to get out of Dodge.

Bayonetta does something similar where when an invincible dodge is activated within the right time frame of an enemy attack, Bayo enters Witch Mode and gets to shell out massive damage, but you can still execute the regular dodge at a lower level of risk.

How would you implement those kinds of risk-mitigation mechanics in Dark Souls? Well . . . you don't. Because the fanbase would never shut the fuck up about it. Because remember, the most important thing you can derive from a hard videogame is being self-important about being able to beat it.

This week you'll've heard the Majula theme from the Dark Souls 2 original soundtrack and the Firelink Shrine theme from the Dark Souls original soundtrack composed by (I am definitely going to screw this up) Motoi Sakaruba, and “Stains of Time” from the Metal Gear Rising OST, music and lyrics by Jaimie Christopherson.

Zolani Stewart will rejoin you next week.

From Seattle, Washington, I'm Austin C. Howe.