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Comment by haunter | Hacker News Reader

>Iyashikei games, shows, and movies are “healing” because they help us celebrate the ordinary parts of everyday life

I'm really not sold about the game part. Like Shenmue is pretty much the quintessential ordinary life simulator but I'd not call it a iyashikei. Same with Ni No Kuni and Yokai Watch. Sure for Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon but once battle and fight involved then personally I think it's already another genre. And people wouldn't call Pokemon a iyashikei either yet Yokai is 'just' a more modern 'clone' of that

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Trying to assign strict genre labels to games is probably not the right approach here.

Many games contain aspects of 'iyashikei' games. Persona 5 is a good example. Half of the game is spent doing 'ordinary life simulation' activities - meeting friends, eating out at restaurants, going on dates, etc. This part of the game is focused on story-driven events, many of which could be classified as iyashikei (although there are certainly darker elements mixed in). The other half of the game is spent on RPG turn-based battles and puzzles.

The Shenmue series is the same. A lot of it is iyashikei - wandering around, talking to people, enjoying the sights. Along with that are battles and stressful mini-games.

>Sure for Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon

Does it even apply for those?

In Animal Crossing there are two battles, wasp and tarantulas. Both have something at stake with both a win and loss condition.

In Harvest Moon you also have a battle against limits. Most of them don't have any sort of enemy units, but you do have tasks and you are doing them in a time limit where there is a failure condition (either running out of stamina or time), and in some cases there can be a big cost to failure (especially around harvesting crops right as the seasons change).

One game I think interesting to consider is Minecraft. There are three different takes.

* Normal (with Easy and Hard included) which has enemy mobs you must fight against and environmental traps.

* Peaceful, where there are no enemy mobs but environmental traps still pose a risk (though less of one).

* Creative, where you are fully immune even to lava or falling.

Each step down is progressively more relaxing as it removes even more conflicts from the equation. But even in creative, you can still have a conflict with the game rules or within yourself (consider someone trying to design some redstone contraption and getting frustrated that their design isn't functioning correctly).

I'm drawn to thinking about the following web comic on conflict in literature and how it parallels the different conflicts and battles that can occur in games and how some of these might not be possible to remove.

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-FWszluTZTpM/U310wQoCMWI/AAAAAAAAE...

> Both have something at stake with both a win and loss condition.

All that's at stake is you fainting and respawning in front of your house. The only thing that's lost is your opportunity to catch the tarantula that time.

But that opportunity is rare enough, at least for some (in my time playing I've only seen two, though I did capture one so I don't need it for the museum). It is also surprising enough of an occurrence that it can cause stress. There are studies monitoring cortisol levels when a person hears their phone make a normal noise (incoming call and incoming text). Those create a noticeable spike in cortisol. While I haven't seen the same testing done for Animal Crossing, I would expect the sound indicating wasp falling out of trees does the same.

If one were to take pokemon, it would be reduced to much the same where the penalty for loss is fainting and in rare cases losing a chance to catch a rare pokemon.

Even if one were to take something like Path of Exile, any failure only costs some amount of time to restore from that failure. Some cost more (a death on hardcore can mean dozens of hours while a death on normal can be recovered in minutes). In general, I think you can reduce most game conflicts/battles down to a time cost in the case of failure, with a few games introducing horror as the main alternative cost (any game where death involves a jump scare).

If I spend 3 hours looking for a tarantula and it wins, that is a cost of 3 hours compared to many games were losing a battle cost only a minute or two.

Dark Souls style games are another interesting look into this, as the first death generally has low cost (you have to go pick up the dropped souls), but if you die a second time before you pick them up, the cost is much heavier (the souls dropped are permanently lost). I notice when playing that I am more on edge when I'm trying to recover dropped souls than when I am not.

> If I spend 3 hours looking for a tarantula and it wins, that is a cost of 3 hours compared to many games were losing a battle cost only a minute or two.

Why just the tarantula, then? If you see a rare beetle on a stump, you can re-interpret trying to catch it as a "battle" with a "winner" and a "loser".

I think you are right. It is even less of a battle in some aspects, but at least for very rare insects it can be more of a battle in that the cost of messing up is higher.

When you break down a game into these many sorts of conflicts and see which ones the player feels joy for winning and which ones the players struggle against with no benefit even when they win, it hints at an interesting framework to evaluate games by. It feels deconstructionist almost to the point of absurdity, but so far I don't think it crosses that line.

You could use that argument to dismiss any loss condition in games that allow arbitrary saves.

In Pokémon the players and monsters only “faint” in a battle when lost

It could be appropriate to consider them cross-genre games containing elements of both soothing-slice-of-life gameplay cycles and conflict-oriented-'normal'-game gameplay cycles. Games mixing placid, relaxing gameplay loops seem to definitely hold a different overall tone even if you can't play through them without any aggression or violence.

A pure iyashikei game feels like an aspirational ideal and fairly rare.

I concur. Iyashikei games are usually (not always; think Animal Crossing) mobile games, and games that really don't require much concentration. They're for de-stressing.

https://gameappch.com/rank/category.html?category=%E7%99%92%... Here are some examples

Subnautica is a wet-your-pants game of sheer terror. However, if you disable damage and aggression you can focus on beautiful and peaceful exploration and building and gardening. A very iyashikei experience for me.

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