More notes about pain as a game mechanic | Hacker News Reader

More notes about pain as a game mechanic

blog.plover.com

41 pointsluu31 comments

Being a father of a toddler has taught me that patience is a type of pain tolerance.

If I can be patient longer than my toddler can inflict "pain", I win.

There was a fairly famous article on the internet about a couple guys who modded their original XBox controller (I think) to deliver a significant electric shock every time they got hit.

As I recall, they rewired the rumble motor circuit to instead trigger a ~10,000V stun gun, the output of which was wired back to two metal contacts they added to the grips.

It's turning out to be impossible to search for, but always seemed like a fun idea.

IIRC, the 90s Japanese game show "Irritating Stick" had a premise where you had to guide a metal training sword (a stick) through a wireframe maze without touching the sides. Failure would shock the contestant.

This is similar to one of the Tough Mudder obstacles except the sword is your body.

After 15 years of playing rugby, where pain is an ever-present game mechanic, I will say this:

My hardest season was the one where I had shin splints. You'd think the concussions, the hematomas, the separated ears, the stomped feet, the scraped hands, the black eyes would be painful, and you'd be right: they're painful. But not as much as the shin splints. Go figure.

I rarely see rugby mentioned on primarily American forums. Where are you from? Pacific Islander, UK, Europe, South Africa?

I’m American, and as a kid I loved playing the game “Cream the Carrier” (tackle the ball-carrier). The closest analogue as an adult was rugby, and there are four rugby clubs in San Francisco, so I played for one of them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35941369 ("Notes on rarely-seen game mechanics", 5 days ago, >100 comments)

The canonical game about Pain is "Getting Over It", by Bennett Foddy. Truly a masterpiece.

This is great! Thankfully enough Let's Play videos are out there to give me an idea how much I would hate this, at least alone. OTOH I could see this being a fun (and hopefully short) party game with friends in-between more "serious" games, just to laugh our asses off for a few minutes ;)

This also reminds me of QWOP[0] and Petris/Bastet/Bastard Tetris[1].

[0] https://www.foddy.net/Athletics.html

[1] https://libregamewiki.org/Bastet

FWIW, Getting Over It probably reminds you of QWOP because they're by the same developer, Bennett Foddy.

QWOP was also developed by Bennett Foddy, along with the successor games GIRP and CLOP

Which is weird because I Wanna Be the Boshy puts GOI to shame in the masochistic difficulty department.

The games mentioned are far too masochistic for me. But at my current skill level, trying for the cosmic ocean in Spelunky 2 feels not only masochistic but hopeless because I will probably never be able to do it. And yet I keep trying. I don't even know why at this point. But I'm not ready to give up on it.

Games like I Wanna Be the Boshy are generally a different kind of difficult: they have quite frequent save points and fast restarts close to where you last failed (except for on the very hardest difficulty, which is not the intended difficulty). Getting over it is easier mechanically but it's very punishing: in many places failure will put you right back at the start, meaning a retry is very tedious.

This dichotomy about difficulty is described in more detail in this long-winded but carefully thought out essay about a Celeste mod by Patricia Taxxon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX3w4hubVnQ

I think it's the narration during gameplay which makes GOI so memorable.

That brings back a vague memory of watching a youtuber play it and at some point he was raging more at the commentary than the game because it was so pretentious(to his mind).

I bet that aspect to it was probably intended too, which I love

Interesting strategy for HN score: make all your comment replies long form blog posts (and maybe add one or two other asides before the reply)

I do this when I hit the length limit, but I don't submit the post as an article just, "see my reply here". People do click them!

The finger-cutting in chess must be a reference to

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yubitsume

Which makes more sense in the criminal underworld than in chess. That kind of feedback loop is terrifying and beautiful.

A similar (less gruesome) loop in the white-collar world is effort measured by tiredness. Bags under the eyes is an honest signal for mental strain over time (as far as I know).

I had that at the back of my mind as something similar, but I didn't intend it as a reference.

The two games are very different.

A better chess analog of yubitsume would be: you can make one (normally) illegal move in the game, if you pay for it by chopping a finger.

This is a theme which the video game Inscryption plays with a little, both with ingame mechanics representing similar effects, and (spoiler) some effort towards extending this outside the game to at least the computer you are playing it on, though the developer wisely goes with the honor system for actually enacting the results.

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