abbysplayjournal

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Week 7-- Splatoon and Meritocracy

As a rule, I generally avoid online multiplayer games with voice chat because I am a woman, I am not good at video games, and I don’t want to get harassed. The one exception to this rule for me has been Splatoon 2. In many ways, Splatoon 2 tries to combat toxic gaming culture while also reflecting it.

Splatoon is developed by Nintendo, who are known for being family friendly. For a while, it seemed like Nintendo’s solution to gaming toxicity and to keep everything family friendly was to not have native voice chat in their games. When I bought Splatoon 2, there was no voice chat in game, and that was one of the things that attracted me to it. There was also no subscription service required to play online when I bought it. I went back to the game this week, after not playing for at least a year, and I discovered that a subscription to Nintendo Online is now necessary. There is also a voice chat option through an app that you download on your phone, but the voice chat in Splatoon 2 specifically is restricted to friends only, mitigating the key aspect of online disinhibition (as described by Kishonna Gray) that would lead to harassment in Splatoon: dissociative anonymity. People on your friends list are not random strangers, and you have to reveal more aspects of your identity to them by the very nature of them being on your friends list. Nintendo is also much more serious about policing online harassment than Xbox or Playstation because of their family-friendly reputation.

Splatoon also appealed to me because it is a more casual online shooter, designed to be kid friendly. Because it attempts to appeal to a wider array of players, it is sometimes not considered a “real game.” However, it still has a large competitive community. It also offers some communication with other players in lieu of voice chat, but it is extremely limited. A player can press a button that has their inkling say “this way!” or “Booyah!”

Splatoon is designed to be seen as a meritocracy. As you play matches, your level increases, reflecting your increased skill as you become more experienced. There are regular battles, which are more casual, and ranked battles, which is the real competitive play. Ranked battles are locked until a player reaches level 5, and additional modes are unlocked at level 10. The more you play, the better you get, and the more rewards you get.

As Christopher Paul describes in “The Toxic Meritocracy of Video Games,” ideas of meritocracy leads to rewards being heaped on the most talented people and requires rigorous testing system to determine who is worthy of those rewards. Both the level system and ranked battles in Splatoon are examples of those testing systems. Higher level players get the reward of access better weapons and gear, further cementing their status as the best players. Players receive more coins for playing in ranked battles, enabling them to purchase the better gear. 

Splatoon 2 has been out for a while, and I observed that the majority of people who are still playing it are the hardcore players. Even in regular battles, most players in the matches I played were level 40 or higher, far above my measly level 5. Theoretically, I could reach their skill level, but I would first have to endure match after match of getting splatted constantly and feeling like a burden to my team. Splatoon attempts to start everyone out at the same point, level 1, but it cannot overcome the structural inequality inherent in gaming culture.

As a woman, I am not considered a “real gamer” by gaming culture at large, so I have avoided “real games” (i.e. competitive shooters) that would have built up skills that would be useful to me in playing Splatoon. In this way, I am disadvantaged. By jumping into competitive play fairly late in the game’s life cycle, I am also disadvantaged, because the majority of players have been playing and honing their skills for much longer than me. It would take an extreme amount of labor on my part to catch up. Splatoon, like many games, relies on “repetitive ‘hard’ work” (Paul 68). Splatoon’s gameplay of covering the map with ink and swimming around in it as you shoot at other players is fun, but it’s frustrating to be constantly beaten by better players in the hope that you will eventually improve enough to stand a chance. After a few rounds of playing, I stopped having fun, and it became a slog of hoping my team would win so that I could get enough coins and experience to buy a new weapon that might make me play better, or at least start having fun again.

It simply was not worth it for me to put the labor in to close that gap. It’s a vicious cycle that continues to uphold gaming culture as it currently is. Marginalized groups are ostracized, and when they try to get into playing different games, they discover the disadvantages they have, and the culture discourages them from working to overcome that disadvantage, cementing them as being outsiders from the community. Even a game like Splatoon, that tries to be accessible to non-gamers, continues to uphold this cycle.

[abbysplayjournal]

Week 6-- Identification and Freddi Fish

I was feeling nostalgic this week, thinking about video game characters I identified with in the past. My early childhood experience with video games was limited to games that would run on our family’s Mac, which were pretty limited. I spent the most time with the Humongous Entertainment adventure titles. My dad would play them with me, and they were definitely a father/daughter bonding time for me. Spy Fox was my favorite, but out of the characters in Humongous games, I identified with Freddi Fish. As a kid, I played all the Freddi Fish games, but for this week I re played Freddi Fish 3: The Case of the Stolen Conch Shell. My experience with identification is mostly in line with the conclusions Adrienne Shaw makes from her study, but I think it also raises some extra questions and dimensions.

Shaw’s distinction between identification as and identification with resonated with, because there are a lot of characters in media more broadly that I identify with that I do not share any identity characteristics with. Freddi is not a character that I ever identified as; she is a fish, and although we’re both girls, I thought Freddi was a boy for the majority of my childhood. I thought Freddie was only a boy’s name, and there is nothing feminine about her design. She’s yellow, and she doesn’t have visible eyelashes. She is voiced by a woman, but many child male characters are voiced by women. Perhaps I was also already picking up on the idea of video games seeing their audience as male. Most other video game protagonists I had encountered were male, so I assumed Freddi was too.

Freddi Fish, as an adventure game, is narrative focused, but the narrative is pretty bare bones. Freddi and Luther were invited to the Founder’s Day Festival by Luther’s uncle, but when they get there, they find that the ceremonial conch shell was stolen, and Luther’s uncle is the main suspect. Freddi and Luther have to find the real culprit. It is not an engrossing narrative. Shaw identifies narrative as being the key factor in players identifying with their on-screen proxy. I’m not disputing this, but I would argue that narrative in how it constructs the characters is the key factor. The narrative in Freddi Fish may not be particularly strong, but Freddi and Luther’s personalities are, as shaped by the narrative. Freddi is the detective, and Luther is her best friend/sidekick. Because her personality is strong, I identified with her despite the fact that she is non-human, a fish.

Shaw observes that strong narratives can help players identify with non-humanoid characters, but I would argue that the degree of anthropomorphization is also a large factor. Freddi talks, her face makes human-like expressions, and she uses human objects, like flashlights and shovels. If she were not as expressive or looked more realistically like a fish, it would be more difficult to identify with her. She is obviously part of a fantasy world where fish talk and have other human qualities, and within that world, the player is able to imagine she is real, so in that way, realism is still present in the game.

Freddi can be described as a set character. She has a specific persona, but she differs from a lot of set characters in that her character is relevant throughout the action of the game. The game is from a third person perspective, so the player is always looking at Freddi and Luther, and Freddi and Luther talk to each other and interact with the world at every step of the game. They comment on every item the player picks up, and they also comment on many of the game’s locations, like the different rooms of the carnival fun house. They are present throughout the game, not just in cut scenes. In this way, they are easier to identify with than many other set characters.

Freddi is the more serious one out of her and Luther, and she is clearly more mature. I identified with this aspect of Freddi, because I was usually the more serious one out of my friends, and being an only child, I was always considered mature for my age. But more than that, I identified with her because she was a kid detective. The idea of being a kid and solving crime held a lot of allure for me as a kid, (Scooby Doo was my favorite TV show), and in that way, Freddi Fish was aspirational identification. I wanted to solve crimes like she did, and I wanted to be always able to help, and I wanted authority figures to turn to me for assistance. When I played as Freddi, I got to do those things.

It’s been a good 15 years since I played any Freddi Fish game. Playing the game again, I remembered vividly how it felt to identify with Freddi when I played the game as a child, but I found that I no longer actively identified with her. Unsurprisingly, I found her too child-like to strongly identify with her. The level of disidentification was too strong. I still connected with her on some levels, being the serious one, being kind and helpful, but age distanced me too much. Identification with a character can change over time. Like identity, which is constructed in specific moments in specific contexts, identification is also context specific. I would be interested in a study that examines how identification with a certain character changes over time.

[abbysplayjournal]

Week 5--Rules and Story in Thimbleweed Park

Knowing that this week was going to be all about narrative, I picked up the point-and-click adventure game Thimbleweed Park. The game is a contemporary take on the classic point-and-click genre, and it was designed by Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick of Maniac Mansion and The Secret of Monkey Island fame. The game is clearly intended to be a nostalgia bomb for lovers of classic adventure games published by LucasFilm Games, in terms of both graphics and gameplay, as both are pretty much taken straight out of the classic games and slightly updated for a contemporary player.

Maniac Mansion (1987)

Thimbleweed Park (2017)

I don’t have that nostalgia. I’ve never played an adventure game that utilizes this verb interface, but I played hours upon hours of the Humongous Entertainment adventure games as a kid (Spy Fox, Pajama Sam, Freddie Fish, Putt Putt), which were simplified point and click adventure games for kids. I’ve played about five hours of Thimbleweed Park so far, and I’d estimate that I’m a third of the way through the game.

In “Stories for Eye, Ear, and Muscles,” Grobal describes games as interactive because the story is only developed by the player’s active participation, and the player needs a certain set of skills to develop the story. Obviously, for Thimbleweed Park, the player needs logic and problem solving skills, but a knowledge of conventions of point-and-click is also necessary in order to progress. I like to think I have more knowledge of the genre’s conventions than a lot of gamers today, and even I got stuck a lot. The story couldn’t develop, and the characters were stuck in limbo because I didn’t have the skills to progress. As a novice, I didn’t know what my options were, so I spent a lot of time interacting with every single thing that was available to me, trying out every verb. I knew that adventure games are all about inventory object puzzles, so I picked up every single item I could, paranoid that I would need it later. As I played the game and became more skilled, I became better at recognizing the clues the world gave me about what was important and what wasn’t. For example, at the start of the game I picked up an empty tuna can that was on the side of the road, and looking at it now I’m fairly certain that it’s useless, at least in casual mode.

The point-and-click genre became known for obtuse “moon logic” puzzles that were impossible to figure out without just trying every single combination until something worked, and putting the player into unwinnable game states, and the genre died out. There was a strong mismatch between the fiction of the game and the rules, to apply Juul’s terms. The fiction didn’t clue the player into figuring out that the certain puzzle solutions were possible. Thimbleweed Park brings the fiction of the game and the rules closer together than many other games of the genre in a few ways. First, the game offers a casual mode, for players who are new to adventure games. In casual mode, the game gives the player a tutorial at the beginning, the puzzles are simplified, and some objects no longer have a use. I played the game on casual mode, and I still got stuck at several points. 

The game also offers a hint system, although I am not sure if the hint system is exclusive to casual mode. The hints were helpful without spelling out exactly how to solve the puzzle. For example, there was a point in the game where I needed a map of the county. There was a framed map in the newspaper office, but the journalist wouldn’t let me touch it. There was also a copy machine in the office, and I knew that I needed to copy the map, but I just didn’t know how. I dialed the in-game hint line, and it gave me a few options. “I don’t know how to find a map” was one, and “I found the map but I don’t know how to get it” was another, and the last one was “I don’t know how to progress.” I chose the second option, and it told me I needed to find a way to distract the journalist. That was the only hint I needed, although there was an option to get more hints. On the journalist’s desk was a police scanner, and when you looked at it she would tell you that she was waiting for a call from the sheriff’s office, and describe an incident that she wanted. The solution was to go to the sheriff’s office and use the police radio to distract her, and while she was gone, you could photocopy the map, and voila. 

The game also brings the fiction and rules closer together by simplifying the manipulation rules of the game: the verbs available to you to interact with the world. As shown in the screenshot from Maniac Mansion, in that game you had 15 verbs, whereas in Thimbleweed Park you have 9 verbs. It removes a lot of the ambiguity, and makes cues in the game world easier to act upon, because there are fewer options. Even if the player is stuck and resorts to trying every combination they can think of, there are a lot fewer combinations, so they won’t get as frustrated. The game’s goal rules are also very clearly defined, with the goals for each character explicitly written out in a journal or to-do list that the player can access at any time.

The gameplay isn’t the only aspect that relies on our nostalgia and “previously existing narrative competencies” (Jenkins, 6). The setting of Thimbleweed Park is an evocative space, as Jenkins describes it. Thimbleweed Park evokes detective stories set in the middle of nowhere, and the supernatural elements of the story most evoke the TV series Twin Peaks and The X Files. The town is filled with quirky characters, like the sheriff who is also the coroner and also runs the hotel. The two detective characters Ray and Reyes evoke Mulder and Scully. Ray is even a redhead. The game’s environment would not be nearly as effective for a player that was unfamiliar with these kinds of detective stories.

Much of the game’s humor also relies on a knowledge of the point-and-click adventure genre. One of the characters, Delores, is an aspiring adventure game program who wants to get a job at MucasFlem games, a jab at LucasFilm. Early on while talking to a character, you have the option of asking “Should I save my game? This seems important” and the character you are talking to assures you that this game is well-designed and there are no unwinnable states, so you don’t have to worry about that. As Juul says, “the breakdown of fictional levels is a positive emotional experience,” and the game endears itself to the player in this way. It presents itself as a point-and-click adventure game that takes the best from the genre and distances itself from the worst.

[abbysplayjournal]

Week 4 -- Agency in Breath of the Wild

This week, I was not feeling particularly inspired to play a new game, or to continue Octopath Traveler, so I decided to replay a favorite of mine: Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It’s been a few months since I picked up Breath of the Wild, so I started a new game, which is my fourth time starting over. The game was universally praised upon release, and with good reason: the game creates a beautiful and expansive open world that the player is free to explore to their heart’s content. I remember, during the hype of the game’s release, people were constantly talking about the freedom the game afforded, the agency given to the player. “You can do whatever you want! You can go straight to the castle and immediately defeat Ganon!” seemed to be the rallying cry among Zelda fans who have long bemoaned the series’ shift to more linear narratives and game play.

As I replayed the opening portion of the game, I couldn’t help but consider this assertion. I argue here that Breath of the Wild exemplifies Schulzke’s centrist view of agency, using the tension between determinist and voluntarist approaches to agency in order to create the game experience. According to Schulzke, “Players must make choices within a context created by the games they play. They may be fully autonomous, as voluntarism assumes, yet their autonomous choices are still situated in the game world, as determinists maintain” (12). What the player can do in Breath of the Wild is restricted by the game’s mechanics. Link can climb basically anything in the game, as long as the stamina meter doesn’t run out. The player can combine the powers of the Runes with the multitude of weapons in order to defeat enemies in plenty of different ways, but everything still must follow the physics of the game engine. Weapons become damaged and break, so the player cannot simply decide to use one weapon throughout the entire game.

Much of the discourse surrounding Breath of the Wild holds it up as a game that gives the player total freedom in where to go, how to explore, and how they experience the game’s story, and from a surface view it does. There is only one instance in the game where the player is explicitly told “you can’t go there yet,” and it is the beginning of the game, where the player must first get the hang glider before they can leave the tutorial/opening area of the Great Plateau. Once the hang glider is obtained, nothing in the game explicitly restricts the player’s movement, but the game still has it’s ways of getting the player to do what it wants them to do.

An excellent example of this comes not even five minutes into the game. As the player exits the temple where Link awoke, the player is treated to a sweeping cut scene that shows off the gorgeous scenery and ends with the camera panning down the hill, towards the old man and the ruins of the temple of time, as a nudge to the player that that is where they are supposed to go. Of course, the player can ignore this and decide to go in the opposite direction, but they are met with cliffs that are impossible to climb with the meager starting stamina, and a drop that will kill the player with fall damage. The game constrains the player’s options, giving them basically no choice but to go in the direction the game wants. 

After the tutorial, the explicit restraints on the player’s movement are removed, but the game continues to try to guide the player by placing way points on the player’s map. The next destination the game gives the player is Kakariko village, where finally the main goal of the game is revealed to the player: defeating the four Divine Beasts before finally taking on Ganon. Here is where the first explicit choice is offered to the player, which Divine Beast do you tackle first? The Divine Beasts are spread out across the map, but there is an order that the player is more likely to take. Divine Beast Vah Ruta is closest to Kakariko village, so the player will probably go there first. Vah Rudania is pretty close to Vah Ruta, so it will probably be next. From there, the player is already in the northern portion of the map, so Vah Medoh in the northwest corner will be next, with Vah Naboris in the southwest corner last. It’s the order that I defeated the Divine Beasts on my first playthrough, and on subsequent playthroughs I had to make a conscious decision to do it in a different order.

In this way, the game allows the player to create their own difficulty. Enemies in other areas of the map are much tougher, and if the player wants a more challenging experience, they can seek out these more difficult areas by taking on one of the other Divine Beasts first, or by going straight to battle Ganon without doing any other shrines or Divine Beasts, which lead to more health, stamina, and other useful abilities.

Early on, the game offers step by step guidance through it’s way points. This system is incredibly common in modern games, and the past few games in the Zelda series have been linear and held the player’s hand throughout the experience. The centrist view of agency acknowledges that past experiences influence how players approach new games, as Schulzke says, “the influence of new experiences is always mediated by players’ past experiences, values, beliefs, and attitudes” (13). If a player’s past experience of video games is of these linear games, the player may not even consider that they don’t have to follow Breath of the Wild’s way points. In this situation, does it matter that you can go to the castle and defeat Ganon right after the tutorial if the player never even realizes that’s an option?

Schulzke discusses four types of agents involved in constituting the meaning of games: developers, marketers, virtual agents, and players. Marketers (and I would argue that game reviewers and press fall under this category) tried to assign value to Breath of the Wild by asserting that the game offered the player a purely voluntarist view of agency, (not using that exact language, of course). The view of agency presented by Breath of the Wild is more complex than that, as I have outlined here, but saying that it just lets you do whatever you want erases the complexity that the developers put into the game and reduces its actual value.

[abbysplayjournal]

Week 3 -- Classic Arcade Games at Pinballz

This week, I went to Pinballz to play some classic arcade games. I was there for about three hours, and I spent half my time playing classic arcade games, and half my time playing newer style arcade games.

It was overwhelming looking at all the classic arcade cabinets. I didn’t recognize about three quarters of the games, and I gravitated towards games I recognized or had played before. The two arcade games I’ve played the most are Galaga and Ms Pac Man, because I restaurant my family frequented when I was a kid had a combination Galaga/Ms Pac Man machine. My best friend and I spent countless dinners begging our parents for quarters so we could play Ms Pac Man, running back to our moms for more quarters when we died so we could continue our game before the timer ran out.

I’ve never been particularly good at arcade games. My friend was better at Ms Pac Man than me, so I usually watched while she played. I preferred Galaga anyway, but I was even worse at it than Pac Man. My mom, on the other hand, was awesome at Galaga. (Or at least, she was significantly better at it than I was, and as a kid, everything my mom did filled me with awe.) I was thinking about my mom’s Galaga skills when I got to Pinballz, so Galaga was the first machine I went to.

Galaga has all the traits of classic arcade games that Rouse describes in his Centipede article. The game takes place on a single screen, a player could play Galaga forever, there are multiple lives, the game has high scores, the gameplay is simple and easy to learn, and there is no story. I haven’t played Galaga in at least ten years, but I picked up the gameplay again pretty much immediately. I made it to the fourth stage on my first game, and I made it even further on each subsequent try. Galaga also follows many of the same design principles of Centipede. There are multiple types of enemy ships that have unique attack patterns, and they attack the player in turns. As the game goes on, there are new types of ships and more ships that escalate tension with each round. Like Centipede, Galaga also provides “breathing periods” when the player dies and in between rounds, and there are challenge stages where the player’s goal is to destroy all the ships as they pass by, but the enemy ships don’t fire on the player. Galaga is a really well designed game, and it’s unsurprising that it’s remained so popular.

After two rounds of Galaga, my right hand was starting to feel sore from hitting the fire button. I’m left handed, so my left hand is stronger than my right, and I found myself thinking, “if only I could hit the fire button with my left hand, maybe I’d do better.” That’s when I realized: control schemes for arcade games were designed for right handed people. I looked at the machines around me for confirmation. Basically every one had the joystick on the left side and the buttons on the right.

For reference, here’s Galaga’s control panel:

And Donkey Kong’s:

Mario Bros:

Modern arcade control panels that are sold for people playing emulated arcade games also follow the same layout: joystick on left, buttons on right.

For the first time, I realized that maybe I’m not awful at arcade games just because I’m not skilled enough, but because I’m having to use the wrong hands for the controls. I physically cannot smash a button as fast with my right hand as I can with my left, and my right hand doesn’t have the same endurance as my left. Many arcade games require you to hit the buttons repeatedly as quickly as possible, like Galaga.

I thought back to my mom playing Galaga. She’s also left handed, but she’s much closer to being ambidextrous than I am. Basically the only thing she uses her left hand for is writing; in everything else, her right is dominant. She has an inherent advantage over me.

After a few more rounds of Galaga, I decided to try Mario Bros, which I had never played before. I fared a bit better at that, because it didn’t require any button mashing, but I didn’t find it as fun. The way Mario controlled was frustrating to me, and I didn’t like how slippery the whole thing felt. After Mario Bros, I played a round of Gauntlet with a friend, and I was amazed at just how much faster she was able to hit the attack button than me. I didn’t play any games with other control layouts, but I would be interested to try some in the future to see if I have a different experience.

In Coin Operated Americans, Carly Kocurek discusses how society created and enforced the idea that arcade games were for boys and men, excluding other portions of the population that also played video games. My mom and her sister both played a lot of arcade games, but neither of them made the jump to home consoles. (At least, not until the Wii.) However, games themselves can also exclude people from being gamers, because the game mechanics are not designed for them. Different people are affected in different genres and styles of games, but I think arcade games are interesting because their very nature excludes a lot of potential players. I bring up lefties here as an example because it affects me, but game designers almost never accommodate for players with disabilities, even in modern games. Accessibility in gaming is a growing debate, one that game designers are finally starting to take seriously. Hideo Kojima recently announced that his next game Death Stranding will feature a “Very Easy Mode” for people who do not usually play video games but want to play Death Stranding because of the actors in the game.

Most arcade cabinets were designed to be played while standing, which right off the bat excludes wheelchair users or anyone who cannot stand for an extended period of time. Most arcade games feature fast-paced, easy to learn, difficult to master gameplay, designed to keep players pumping quarters into the machine. Many disabilities prevent people from becoming skilled at these games or even playing them. Taking a historical look at arcade games can help us contextualize the current calls for accessibility in video games, and hopefully banish the phrase “git good” from gamers’ vocabularies.

[abbysplayjournal]

Week 2 -- Flow and Optimal Experience with Octopath Traveler

This week I played the Japanese role-playing game Octopath Traveler, developed by Square Enix.

Before this week I’d already put around 65 hours of gameplay into it, and I ended up playing around 7 hours over the course of the weekend. At the beginning of the game, the player chooses a main character out of eight potential characters of different job classes (such as thief, hunter, warrior, merchant, etc). I chose Therion, the thief. After finishing that character’s first chapter, the player is able to recruit the other characters to their party in any order they desire. Each character has their own story, broken up into four chapters. The locations to continue the characters’ stories are shown on the map, with level recommendations so that the player knows just how difficult each chapter will be.

The party is made up of four characters, including your main character and three others, and the other three slots can be swapped out freely at a tavern. In terms of the classification of games as proposed by Cailois, Octopath can best be classified as existing in both agon and mimicry. The agonistic elements of the game are best exemplified in the game’s battles against enemies, where the rival the player is pitted against is the artificial intelligence of the enemies. Octopath does have elements of alea, however, as certain abilities in and out of battles are left to chance. For example, Therion’s Steal ability has a percentage chance of success each time you use it.

Octopath fits in the mimicry category because the game creates this fantasy world, an “imaginary universe” as Cailois describes, and you, the player, take control of a character in that world. However, I found the game broke the illusion of you being the character through the game’s cutscenes. The player has no control over what the character says or does during cutscenes, and the cutscenes also broke the illusion by completely ignoring the other characters in your party. They have no bearing on each other’s stories. When experiencing a chapter in another character’s story, it comes from their perspective, so the player does not become a single “illusory character”.

When I started playing this week, I had just finished up the cleric Ophilia’s third chapter, which was the final character’s Chapter 3 I had left. I decided to tackle the merchant Tressa’s final chapter next because it was in a city I had not been to before, which meant I would have access to new weapons and armor. A few of the characters I was planning to use in my party were a couple of levels below the recommended level, but I figured I would level them up while exploring the dungeon before the boss, and I’d be fine.

(This video shows a fight against the particular boss I was fighting, starting at 24:52)

I reached the boss Esmeralda, and proceeded to get absolutely destroyed. Over and over again. Before the boss, I was in the flow channel, as Csikszentmihalyi describes. The challenge and my skill were pretty evenly matched, but when I encountered the boss, the challenge shot up, and I was in a state of anxiety. I had to increase my skills by grinding my level -- fighting the less powerful enemies in the dungeon before the boss. As I continued to grind, my skills increased and I was bored. The pattern repeated itself several times. I got to a higher level, attempted the boss, got defeated, and had to go grind again. I was bored and frustrated.

I realized that in most RPGs like this, your character’s level is how the game measures skill and difficulty, but it is completely arbitrary. It doesn’t actually reflect the player’s skill. If a player’s level is high enough, they can beat virtually any enemy with little skill. Octopath’s battle system has a way of forcing the player to develop at least some skill and use strategy through the shield system. Each enemy has a shield up that can only be broken after a certain number of hits from certain weapons or from certain elemental attacks. Until it’s broken, your attacks will be half as effective, and once you break a shield, the enemy is stunned for two turns. This is crucial for a battle against an enemy like Esmeralda, whose incredibly strong attacks can easily defeat all four of your party members in just two consecutive turns without healing.

The fight with Esmeralda forced me to reevaluate my strategies. Each character can learn a secondary job that comes with different support skills, and I had to experiment with using different secondary jobs on my characters and teaching them different secondary skills. For example, I taught all the characters the apothecary skill Heightened Healing, which would give them thirty percent more health any time they were healed. I made the warrior Ha’anit’s secondary job the cleric, and taught her a skill that allowed her to be healed above her maximum HP. I also realized that all of Esmeralda’s attacks were physical, so I gave my characters shields and armor that raised their physical defense as much as possible, ignoring elemental defense. As I was experimenting with changing my strategies, I entered the flow channel again, and my optimal experience began. My real skills had matched the challenge posed by Esmeralda, and they had caught up with my characters’ levels.

I began the battle for what ended up being the final time. I had the TV on in the background while I was playing, but I was so in the flow of the game that now I can’t even remember what show was on, let alone what actually happened in the episode. But I remember how I felt while I was playing, and it was exactly how the different people in the Flow excerpts described their optimal experiences. The first time Ha’anit was hit, I used a healing item that healed her to 9,999 HP. That way, she couldn’t be taken out with a single hit, and since she was my cleric in the battle, she was always able to heal and revive the other party members. The fight was still difficult, and it kept me on my toes, but it was no longer impossible. I found a deep sense of enjoyment watching Esmeralda finally turn to dust, as I had been expecting to be defeated once again. Finally winning was both pleasurable and enjoyable, because I had exceeded my expectations.

I have an attention disorder, so it can be difficult for me to have optimal experiences. For me, not all video games are flow activities. Some of the games I play are merely pleasurable, and I use them to relax or pass the time. Animal Crossing Pocket Camp is one of those games for me, but I have had other similar optimal experiences during my time with Octopath. Many of the bosses come with a spike in challenge, forcing me to get better, and that’s the main reason why I keep coming back to Octopath. The story and immersion afforded by the game are lacking, and it does require a lot of boring grinding, but the way the agon of the game makes optimal experiences easier to achieve is why I’m probably going to end up putting well over 100 hours into Octopath Traveler.