As we get into the endgame of 2025, one must prioritize steeling their resolve, to give themselves a fighting chance in the face of impending chaos.

Print out and use this helpful scale to manage and track your stress levels as we near the beginning of December

Pondering further about the newly introduced systems Kojima & Co brought into Snake Eater, and breaking down how they worked in my last post, I feel as if there was just a little more to say before moving on to a far more conceptually domineering elephant in the room. Some of my posits yesterday, in regards to the general apathy involving player engagement with said mechanics were obviously broad strokes: I don’t think all gamers playing MGS3 were completely ignorant or dismissive of all the systems all the time, but based on my anecdotal evidence of how I’ve viewed many others interact with such games, the likely amount of care they had for any of said systems would be extremely minimal. Though interestingly enough, that might not be entirely their fault, nor necessarily a bad thing, as focusing in on those systems does bring into question something I had thought about a bit the other day and quite honestly, a topic of consideration that has come up many times in the past when dealing with gaming deconstruction as a whole.

That is to say, bringing into question the integrity of any given gameplay system, and or its fundamental implementation to the overall design methodology of the title in question. That assertion is an extraordinarily broad topic, so the myriad number of ways it can relate to video games in general may have as many ways in doing so as there are games themselves. I’ll bring up an example from last year that irked me, and then continue to discuss how this plays out in Snake Eater.

One major example of questioning the integrity of gameplay systems, hearkens back to last Spooptober, when in following up my delightful runthrough of the Resident Evil 3 Remake (RE3R), I decided to pull the trigger, and try a different survival horror game that I had never played before, but a title that had a decent amount of heresy surrounding it that give it some street cred. The game was Siren, and boy oh boy, did that game get a lot horribly wrong. I know it might seem random I’m taking such a massive detour in mentioning it, in the middle of my explication involving MGS3 systems, but Siren is an excellent example of what happens when a games systems are intrinsically tied to gameplay/progress, and they simply don’t buff out in the manner they’re suppose to.

One of my big parallels to the realm of philosophy with Siren, was bringing up the “trolley problem”, which is a fairly famous thought experiment involving utilitarian based morality, essentially. In the example I used in applying it to Siren, it wasn’t so much about the morality of choosing between how many people will live or who you choose to die by your choice, but more of an existential death of sorts, as the trolley problem in relation to Siren, involved a decision of design choices. On the one hand, developers can choose to make their systems more obscure and or to hide elements of progress from players, at the risk of alienating them, and thus, having them put down the game, due to not having the patience to solve it. On the other hand, you can not have your systems so built into progress, more as an optional flourish with which to heighten the games sensibilities, make elements of progress much easier to find, and keep the player around, albeit at the risk of possibly having your game not feeling as rewarding/memorable. Ideally, developers would attempt to juggle these two pretenses, instead of boiling it down to a binary, but often times, designers take the path of least resistance, and distill these notions into an either or scenario for simplicity sake.

In Siren’s case, the designers chose to have their progressive based system, one involving extremely cryptic ways of progress tied to Rube Goldberg like puzzles, and hidden “keys” of various representations quiet obscured, making progress glacial in actuality. Since the game is also more or less linear, you would end up playing the exact same area over and over again, so it really became an intense trial of repetitious tedium that represented a slow that demanded patience like few other experiences dare to. I ended up dropping the game before the end, because I came to the conclusion that the title was just poorly designed, and not really worth contending with. In the metaphoric application of the Trolley Problem applied to game design as I did earlier, the Siren developers committed to more complex design over accessibility, and lost the player in the process.

Refocusing now on MGS3, while I put forth the notion that many casual gamers likely glazed over or disregarded the systems in Snake Eater so easily, is because these systems are not necessarily intrinsic to progression, I.E. if a player largely ignores them, or at the very least, does a very poor job of understanding them or grappling with them, it is mostly a no harm no foul scenario. This is only more or less true on easier difficulty setting of course, but obviously, by the logic of speaking to casual players overlooking the relevancy of these mechanics, they would inevitably be playing on either easy or normal, making such ignorance or apathy possible.

However, it kind of works in MGS3’s advantage, as, if things like the camouflage system or the cure system are not easily understood, or really, kind of barely touched upon or utilized by any given gamer, it’s not a make or break for players who simply just don’t care about mucking around with more in-depth eccentricities, due to either playing the game purely for story, or out of some love of escapism through the escape hatch of MGS. The difference between Siren and MGS3’s popularity is quite vast, and this might be in no small part to how each are designed. Giving the players options, as outlined here, and in the spirit of letting them not even care about the brand new ways to play, ultimately shouldn’t stop their enjoyment of the overall experience. Whereas with Siren, the cryptic systems and obtuse puzzle elements in conjunction with each other, further complicated by being linked to direct progress, basically makes the entire experience come to a screeching halt, if any players present do not have a greater sense of curiosity or patience in figuring stuff out to get to the end. I would posit that Siren is a fairly extreme example of this notion, as I usually love solving puzzles and harder challenges in gaming, and have a metric shitton of experience in doing so, and even I grew exhausted in figuring it out, so I can’t even imagine how many other more inexperienced players would have given up way easier, and much earlier on.

So yeah, overall, it is no small surprise that providing gamers with options will go a long way in broadening appeal to the largest crowd of people, which some games like Siren did not seem to care about. Other games like Snake Eater, care about drawing in a much larger crowd, and therefore focused on more quality of life (QoL) decisions to accomplish this. As a bonus aside, you have others games like Silksong, which has a bold vision for difficulty, and sticks to its guns, not necessarily giving players an array of options, as it only possesses one difficulty, but at least allows for a lot of different approaches in-game, to surmount challenges.

Variety remains the spice of life.

-Pashford