New writing tip: poorly describe your characters guestures so the reader can perfectly fill them in
"I don't want to say 'this is a white neighborhood that'd call the cops on you' buuuuuuuut…" Debug gestured at the houses along the street and made a face that tried to finish her sentence.
I've seen some people point at 1st and 3rd person shooters (especially online ones) and say "this is a violent and immoral depiction of violent fantasy and we shouldn't encourage it". And while I agree it is often violent and sometimes needlessly so, it isn't a fantasy. And not in the sense that people do go into conflicts with guns. No. Children play these games at school. You reading this will likely have played one of both of the physical games that modern shooters use as the basis for their gameplay.
Tag (and it's infinitely spelt alternatives) is a melee combat where some number of players are on an attacking team and the others are on an evasive team, often attempting to reach some kind of safe haven. When tagged, players tend to either swap sides or get reset back to a safe space for them to begin their assault anew. The game can end, but also can go on endlessly or until lunch ends.
Spotlight is a game often played asymmetrically with one player defending a location and all others attempting to use subterfuge or speed to reach that location. The defending player has some form of range that the other players don't, sometimes played in low or no light with the defending player using a literal spotlight to spot and call players to indicate they need to return to a starting position and begin anew or are out until the round ends.
These two games are essentially melee and ranged combat in FPS games.
We're not glorifying conflict, we're remaking and decorating playground games to try and give it the gravitas it had when we were five.
Writing trick: characters can ask one another to let them know if something they do makes them uncomfortable, and even agree to do so, and still not say anything. Cause that'd what I'd do.
I held hands with someone with a broken arm hour like 30 minutes and didn't tell them it was excruciating pain cause I didn't want to be a bother. They just need a reason…and probably some internal monologue to let the audience know it's an active choice to stay quiet.
I know I'm not the intended audience for games when instead of trying to work out a puzzle based on clues the game has given me, I'll try to guess the intention of the developer and sus out what they are aiming for and how they've approached similar things before to work out a puzzle.
This has been fun for Deltarune since a lot of that game is just the developer coyly winking at you through the screen while blatantly lying in the on screen text. Trying to work out what the unwritten hint is that will be put in a later part of the game to tell me to come back here and do something specific.
So far for the egg hunt, it's the appearance of the Mysterious Fast Travel Door allowing back tracking.
For the secret boss, it's introduction of a second named darkner for the chapter (Ch1: Lancer, Shawm, talk to shawm to access the secret boss. Ch2: Queen, Spamton, talk to spamton to access the secret boss. Ch3: Mr Tenna, Ramb, break from pattern as talking to Ramb mentions the rewards for getting good ranks and it's the S rank door that leads to the item that makes the fight doable for most players)
So it'll be interesting to find out if Ch4 follows this design language or not once I finally beat the Ch3 secret boss and move on.
A game i hate that is popular is Cards Against Humanity. But I hate it cause it's not a game, not cause it's cringy or anything.
In CAH you are dealt a random set of cards to use as adlib answers, and then someone reveals an adlib from a deck of them and all other players pick an answer from their hand (nirmally of 7bcards) and add it to a pile, the pile is shuffled and the person who drew the adlib decides which is the best answer…
Do you see how that's not a multiplayer game?
One player has an active role and everyone else is at the whims of random chance. So you can simulate mechanically a game of CAH by yourself by dealing some number of random answers and one adlib and picking the best.
The game wants you to pretend you're a witty and brash person who would answer those adlibs with these answers. But you're not, the game is doing that. Because not every answer is built the same syntactically nor every adlib, there are some answers that are nonsense for some adlibs and would never be played for them. The game self-selects good answers from the players, narrowing down the possible answers a player might choose. So in a hand of 7 cards you might only have 2-3 that make sense as an answer and of them only 1 is in theme.
So due to your reading comprehension and the finite number of cards in the deck, most games will functionally play themselves. Because the best answer is rarely a matter of personal opinion (unless all answers were bad) all players would likely agree on which answer wins a round. So yeah…what part of that is "playing" a "game"?
All you've got left is performance or house rules.
Jankette