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Death to the self-playing game. www.jank.cool/death-to-the...

To all of the people saying that folks are "reading the headline and not the article" what exactly do you think we're missing about the article? The headline, top image, and thesis paragraph all identify Vampire Survivors as a "self-playing" game. It… isn't — in any way. That's not an opinion.

I'm sure we can say "oh well they're just trying to get you to click" or "well they're allowed to write about their own opinions" but I can't help but believe that the *fundamental idea* of this opinion is flawed, not even the writing itself. The writer doesn't identify what "self-playing" means.

he contrasts it with idle games, in which you have no agency, with games like VS where your agency is quickly automated away. I guess it's not technically, literally self-playing because you can move your guy in a direction at will but the game portion of it is astoundingly shallow

That’s simply not true though! There’s a lot of game design in VS and a ton of different ways to play it. its fine if you didn’t like it, but bullet hail games were around before Vs and no one was writing shit like this about them.

are there? between steam and the mobile version I have I think at least 15 hrs in the game (I, too, am not immune to dopamine) and beyond figuring out what the items do and wandering the map for a few secrets, what am I, as a player, really *doing*?

But you got 15 hours of dopamine positive gameplay out of a game you spent $14.99 on. Isn’t that enough? What more does a game need to be?

I think this is the fundamental frustration I have with all of the discourse surrounding this (and stuff like it) -- who cares? I am wholly uninterested in talking about art as some sort of good value consumer good and want to engage in criticism of the art as a piece of art.