I managed to make a Getting Over It video on YouTube without screaming or losing my cool even once! Do I get a cookie?
Also, we talk about boring game design things and the concept of failure in videogames and frustration and pain as express aesthetic goals. You know, NERD STUFF.
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This episode was made possible by generous support through Patreon!
First a new MrBtongue video (!) and now a new Errant Signal video. I feel spoiled.
Wait, what?! I must find this now!
He is still alive? awesome!
Farksisten All this straight after a new Matthewmatosis video. Amazing week for in-depth gaming critique YouTube!
The idea that the mountains we climb are created by our attempts to climb them rings very true to me, having recently completed Dark Souls 2. The entire Dark Souls series is built on the ethos that going at an obstacle again and again–and feeling pain with each loss–is integral to getting a proper sense of achievement when you finally do succeed. It’s not a perfect comparison; Getting Over It is a singular, massive obstacle from which you can plummet right back to the start at any time, whereas Dark Souls has a limit on exactly how far it will put you back, but I think the core philosophies really aren’t very different at all.
So what you’re saying is that t h i s i s t h e D a r k S o u l s o f c l i m b i n g g a m e s .
Argarghble Fshnaghn Just play hardcore mode on DS. Start over if you die.
Love the frustrated mouse shaking. Perhaps better than a filmed reaction.
Totally
It seems to be something almost all who play the game share in common when losing major progress, hahah. A human constant.
My favourite part of any Getting Over It gif or video is when someone falls super far and the hammer is still just stuck in that “pointing slightly upwards towards the next thing you tried to climb but tripped” position. As if moving it again would cause you to fall even further. Always followed by extreme care as they try to move back up. I’ve had it happen to myself several times and while I’m frustrated in the moment I know I’m just another human like all the other fucking up in a game where you’re sort of meant to fail.
Got a Noah Caldwell vibe from the start of this vid
Lucas Ballard all that is missing is a scenic shot and a handmade sign.
was the intro including some sort of gem from the past, with a production quality that is low but somehow very charming.
I really like you taking the time to explore the ideas behind this game, and not just writing it off because it got Youtube popular. It’s really interesting seeing your thoughts on it.
This game is even frustrating to watch.
This game is best played when watched… and best watched when played…
Ignore what I said after the word ‘and’ because that doesn’t make sense but the first thing… that’s my bread and butter when it comes to watching my favorite streamers fail beyond belief and hope that they think a god might actually save them and their legless bodies(GO POO)
Arokace Did you try to make your comment difficult to read? That’s metta. Well, I read don’t to know harder if comment you a could make.
(After “well” read I and skip every other word and at the period read all the words you skipped.)
TheSugarRay is that’s how you had to read it in order to understand it then sure… otherwise though, no I didn’t purposely make it hard to understand besides the second half of the first sentence not making sense (in my mind at least). And why the first half of the first sentence made sense in my mind was because I was never going to play the game so watching GrandPOOBear’s stream of him playing it WAS my way of playing it basically.
Yup. I couldn’t watch it in one go, I was just gritting my teeth in anticipation of inevitable failure, so I just alt tabbed and listened.
Seeing them fail and hear the witty quote the creator put into the game was always the best part… And then the creator had the nerve(rather genius idea) to put in more negative quotes even when you do something good(as in getting higher up the “mountain”(is it really a mountain… can we actually call it that lol)).
What game is that at 1:35?
That’s Mr. Shifty. It’s basically “What if we took that opening scene from X2 where Nightcrawler broke into the White House and turned it into a top down beat ’em up?”
@Errant Signal Sold.
This was a really in-depth video essay. I’d never heard of this game before today, but now I’m kinda interested in it.
Great video. Well done.
you where the one who brought me to this channel 😀
I don’t understand why so many of you find in this game. I really genuinely don’t.
My meat with it is not the graphic or it’s gameplay per say but when the author claim that the obstacle are real unlike other game where with enough try you would succeed implying that his game might never be beaten no matter how many times you tries by some…I mean…Come on you have just been uncompromising with your vision as long as it was doable…
a lot of fancy word just for that : Uncompromising vision.
And while this is something that deserve much respect especially with all those “triple A” games with the integrity of a mass murderer claiming to be innocent walking around untouched straight up naked hooking up with the policemen and what not, even defended by many(which is something beyond my comprehension too) I think the phenomenon to be vastly overblown when it comes to this artistic integrity.
If we live in a world where we have to celebrate artist actually being artist rating then money making machine or for policemen to do their job instead of eating donuts all day or the waiter to be on time with the plate without breaking anything then what a sad world we are in.
Maybe it’s just me or maybe I am stupid but I do not understand the appeal and before you ask yes I tried and it wasn’t that hard since I planned how I would go about every obstacle and actually took my time. And once I got about with the orange I stopped not because I was defeated but because the experience was not teaching me anything. I was simply not getting anything from the game and to be honest I experienced far more boredom then any degree of frustration.
Which is why I do not understand what’s so captivating about it for you all. So if one of you would be kind enough to explain it to me I would be thankful.
I know exactly what you mean, I don’t find it stressful and engaging when I’m attempting the same stuff over and over to no avail. I just find it incredibly dull, because there’s no sense of permanent progress after I’m finished learning what must be done.
Hi Joe!
hi joseph i love u
Hm. I disagree. Not with your reading of the game, it’s quite plain that you are articulating the creator’s intent but rather with the philosophy presented. Someone else has already pointed out the connotations of this philosophy concerning restricting game accessibility and the fetishizing of challenge, and that certainly came to mind when watching this video. The creator’s comments about games “without frustration” annoyed me, and I just now have figured out why. For one, like the notion of “fun”; challenge and frustration is subjective, and although like this one, there are games designed to frustrate, a perfectly soothing game might frustrate you. It might even frustrate you because you don’t find it challenging.
For example, I as a person prone to nausea and with depth perception problems find first person shooters extremely frustrating on a very basic level. It does not make it an engaging experience for me. When I get frustrated, often I just stop playing the game. Gaming is my escapism from my frustrating and anxiety-filled life, I don’t play games to be frustrated and I don’t need frustration to find an experience engaging. However, I accept that people do play games to beat a challenge, to endure frustration. It is a problem I find with analyses of games that so often they limit the potential of games by focusing on specific outcomes and intents.
Secondly, I think in certain contexts when a player feels frustrated it is because a game designer has done their job poorly, and sometimes it is because they have done their job extremely well. And again, this depends on a personal threshold of what they consider frustration. I can think of many amazing games I never really felt truly frustrated at, like animal crossing, or stardew valley. I enjoy games that have a certain level of difficulty when I enjoy them and that’s not all the time. Games don’t have to offer one experience – and calling back to the “that’s no game” episode I like to think that games don’t have to be just one thing, and that games that do something different (like being frustrating or being calming) don’t have to oppose one another.
On a certain level I understand his point but my first thought is concerning the elitism within gaming culture that breeds toxicity – the amount of discussion around Dark Souls’s difficulty that was not about what the game does well to make it challenging but how people are “pussies” for not rising to the challenge comes to mind.
The concept of enjoying challenge and taking it further to enjoying failure is an interesting one, but one I personally cannot connect to. Maybe I’m an idiot who’s a total casul and can’t appreciate challenge but I like to think that maybe it’s just a facet of what games can offer that I don’t connect to. And that’s kind of okay. I guess.
I dunno.
Em S. It is definitely how online gaming culture works indeed, and yeah escapism and elitism work together but I was thinking of the way you talked about it (ie. people playing game to have fun, not to add stress or frustration). But at that point like you said initially, it gets very subjective. So I guess one thing someone will view as fun and stress-free can be considered frustrating by someone else.
It wasn’t to convey irony but to oppose it to the quote from the game “most obstacles in video games are fake”. I didn’t mean only the best players are supposed to play those game, but only the ones who accept that mindset. The challenge is “real” because you will obviously fail but also maybe you won’t make it, whereas most game will balance their challenge to make you fail a few time but you’ll get past it eventually, not necessarily because you got better at the game but because you understood how to get past a specific obstacle. It’s not to say one is better than the other, but that’s two different “flavors”.
Basically what I wanted to say is: Bennett Foddy isn’t saying “git gud” but “if you’re in this specific mindset, I think you can enjoy this”.
But what you said is definitely true, and I tend to agree with you, but I find it didn’t really apply to that game / Foddy, that’s all 😀
(and to be fair, I don’t think that specific quote is good, since softwares tend to REALLY be frustrating. I’d take Getting Over It 500 times over the UX of Microsoft Office)
So what you wrote was pretty interesting, and what I’m about to say might be me misunderstanding your intent, but here goes:
Varying degrees of accessibility exists in all forms of art and all of them have some form of elitism.
It’s why Moby Dick is seen as “higher” literature than Harry Potter. It’s why Jazz is adored by so many skilled musicians.
Some works of art do take effort to appreciate, which many times however can heighten the resonance of the work. However the elitism expressed by some of the people who enjoy those forms of art is merely an expression of their vanity for taking the effort to understand them. I don’t believe it’s a byproduct of the artform itself, but merely a question on how people expresses their own achievements. The people who are arrogant about their taste in music are most likely the same people who belittles people for not understanding facets of science, or look down upon people who don’t exercise as hard as them.
Any culture that prioritizes individuality, will be fixating on personal achievements in all it’s shapes and forms, because it’s what people uses to determine worth. To be good at a video game might be seen to you as a trivial achievement, but individuality also has the byproduct of democratizing what will be seen as worth, it’s why avant-garde Jazz ever became a thing.
At some level there doesn’t really exist any “correct” way to deal with frustration nor does all game have a singular way of confronting said frustration.
Some games teach you to adapt and learn, others ask you to just power through it and some asks you to accept it as an inevitability.
However while there are games that focus on “failure” as their main theme they tend to only deal with one of these specific solutions which, ironically, can be rather frustrating in of itself if your personal solution of dealing with anxiety isn’t actually programmed into the game.
“Dark souls” for example has a very different approach to dealing with frustration than “Get over it” and I think that really makes all the difference because on a surface level they are both “hard” but where they differ is how the games are designed for you to complete them.
shove those 100 dollar words in ur pooper, dr PC
IA.
And the “empty calories” comment was exactly the “get gud” judgey garbage I’m tired of. Some of us don’t consider “challenge” to be the nutrition we get from gaming. Implying that the rest of us are consuming games for the “wrong” reasons really grates.
Video Game Challenge is often an “I’m so smart, look at my words” approach to video games. If you write a book and use lots of uncommon words, unnecessarily complicated grammar and poorly expressed thought you have made a book which is difficult to read but doesn’t necessarily impart a profound message. Likewise, Kaizo-style games remove accessibility and while they are still games there is nothing inherently better about them. If you make a product that is intentionally obtuse, you aren’t providing a revolutionary vision, it’s a poorly designed item. It can be poorly designed on purpose, that can even be the point of the design, to be bad, but it is just poorly designed. There is a reason “good” standards for how to write exist, and these standards are constantly being updated and refined just like in video games. What Kazio games are is art, they use the medium of games, but by removing accessibility they are no different than an intentionally obtuse manuscript. Yes you can enjoy it, but there is nothing inherently special about Kazio style games or a bad translation of Kefka. Both are hard to get into, and both can hide profound insight, but they are not inherent;y something to be allauded.
I always enjoy the more abstract videos you do, whether that means philosophy, psychology or both by analyzing a story-rich game. Discussing gameplay mechanics or level design is always more interesting when it comes with the theory on why one way is better that another, and in that regard you’re one of the best out there.
From your DS3 videos, I was under the impression that you saw unchangeable and punishing difficulty as a toxic practice centered around gate-keeping, I’m *hoping* Foddy changed your perspective on that. When done right, a game can be outright hostile to its target audience and not lose face, as it is in line with its themes and design. Losing is fun. When victory comes easy and a game congratulates you on beating its “challenge”, it is like being force fed candy – yes, it tastes good, but it is unfulfilling and there is a sickly feeling in the pit of your stomach. It feels like a mockery of the medium. A parody of the effort the game promised.
MinimMats c.d.s.
Jaylene santos ?
Twice you say it’s not really about skill. You did acknowledge that you do get better as you play.
While I agree that perseverance is important, the reason it’s important is because without it, you don’t have the opportunity to acquire the necessary level of skill. To complete the entire game is an impossible task at the base level of skill, that is, when you open up the game for the first time, or just adjusted to your input settings.
The entire game revolves around honing your skills in an imaginary craft. The Paradox of failure is no paradox. The reason we’re drawn to places of many failures is because of the possibility of winning, that is, to NOT fail, where many others have.
Winning in this game gave me some of the greatest sense of pride and joy. Being able to overcome seemingly impossible obstacles with little room for mistakes and harsh punishment; it all adds to this sense.
The presence of failure amplifies your success, simply by contrast. That includes the failure of others. Of course, you wouldn’t know that, having never reached the late game (unless you just didn’t record it) 😉
I would say: play the game another time, learn some new strategies from good players, and see how much easier the game is. I’ve beaten the game in less than 5 minutes now, and I can tell you that this game has one of the purest representations of skill I’ve seen in a videogame. The top speedrunners baffle me.
Of course it’s about skill. That much should be obvious in a game that demands you to master its mechanics to win it.
Honestly think this video is better than the game. There isn’t enough meat for me to ever consider making a purchase, and as much as I like waxing and waning over difficulty and the nature of challenge, at a certain point you I just break down the quality and depth versus similarly priced games and this one comes woefully short.
Getting Over It is no different from the Tide Pod meme. The only thing positive to come of either is the opportunity to laugh at stupid people freaking out, and that aspect is the sole reason for their popularity. The Dark Souls series already taught all of these same ideas and lessons, while also being absolutely packed with all forms of content… lore, mechanics, scenarios, experiences, music, and more. Even if you cheat your way through it, souls is still absolutely worth experiencing, as goes for countless other franchises, while this is just a physics sandbox with only one awkwardly moving little object. I think it’s great that anyone can make whatever they want, but we might be going a bit overboard when we start presenting memes as some sort of grand statement on the universe.
CatWithAHat2HD Pretentious?! Can’t it just be called minimalist? It’s not like it’s wrong, right? Or that it’s pretending to be something it’s not, which is what I’d call something actually qualifying as pretentious. It’s just trying to do something simple. It even calls itself trash. Not the answer to the Galaxy universe.
Also, why can’t it be more than 5 minutes? It’s not like this video was filled with dead air or that he states that this is the greatest thing ever created in the whole multiverse with a mini-series discussing how every asset or word from the game, if you’re willing to let me call it that, is the reincarnation of heaven on Earth.
Maybe I’m just being crazy here but it just seems like you just seem to be threatened here by discussing this interactive software. Seemingly.
Every paragraph responds to every one of yours:
I’t pretentious because of all the “challange is more like an grapefruit than like an orange” bs. Sure, it calls itself trash, but (as far as I can tell) it thinks that making itself trash is a profound artistic statment too (it’s not btw). Minimalistic art is when you presnet something simple that fits in surprisingly well within the context – despite being simple it’s inclusion into the space makes it accentuate something aesthetically. This is not it. I can’t remember the name of the game, but a few years ago there was this, all black and white, platformer where you played a kid going through a forest (among other locations I believe) and facing environmental hasards that made your child character die – that one had a minimalistic art style. This is: I have a V-A-G-U-E point to make about difficulty in games so I’m gonna take chepo assets from online stores, scramble something conveniantly simple to make with ’em that illustrates my point and voila. It’s not art, it’s a simple visualisation of a point – it’s a pie chart.
The commentary can be however the fuck long one wants it to make. What I’m saying is that all that there is to say about the game can be said in 5 min tops. The rest isn’t dead air, it’s just semantically barren.
You are crazy. What sort of emotionally retarded sea cucumber would feel thretened by a game review online? Or is this the point? Are you just making a veield “ad hominem”? If so: here’s my answer to it: fuck you and your whore of a mother. (I like being honest and straithforward in my interactions with people you see – I think it’s polite.)
CatWithAHat2HD Well, there are quite a lot of elitists out there who tend to believe people that do things differently or opposite of what they believe is right then get appreciated for what they did will start a change in the things are made. And nobody likes change that doesn’t align with them. I still do have that impression that you’re being threatened by this video or interactive software considering how emotional you seem to be. May not be as severe as what’s played in my or your head.
I don’t really think he was trying to make art. Nor do I care what is the definition of art or what qualifies as art. I do hear that Kickstarter guitar play when he’s giving a speech. I don’t think his view on difficulty is vague, though. Seems more simplistic than vague. You could consider his work misguided but I do believe he seems to be quite personal here. Maybe you just don’t like that, or maybe you just see him as being manipulative here. That grapefruit analogy metaphor symbolism was pretty corny but overall I don’t see much to be emotional or spiteful here. Maybe you just don’t think he should get this much attention, more than there should be on other games he hasn’t talked about. Maybe that’s why you seem angry. Hey, people just like to do what they want to do.
I think you’re thinking of Limbo.
I do appreciate your politeness. Not that plenty of that kindness on the internet but it does make me happy when people decide to change the norm and be as great as possible. Do tend to be careful, though. People might view your honesty as a hint that you are an angry, unapproachable, dismissable, laughable, pathetic excuse for a human being and instinctively ignore any of what you have to say no matter how important, enlightening, or loud you try to make it.
Screw you, too. Or those who may relate to you, regardless of their lack of involvement on our conversation. Or however you say it in your home country city village.
Yes Limbo! Thank you, I couldn’t remember the title for the life of me and googling something like: “platformer about a kid in the forest” seemed like a sub optimal way of finding the title….
There are indeed lots of worthless cunts on the internet – it’s a big place after all. I would like to point out though that, apart form the exchange of standard online courtesies (the insults), you haven’t adressed anything I said. Which leaves me with the suspicion that you have nothing to say but that. (Interestngly it is the same supicion I voiced at the end of my last comment if you recall.)
Oh and btw: if someone takes honesty as a vice they are wrong. If someone takes pride in oneself as a vice they are wrong aswell (as long as we mean pride not vainglory ). In other words being proud enough to take insults for free is good, being proud enough to think that one is by deffinition not worthy of insulting is bad. But than again, this is very much unrelated to the topic at hand.
CatWithAHat2HD I was confused for a while because I don’t know what the heck “veield” means from Latin or Spanish or something until I realized you just made a typo.
I haven’t finished both Limbo and GOI because I am already facing the most difficult challenge for a gamer: dealing with a second hand computer that blue screens at start-up and is only able to see games through an Android phone that tend to freeze and even crash. I don’t even download porn anymore! Because of that, I really can’t give that much of an informed statement on the subject like why is one pretentious and not the other, or what themes does Limbo have and how did it do as well/poorly or better than GOI in terms of delivering it, or can something really be artful when I have to pay for it. There is also the fact that I don’t think I’m generally clever or good-with-words enough to try to verbally fence with you. I also tend to really not stand completely on everything I have to say because their is always the chance that I’m wrong. Hence, the constant distraction in my comments.
My main objective was to try to make you more accepting and/or appreciative of these works even if you find them inferior or highly flawed because I’m tired of people being negative over everything while trying to be witty or funny because I just binged a bunch of Half-Life and Portal videos and I’m salivating for Valve to make another game that’s not about cards or gambling. How the mighty have fallen. It’s a shame considering I’m pretty sure both of us could at least agree Valve is truly the master of game design and writing. I like it when people agree with me because I like to think I’m right.
I did get confused on your last statement and to which word were supposed to represent whom(or who, whom knows) Were you admitting pridefulness or were you saying I’m being too prideful here? My pride is blocking me from understanding.
The popularity of this game astonished me. It imitates QWOP a lot more than any commercial game product should, with its absurd, unrealistic movement mechanic that’s all but impossible to control. The difference is that QWOP was free, short, and most people never played it for more than an hour. This game is eight bucks and can go on for hours, and the major enhancements are a smattering of random set decorations and a running commentary of overblown sermonizing on the game’s “message”, peppered with incoherent quotes from famous authors. I wanted to retch when I heard that beautiful William Blake quote being used to make this pretentious mess appear sophisticated.
Gains and losses in video games are all about context, which Getting Over It nakedly lacks (pun intended). In the real world, you’re just pushing buttons, but a game can make that come to life by telling you a story that can end in many ways depending on your actions. It’s not a paradox that gamers want challenging games, just a reflection of the truism that working hard for something makes it feel more special. Gamers don’t want to fail; they want to succeed knowing that failure is a distinct possibility. But if playing a normal game is like cracking a shell to get at the nut, Getting Over It is just a bunch of empty shells. That may be fun if you’re really bored and don’t have anything better to do, but it’s low-grade entertainment.
There have been so many games like this lately, games which obsessively stare into the void of metatextual commentary and equate that with philosophy. You may call this a “meditation” on failure, but there’s a difference between meditating and just sitting still. Oh, and by the way, you can tell Jesper Juul from me that irony isn’t the same thing as paradox either.
Cinnamon Noir same creator as QWOP
Yes, I know. That was kind of my point. I don’t think Bennett Foddy has progressed very far beyond QWOP in terms of game design. Which is oddly appropriate, actually, considering what his games are about…
I’m not sure how astounded you can be. QWOP was frustrating, had no real victory, and had sufficiently little skill to it that it felt like a funny but stupid game. A game defines itself by how it acts, the mindset it puts you in. How you approach a game is perhaps more important than mechanics and plot combined, because it is the context within which the entire game operates. As such the most major difference between QWOP and Getting Over It is that QWOP feels like it’s just being silly in a frustrating, funny way. By contrast Getting Over It seems to present itself as a challenge, a pile of ’empty shells’ as you put it.
Besides, the shell isn’t empty. The fruit in the middle is getting to the top. The core concept, difficulty making victory sweeter, remains the same. It just amped up the difficulty, and made it so you have to keep digging for hours to get the fruit.
Calling Getting Over It low-grade entertainment does the game a disservice. The game’s beauty lies in the challenge it presents, the attitude of the narrator, the idea it represents. You may disagree with the design philosophy it espouses, but that doesn’t mean there is no message.
Got playing this game this week after initially assuming it was another Youtuber bait game. Quite pleasantly surprised that it had a layer of smartness to it. that it’s balance of success, failure and frustration can be eased by some light poetry or the gradual feeling that you’re slowly getting better. People how master this game are gonna be mouse wheeling wizards before too long. I won’t though. The game drives me nuts. I really like it, but I also want to give Bennett Foddy a slap.
Just because you’re trash doesn’t mean you can’t do great things. It’s garbage can, not garbage cannot.
“The climb toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. We must imagine Sisyphus happy.” ~Albert Camus