im watching a retrospective about Majora's Masks dungeon progression and realizing a little more every time he says "this game took a lot of very brave steps out to not be ocarina of time" that my disappointment with totk isn't out of place. I've been told "it's breath of the wild 2, why did you expect it to be different?" but like.. it's it's own game. why is it the exact same but with an arguably worse iteration of the story?

Something that I’ve been thinking about for a while: why do, like, 99% of all video games involve combat?

Like, we have a significant number of genres that are entirely focused around combat (shooters, fighting games) and genres that, while not technically focused around combat, use it as a core mechanic (most RPGs, most adventure games) and practically everything else uses it as basically an environmental hazard (most platformers, a lot of puzzle games). It’s just a default expectation at this point that any game will involve some kind of combat, even if that combat is 'there is an enemy in your way, the easiest way to move past it is to kill it’. The only major genres I can think of that don’t include some kind of combat are sports games (other than boxing or wrestling games, but I count those more as sports games than as combat games), simulation games (and not even all of those), and board game-style games.

And on the one hand, it’s personally frustrating because, like, I don’t like combat. At all. I don’t play games to kill things, and I don’t enjoy having to put up with combat mechanics for the sake of playing a game I otherwise enjoy. It means that most of what I play are sim-style games, which is fine, I enjoy sim-style games, but I would also like to play other games sometimes. And I can’t, because so many of them rely so heavily on a mechanic that I really don’t enjoy, and I don’t particularly feel inclined to force myself to do something I don’t like for the sake of having fun.

But on the other hand it’s interesting from a larger perspective. Like, how did we get here? Why is it that, pretty much from the beginning, we decided that video games should be about killing things? And part of it, I think, is because it’s probably relatively easy to program in enemies to kill, but we’re well past those limitations now. At this point, it’s not a technical limitation, it’s a paradigmatic one. You see it all the time in the fights about ~real gamers~ and the games they play, and how games without violence get relegated to the territory of ~casuals~ or ~fake gamers~. And there’s a lot of (justified!) talk about how these distinctions are bad and also just kind of dumb and don’t really track with any kind of reality, but I’ve never really seen conversation surrounding the fact that there really aren’t that many choices for someone who wants to avoid combat in games. Lots of people defend my right to play non-combat games, but very few people seem to realize just how few of them there actually are, and how narrow the selection is.

Or, to put it another way, why do all the Minecraft clones focus on killing zombies rather than on breeding sheep?