Critique Tips: Demystifying Friction

A recent Maximilian Dood video on the topic of “friction” in games came across my feed the other day and really concisely laid out (on accident) the mess of concepts that friction has come to embody. To explain the issue of “absence of friction” in Monster Hunter Wilds, he pulls up a separate clip of fellow YouTuber Shroud talking about the lack of friction in extraction shooters post-Escape from Tarkov. Here’s one example he gives:

“…on the screen, you see every single item and its value. You don’t learn the value as a player; you instantly know what it’s worth. That is a developer coming in and saying ‘we’re going to remove the friction and remove the complications of the complexity of seeing an item and being like, ‘what is this?’ We’re just gonna tell you what it is. It’s worth $1000. That’s it.’ Great if you’re playing the game for the first time; bad if you’re playing the game for the thousandth time, because what makes extraction shooters good and interesting is giving that player the knowledge – the tools – to learn the game themselves… figure out what a pack of cigarettes is for. And nobody thinks like that, most people are like ‘just tell me what the pack of cigarettes are for, man.’ But what’s fun about extraction shooters is when they don’t tell you.”

I’m not gonna debate that on its merits, but what’s interesting here is the follow-up from Max. He brings up two examples of his own: one about Call of Duty: Black Ops 4’s Blackout mode and its equipment procurement versus full-kit starting builds in Warzone, and one about how the easy monster difficulty in Monster Hunter Wilds making build-crafting unnecessary. But are those really the same concepts as Shroud’s Tarkov example?

What Shroud is describing is what I refer to as aesthetic obfuscation. Games in play manifest as a series of states (all of the variables that make up the game instantiated with values and changing over time), but the player rarely actually perceives the game this way. Instead, the states are obfuscated through some sort of visual interface and sign system: this may hide states entirely or display them as numbers, charts, or real-life corollaries that suggest how they function. This is one of the most powerful aspects of any game, as it lets the developer control how the player interacts with the game, contextualize their decisions, foster messaging, theming, and narrative around the game’s mechanics, and eventually create an impression or reflection of life (mimesis). This example of hiding the state around an item can lead to many outcomes based on this aesthetic choice, and the one Shroud highlights here is one related to complexity exploration. Shroud finds it more exciting in the long-term to force the player to organically explore the state space in order to make conclusions rather than giving them away up-front. His conception of friction here relies on aesthetic obfuscation in order to push the player into exploring the state rather than telling them up-front what’s going on.

But that’s not what Max is talking about at all. In his Wilds example, he notes that there’s no point to grinding out new gear just to “take a five-minute fight and turn it into a three-minute fight.” Here we’re not talking about aesthetic obfuscation; he’s complaining about tuning in the game that’s led to heightened efficiency for virtually all player combat options in the game. You could argue that this rebalancing problem (I assume he’s saying more than just “monsters have too little health”) also decreases complexity exploration (weakly speaking: fighting more, getting more loot, and building new gear), but the mechanism that’s led to this is completely distinct from aesthetic obfuscation; it has to do with the actual core system of the game. In fact, he off-handedly points out that players still are performing this exploration by getting all of the available gear purely for its aesthetic value: they want to express themselves through gear designs of their choice. These two situations are inverses of one another: modern extraction shooters neglect to completely obfuscate item state and discourage players from exploring this state for themselves, while the only thing keeping Wilds’s states being continually explored is the self-expression that results from the aesthetic representation of the defensive state as a variety of elaborate, ornate armor designs.¹

An article I think has something closer to a clear-eyed view of friction comes from Logan Taylor in his piece “Friction and Drag: Why You Stop Playing Games You Think You Should Like”. His definition (similar to what I found from many other sources) is the following:

Friction, sometimes called “intentional friction,” is the resistance a player encounters from the game’s systems as they try to reach their goal. In simple terms, it’s anything that complicates the player’s journey from their current position to their goal. This could be enemies that attempt to hinder or kill the player character, things that serve to slow the actions the PC takes, the difficulty of certain button prompts, or a dozen other things that restrict the player’s progress.

He defines three different ways that friction can be created: difficulty, complexity, and “drag,” or “something that slows the player down.” This latter definition fascinates me: in my model, all of these additional states that result from drag would slot into complexity, but what he’s doing here (as I had already done in my previous complexity article) is differentiate between complexity of breadth and complexity of granularity,² and he’s highlighted the ability for a game to apply friction merely in stretching out the state space in a mandatory way. This is to say, the player isn’t nudged to explore complexity here, they’re pushed through it like water through a sieve, restrained to experience the game without necessarily exploring it. This resembles slow design principles, where interaction with a system is restricted in design such that the user must engage with the temporal proceedings around their interaction and potentially reflect upon the work at a deeper level.³ Although the verbiage is the same, this is distinct from the previous expressions of friction we’ve seen above and in footnote¹, where now friction is not just something the player can push through but rather something the player must push through, potentially to the exclusion of other options. His main example of drag is Red Dead Redemption 2, which he bounced off within a matter of hours due to its lethargic pace. While his example of skinning an animal is straight-up complexity from the system (many, many tasks to wade through at the player’s pace to complete this task), he also mentions the infamous Rockstar formula:

Taking a mission from an NPC usually involves speaking to them, climbing onto your horse, riding with them to where the mission actually takes place, doing the mission, and then riding back to where you got the mission in the first place. This time is used to explore the relationships between Arthur and these characters, as he has known them all for years but the player just met them… RDR2, for good or ill, includes this amount of drag as a gesture toward realism.

This is really scenario complexity: interaction is minimal for the most drag-laden sections (riding to and from the mission locale) and instead is an expression of scripted states inherent to a particular mission. The complexity that exists here in terms of state granularity exists for the purpose of the aesthetic; the position and slow velocity variables are obfuscated as Arthur Morgan riding a horse, and the visual they create fosters the sensation of actually riding a horse, which in turn gives them time to dole out characterization and narrative. This dynamic again flips that of the above; the obfuscation doesn’t exist to push the player into exploring complexity, the player is pushed into exploring complexity under an obfuscation that will elevate the aesthetic. We could argue that this is a facet of Tarkov that Shroud was implying (in real life, cigarettes also don’t come with text telling you what they might do, other than how they might harm your body), but when he calls this the “fun” part, do we expect this of the aesthetic? Do we wish to saddle all appearances of the aesthetic with the requirement that they make the player feel like they’re having fun? Or can we agree that there’s another split in the definition between Shroud and Taylor?

Looking at this downtime in Red Dead Redemption 2 not only stands on its own, but it also gives us another lens for Monster Hunter Wilds. Anecdotally, I heard many, many complaints about the exact same dynamic as discussed above within Wilds before missions, where the player had to follow an NPC around the map on their automated Seikret to reach the monster, watch a cutscene, and then finally begin the fight. Again, the purpose here is to elevate the aesthetic; conversations during these treks highlight the environment and its ecology as part of the developer’s world-building exercise (at least for the first half of the game). A simple reason for the disdain here is that the narrative and ecological emergence are serviceable at best, so on its merits alone we can see why these elements lost some, but at the same time, it clearly highlights again that the word “friction” is encapsulating meanings that are not only distinct but potentially at odds with one another, where when friction is requested it actually refers to a specific dynamic that cannot be replicated by another dynamic under the same umbrella. Those looking for difficult boss battles likely will not be soothed by time spent on bird-back picking up items and twiddling the camera, especially when said sections can actually meet or exceed the runtime of the fights themselves.

Another anecdotal piece of evidence also intrigued me with Wilds: the menus have absolutely ballooned over the last couple generations, leading players to lament the time needed to find options and information. The dynamic here resembles previous examples – higher complexity that the player must wade through – but again the player base is not enthused. If you’re thinking “the menus have no relevance to the aesthetic or to the core of the system” you’d absolutely be correct, but it highlights another thorn on the stem of friction: it has a teleological basis as a descriptor rather an ontological basis. When people discuss friction (and you can see it in Taylor’s quote when he highlights it as “intended friction”), they are looking at the purpose of the mechanic or obfuscation rather than what it actually is, under the impression all along that it somehow works against the player. This assumption has a dangerous counterpart to that of the menus: if we could have a mechanic that matches friction in form but we all acknowledge has a different (or lack of) purpose, could we have a mechanic that seems to have the same purpose as friction but doesn’t achieve it? Let’s look at this article from Charleston O’Bryant:

The term itself can have a rather vague definition, but the most ideal one seems to be that “friction” is elements in games that purposefully push back against the player via mechanics and direct gameplay. A prime example of this would be a survival horror game such as Resident Evil, in which the player’s inventory is limited, ammo and weapons are scarce, enemies take a lot of resources to kill, and saves are limited, meaning that death could possibly push the player back hours.

Note the last bit there about the saves. The ink ribbons in the original Resident Evil games notoriously restricted the number of times a player could save, and using one meant that the player must take up an inventory slot on said ribbons. That being said, would a death really lose the average player hours? HowLongToBeat pegs the original Resident Evil at 7 hours, and EvilResource tells us that, on the original American difficulty, there are 28 save ribbons (on the original Japanese difficulty there’s 42!). If you picked up every ink ribbon (each pickup gives you two saves) throughout the game, you’d be able to save once every 15 minutes (10 minutes on the Japanese version). With ink ribbons next to virtually every save station in the game, would we really consider this true to what O’Bryant is saying here? This is compounded by the fact that the majority of these save stations have safe item boxes in walking distance,⁴ meaning that the player will almost never have to actually carry ink ribbons around with them in unsafe parts of the world.

What’s being conveyed here is the fear that the presentation of the mechanic inspires, rather than anything material about the game. Because the mechanic was unorthodox even at the time, players have continually not known how to deal with it effectively, even though it should become apparent quickly that more than enough ribbons exist, to the point that picking them up creates annoyance rather than relief. The only way one could go hours without saving is through either forgetfulness or purposeful self-restriction (which influences rank in the sequels). There’s aesthetic obfuscation in effect, in that the amount of ink ribbons present is never revealed in-game, but information on their use appears prominently, and their placement in front of typewriters actually limits the amount of literal exploration one needs to do to use them. This goes for the ammo and weapons as well: the weapons aren’t a resource outside of taking up inventory space, and there are far more shotgun shells than there are zombies, even before we begin talking about pistol and magnum rounds or grenades. Again, with the limited inventory space (an mechanically legitimate, well-implemented bit of friction), the prevalence of ammo and the room it takes up in the inventory arguably encourages players to avoid exploring the state space for it to keep from wasting space. What Resident Evil presents as friction is purely perceptive; it has no mechanical tie. This isn’t a specific issue in O’Bryant’s analysis, as I’ve seen this same analytical construction repeatedly at all levels of critique surrounding Resident Evil, and I didn’t process the misrepresentation until I had played the game myself. But if we give ink ribbons praise on the basis of its supposed friction, are we really using the concept to spotlight mechanics that perform the desired task? Or are we letting its appearance gloss over the flaws of the mechanic in the name of friction?

Friction as obfuscation to provoke exploration, friction as complexity, friction against efficiency, friction as slow design, friction as appearance… many disparate appearances with thin throughlines. I’ve taken the time to dismantle each of these examples into their constituent components for you to illustrate how vast the term has become; it’s become a “magical” word that conjures a bevy of “correct” feelings about game design. None of these approaches to friction are wrong, but at the same time it’s evident that the term itself obfuscates the mechanics and aesthetic in order to demonstrate an intent to push against the player. But are we truly pushing against the player? We walk on ground because of friction; one leg pushes against the earth, holding us in place so we can swing our other leg forward. Friction inhibits movement but at the same time allows for control, giving us grip to hold ourselves lest we slide off infinitely into the horizon. And in a medium built around control, the notion of friction pervades every inch of every game we play, grounding us in discrete moments and showing us our options going forward, limiting appearances to let our mind fill in the blanks, and eventually, letting depictions of life bloom on the screen.

To say a game lacks friction is much like saying a game isn’t “game-y” enough. And this is my essential issue with the teleological underpinning of the concept, where the end goal of the facet is where we start in our critique. Friction is the beginning of the game; if you want to sit silently and let the art talk to you, you watch a film instead. When we build our critique, friction may be where we start, but we need to develop language that specifies and expands upon it, as I’ve tried to do with the examples above. How does obfuscation hinder the player’s success? How do individual mechanics in the system form difficulty? How do moments of minimal interaction bring forth contemplation? How can the presentation of a mechanic differ from how it works in practice? When we begin asking questions like these, it lets us dispense with friction as our descriptor of choice in favor of actually describing how the system works and how the aesthetic is layered on top. Next time you’re tempted to use the word, try to describe what’s going on that gives you the impression of friction and build from there. Describe what’s in front of you, and you’ll find you’ll have far more words for what it’s attempting than just “friction”.

Image sources are in the alt text.