I should dig out my copy of Illusion of Gaia.
It’s so fascinating to hear things like waiting become praised. It very much triggers my “Bad thing is actually GOOD” contrarianism senses, but I can see where this guy is coming from.
Illusion of Gaia was one of the few RPGs I remember playing to completion as a child, though I think I needed to use a Game Genie to get through because I could not get the hang of combat since I mostly preferred puzzle games.
I think there’s some silly parts of the story, but I do agree about how immersive it felt, and I think that’s why I wanted to play it in its entirety. It was one of the games that impacted me enough that it would have nerdy-ass teacher’s pet young me clock watching at school.
I’m actually very much of the opinion of the author too that waiting and drudgery and all of that can be very good parts of games. Games can do so much more than “fun” though I do think there needs to be a good central cycle that is fun and care needs to be taken that such monotony doesn’t overstay its welcome.
Like when I think of the raft sequence in Illusion of Gaia, I don’t think “it was so annoying I had to wait!” I think about how that sequence resolved. Partially because I misremember it ending on a weird resolution where your pig companion jumps into the fire on the raft to sacrifice himself so you have food to eat, but also because it was just long enough to get the point across but not so long I got annoyed.
I feel like there’s been this design trend both due to monetization and fan desire to make games just constantly feeding you content and much like how streaming services want to rush you through title sequences and credits and I think it ends up being very unsatisfying in the end because nothing is given time to breathe or settle. It’s very much part of the addictive cycle that keeps you hooked and pumping money into microtransactions.
People even do this in games where that’s not the intended play experience and then blame the game design. I think a lot of people who basically time traveled through all of Animal Crossing New Horizons in like a week and then complained that there wasn’t enough content.
I really like this as a game design topic! I think my main point is not “slowing down the player is good” but “slowing down the player can be good”. I think a great example of doing it wrong can be found in this Design Delve I watched recently where an absolutely tedious puzzle overstays its welcome for a criminal amount of time.
Eta: I was thinking a bit and I may have crossed the resolution I give in the spoiler with another scene. Oops! To be clear, the scene I say definitely exists, it’s a major plot point but I don’t think it happens on the raft. (And looking it up, it’s even more wild and involves a village of cannibals.)