Nothing frustrates me more than not being able to pause for no seemingly good reason. I’m playing Wild Hearts right now and even though I never play online I cannot pause for some reason. To simulate pausing, I can turn off the xbox and the quick resume feature makes it look like the game was paused when I turn the console back on.
Other games guilty of this are Fromsoft games: Dark Souls, Elden Ring and so on.
Obviously all of these games have an online component. Not allowing pausing when this component is activated makes sense. But if I am playing completely online why cannot I pause? In Soulslike the worst exploit I can think of is switching equipment on the fly but is that really that bad? When stuff comes up in the middle crucial moments it frustrates me a lot.
counterpoint: not being able to pause creates tension and puts pressure on the player. that wii U zombie game didn’t pause while you were digging around in your inventory and that game would be way less interesting if it did. i probably wouldn’t even remember it exists.
if you don’t like that tension and pressure that’s fine but there’s no shortage of games that don’t restrict you like that and no-pause is a legitimate design tool.
If there was a pause button and you wanted the tension, all you would have to do is simply not press pause.
Whether not having a pause is justified or not, you surely must know this isn’t a good response, right? “Just play wildly suboptimally for dramatic effect” is not viable game design.
So not building in a pause button automatically makes gameplay wildly suboptimal?
Optimization only happens within constraints. How the game is built represents the constraints.
But in a game where you can pause, making a rule of not pausing would put you at a drastically lower “power level” than someone who pauses.
I’m afraid you’ve moved the goalposts or something. I don’t really care about optimization. Games should be accessible. Not having a pause button means I can’t play the game at all. Optimization doesn’t come into it. The person I responded to argued that having a pause button makes games less tense. I understand that because being able to pause the game gives the player a breather. But just because there’s a pause button doesn’t mean the player has to press it. If they want the tension, they can simply choose not to press it. It’s not up to me, the end user, to solve the problem beyond demanding accessibility.
That’s not tension, that’s edging. You can complain about it all you like, but fundamentally you’re ignoring the design issue here when it looks like the real answer is that it just isn’t for you. The issue of accessibility is difficult because – however much some advocates like to frame it in an abstract, deductive fashion about tailoring one’s experience – the reality of a lot of the “inaccessible” elements of games is that players, when given the opportunity, have a high propensity to “optimize the fun out of the game,” i.e. to do what is less fun because it is simply better strategically for the goal of “winning the game,” which is typically something you kind of gravitate towards when you play a game. There are some design features that are just bullshit and should be gotten rid of, like “mash the x button to escape” or whatever (and I think some Souls grabs actually have that and I won’t defend that shit), but many of the practices that have survived to this day have reasons beyond inertia and gatekeeping for their existence, and calling for their removal with no interest in either what those reasons might be or what could be a genuine replacement is just masturbation.
On the plus side, you can pause Sekiro, so maybe you can give that one a shot. “Doesn’t that demonstrate that you should be able to pause in all of them?” Probably, yeah, at least if you’re in “offline mode”.
a self-imposed limitation is not at all the same as an external restriction.
It’s either a self imposed limitation for some users and inclusivity by default, or a design-imposed limitation and exclusivity by default. Considering I spend so much of my time arguing and fighting against against exclusion and for inclusion in every other part of life, I see no reason why games shouldn’t get the same treatment.
tests of skill and ability are inherently ableist. There are plenty of games that allow pausing, they’re the majority, even. Let people have some that don’t for artistic or ludic purposes.
I find hero shooters visually overstimulating and can’t play them. I could try to get those to stop being made or i can go play any of the thousands of other games that aren’t like that and let people who want and like them to have their fun too. I don’t like visual design of anime fighters, but there are plenty of fighters that aren’t like that i can go play. I don’t like to keep playing a game when i know i lost for 25 minutes because it’s depression triggering but other people like league of dota for some reason.
I and people who need to pause at all times are not under-served minorities.
“Let us have a little ableism, as a treat.”
The thing is, it doesn’t need to be either/or.
Or devs could do the same thing they’ve been doing for decades with difficulty levels. Before the start of a game, let users choose the difficulty levels and that could include whether or not they can pause the game. Users who wish to can then pause. This can be locked into the entirety of that playthrough. Problem solved.
Games almost never have to actually choose between ableism and the dev’s vision for difficulty or pacing or whatever the fuck. Just give people the option. Hell, it would encourage people like me who struggle with difficult games to experience the game the way I am able, then try it again with higher difficulty (without being able to pause) rather than simply never being able to experience the game in the first place.
Given the reasons you listed why you can’t play certain games, wouldn’t you appreciate it if devs made the game in such a way where you could still choose to play it in the way you can, and let others play it as is? Obviously this isn’t possible in all cases, and some while possible might require such a huge revamp of the game that it would effectively be a different game. This is not the case for simply being able to pause the game.
This isn’t a lot to ask of devs for large masses of people who live lives where they will have to step away from a game without notice but would also like to not be punished by the game for doing so or outright unable to play it because of that life.
i have enough games to play, i’m not put out by design features i don’t like or render a minority of games inaccessible to me.
a fuckload of books and movies don’t hold my attention, should everything be re-edited to suit my neurology?
you can’t have challenges for everyone without being somewhat exclusionary some of the time, and that’s fine as long as it’s optional recreation and there’s a wealth of other equivalent things we can do for fun.
the large masses of people who have to be able to pause at the drop of a hat are the default. offline singleplayer with no pausing is a rare aberration. You might as well ask for the spiciest food to cease to exist, to accommodate normal people, as though the vast majority of food is not spicy at all.
You sound like one of those chud gamers who thinks making games more inclusive for other people detracts from the purity of the game. It’s ablebist bullshit.
“There’s a fuckload of places around the city that are wheelchair-accessible, should every public building be re-engineered to suit me just because I’m in a wheelchair?” A book or movie “not holding your attention” is a completely different thing than if a book or a movie didn’t allow you to set it down or walk away from it. If a movie forced the people who wanted to watch it to do so entirely on the terms of the producer, like say, not letting people fast-forward through a scene with intense flashing lights, then yes, that’s ableist and that movie should be criticized for being ableist and a version of it should be made so people with epilepsy could watch it.
This is such a bullshit analogy that totally misrepresents what we’re saying. (“We” being those of us who think games should not be ableist). We’re not asking for spicy food to “not exist” in that we’re not asking for your precious games who don’t want people to be able to pause them to “not exist.” They can exist just fine, as I described above, it doesn’t have to be either/or, so you should stop pretending like it does. Just as a spicy food dish and a mild version of it can exist simultaneously. In fact it’s funny that you’d even use that as an analogy since every restaurant I’ve ever been to gives its customers the option to order a hot or mild version of whatever spicy dishes it has on the menu.
people are literally in here complaining about games that don’t allow pausing, saying that they should all allow it with no exceptions regardless of artistic intent or ludic effect.
this thread would not have happened if “they can exist just fine” was the premise.
ableism is inherent to challenging participants on the basis of ability. a challenge for some will be impossible for others, and some people will be unable no matter how easy the easy mode is or how low you put the basketball hoop. We have to reckon with that, inventing wheelchair basketball, or having a lower hoop for kids, or games that have no time pressure, but we don’t get rid of the NBA because I can’t dunk and we shouldn’t force every game to have pausing just because somebody might need to walk away.
I think my favourite implementation is Dead Space. All the inventory and map are diegetic and the world doesn’t pause to use them but the game does still have a pause function. Best of both worlds I think.