Posted April 25, 2021 by Yi
When we move into the 4th week of the quarter, we start to explore the beauty of the asynchronous game. Although it is not relevant to the content of this play journal, I still want to share a quote from Hideo Kojima about the Asynchronous game.
When talking about the online co-op system of Death Stranding, Hideo Kojima said:
How does the concept of the chiral network differ from our modern-day communication?
It’s a “letter theory.” It wasn’t real-time before, in the past. For instance, a husband writes a letter from the battlefield a long time ago: “I don’t know when I’m going to die.” And he sends it, and it takes a couple months before it arrives, and the wife receives it and reads it. There’s a time when she thinks, “He might be dead.” The wife has to imagine what he was thinking at the time he was writing – and this was the communication then. Right now, it’s more real-time.
This is about caring for people. It’s not direct; I wanted to do that with the internet we have today. If someone puts a cup there in Death Stranding, you might think to yourself, “Did that person deliberately put it there? Did he just have to throw away the load? But you think about it. It’s like the letter theory. In this direct communication era, I wanted to create an indirect communication using the technology of today so you feel for others more. Like you used to, back then – the 20th Century, 19th Century style – when people had to think about others in communication. But nowadays people forget about it because we’re so direct. I can Face Time you any time. So, right now, if I see your cup, I can phone you and say, ‘Hey, what’s this cup for?” But in Death Stranding, you can’t. You have to think about it.
Now, when you place a cup after that experience, you have to think about, “What would people think if I put it here?” So I believe that this way, people’s feeling towards each other will deepen in Death Stranding because of how it’s connected.
Although the pure asynchronous game is nearly disappearing nowadays because of the fast-paced life technology brings us, the “caring” feature of the asynchronous game still attracts me.
Many successful games use asynchronous mechanisms to make player’s experiences better. My favorite games of all time are Nier: Automata (especially the Ending), Death Stranding, Sekiro, and Dark Soul. They all have asynchronous features that attract me so much.
This week, we played Hanabi synchronously and asynchronously on BoardGame Areana. I found this game really interesting because it requires players to think about the underlying message other players want to tell when they are sending a hint.
However, there are a couple of differences between the synchronous play and the asynchronous play of Hanabi on the website.
It is a highly engaging game experience. Although we are muted, we can still learn about each other’s feelings at the moment when someone made a move from the facial expression of us in the video. Unlike the physical version of the Hanabi, all the visual hints in the online version of Hanabi are easy to read. It is hard to imagine that we are able to play a board game with each other easily in this pandemic time.
The same thing happened when I played a face-to-face Hanabi with my friend. However, the engagement of the game becomes much stronger. Unlike the website version in which we can only hint at each other by clicking the buttons, we have to use our mouth to tell each other the hint. The tone, the facial expression, the confusing facial expression when someone draws a bad card gave us a bunch of extra information that does not exist on the online version.
The game mechanics of the asynchronous game of Hanabi is almost the same as the synchronous one, but we only have six moves per day. It extends the playtime, and we cannot get any real-time replies from other players during the game.
However, I was super busy during the days we played the asynchronous game of Hanabi, and something exciting happened in our discord chat.
Like the “letter theory” mentioned by Kojima, we care more about each other when playing asynchronously.
We are having a long period of playtime, and if someone does not move for hours and hours, I will start to think about what happens to that player.