I want to write about a game my friends and I became obsessed with briefly and almost simultaneously, and then dropped almost as quickly: Vampire Survivors.
The game lingers in my memory because it did something unique. Most games take the form of an archetype or mix of them: games like shmups (Raiden) and Monkey Ball are all about mechanical mastery, choreography. Slot machines are games of chance. Visual Novels are storytelling games. And so on1.
Good games tend to mix qualities of several. Some of my favorites: Binding of Isaac is a mechanical mastery game (bullet hell), mixed with strategic “deck building” and a heavy dose of chance. Chrono Trigger is a storytelling RPG mixed with a strategic battle mechanic and a puzzle solving mechanic.
What is Vampire Survivors? On the surface it looks like an action game, but once you play a bit you realize that the core mechanic is process management. Your character “shoots” at a set tempo with strength based on power-ups, enemy waves arise with increasing strength and volume at a set tempo, and your goal is to ensure your “defensive processes” are always stronger than the “attacking processes” of each level. You make early decisions about build and then “steer” your character’s development over time.
Technically speaking, the game’s process management is a “survival” mechanic, but unlike many survival games based on mechanical skill (dodging in tight situations, e.g.), Vampire Survivors is also a game of chance: your power is based on leveling up from collecting gems dropped by felled enemies, and from chests. When you level up, you get to pick one of 3 or 4 power-up options (and you can only collect a finite number of different powerups, after which all you can do is raise their level), lending the game a deck building mechanic, but the point of the deck building is to ensure your processes are ahead of the strength curve of enemies. So we can say it's a process management game with chance and deck-building elements.
Vampire Survivors gameplay takes place in 30 minute rounds, where your goal is simply to survive. Most of the “gameplay” is running around collecting gems, or in certain cases, sitting in place and watching your strength vs the enemies and thinking about what powerups you want to get. I have had 10-15 minute stretches of gameplay where I don't move at all, the game “happens” while I observe passively. Hence why Vampire Survivors is ultimately a “casual game”: you don't have to “do” anything but collect gems and pick your powerup, if you're playing well. I played it on my smartphone and it was fine. This lack of “active gameplay” is also why my friends and I all ended up dropping it eventually. It just gets boring.
But it took quite a while for it to get boring. It's always fun to discover new powerups and combos, but the element of mastery really comes down to being able to leverage that knowledge to enact a stable process. One of the worst feelings in the game is getting completely wrecked after the 20 or 25 minute mark, because your strength “capped out” within your chosen build, and suddenly you got overwhelmed by enemies that didn't stop getting stronger.
The fact of being a process management game gives it an unusual set of resonances with everyday life. It feels in many ways similar to how management actually works: you're stewarding a process that happens “automatically” (in reality: other people are doing the work) and you're threatened by a looming deadline. Will you make it? Or will your capacity to “deliver” collapse before the deadline, so you're overwhelmed? You have a few core levers that mean a lot when you select them (your initial build), but that then “play themselves out” (get leveled up) through the rest of the initiative, where you're mostly passive, ensuring that they continue to get acted on. This is, in a sense, a fundamentally weird position, where your job is really to know at the outset how your decisions will manifest a long time later. The fun happens in the partial-knowledge experimentation phase, where you, say, pick one item you know will become strong, but try something new alongside it, to see whether they happen to synergize.
The game's fundamental fantasy is the “automatic” nature of the attacks, akin to how Arcade Idea talks about the shop in Wizardry (1981) (italics mine):
the fourth thing in the Castle is all price tags: a trading post, or to drop the euphemism, a pawn shop. Capitalism is naturalized and all-pervasive, even in our capital-f Fantasy scenarios of the vaguely antiquated, to the point where your characters are born with a small fund of gold. It’s just enough to outfit themselves with suitable gear, especially if you pool your resources among your party or cheese the system by creating characters who exist to give away their money then get thrown away. (Sucks for them.) There’s no reason not to buy the best thing available except that you cannot afford it — don’t buy your thief a 5 GP dagger when you could get them a 15 GP short sword, or a 15000 GP +1 short sword. Not only are prices completely rational and stable, but items themselves reduce to nothing but math, easily compared on quantifiable apple-to-apple lines where a short sword is simply better than a dagger, not two different weapons for different ranges and situations. One could say this is the actual most fantastical element in the whole game, even a gesture towards the core of its fantasy: In this game, even magic is more rationalized and easy to reduce and understand through investigative experimentation than our own world’s science. It’s the reassuring simplifying dream of capital. The manual even makes a point of saying that the trading post, which is also the only place that pays you in any way and so comes the closest to being an employer, is the real winner in this society. Your adventuring party are more like laborers, miners where the trading post is the archetypical pickaxe middleman, and your success is playing out the Gold Rush fantasy of accumulation and self-improvement where an independent miner can become fabulously wealthy with the right combination of luck and determination.
Vampire Survivors takes the same fantasy but from the opposite vantage point: rather than playing as the laborer, “employed” by the shopkeepers, you play as the manager, who “employs” the automatic magical/rational processes of the game to… collect gold? Oh right: you can collect gold in-game and spend it on… more powerups, this time globally applied, at the shop. There’s gold coins on the screen, chests always contain gold, and there’s various other tricks to increase how much gold you get. Some players who’ve completed all the in-game achievements like to farm gold for fun. But it has little to do with the actual gameplay, besides making the game easier once you’ve bought a few global powerups. Gold is just there to “be accumulated” by you, for the sake of some abstract “shopkeeper” within the game’s main menu (and, later on, the aptly-chosen “jester” at the beginning of each level).
We can hone in a the specific element of rationalization within the “fantasy” of Vampire Survivors — it’s not just the shop, but the “automatic” quality of your play. You’re the boss whose reports are always perfect, they execute totally reliably and on-time, like robots that never break down. You only deal with setting the system up and handling the occasional contingency. It’s a sort of manager’s fantasy: only your choices matter, everything else can either be left to operate on its own, or is part of unchangeable “nature”. You reap the literal wealth of your stewardship, but you’re still beholden to other, more abstract masters: the shadowy figures controlling your parameters of play, deciding which powerups exist, how you get them, etc.
To extend the comparison even further, what happens at the end of the level? The enemies stop coming, and then a grim reaper appears who 1-hit-kills you, ending the level. There are a few particular builds that actually let you fend him off, and even KILL THE REAPER, which drops a few rare pickups and spawns another, white reaper who you can do absolutely nothing about, and kills you for real2.
The level always ends with a “game over”. The Reaper always gets you. Even when you win, you lose. You don’t live happily ever after. In fact, you don’t live at all. What you’re left with is a bucket of money and the choice to do it again. I’m reminded of The Gervais Principle’s depiction of the sociopath, the upper management who typically would spend all day running processes, as essentially soulless. As Venkat puts it in part 6:
That is what Sociopaths ultimately do with their lives if they survive long enough: generate amoral power from increasing inner emptiness, transforming themselves into forces of nature.
As a side-effect, they also manufacture transient meanings to fuel the theaters of religiosity (including various secular religions) that lend meaning to lives of Losers and the Clueless. This meaning is achieved via subtraction, through withdrawal of complexities that the latter are predisposed to ignore, leaving behind simpler, more satisfying and more tractable realities for them to inhabit.
Vampire Survivors is the fantasy of being a sociopath, in this sense: some other guy (the game developer, the real life sociopath, or something) hides the complexities from you, the player, through subtraction of all but essential elements of gameplay, so that you can embody a character who is a force of amoral power producing autonomous functions, creating a little orderly reality out of item choices and power ups, collecting money, acting as a force of nature, until the actual forces of nature (death) intervene and put an end to your little game. You can cheat death for a bit, but it will cheat you right back.
Speaking of which, who is the game developer? Some Italian guy named “poncle”. Why did he make it? Per Wikipedia:
He wanted to create Vampire Survivors because he wanted to manage a community, based on his past experience as being an admin for an Ultima Online server… Prior to developing Vampire Survivors, Galante had been a developer in the gambling industry, and he used his knowledge of how to use flashy graphics for slot machines as part of the allure for Vampire Survivors's chest-opening animations.
Based on the Reddit community, it seems like he succeeded. And like the old story of the computer circuit board containing a printed image of the manufacturing company’s org chart, the game where you play as a manager was in fact created by a man whose desire was… to manage a community. At least he has a sense of humor about it: the entire game is basically a collection of his in-jokes. One of the powerups “La Borra” is a reference to an Italian meme (per this Reddit post, which also has a lot of speculation about references), and, well:
The references to obscure Italian internet memes and old school Castlevania never end, and in a strange way make the game worthwhile. You can play it just to enjoy poncle’s idiosyncratic humor.
Anyway, it’s time for me to get back to my JRPGs. This was supposed to be a tweet but got way too long. Vampire Survivors is literally free to play on mobile at least, you can download it right now and see if you get what I mean. There’s also DLCs that cost (not kidding) $2 each. I was not paid in any way to promote this game, I just think it’s kind of cool. I’ll leave you with a short video to show you how it feels to hit the Vampire Survivors jackpot: the rare 5 item chest.
It could be fun to list out as many of these gaming archetypes as I can think of, but I’ll have to do that another time.
No, it doesn’t kill you in real life, but you can’t fight back at all. It’s a cutscene death.