Masahiro Sakurai Talks About “Stress” and Enemies In Games!

Whether you realize it or not, when you truly engage in a video game, you follow certain styles or patterns throughout each gameplay experience. So it doesn’t matter if you’re a novice or an experienced gamer. If you play a game from start to finish, it’s because it’s triggered something that made you want to finish. In his latest video on his YouTube Channel, Masahiro Sakurai noted that while having enemies to beat in games can be essential for some, the “stress” of video games makes you want to finish things. But what does he mean by that?

Well, he notes in the video that when you play video games, you want to feel both accomplishment and relief for doing what you’ve done. To be “engaged,” you need a challenge to overcome. For many titles, that means putting enemies in your way and having you fight to progress, grow stronger, beat bosses to get new weapons and abilities, then repeat.

However, Sakurai notes that the key thing in this process is stress. You need to stress about the upcoming challenges to make you wonder how you will progress, even if it’s just a little. Then, after you grow and solve that problem, you feel relief and want to keep going. But Masahiro Sakurai wisely notes that not all games have enemies to fight. Instead, they bring stress to you differently, and then you work through them differently to get the relief you want.

The Just Dance series is an excellent example not named in the video. The “stress” the game gives you is the stress of trying to make all the moves to do the dance routine. The relief comes when you get a high score or nail the entire routine. But you have to work at it to make it happen. Plus, there are multiple difficulties on the songs that you can do to increase the stress and the challenge.

There are also multiple games, like Undertale, that give you the option to not use violence and instead try for a “peaceful” run for the game. Of course, you’ll do everything you can to stay on that side of things because you want to see where it ends, and thus the stress is high, but the relief is powerful if you accomplish it.

Video games are diverse, so you don’t need intense combat to make your game engaging and fun. Instead, you just need to invoke a need in the gamer to finish the title once they start.