Rise of the Jinglingkeys-like
DISCLAIMER: by its very nature, this blogpost is going to contain a whole lot of criticism of Balatro and, by extension, most games of its ilk. Rest assured, I do not believe Balatro or its developer are evil or unethical or that it's going to crawl out of your PC screen and kill us all. I do, however, believe that:
its gameplay is deeply unengaging, something which I suspect is by design, and I believe it deserves criticism for that.
it is illustrative of larger cultural trends that are steering the gaming industry and society at large in a direction I really don't like. Yes, really.
So, if you're the type of person who feels that someone criticizing art that you like is an attack directed at you personally, maybe you should skip this one and seek professional help while you're at it. To everyone else, who probably still thinks I'm full of shit but is at least willing to hear me out, thank you. You're the reason why I think taking the time to write this is even remotely worth it. I don't want to waste any more of your time, so let's get into the blogpost proper, shall we?
In the words of Fyodor Dostoevsky, I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. Yes, I confess. The initial motivator that pushed me to write this blogpost was spite. Not towards Balatro, although I do have plenty of gripes with it, but towards the reaction of a certain subset of Bluesky users to this blogpost. There is nothing that infuriates me more than reading, other than perhaps writing, impassioned criticism and then seeing some random schmuck dismiss it by going "That's just, like, your opinion, man". Yes, it is my opinion. I'm the guy who wrote the goddamn blogpost, of course it's my opinion. What do you think the goal of criticism even is? If your answer is that criticism should approach art impartially and with objectivity, I'm sorry but you have no idea what you're talking about. How are you supposed to approach art, a deeply subjective matter by nature, objectively? You can't. In art criticism, "objectivity" is just a word people use as shorthand for "general consensus". It's the mantra cowards repeat so they don't have to face the reality that their opinion doesn't come from observing objective reality, but simply from seeing what most people think and going with it. It's a convenient mask to hide how shallow you are.
Now, is my view of those people colored by the fact that I agree with the general thesis of that article? Yes, of course it is; I literally just talked about how it's impossible to be truly objective. Come on, try to keep up, man. At the same time, however, I'm not going to pretend that blogpost was perfect. I'm also not going to pretend I read all of it, because part of it is paywalled, but I do feel that, even if I agree with its thesis, its tone gets a little too spiteful at times and a lot of what is being discussed are feelings and vibes instead of more concrete dynamics. Not that that's inherently an issue, but I'm a practical person. So, rather than spite for witless internet commenters, I'm going to try to make that the main driving force for this blogpost. The goal of this piece is to try and explain why I feel the way I do about "self-playing games" by dissecting concrete examples. Or to fail and let someone else make a fool of me. Because that's the point of criticism, to invite discussion and analysis.
Now, my framework for this type of essay is usually the following: I pick two games, the game I want to bitch and moan about and a golden child who can do no wrong, and compare them. For the former role, you've probably already guessed which one I picked. That's right, the indie roguelite that took the world by storm, Balatro (the hyperlink is purely perfunctory, as I have no idea what rock you'd have to live under to never have heard of Balatro until now). For the latter, well, call it cliché but what game could I pick other than the roguelite classic: The Binding of I-
"Oh, here we go again!" I hear you say, "yet another retrograde elitist hopping on his soap box to tell us no good games have been made in the last fifteen years! Spare me!"
And you know what? Fair enough. In the interest of proving that, while I very much am an elitist, I am not retrograde, I'm going to pick a game that came out of early access less than a month ago: my sweet darling Quasimorph. If you have no idea what that game is about, I invite you to forget about this essay and go play it for yourself. I wouldn't even be mad, it's that good. But if you want a quick summary, Quasimorph is a game where you run a PMC in a futuristic hypercapitalist dystopia and take control of cloned super-soldiers completing contracts for their corporate employers. Imagine an extraction shooter, but grid-based, turn-based and actually fun.
"You silly boy," you say, eating grapes and fanning yourself with peacock feathers, "these two games are nothing alike! How could a comparison yield any useful information?"
To that I say: never call me that again. And also Balatro and Quasimorph are part of the same genre. Yes, really. They're both roguelikes. While yes, I do agree that "roguelike" as a term that has been diluted into meaning basically anything and the opposite of anything, if I started complaining about roguelike nomenclature, this blogpost would be longer than Crime and Punishment. Suffice it to say Balatro is a roguelite (a type of roguelike which has metaprogression, which I think is an incredibly stupid distinction to make, but whatever) and Quasimorph is a roguelike. If you're not convinced Quasimorph counts as a roguelike, I invite you to go play Rogue (1980) and then come back and tell me if it reminds you more of Balatro or Quasimorph.
The first iteration of this essay was a Bluesky thread from almost a year ago, which I probably typed while on the toilet. It was prompted by, of all people, Northernlion. I still watched Twitch streams at the time and, at one point, while playing some nondescript Steam NextFest roguelite, he starts going on a tirade about modern roguelite design. The long and short of it is that older roguelites, he cited The Binding of Isaac specifically, didn't usually let you reroll items: what you get is what you get and the two options you get are to take it or leave it; while in modern roguelites the whole game is about rerolling the store as many times as you can, hoping to find one of the three meta items that automatically win your run. Imagine my shock, hearing this from Ryan "Northernlion" Letourneau, the quintessential modern roguelite streamer. Imagine my shock in realizing that he was right! He was completely right! I was watching him play the videogame equivalent of junk food! Now, if you're at all familiar with him, you're probably not wondering what he did with the dazzling insight he had just gleaned, because you already know: nothing, really, he just kept playing the game and then never streamed it again. The only real change to speak of was that, after a while, he started streaming Isaac again, but even that was temporary.
However, that sudden revelation from the most unlikely of sources hit me hard. Anyone who knows my taste in games knows that the only thing I love more than traditional roguelikes (roguelikes that actually play like Rogue, that is) is pontificating about the Modern Roguelite, but until then I had just chalked that up to me being a bitter contrarian and had never thought much of it. But I had just witnessed the Modern Roguelite's strongest soldier agree with me on a point! Maybe I wasn't insane! And hearing those words was the push I needed to put into words a feeling I'd long had about that subgenre.
Suppose you're on a bad run of Quasimorph (you can mentally text-replace it with The Binding of Isaac if you haven't played it, the principle is the same). Just a complete dogshit mission. Your loot is terrible, enemies are all over you, you're taking constant damage from 5 different wounds and the quasimorphosis meter is ominously ticking up, far past any amount you could consider comfortable. At this point, you're probably thinking "well, I'm definitely not making it out of here alive" and most of the time you would be right. The thing, however, is that there's a chance. Yes, RNGesus undoubtedly screwed you over, but those facts only matter up to a point. Because you, the player, can overcome the odds with skill. No matter how much the RNG hates you, the only thing that can really defeat you is your own mistakes. So what you have to do is learn how to avoid making mistakes (and how to limit their severity when you inevitably fuck up regardless). That's where the fun comes from. Because, forgive me if this is a controversial statement, learning is fun. In fact, I'd even go as far as saying that most of the fun that can be had in a singleplayer videogame is a type of learning!
Now, let's say you're having a bad run of Balatro. The blind is an order of magnitude higher than any score your deck could ever hope reach or maybe you got unlucky and the boss blind just so happens to be the one that completely neutralizes all your jokers. By this point, you've probably known for a while that this run is not going anywhere. So! What now? Nothing, really. Your two choices are to eat shit and die or quit the run before that happens.
"Wait!" you scream at me, indignant, "you just said Quasimorph and Balatro are in the same genre! Does that not imply that making up for bad luck with skill is also possible in Balatro?"
And I thank you for that objection, my dear strawman, because that's exactly the point I intended to make. No, not really. Sometimes it is simply mathematically impossible for you to pass that blind. Balatro is a numbers game and no amount of skill can magically make your numbers good if they are bad. You can't pick your cards in a manner so skillful that you score above your deck's mathematical limit. You are fully constrained by that limit and there is no way to break past it. If that limit isn't high enough, then, well, maybe you'll get luckier next run. Because, yes, it is mostly about luck.
The items you find are random. That, by itself, is nothing new. All roguelikes have random items, that's, like, the entire point. The thing is that, while Rogue and Quasimorph are about making the most of the random garbage you find, Balatro and the current of roguelites it spawned aren't really about that. The items do all the work and if the items are not up to the task, then you're SOL. When I say this to people, their reply is usually that the real skill is in learning what cards to play and which items synergize with each other. That's a worthy counterargument, but I don't think it's good enough. First off, I don't think it's exactly rocket science to figure out that if your build boosts straights, then you should probably play straights. That's not learning, that's just reading what's written on the cards. Second, build-crafting in Balatro is just high-school math and that's on a good day.
The point of a game is to force a player to make interesting decisions. Choosing which jokers to buy in Balatro isn't an interesting decision because it's not a decision, it's a calculus problem. If you stop, look at your options and make some calculations in your head, it becomes immediately obvious that there is an obviously correct answer and every other answer is wrong. A decision that can be mathematically solved is not interesting, it's homework. Yes, all games use math on some level, therefore all games technically have a mathematically correct option, however in Quasimorph (or any game where you actually have to play your build) there is an element that always factors into any build-crafting decision you make: how much will I enjoy playing this build? The answer to that is not mathematically quantifiable, therefore, even if there is a Most Effective Tactic Available, sometimes you deliberately choose not to go for it because you feel like you'd enjoy something else more. That's not a thing in Balatro: every deck plays virtually the same, the only part that changes is the internal calculations the game runs. If you think this kind of approach is bad, I have even worse news for you: most players don't even do the math. Watch any streamer play it and you'll notice few people ever stop to consider the underlying math, they just operate based on a mental list of which items are good, which items are bad and which items go together. In other words, they're following a tier list that someone posted on Reddit (although, in fairness, this last phenomenon isn't unique to Balatro and it plagues many games across different genres, including, regrettably, The Binding of Isaac). One may argue that it's unfair of me to blame the developer for an obviously unintended behavior that players adopted by themselves. To that I say: no, it isn't. As a game designer, your job is to incentivize certain player behaviors and disincentivize others. If your game fails at doing that, I think it's entirely fair to hold that against it.
Despite all I just said, I do, however, believe there is one type of skill expression in Balatro and most of its copycats: learning how to reroll items as many times as you can. It's kind of obvious in hindsight that that would have to be part of the design. If you remove the reroll, the game breaks. If the shops are random and that's that, then doesn't that mean every run is a foregone conclusion? Doesn't that make every part of the game other than generating the seed completely perfunctory? Doesn't that become basically just buying a lottery ticket, but without even the incentive of winning real money? That sucks! How do we fix that? Reroll is the kind of solution you come up with when a devilish grin appears on your lips and you go "actually, we don't fix that". Think about it: actually fixing that problem would require us to alter the concept of the game so radically that we'd basically have to make another game entirely. So what's the next best thing? Well, buying a lottery ticket feels bad because your chances of winning are one in a billion. But what if you bought eight hundred million tickets instead?
While it doesn't directly address the core issue, rerolling works fine enough. Thanks to the reroll button, you can buy dozens of lottery ticket and, as long as you have one winner (that is, as long as you get the meta item that ties your run together), then your run is saved! It exponentially diminishes the number of unwinnable seeds and gives the player something they actually have to learn: tips and tricks on how to get as many rerolls as possible! Everyone wins, right? Right? Wrong. Sure, that provides the illusion of gameplay, but in the end am I not still buying lottery tickets? Have you ever heard of someone who won the lottery and thought "wow, that guy really earned that money"? Yeah, exactly. I want my losses, but most importantly my victories, to happen because of something I actually did, not because I kept pestering the RNG until it sighed and handed me a win out of pity. What's the point of a game like that?! Even actual, real-life gambling has a lot more skill involved! I could tolerate that kind of "solution" if there were other aspects of the game where I, the player, can shine, but as we've already discussed at length, there aren't any!
"So," you say, rolling your eyes, "if Balatro fails so spectacularly at being a game, then how come it's so groundbreakingly popular?"
Before I answer your question, I must first thank God that you're just a figment of my imagination, because if a real person told me that the fact that something is popular necessarily implies that it's good, I would probably physically assault them. Anyway, to answer your question, let's look at Balatro's Steam page and find out together! Its description calls it a "hypnotically satisfying deckbuilder" where you "trigger adrenaline-pumping, outrageous combos". Scroll down further and you'll find a paragraph encouraging you to "ignite a combo frenzy and turbocharge your poker hands, crafting electrifying, adrenaline-fueled synergies". Huh. Two references to adrenaline? That's odd. Isn't this, like, a card game? Playing bridge is fun, but I wouldn't exactly call it "adrenaline-pumping". Let's scroll down further. "Immerse yourself in Balatro’s distinctive psychedelic world. Let the synthwave soundtrack wash over you - wind down, escape the daily grind and prepare to enter the ultimate roguelike flow sta-
Oh. It's not trying to be a game, is it.
Balatro isn't a game. If I was writing this for any professional outlet instead of my own blog that no one reads, I would probably make that my title. As a cultural artifact, Balatro occupies a place much closer to a fidget spinner than to a videogame. As I'm sure the few remaining Balatro die-hards reading this have probably been yelling at the screen this whole time, people dont play Balatro because they want to think and make complicated decisions: they play it because they want to do the opposite of that. Balatro was designed from the ground up to be an addictive timewaster you play on your lunch break to forget that you have to go get groceries after you clock out and you really don't feel like doing that. Balatro is an excuse to look at some pretty colors and let the numbers trick your brain into thinking you're achieving something so it'll stop giving you shit. Balatro is what you turn to when all you really want is to turn your brain off and forget you exist for 30 to 40 minutes.
Personally, I never got the appeal of "turning your brain off", but I know I may as well be an alien in that regard and I won't deny I can get pretty far up my own ass about it sometimes. What I'm saying is that, in isolation, that isn't a bad thing. I don't like addictive timewasters, but they aren't evil. However, what does it say about how we live that people latched onto this specific format of game so hard? If an addictive timewaster gets made, that's normal. If a thousand addictive timewasters get made, that's also normal. If a good 70% of what's on Steam is an addictive timewaster and people keep begging for more of them, that's where I start to think that means something. Why do people want to waste their time so bad? Like, on some level I get it, your time is not really yours unless you have the option of wasting it, but surely that can't be all you want to do with your time… right?
I'm sure you don't need me to tell you, but people aren't doing well and they haven't been doing well for a while, at least since COVID happened. I'm extra sure I don't need to tell you how basically everyone has to work grueling hours in order to make ends meet. So when you get home from your 12 hour work day, a third of which was unpaid overtime, it's not that you don't want to do something that will actually make you feel fulfilled. You simply don't have the bandwidth for that, so you settle for the next best thing. You scroll Instagram Reels. You wearily stare at the algorithmicaly generated jingling keys in front of you, promising yourself you'll definitely start reading that book that's been sitting on your shelf. But you'll do it tomorrow, because you just don't have it in you to do it now. Or you play Balatro.
Now hold on, before you crucify me, I am not claiming Balatro is as bad as algorithmic social media. It is not. It is absolutely not. Algorithmic social media is the closest thing to the devil other than maybe Claude or ChatGPT and I think it's simply not possible to make a game that is that harmful to society, unless you somehow managed to make hunting people for sport a worldwide sensation. I'd also wager playing Balatro is a lot less likely to turn you into a nazi. That being said, they fulfill the same need, don't they? That need being software-assisted dissociation or, in other words, "turning your brain off", not because you want to and are free to, but because you feel you'll go insane if you don't. Plenty of people love to say this kind of past-time is popular because the unwashed masses are irredeemably stupid and are content to simply swallow whatever slop is spoonfed to them. I don't think that's true. I think that's a uniquely dismissive and mean-spirited way to think of your fellow man and if you earnestly believe that, you should probably do some soul-searching. If this sort of maladaptive behavior is incentivized at every turn in society, how can you possibly blame someone for falling victim to it? That'd be like walking up to someone who got run over by a car and scolding them for not wearing a fluorescent jacket when they walked out of the house. Not only does that place the blame on the wrong people, it's also anathema to finding an actual solution to the problem. It's the weapon of insufferable pedants who care more about pinning the blame on someone than actually improving circumstances.
"Wow, nuk," you say tearfully, "your words have truly moved me and I now realize that you were right all along! But what can I, a single person, do to solve this problem?"
I don't fucking know, man, I'm writing an essay on Balatro. Go unionize or something. Agitate for political change. Become a marxist. That can't hurt.
But in all seriousness, this discussion does leave us at a bit of an impasse, doesn't it? We are both aware that spending all your time wasting your time is a maladaptive coping mechanism that achieves nothing other than wasting your life, but we also know that the circumstances that cause this don't depend on you and you can't simply choose to do otherwise. So now what? Well, I have an answer, but you're not gonna like it.
How do you do something you want to do when you're too tired to do it? Do it tired. Yeah, I told you you weren't gonna like it. Yes, the world sucks right now and yes, it's not your fault. I was raised Catholic so don't worry, I'm qualified to absolve you. However, even if the world sucks, you still have to live in it. You still have to figure out a way to survive and maybe even live. Obviously, I'm not saying you should push yourself to the brink of exhaustion and end up hospitalized, but sometimes what we mistake for exhaustion is simple inertia. I've spent years thinking I'd lost the ability to devour entire novels in an afternoon like I used to when I was a kid, that I'm tired now and I simply don't have that amount of free time anymore. All of that is true. But recently I've managed to find some free time to dedicate to reading regardless. And guess what? In 27 days, I've already read nine books. Nine books is about three times the amount of books I was able to read last year. I didn't suddenly become smarter or more enlightened, I just set aside some time for it. You're probably scoffing right now, thinking that there's just no possible way for you to squeeze that time out of your busy schedule. I'm not saying you're wrong. But try it. I used to think the same and evidently I was wrong (and if you actually were correct in your assessment then hey, man, I don't make miracles, I write blogposts). You don't even necessarily have to read books. Use that time to do anything that makes you really think or really feel. Anything that you feel will enrich you as a person. And once you've done that, then, yeah, go play a run of Balatro, if you want. You've earned it.