What Deadlock's Butter Cookies Taught Me About Soul
Oh! These cookies!
Put That Cookie Down! NOW!
I’ve been playing a lot of Deadlock lately. By a lot, I mean an excessive amount. There was a huge update that added a new mode, changed the UI, re-worked the bases, added new items, then a balance patch came out and they’re also rolling out two new characters per week. They’ve been busy over at Valve, and I haven’t, because I’ve been playing Deadlock instead of being busy.
There’s a lot of new things to be excited for in the game, but today I’m going to ignore all that and focus on possibly the least important thing in the update: a little tin of butter cookies.
It’s one of those Danish butter cookie tins you get during Christmas. At least, that’s when I usually get them. I’m sure they’re on sale year-round, but it’s something I don’t notice outside of its designated season. Like candy corn. Sure, you can grab a bag of it at any point, but it’s physically invisible to me until the first of October.
That little tin of cookies got me thinking about “soul”. Not the metaphysical kind, but the “soul” in a work of art. It’s a term that gets thrown around a lot, like its sibling “slop”. Two vaguely defined terms that, when used, mean whatever the speaker wants them to mean. The listener gets to join in on the interpretation, too. They get to project anything they want onto those terms. It’s a linguistic Rorschach test.
I’ll try my best to define what soul means to me, with a few examples, counter examples and a digital tin of fake butter cookies.
What is Soul?
Soul is when you can tell that something was made by a person with a specific vision and intention. When you watch a movie, or play a game with soul, you can see someone’s fingerprints on it.
It’s also kind of related to effort and, to a degree, uselessness. The phrase that comes to mind is “they didn’t have to do this” or, as the kids say, “they didn’t have to go that hard”. Going the extra mile.
I say kind of related to effort because not every soulful detail has to be a thousand-hour process. It can be something as simple as a character waving at the camera when you look at them, like in Hot Shots Golf Fore (which I didn’t mention in the review for some reason). In the review for that I made a comment that a low poly cow in one of the courses has more soul in it than any Sony published game after 2012.
The developers didn’t have to include that little cow, but they did. It adds personality to the course it’s in. It’s an entire cow with less polygons than Kratos’ index finger, but what it lacks in graphical fidelity it makes up for in artistic detail. A 3D modeler sat down and thought “how can I capture the essence of a little cow in just a few triangles?”. Then they put it in the game, and gave it some moo sound effects, and made it react to you when you look at it. Why? Because, if the player sees a cow on the side of the course, they’re gonna want to take a closer look at it, and if they do, the cow should do something.
Following things to a conclusion is also an aspect of soul. Thinking that, if something happens, something else should follow. If the player keeps interacting with the same NPC over and over, of course the NPC is going to get annoyed, and they should react accordingly.
Old shooters had soul, in the sense of small consequences. In Quake, if you use the lightning gun under water, you get electrocuted, because of course you would. You’re using lightning in water, so you should get electrocuted. Same with the old Build Engine games. Duke Nukem is full of interactables to a ridiculous degree. You can piss in a toilet, use a sink, see yourself in a mirror. Why? Because all those little details make sense to create a more believable world. The old Far Cry games had details such as grass and other foliage burning when you used a flamethrower near them. Someone tested the game and saw that you could use fire next to dry grass and thought “that would catch fire. You know what? It should.” A lot of modern games lack those little details. When was the last time you saw a functioning mirror in a game?
Nice little touches that show that someone was thinking about them when they were made. Details that someone less interested wouldn’t bother with, because they’re unnecessary. To me, that’s a large part of what soul is, but it’s not all of it.
So just attention to detail?
In a reductive way, yes, but not always. There has to be a vision guiding the details.
Sometimes “soul” can be a synonym for charm.
Some examples
Here are some examples from previous reviews.
In my review for Wanted: Dead, I said it had the “soul and jank of an unfettered creative”. Wanted: Dead doesn’t have a particularly strong art direction, and it’s pretty generic in its themes and setting, so why do I say it has soul? Because it’s a bizarre mess that could only come from someone with a clear vision. A team whose reach exceeds their grasp. They wanted to make a big action game with cutscenes and lore, but made a low-budget absurdity. It’s the kind of weirdness that comes from people who wanted to make a game at all costs.
Its soul comes from its gameplay identity, too. Soul isn’t just about art, effort or extraneous details. It’s about a vision. A lot of games don’t have a solid, core mechanical identity. They do stuff and that’s it. Staple on some souls-like combat because that sells. Add some RPG elements, and of course it needs a parry. Back in the early 2010s every shooter had to have a two weapon limit, hit scan enemies, regenerating health and a state-mandated turret section. If you compare the first three Ninja Gaiden games to Ninja Gaiden 4, you’ll see that the core mechanical identity is gone.
In my review for Pizza Tower, I said “There is more soul in one single frame of Peppino’s animation than there is in the entirety of Forespoken (sic)”. That one’s easy. Pizza Tower was made by one guy, with help from two music composers. It’s a very specific, singular vision. The comparison to Forespoken is an easy pot shot. That game has nothing going for it. It has a weird unnecessarily realistic art style with unimpressive character designs, generic quipyy dialogue, set in a fantasy world that looks like they took a can of store brand Fantasy and poured it on premade assets. Comparing Pizza Tower to Forspoken is like comparing… well, like comparing Pizza Tower to Forspoken. It doesn’t get any more unfair than that.
On the subject of En Garde! I wrote: “It perfectly captures the swashbuckling spirit with an endearing cast, excellent music, great visuals and a whole lot of soul.”. This one’s a lot more vague out of context. The game itself has a very solid identity as a swash-buckling saturday morning cartoon. The characters, plot, voice acting and music all contribute to this feeling. The most impressive part is how the gameplay also manages to capture that fantasy while still being a cohesive package with mechanics that work well and make sense. You can swing from chandeliers, kick enemies away, trick them by putting pots on their head. Storm a busy banquet hall and throw an entire roast turkey at someone. It takes all the tropes and quirks you’d expect from a cartoony adventurer and puts them into the game, and it lets you do them. The developers love this kind of thing, and it shows in-game.
In my impressions for Highguard, another Forspoken-like, I said it was:
“A soul-less product churned out to maximize profits while limiting risk. It touts it’s from the developers of other, better, more successful games, but it doesn’t have any trace of their magic. This game might as well be AI-generated.”
That one is self-explanatory. Highguard takes every fantasy cliché and mixes them together until it’s an unrecognizeable mush. It has vague Chinese elements with some of its character designs, but then it throws technological bits on them, then it tries to make it look medieval because fantasy is medieval, but the armors are too perfectly machined and detailed so they look modern. Then it throws actual sci-fi technology in, but it has Celtic influences here and there, then the maps look like they take place in a stock photo of a grassy field. The game’s currency is crystals, and they look like what you’re imagining right now, with no variation. Just crystals. It’s an unidentifiable mess of everything at the same time, with an uncanny level of polish that sands off any rough edge, making sure there isn’t a trace of personality visible.
Hey, that sounds a lot like AI.
Some long-running franchises are good examples of soul vs soulless. The Tony Hawk franchise was always a commercial product, but it was steeped in the skating culture of the time. It had the kind of music they’d listen to, collaborations from brands and magazines in the scene, an irreverent sense of humor and it translated skateboarding into a fun arcadey game. Then Pro Skater 5 came out and you could tell no one cared. The game lost all its edge, the physics were changed, features were removed and it felt like some generic game wearing Pro Skater like a skinwalker. Kickflip? More like asset flip.
The Pro Skater remakes are a good example of this, too. They sand off the game’s edges and change what made them unique. It removes the blood, which you could say was unnecessary, but it’s part of the original. They altered how the games play, changed tricks. It doesn’t feel the same.
The Grand Theft Auto remakes infamously ruined their games. They went over the entire thing, using AI to upscale things for better resolution, completely demolishing any artistic details from the original. The limitations made the artists make specific decisions, and the machine upscaling just shellacked over them with two pounds of computerized slime. It shipped full of bugs because hey, there’s a deadline to meet, and they can’t be bothered to mess with all of that. Besides, no one’s going to notice, it’s just a bunch of inconsequential detail, right?
What about the butter cookies?
The butter cookies were what started this train of thought. It’s just a little tin of cookies on a table. Why do I think it’s worth mentioning?
The little table is there because of the new character event, where you vote for who you want to come out first. There’s a ballot box with some ballots showing a picture of each character. The box is on a table, and the table has a little tin of cookies, some cups and a coffee pot.
There is no reason to have all that in the game, but it’s there. If you’ve ever been at a meeting, or a small impersonal social event, the kind you don’t organize for leisure; something like a PTA meeting or a small orientation, you’d know there’s always a table with some refreshments. Someone at Valve thought to put the ballot box on a table in a physical space in the hideout to make it look more interesting. Then they thought “they’re going to want some refreshments. Let’s put some there”.
They had a weirdly specific vibe for that set-up, a quick meeting with refreshments, a singular vision. It came from someone’s experience. When I saw it, I knew the feeling. I’d been there before. The little cookies don’t add anything to the game in a practical sense. They didn’t have to do that, but someone thought it would be nice if there were some snacks on the table, and they thought about what specific kind of snacks, and what the cookie tin would look like.
To me, that perfectly summarizes what I think soul means.
QUACK!
Gosh, that cow deserves to be 3D-printed.