From the ages of 12 to 17 or so, I thought I wanted to be a professional percussionist. In high school, I joined every rock band and school ensemble that would have me; I practiced an amount that I find, in retrospect, honestly impressive. Still, when I began to look into what going to college for percussion would entail, I realized that I just didn’t love it enough to practice as much as I’d need to.
It was something of a surprise, then, that I wound up playing drums in a touring band after college. The leader of this band did not write or record drum parts playable by a single drummer, so I had to adapt them, a practice which really forced me to consider what it is a good drummer does. Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that the drummer’s role (the drumroll?!) in a band is structural.
In big band-style jazz drumming, the drummer exists in large part to “set up” hits: to ensure big moments are well-articulated by playing a fill that rhythmically synchronizes the band. Usually this means making the moment before the hit clear, so everyone knows where to put the hit. It’s hard to discuss without getting a bit technical, but syncopation—rhythms that aren’t quite where you’d expect them—is fundamental to jazz music. The drummer helps coordinate and scaffold this syncopation, ensuring these counterintuitive or unexpected moments land with precision and feel. You have to play in a way that makes the logic of the composition clear both to the musicians and the listeners.
This concept doesn’t translate perfectly to rock music, but the central insight is the same. The drummer is kind of like the conductor—their goal is to ensure that the music is legible to both musicians and audience. This usually happens behind-the-scenes and takes a lot of subtle forms: the feel of a given fill; changing the way you’re playing the cymbals in order to sustain the build of momentum; dragging or pushing the snare respective to the rest of the kit depending on the desired feel. These are things listeners might not consciously notice, but they serve an important functional role. They make the song make sense. I was never the most technically accomplished drummer, nor the best timekeeper (see the old joke: how can you tell a drummer is knocking at your door? The knock speeds up), but I like to think I was capable of grasping the songs as a whole, understanding how to fold my playing under and around the song to focus energy and attention where they ought to be.
Rhythm serves this function across all art forms, I think, most clearly art forms which progress in time, such as narrative art. It orients and focus attention, like good architecture. And it does this by acting directly on our bodies. Rhythm is deeply somatic, maybe the most fundamentally somatic dimension of aesthetic experience. The heartbeat, the breath, sleeping and waking: our lives are conducted in and through rhythm, and art makes rhythm, like other dimensions of experience, formally approachable.
Rhythm, then, is a scaffolding—a framework; a syntax. It’s rhythm that makes dance music danceable. Comedy is fundamentally rhythmic—if the timing is off, a good joke will fail. A horror movie jump scare is a rhythmic incursion, an unexpected disruption of anticipated continuity. It’s like a contract drawn up when we weren’t looking, directly between the work of art and the unconscious mind. We usually only notice when the contract has been violated (“the climax was rushed”; “the beginning was slow”).
Like form in general, rhythm facilitates art: it is art’s precondition. It lays the foundation for the attention that comprises our experience. If the rhythm is off, the whole thing collapses.
I’ve said this many times before, but in early 2021 I played three video games in rapid succession that made me realize I found the medium deeply compelling: Dark Souls, Persona 5 Royal, and NieR: Automata. In retrospect, it’s probably not a coincidence that all of these games are acutely, specifically rhythmic. Dark Souls’s combat requires you attune yourself both to your character’s attack rhythms and to the rhythms articulated by enemies’ animations; at its best, it feels like an odd, stuttering dance, demanding careful attention to the push and pull of every encounter. Persona 5 Royal is a game which aestheticizes the rhythms of daily life: the interplay between work, school, leisure, sleep, and sociality are simplified and clarified, building methodically towards emotional and mechanical climaxes. And NieR, without getting too spoiler-y, thematizes the rhythm of completing and replaying a video game, the oddly Sisyphean nature of the “gameplay loop,” making the unconscious rhythms of the action RPG into material for thematic development and dramatic tension. (Not coincidentally, the music for all three is also real good.)
Like rhythm in general, games are also intensely, uniquely somatic. Designers and programmers go to immense lengths to dissolve the perceived boundary between the player’s body and the action on the screen. A good game feels good. It establishes a connection that, like rhythm, bypasses the conscious mind, connecting the player’s hands directly to the fiction of the game’s world. Good games leverage this connection in a towards aesthetic expression. Bad games usually wind up doing something else.
I play a whole lot of video games, but I typically don’t “binge” them. Generally, I dip in and out of a bunch of stuff at once, playing a particular game for between twenty minutes and a couple of hours, pausing when it feels natural to stop, leaving most of them unfinished. I wish I were a little less scattered, but I try to prioritize curiosity over completionism, and I often get more interested in a series or genre than a specific game. It is, as they say, what it is.
I did not play Diablo IV this way. I began on a whim after work on Friday—the expansion pack had just been announced, and it was on Xbox Game Pass, which I was about to cancel, so why not—and continued until very, very late at night. Then I woke up too early on Saturday and played all day, pausing only to discharge a small handful of absolutely necessary obligations, continuing, again, until very very late at night. I finished at some point on Sunday evening. All told, I had spent a little more than thirty of the prior seventy-two hours playing Diablo IV.
This did not feel very good, but I didn’t really feel I had an alternative. The game did the thing some games do where it posts right the hell up in the living room of my mind, forcibly displacing all long-term occupants, and the only thing I’ve found that consistently works when this happens is to smoke all the cigarettes in the pack as fast as I can: to trust I’ll get sick of it and pray it doesn’t take too long to work its way out of my system.
Without getting moralistic about it—and bracketing, for now, the awful ways game designers, very much including those at Blizzard, exploit human behavioral vulnerabilities for profit—I have found that some obsessive experiences like this leave me feeling fulfilled, and others leave me feeling disjointed and alienated. I do often feel guilty for “wasting time,” but I don’t think what I’m describing is reducible to that. Some of the games that get their teeth in me like this leave me feeling like I’ve had had a great experience. I’ve written before about 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim; I played that game in a similar three-day “binge,” but I remember that whole thing very fondly, because the game was gripping and engaging to me on every level. Or I played, like, 200 hours of Balatro, but it was genuinely enjoyable to try to wring as much as I could out of that game’s clever mechanics, and my time with it did draw pretty naturally to a close. (It helped that I could just have it on the screen while I was doing work.)
Diablo IV is a stunningly crafted and presented game. It feels, in pretty much every way, like a kazillion dollars. At their best, Blizzard is just such a force. I’m new to the Diablo series (though, as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve played many, many, many hours of World of Warcraft), but playing Diablo IV reminds me of watching the second Villeneuve Dune movie in theaters: here is a supremely confident artistic team blowing an apocalyptic quantity of money in service of a coherent, surprisingly specific vision.
Diablo IV has a story. It is a big, goofy, meticulous, ridiculous story. I really liked it! Given that it was my first Diablo game, I had very little idea what anyone was talking about (I Googled “Horadrim” at least twice), but it was still a great time. Like the presentation in general, the narrative parts of the game felt like peak blockbuster genre entertainment. The cutscenes are, in typical Blizzard fashion, lavish and spectacular, but even the moment-to-moment dialogue is generally well-wrought and involving, and the voice acting is wonderful.
I was struck in particular by the cinematography: most in-engine cutscenes in Diablo IV do this cool thing where the camera kind of dislodges from its isometric vantage and zooms in a bit, floating around the scene like an airborne observer. Other isometric games have done this, but it feels especially fluid and artful here, especially when it cuts against what I understand to be common-sense theatrical and cinematic scene blocking. A whole cutscene might go by and we’ll only see characters’ backs, but it doesn’t matter, because Diablo IV knows that it’s not a play or a movie—it’s a video game, and these scenes do exactly what an in-engine video game cutscene is supposed to do: take the reins from the player while preserving immersion.
Here, however, we get to what I regard as the game’s biggest problem. There is a fatal contradiction in the rhythms of Diablo IV. The story is pulpy and garish, yes, but it is patient, too, doled out methodically over the course of twenty or thirty hours. The gameplay, on the other hand, is viciously snappy, so fast-moving that that the experience begins to blur into an odd sort of trance, a permanent present of smashing and grabbing. If you bracket the problem of financial exploitation and microtransactions—a massive bracket, but bear with me—there’s no problem per se with the way the combat is built. It’s not exactly for me, but it’s nice to futz around with while listening to a podcast or whatever.
The problem emerges in the balance between gameplay and narrative. Even when the story was doing things I thought were cool, I found it difficult to engage with, because I was still in the Diablo Combat Zone, physiologically speaking: that weird, tired feeling behind my eyes, impatient to get back to crushing enemies in my avatar’s werebear paws and snagging treats to sift through back at camp. Interesting, emotionally compelling narrative beats approached, and I watched them pass like trucks from the side of the highway. What I’m talking about is of course a variety of good old “ludonarrative dissonance.” But instead of a conflict between the verbs of a game and the game’s thematic and narrative material, the dissonance was inside of me, like, physically: a bodily tension, somewhere near the back of my silly primate skull.
Here’s another iteration of the problem. Diablo IV takes place in a big, handsome open world. One of the fundamental appeals of the open world format is that the environment design allows the player to determine the rhythm of their gameplay in a freer, more improvisatory way. You can hang out, do a bunch of side quests, and poke around in caves—or you can bulldoze through the main quest and backtrack afterwards; or you can never do the side quests at all. A good open-world is both a focused experience and a meandering one: both fifteen and 150 hours.
Diablo IV seems to want to be this, but it’s hamstrung by its own design. I watched Noah Caldwell-Gervais’s excellent video retrospective of the Diablo series before playing the game (much of this review is indebted to it), so I’d heard that Diablo IV’s power curve discourages side questing by gating mechanical progression behind completing the campaign. Naively, I thought that was the kind of error they’d have patched out by the time I picked the game up.
The thing is, it’s not an error. By doing maybe 60% of the side quests in the first couple of zones, I leveled to the point where most of the back half of the game became trivial, even on the hardest difficulty available to me. (There are harder difficulties, but you don’t even unlock them until you finish the campaign.) I guess I could’ve, like, only used crappy gear or something, allowing myself to stay intentionally underpowered, but that felt silly: if a game gives me a tool, I’m going to use it. And besides, I liked screwing around with builds and gear; I’m not against that dimension of the game by any means. What this particular imbalance did, though, is prevent me from paying the kind of attention to the game that I felt it deserved.
Difficulty modes are so game-specific and subjective that I usually look them up beforehand, just to see what people say. When I looked up Diablo IV’s, consensus held that the higher difficulty “wasn’t worth it,” so I started on the easier mode. What I didn’t realize was that people weren’t saying the second difficulty tier “wasn’t worth it” because it wasn’t fairly tuned, or because it was frustrating in a way that felt pointless. What they were saying is that the second tier wasn’t worth it in terms of the rewards it provided.
Getting rewards is fun! No beef with rewards. But I wanted the game to be more difficult not so it would spit out differently-colored items, but because I wanted the gameplay to feel rhythmically and thematically of a piece with the narrative. I’m not that good at video games, and I don’t care that much about mastering them, but it really felt to me like Diablo IV’s story and pacing demanded some level of friction. You’re fighting some of the most powerful entities in the universe! Besides, dungeons and exploring occupy so much gameplay time, and I wanted that time to keep me engaged.
Again: I’m new to Diablo, and I’ve never knowingly bought a season pass for a game in my life, so I’m probably just not the target audience. But Blizzard has been a part of my life for nearly as long as I can remember—since playing Warcraft II as a kid at my uncle’s house, then Starcraft and Warcraft III on my family’s kitchen desktop, then World of Warcraft on and off for literally twenty years, in what is still probably my most intense engagement with any cultural object ever. As reprehensible and ridiculous a company as they are, as checkered as my past with them has been, I’m fully prepared to consume and enjoy the products they create.
Diablo IV doesn’t frustrate me because it’s “mindless.” I put sixty hours into Vampire Survivors, a game without an action button in which the end goal is being able to just stand there while everything around you explodes. If anything is “mindless,” it’s Vampire Survivors—but Vampire Survivors rules, in large part because it is exactly itself: a coding exercise built from a royalty-free Castlevania asset pack; nothing more, nothing less. Diablo IV frustrates me because the rhythm and pacing of its gameplay made me physiologically unable to access the rhythm of its narrative and world.
There’s a sense, I think, in which Diablo IV is fundamentally unplayable—not because it’s hard to play (I could, and did, play it literally all day), but because it sabotages itself on a structural level. The game presented me with great story beats it had made me completely unreceptive to, in a wonderful world I wasn’t actually supposed to engage with.
I have avoided discussing the microtransactional elements of the game because I didn’t pay any attention to them. They’re not necessary at all for the main campaign. But it’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that Blizzard built the game this way so we’d hurry along to the endgame, where microtransactions begin to matter. I’m sure the endgame is fun! I’m definitely going to keep noodling around in the game at some point. It’s a very fun game! It’s just not quite a great one. There’s a great game inside there, somewhere. But that game is not for us. Something something offspring of angels and devils, etc.