The hole at the center of the mech, or: why isn't it about the people?

July 16, 2025

Created as part of Prismatic Wasteland’s Holes Blog Bandwagon, in which we all write about holes. Some holes are more literal than others, I suppose. And maybe one of these days I’ll get out of the hole that is “devlogs/retrospectives about my own games”, but not today.

“When you get right down to it, (mech game, show, etc etc etc) is about the people.” If you’ve done anything remotely adjacent to mecha stuff, you’ve read some variation on this. I roll it out as a halfway-joke every time someone brings mecha up because it’s such a combination of “cliche” and “John Madden statement-obvious”. Like, yes, it’s not literally about the walking war machine itself, it’s about the interactions of various people, much like every other story ever that involves people clashing against each other. And yet…APOCALYPSE FRAME is not “about the people”, at least not by focus. I barely touch upon the Aces at all, to the chagrin of a lot of people. What an oversight!

The obvious move is to add in more Ace stuff: if not explicit pilot systems, then at least relationships, bonds, something that ties characters together or to larger things. (Or at least it’s obvious to a lot of people who have suggested that I do it.) Relationship mechanics can be fun in games! I like them a lot. I have them in Valiant Horizon, for instance, and I think they’re great there. But I don’t have them in APOCALYPSE FRAME: mechanically, APOCALYPSE FRAME is pure LUMEN-esque combat and setup for LUMEN-esque combat and exceedingly little else. So what’s up with that?

For full disclosure, at one point I had considered adding in some kind of relationship system in an expansion or revision. I decided against it, however, because when I playtested, I noticed something very interesting happening. At the beginning of an APOCALYPSE FRAME game, players are invited to flesh out their characters not via some extensive character generation, but by creating NPCs who have opinions about them and vice versa: other pilots, maintenance staff, civilians, branch heads, the general members of their Collective. They end up being defined by who they know and why, with the expectation that between missions, they’d do more. Whenever we described what they would do between missions, sometimes a player would have a good idea about something or wanted to focus on a person, but a lot of times they wouldn’t, and we’d just move on to the tactical bits, characters left unfleshed. This, in turn, made me think harder about what I wanted the game to do and be.

When a rule isn’t present for something, one thing that can arise from it is that it gets talked through more because it can’t be reduced down.¹ There’s a second phenomenon, though, which is that when an aspect that’s conceptually very important isn’t present in an otherwise rule or procedure heavy game, it can get ignored. This is very frequently a bad thing, which is why those kinds of rules exist! But sometimes we can weaponize that fact to make a point, however subtle it may be.

As a preface to where I’m going with this, there are two relevant things I want to say about violence and war. First: war, even the most justified one possible, is a dehumanizing experience for everyone involved. Soldiers usually have to view their enemy as something lesser or really keep their eye on some greater goal to continually justify one of the most unspeakable acts a human being can do to another. Proper training to wage war “well” molds people into being reactive and following orders, acting less like a person and more like part of a greater force. Any kind of revolution can do this too, as the needs of the individual give way to the needs of the collective (capitalized or otherwise). Second, violence is also a great source of entertainment. There are a lot of game mechanics built around violence, and war, and eath. You typically kill a triple digit number of people in any given Armored Core mission within the space of a low single digit number of minutes and it feels great. Competition and violence are extremely gameable and gratifying and a LOT of the AAA video game industry is built around this fact. In APOCALYPSE FRAME, as with many power-fantasy games, you are empowered by violence and it feels very good to encase 30 goons in their metal coffins.

When someone feels like one part of their life is really rewarding and is what they SHOULD be doing, they’ll frequently neglect the rest. In APOCALYPSE FRAME, the lack of a social mechanic means that as a player has a lot of things driving them to focus on doing and preparing for violence; and no real drive towards social-anything, or towards thinking about character motivations, or even survival really. In that same way, the player is drawn away from further defining their character and their interactions with the people who surrounded them towards the mechanics, slowly becoming focused on the bit that feels good to the extent of fully losing the plot.

Now, you could just as easily mechanize this aspect as well, of course, and plenty of games do that: Delta Green, for instance, is all about snapping those bonds between characters over time. But here’s the conclusion I came to for this game: I feel like that’s a little too up-front and exculpatory for what I want to accomplish here. A mechanical acknowledgement and systemization brings the character to task for their neglect just fine. What it doesn’t do is indict the player. In contrast, I’m not so merciful. And a lot of players will never pick up on this, especially in short-term games, and that’s not only fine but good; but especially over time, my hope is that players will understand what incentives are pulling them towards, and decide how that makes them feel.

I think you might have guessed already if you read this far, but there’s not actually a hole at the center of the mech; this one’s about the people. It’s just also about the players.

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