I don't think the Activities thing on the PS5 is bad in itself, live your life or whatever, but I'm wary of the way it seems to elevate a particular conception of game design up to the level of a system-wide feature. https://twitter.com/patrickklepek/status/1333468566314754048

This is almost inevitable when you start blurring the line between in-game features and system features like that, really. I wonder what, if anything, Activities look like in games that are not open world or level-based action-adventure games.

To support the feature as it seems like Sony intends it, you have to be able to split your game into neat chunks of gameplay -- "quests" or "goals". What does the existence of such a system suggest to players about games that don't split neatly like that?

What does an "activity" look like in The Sims? In Spelunky? In XCOM? In Stardew Valley?

The games industry has a huge problem with flattening every game into an ever narrower band of acceptable and digestible experiences, training players to have ever more rigid expectations.

So I just see this feature and think "what game is going to get kicked around by reviewers or players for 'not supporting activities' even though they would break the design intent"

The other thing of course is, what design compromises are you making to be able to make those kinds of playtime promises to players -- saying "this will take 20 minutes" implies that your content and design have been regimented in certain ways, especially in a large game.

Sony's surveys, of course, come up with a totally valid description of symptoms but a corporation can never diagnose the real problem, which has little to do with game design and everything to do with the paving of leisure time into ever more work

That people largely can't play games without a lot of upfront information about how long a play session will take isn't really an intramural problem the games industry can solve, but Sony will try anyway in a way that may make games ever more bland and homogenous