Anti-AnimAction Manifesto / Pro-Environmental Action Manifesto

Anti-AnimAction Manifesto / Pro-Environmental Action Manifesto

not a moral condemnation of AnimAction devs or enjoyers, I just want to see less of it

written for Manifesto Jam 2026

1. The current state of action games leans too much into Animation Primacy, where the majority of the action is focused around quickly reacting to visual cues in order to jump/dodge roll/parry immediately.
2. Animation Primacy means that a successful fight ends up resembling Anime or a Movie: it's the elements of Movies or Anime that are most "prominent" or "primary", hence "Animation Primacy".
3. Let's call Action Games with Animation Primacy: "AnimAction Games."
4. In AnimAction games high-speed reaction times are often demanded, which is why they often use RPG systems to let players get around the quick-reaction-times, despite this often damaging the core action experience rather than just using difficulty modes.
5. The "point" in AnimAction games could be argued to not even be the action itself, but simply overcoming some flavor of high difficulty, which also drives particular narratives about overcoming some kind of physical adversity. AnimAction drives action games to be about this feeling of "overcoming a challenge" instead of letting players have a consistent experience with physical sensation in a game.
6. AnimAction games can give thrilling movie-like experiences, but in its resemblance to Movies/Anime, limits the design space of games to standing in the shadow of Movies and Anime, it also limits the designers to focusing on design elements that are always visible and quickly reactable. This is why action games continue to put most of their budget into expensive animations, models, visual effects. 
7. One could view AnimAction games as an offshoot or overlap of the Movie/Animation industry at this point, although I'd argue that Animation Primacy in games might fall short of Anime/Movies themselves (which are able to more deeply explore their particular visual language: animations don't simply have to be put towards the end of making a parry feel really cool or an enemy being really imposing)
8. In an AnimAction game, the player is acting out their role in an elaborate cutscene: the knight running away from a dragon breathing fire, the samurai parrying a sword swing at the right time.The player is trying to 'complete a shot' of a movie.
9. AnimAction forecloses the future of what can be done with Action, because the only path for AnimAction is simply to make more amazing animations, elaborate movements, with similar narrative themes.
10. An alternative to AnimAction already exists, Environmental Action. You may have also seen this in the form of "positioning-heavy combat", but as I recently learned this term "positioning" can be confusing
11. Environmental Action is action games that think more about the environment/level/space/arena/life itself
12. Rather than players mainly responding to single threats in the form of visual tells, players are Reading the Environment to figure out where it is safe, moving in and out of shifting zones of risk that are more defined about what may happen soon than what is being immediately telegraphed
13. The act of "Reading the Environment" (or "feeling the environment") is more invisible, harder to pin down. It's like trying to figure out where to position yourself on a tennis court. Or where to safely walk or stand when crossing a city street. It's like trying to figure out how best to walk through a crowded train station, it's trying to figure out how safe it is to hike up a slope or balance on something. It's like figuring out how close is too close on a first or second date. The strange sense of distance from sitting near a crush. The AT field of fear that emanates from the principal's office when you fucked up and have to go be reprimanded.
14. Environmental Action, then, deals more in how we "Read/Sense/Feel the Environment" in everyday life: it more holistically draws from our human, lived experience in physical environments, where we are constantly adjusting and reading and responding to what's around us. It is broad and deep
15. Environmental Action in practice does tend to be used in "defeat the enemy" scenarios, but I think it could be broader. I can't foresee what it could be used for. I guess as I write this, I realize I'm pushing for an approach to action that integrates the environment more, something like how ImSims like Thief encourage understanding building layouts.
16. Environmental Action, which encourages a kind of unity/holistic ness within the game (between the player/threats/environment), is something that many games tend to lose as they shift towards being just about really impressive visuals 
17. Some examples of environmental action: For example in a beat-em-up game you might be trying to reposition or close off threats from enemies before things get too chaotic, sometimes utilizing the environment to your advantage
18. In some of the Souls' series boss fights you might be heavily thinking about using the environment to an advantage: running up the stairs in a capra demon fight. Fighting some enemies people often use the environment to hide, which ties the player's memories more to the whole 'unit' of level+enemy+player, vs. forgettable circle arenas
19. In Angeline Era your best strategy is reducing and shutting down initial chaos before you allow too many mistakes to add up, sometimes eking out advantages through walls or higher terrain
20. Environmental Action is about trying to understand the way different parts of the environment relate to what's going on in the game (in traditional action this is usually like reading the shifting Zones of Risk in the level)
21. Environmental Action can also exist in an AnimAction game (e.g. Silksong's enemy arenas, the occasional souls boss )
22. Environmental Action is more capable than AnimAction of representing and drawing on the actions we take in everyday life, even if that might be through more metaphorical means
23. To put it more academically, the threats a player faces in Environmental Action are more abstract (i.e., more invisible, harder to describe) than AnimAction threats (although yes, at the end of the day they may both be you aiming to hit an enemy with a sword)
24. Another type of genre that "abstracts" threats would be turn-based RPGs, and we can see how they have a wide range of interesting metaphors and artistic ideas in what the various numbers and abilities of an RPG party can mean. It's also why when RPGs turn to AnimAction - Paper Mario, Expedition 33 - they more literally turn into movies or anime and lose some of the value of their more metaphorical number systems
25. Consider again the mind games that people play in fighting games, real martial arts: this is inherently already a type of well-developed Environmental Action: players consider their spacing, possible threats, even if to an outside viewer it might look like not much is happening
26. In other words, Environmental Action could be seen as a kind of "AbstrAction": by moving away from - or 'abstracting from' - the literalness of 'parrying a sword slash' or 'jumping over a laser beam cue', designers gain more access to potential artistic richness to explore, because there are so many ways humans relate and respond to their environment, and in each of those relations are abstractions that could take form or be transmuted into action games, or possibly not even about defeating enemies.

Melos Han-Tani 2026/06/14