The Cargo Cult of Game Mechanics
acko.net
acko.net
Freedom and choices can be used as artistic elements. I'd cite e.g. Saya no Uta or Phantom of Inferno as the purest form of this - the interactivity of these "games" is absolutely minimal from a conventional "gaming" point of view, but it's vital to the narrative. You couldn't make these as movies, because the whole point is to make you complicit in what's happening, because the outcome is a result of your choices.
But not every story has to be about such things. Many of the best-loved gaming classics - Ocarina of Time, or even FF7 - are those cinematic games, that maybe have puzzles (almost minigames, really), but where the overarching narrative is purely linear.
If you can take a movie, or a movie-like narrative, and by sprinkling a few puzzles or quicktime events turn it into something more engaging, a better way to tell your story - why the hell not? Why is that not a perfectly valid form? Criticizing a game for being cinematic seems as pointless as criticizing a sculpture because it could have been done as a painting.
I guess having a flexible system of optional plots is better than no plot whatsoever.
This eclipses and outweighs what I would have to say.
I think the author of the article, in those terms, was saying that the experiences created by recent games are often, and more and more, far inferior in quality; I've followed the correct sequence of buttons, I am rewarded with a scene of my character doing awesome things. If done well, I might even feel a tidbit of attachment and of feeling that this was the result of my success. But it's not the experience of being a super-spy in a high-tech facility. It's the experience of seeing a super-spy do stuff after I complete my homework, and I will have more homework to do so the super-spy can go on to do awesome things.
The problem is that these lower-quality experiences still sell better, often because they abuse certain hacks or dopamine bypasses of the human brain, without necessarily reaching all the way through to what makes an experience fun and pleasurable for the player.
Of course, to make such an argument successfully, you first have to convince people that humans do not always act optimally rationally, and then that humans do have such "hacks" and twists that control what they want and do (which in turn requires an audience to be convinced that brains control actions, not "the soul" or some other immaterial entity). Think that's a high bar? It's not even the start.
We experience games very differently as adults than we did as children. Partly because of the child's mind, but partly because we no longer have the kind of time to completely pour ourselves into a game like we used to. I remember playing Master of Orion 2 for so long that I would hear its music in any kind of white noise.
No modern game, no matter how good, can measure up to that kind of adolescent commitment to a game.
The opposite of this would be something like Skyrim, where you are plopped down in the middle and proceed to basically hop around randomly, while individual quests are quite limited, repetitive, and linear (99% of a dungeon quest is pressing forward through the tunnel towards the HUD marker) compared to the scale of the world.
Perhaps the author never heard of them (in which case: I want a rock like that!), or more likely, didn't play them and did not want to speak from hearsay, or even more likely, simply didn't afford a thought to them while in the middle of their rant-typing-spree.
I'd grant them that Bioshock shares many of the elements that are praised about System Shock 2. Bioshock Infinite sounds like a great example of sequel gone wrong on the aspects the article's author dislikes.
There's no inventory management system, there's little stealth ability, there's no threat of player death, there's no backtracking, there's no maps, etc.
System Shock 2 got a lot wrong, but I don't think it's worth mentioning the "spiritual successors" from a design perspective, as they're strictly a step backwards.
Basically, less stuff doesn't always mean worse design.
From a design standpoint, removing the inventory and skills system (and replacing it with a clunky plasmids/tonics/hat system) removed the ability to permanently change your character and evolve them, and also to easily temporarily change out your skills and abilities. Cybermodules (skillpoints) in SS2, once spent, never come back. You can't respec, and so if you decide to build a melee or stealth character, you really have to develop it.
In Bioshock, though, you can switch out components and plasmids and upgrades, and in Bioshock 2 you can do much the same--in effect, an extended inventory system like the chests in Resident Evil, and a clunky mechanism to use. The character never undergoes irreversible build changes, and you can't just drop into inventory and switch out tonics if they're not what you want, like you could in SS2.
Speaking of inventory management, there is never a point in Bioshock where hoovering up random shit off the ground is a bad idea, so why even make it an option? It might as well just be an automatic pickup ala Doom. SS2 had things that were junk or weren't useful--it was a richer, more interactive world in some ways.
In both Bioshock games, you end up with a limited number of weapons to use, wheres in SS2 you can carry around as many or as few as you'd like, depending on how you decide to allocate your inventory. Weapons in SS2 have more pronounced damage types. Melee weapons in SS2 require a dedicated character build, whereas you can bumble into an endgame-useful game-breaking wrench build very quickly in Bioshock.
The removal of text fallbacks for logs in Bioshock made it harder to rapidly review events and piece things together, and overall there were many fewer logs than in SS2.
The inability to use stealth to bypass fights and the relative surplus of ammunition meant that cinematic combat was the main workhouse of the Bioshock games, whereas SS2 played more similar to a survival horror RPG.
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Those are just some of the things that streamlining of the design did to the games, with the end result that the Shock lineage devolved into fun and competent cinematic shooters. I'm not saying that they're bad games, I'm saying that their design has regressed so far that it is basically not worth mentioning in the same breath as their predecessors.
System Shock 1, for what it's worth, was an amazing example of design ideas that never got much love, and likely represent another evolutionary dead end. :(
To an extent, this might be attributed to the simplicity of engines and level editors at the time (I don't think I've seen an easier map editor to use than Build), but level design has definitely been dying over the past decade or so. Procedural generation is set to kill it off completely, but at least it can still offer non-formulaic environments. Potentially.
As a different example compare early Burnout with recent Burnout games. The early games gave you tracks you had to drive on. If you failed it was really quick to try again. Later Burnout gives you a city to drive around, with tracks overlayed on it. You have to be at a certain point in the map to trigger the start of each event which sucks when you're driving back to the start to restart the event.
Over time, this joy faded in the games I played. I can intuitively feel why this is the case: whenever I start playing a new game, I already know most of the rules, or at least I can figure them out from the first few levels. Floating things? Oh, just a Flying Enemy Trope. Glowing box in the corner? Health Kit Trope. Where does that door go? Nope, just a Door Decoration Trope. And don't even talk to me about the Crate Trope. What's more, you can immediately figure out how a game is going to play just by looking at the first level. It's rare nowadays that I play a shooter which doesn't solely involve moving forward, shooting bad guys, and collecting powerups. I can play the game in my mind almost from the get-go, and I get bored.
A few months ago, I started playing a Japanese indie metroidvania game called La-Mulana (HD). As a game, it's rather obtuse: you'd be very hard-pressed to complete it without a walkthrough, as many of the later levels require figuring out the answers to obscure, poorly-translated riddles. But for the first time in probably a decade, I was completely sucked in. There was a true sense of mystery to this game. None of the tropes I was familiar with made sense here. Doorways to new areas kept opening up. Every decoration on the walls could be analyzed with your hand scanner. Items with no apparent purpose were scattered all over the ruins. Every obstacle was bespoke, not a generic "find the keycard" equivalent puzzle.
For 20 hours straight, I could not get my hands off this game. It was exhilarating.
And thinking back to the games I used to play as a kid, I'm starting to think that maybe they really did have a bit more magic than games do today. Take Duke Nukem 3D. You never knew what you'd find in a given level. An inconspicuous wall could hide a joke or easter egg. A vertical vent could contain a secret weapon. A manhole could lead to a secret level. Every area had something new, be it an interactive element, monster, weapon, or setpiece. (Remember how effective the mouse and mirror scenes were in the original Prince of Persia?)
In those old games, there was always something new around the corner. You never knew what to expect, and the sense of mystery compelled you to explore until the closing credits.
While I do think that childhood ignorance and obsessiveness made games feel a lot more interesting, I also agree with the author that something is missing in modern games. I was starting to expect that I would never again be consumed by a game, and then along came this tiny indie title to blow away my expectations. And now I see games like The Witness have a whiff of that same feeling.
I'm really looking forward to getting sucked into games again.
When you first start playing a game, or just look at the trailers and concept art, the visuals might promise you tons of possibilities that the gameplay doesn't actually support. But as you play the game, you learn to pay attention to only those entities on the screen that are relevant to the gameplay, and filter out those that are just scenery. When your brain realizes that the beautiful mountains in the backdrop are just a painting and you'll never be able to go there, you no longer react to them emotionally.
That theory suggests several ways to improve immersion in games. You could make a conscious attempt to mix up the game's visual language until the very end, like in the old adventure games, where anything on the screen could eventually become relevant in surprising ways. You could make the graphics simpler, to avoid suggesting possibilities that are not supported by the gameplay. Or you could pay attention to which possibilities are suggested by the graphics of your game. If the mountains in the background are so beautiful that the player wants to go there - let them!
(I think this was the PC speaker sounds btw, on a proper soundcard it might not have sounded nearly as mysterious and weird)
I'm generalizing though. Some QTEs are a form of twitch gameplay (in which they require the player to hit at the perfect time), but twitch gameplay is not a form of QTE. What does set QTEs apart is that they are not, in fact, the whole game but are a sudden change of gameplay style which is gone as fast as it arrived.
Years ago I played God of War and really enjoyed the QTE kill animations. It made me feel, well, like a God of War.
I wouldn't be surprised if that's the exception to the rule though. Shenmue had some terrible QTEs (my biggest criticism were that they were unpredictable). Also, too many FPS games have QTEs whenever some animal bites you. It's practically a trope now.
The last paragraph of the article seems to equate "a game that's meant to be played" with "real sandbox simulation, autonomous agents and language-capable AI", and that seems like a narrow idea of what "playing" means, one which equates interactivity (which is the distinguishing feature of games) with choice or nonlinearity. Providing players with lasting choices is one way in which you can use interactivity to structure an experience, but it's not the only one. There's some interesting comments on this in a review by Emily Short of the IF game "Howling Dogs": http://emshort.wordpress.com/2012/10/10/if-comp-2012-howling...
"Howling Dogs" is something of a masterclass in the different ways games can use interaction, and I'd recommend people check it out as a supplement to the vision of gaming put forward in this article.
But I'm nitpicky; the distinguishing feature of games isn't interactivity, otherwise every fun activity with interactivity would be a game, and I'm not sure conversations are normally included when we speak of "games" in this way. Games have rules, and often some kind of goal, and other things. The Art of Game Design (a book by Jesse Schell) kind of roughly approximates it by describing games as a kind of activity involving problem-solving and fun. If I'm not taking actions specifically chosen towards achieving a result ("problem-solving"), then I don't feel like I'm playing a game, even if there's some interactivity.
So I'd say that the key towards quality game experiences lies more in the region of providing options to the player (actions they can take) that have an effect on the game world (resulting conversation, successful quicktime scene, dead goblin, shiny new sword, whatever!) where which option is taken lands the player in a different distance from various desirable goals ("solution" being what the player did to get there).
But there's still a lot of fuzzyness, and it's still very hard to even judge what parts of what games are quality experiences for who and when, and especially why. You have it completely right that we can't just say it's "real sandbox simulation, autonomous agents and language-capable AI", and that lasting choices aren't the One True Way.
Number 1: breadth of options. Games like rollercoaster tycoon are fun because you have an incredible range of options. There is no linear progression from start to finish with only a few choice points in between that have little impact. There are choices everywhere. The opposite is a game like mario, where there are almost no choices.
Number 2: reflexes. Games like pong and mario are fun because they require actions at the right timing. Turn based games do not have that.
Number 3: collection. You collect items or upgrades or in game currency that help you later. Although I have never played it myself, an example is World of Warcraft. You collect items, money and levels. There is something satisfying about this. Game designers often exploit it to make a game addictive.
Number 4: human adversaries. Playing against AI or against some in game metric (e.g. get X amount of people in your rollercoaster park) is not very fun. Playing against human opponents is much more fun because they are unpredictable and intelligent. It's not enough to just compete, there has to be interaction. If you put 2 games of tetris next to each other where the players compete for the highest score that's not good enough. First person shooters have this point right. The decisions of the players influence each other, rather than only competing via a score. Chess & go are the epitome of this.
The games that come closest to hitting all these points are real time strategy games. You have a large amount of options. Not as much as in a sandbox game like rollercoaster tycoon, but still far more than in the average game. You need reflexes to react to threats. You collect resources, upgrades and units. Last but not least, you have human opponents who also have a large amount of options that you need to react to. Not as strategic as chess, but far more so than your average game.
Sadly rts appears to be a dying genre...
RTS have more factors, making the game more random, because a human can't control all factors well. Therefore, less advanced players have better chances to win once.
For some definitions of "stress" and, most particularly, of "skill".
I take rather great pride in my GMing skills when playing a tabletop RPG game, but if there's any amount of "stress¹" involved in the same sense that there is stress¹ when I play RTS games, then I'm definitely doing something wrong. Of course there's "stress²", but that's the tension and uncertainty in the events of the game I run, or the uncertainty relating to my players and what their reactions are going to be.
So "skill" here can't be used as a scalar measure, and there's definitely no single one measure of "skill" across different game genres. Declaring a linear correlation between "skill" and "stress" seems rather premature and, IMO, detrimental to the discussion.
I disagree that there can't be a measure of skill across different games. You can just look at the probability of a top X% player winning against a top Y% player. If an average player has a low probability of winning against a top player, then there is a high degree of skill involved. If an average player has a decent probability of winning against a top player, then there is a high degree of luck involved.
Solitaire.
You can't measure my probability of winning against you. This metric sucks.
In a more general way, while in many cases for perhaps a broad range of people stressfulness will correlate, to some nonlinear degree, with the correlation between their choice of action and their odds of achieving a goal (see what I did there, with the second-degree function and everything), the fact that this very (stress-to-skillness) correlation varies in formula from person to person leads me to believe that it's a symptom of a different variable being more meaningful.
What I'm saying isn't that stress doesn't indicate anything, but rather that it's not a very appropriate yardstick to measure things like fun and player engagement when the correlation between stress and skill-dependence varies so much from person to person.
For me, for example, time pressure and assiduousness-related pressures (remembering to always do X when Y or always do Z every time K) will far eclipse any notion of skill-dependency and impact-on-success as far as how stressful I feel is concerned. Give me a game of Chess, and I'll be rather unstressed, despite the high skill-dependency. Put a timer, and my stress level shoots up exponentially, despite skill-dependency remaining more or less unchanged (since the time limit applies to my opponent as well, and doesn't really change the ratio between my choices and my odds of victory).
This applies to any single player game. The discussion was about FPS and RTS.
The rest you wrote makes sense, I agree.
Yeah, fair point.
> The rest you wrote makes sense, I agree.
Yay! Same here.
If people within 10% of each other means one gets thrashed then it's simply not fun for one of the players.
The RTSes you're lauding, which I do enjoy, often are little more than thinly disguised rock/paper/scissor with a big dash of "what is over powered today". Until it all gets balanced into a vanilla mush of nothingness. With the added bonus of the occasional unintended broken mechanic, tower rushes, marine rushes, zerg rushes. Anything called "rush" is usually an exploit of poorly thought out mechanic and an all or nothing of wasting 2 peoples time for ten minutes after which one or the other simply quits depending on whether the rush was spotted or not.
Most RTS games also seem to suffer from the same "let's play for 5 minutes of building and capturing exactly the same things every single game before the match actually starts"
I myself do love these games, but I have friends who hate them. It's not the pinnacle of gaming, it's simply one form of it.
You just need to balance games correctly. This is why modern games use Elo or TrueSkill to track each player's performance, just as in chess. Chess too has a huge skill gap: an average player has no chance against a top player, but using Elo even games can be played.
I disagree that RTS is like Rock Paper Scissors. Starcraft maybe, but a well designed modern game no. In Rock Paper Scissors any person can have a roughly 50% win rate against any other person. The fact that an average player cannot win against a good player with any rush strategy indicates that it's not Rock Paper Scissors.
The same goes for the start of a game. A good modern RTS does not require a standard 5 minute opening.
> It's not the pinnacle of gaming
Oh, certainly. RTSes usually do very poorly on some other points (e.g. storytelling), and aren't the best even on points that they score well on (e.g. chess involves far more decision making). Whether you find those important is completely subjective.
I don't know. I play sc2, and after a few or at most a dozen of matches I just have to quit - too much stress. But I quite like it and I return to it every few days. I don't waste as much time as I would on some no-stress rpgs or europe universalis alikes (waiting for positive reinforcement type of games). These are just different kinds of games. Starcraft fills similar niche like chess - relatively quick competive sport. I don't see people running around bashing chess for the use of clock or the fact that you will lose a lot when you play chess.
> If people within 10% of each other means one gets thrashed then it's simply not fun for one of the players.
Or maybe some players like to get trashed 50% of the time if it's in a honest game? Ladder system is there to match people with similar skill and it mostly works. Inventing chess that are less stressful (let's say you can throw a dice to see if the enemy attack worked) wouldn't make it better game.
i often forget to do something important and quickly lose the game
I liked playing the first Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War against the AI by pausing the game, issuing orders, running it for a while, pausing again, issuing orders... The replays would last a third of the game time and they were actually quite enjoyable to watch. A lot was happening at once since I could actually match AI's speed that way.
It also made it harder to skip some important step, or forget about a unit doing nothing at the edge of the action, etc.
Those aren't necessarily the same properties that can make a platformer, or narrative-driven adventure game great. Or a puzzle game. Or an FPS. And those games are great (Mario, Half-Life 2, the Monkey Island series).
In the end, everyone has their own set of properties that make the artistic mediums they enjoy "the greatest", and the same applies to games.
You mean you like hoarding? That's one of the most annoying parts of many games, managing endless inventories and collecting stuff for the purpose of having more. It distracts you from whatever goal the game might have.
> Number 4: human adversaries. Playing against AI or against some in game metric (e.g. get X amount of people in your rollercoaster park) is not very fun. Playing against human opponents is much more fun because they are unpredictable and intelligent.
Really ? You have a strange conception of gaming then, because your world of gaming has basically started only with online games. There's tons of great solo games out there that require absolutely no one else but you to appreciate their depth. If you subject the definition of great gaming to human adversaries, then the issue is that you don't always find worthy opponents to play against, and the necessity to have people to play with. That's why great solo games never get old while MMORPGs and online games come and go and disappear forever.
> Sadly rts appears to be a dying genre...
Well RTS have been about micro-management for far too long, and that's just grinding when it lasts forever. There's not so much you can do about it unless you make the genre evolve, and it did not evolve much.
SNES bomberman was fantastic if you played against other people, especially if you had the 4-player tap.
MicroMachines (Sega megadrive / genesis was probably best version) was similarly excellent multiplayer but not online games.
GoldenEye, SnoBow Kids, Mario Party, Mario Kart, etc were all excellent games when played multiplayer.
Edit: no need to downvote him....
Yeah, both were great games. But one was a great game that never seemed to end.
I much prefer linear, narrative-driven single-player games, if they're done well - on the ninth or tenth play through of HL1, Deus Ex, Vampire: Bloodlines or whatever, I still feel like I'm noticing new details; the world feels more 'alive' to me without thousands of other normal human beings getting in the way and ruining the suspension of disbelief. It's like going back to a great film or novel.
It's a matter of taste, of course, but I in no way feel MMO games and such are more 'advanced', as some people in this thread seem to think. There's a particularly grouchy film critic over here who likes to ask, "would Citizen Kane be better in 3D?" Likewise: would FF7 be better with a million 14 year olds running around telling people they got pwned?
Hoarding is what you get if you take this as far as you possibly can to make a game addictive. Cookie clicker is the ultimate version of this. The fact that you get a mindless grind if you take it as far as you possibly can doesn't mean that a little bit of collection can't be fun. e.g. picking up a new weapon in a FPS.
> Really ? [...]
Compared to playing against human adversaries, I find playing against AI or in game metrics less fun. I realize it's heresy because many classic games are single player. YMMV.
> Well RTS have been about micro-management for far too long
I agree, but on the other hand most other genres are even more about micro management and less about decisions. The situation has actually improved. If you compare Starcraft with a modern RTS like Forged Alliance you have far less micro management nowadays because of UI improvements. Starcraft 2 on the other hand, even though it is a newer game than Forged Alliance, has a lot more micro management and fighting against the UI instead of against the opponent.
Chess.
Go.
Tag.
Oh, sorry, games don't exist off the computer?
http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/02/10/are-single-player-games...
http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/02/15/have-single-player-game...
The best option I have seen for/against hoarding is "drop all" (Jagged Alliance 2 v1.13) on enemies. Basically every time you kill someone in the gameworld they drop ALL the items they were using/carrying.
You might try hoarding for the first 10, maybe first 50 enemies, but at ~100 it becomes unmanageable and you are forced to stop hoarding, or stop progressing in the game.
Myst.
As long as the interaction is in line with the genre, no problem. In Mario, I don't expect there to be another route to the castle so I don't look for it. In Call of Duty I don't expect to be able to loot the corpses for money.
However, if you raise expectations to the point where your audience thinks they can do anything, then they'll attempt things you never even considered. When they don't work, they get annoyed or frustrated and your game is now tarnished to them.
Minecraft is so popular in part because the world is simple enough that you can do virtually anything, within reasonable expectation.
He argues against it and brings good arguments for what made the games of his youth cool, it's still missing the point. Guys ten years older than him won't enjoy the 90s titles as much, considering them too fancy etc. They would have also reasonable arguments why the 80s titles were better. The same goes if you ask a currently 14 year old child about the games he plays. He probably ignores most (like we do) and can state why he enjoys the ones that are good in his eyes.
Imho you can spend all your life being sad about missing the old days and hoping someone revives them, but instead it make you more happy to learn what makes the great new games great in their own regard. They won't be great in the same way Fallout 1 was great. They will be great in other regards, and discovering these can be as entertaining for a 40 year old as it is for a 14 year old guy.
That's were roguelikes come in. Though they have self-imposed limits, they are often pretty innovative (eg, CDDA, or the huge breadth of available classes in TOME).
RE SC2, I know that the source of majority of my issues with that game is a difference in vision. Creators stated explicitly in one of the interviews that to appeal to a wider audience they wanted the game to focus less on galactic politics and explore individual characters and relationships. Which is exactly the opposite of what I wanted or expected after living through the excellent story of the first game.
The economics of AAA games have changed. A lot of money is spent on creating a cinematic experience - creating content, voice acting, level design, etc. is way, way more expensive than it used to be, because our graphical fidelity, storage capacity, etc. has increased. That in turn means that if a player plays through the game and doesn't see much of the content, the money spent may have been wasted. So designers have responded to economic pressures by creating more linear paths that force players to experience more of the expensive content, and use more scripted sequences to ensure a consistent experience. But they stop being games, to my mind, because they remove player agency.
The lack of agency - the ability of players to make choices that matter, rather than being one-way ratchets for story advancement - is something that's killing way too many games for me.
Are you complaining about AAA games specifically, maybe? I don't know AAA games very well, because I don't like them much myself. But AAA productions (movies, books, music, games) always have some specific attributes that are unpleasant to people. That didn't change much with computer games, did it?
So yeah, you mgiht be right, that I don't get the point. But if that's the case I still didn't get it!
Any criticism of X can be reduced to saying that X doesn't meet one's standards. But without investigating the nature and value of those standards, you're not addressing the argument being made. And I don't think you investigated the OP's standards; in fact, I think you dismissed them as nostalgia. It was borderline ageist!
And what's bad about asking people to broaden their horizon? I don't really get that. If you accept that new games can be good in their own regards suddenly you don't have 100 good games you need to replay because no games like that are made anymore. Suddenly you have 100000 games which are fun in very different ways, and you are sure to get your share of new great games forever. Wouldn't it be great?
Btw. Just yesterday I started playing a new game from a very old genre: Text Adventures (the game is called Heroes Rise). Thanks to mobile platforms there are a lot of games nowadays that are as great as the games old people complained about when the author was the young guy playing all the games that are now awesome (-ly nostalgic) according to him.
From one point of view, gameplay is almost the entire point of gaming. But from another, it's the games with great storytelling that make up my absolute favourite games of all time (Planescape, Baldurs Gate, etc.)
I think there's a group of designers who realised that you could try and make a great story with minimal gameplay, hype it sky-high and it'll sell regardless. This seems to be the current AAA model. Just look at the steady dumbing down of the Mass Effect series from game to game, or the horrendous Dragon Age sequel. Mass Effect 2 had some amazing cinematic set pieces, great voice acting, but some of the most boring gameplay I've ever experienced. Linear cover shooter, tediously simple rock/paper/scissors mechanics, overly simple leveling system, etc.
Saying it's just nostalgia is trying to sweep all these concerns under the rug a bit too much. There are definite differences in emphasis in what designers are trying to do with the games, eg. whether it has a cinematic/storytelling focus or a gameplay focus. I think that a lot of older games got the balance right, simply because they didn't have the capability back then to make it "all style and no substance".
The issue is that the large publishers are making money by adopting the hollywood blockbuster model. But every dollar they spend on marketing a crappy cinematic game, is a dollar they could be spending on developing an actual decent game to play. If you had an actual decent game made, it would sell itself and generate enough reputation to sell all the sequels too - just look at how long the Call of Duty franchise has lasted off the back of COD4:MW.
This is why I generally avoid AAA titles nowadays, especially ones that have been advertised and hyped beyond belief (current example: Destiny). I just know that a couple of months after the launch, genuine reviews will be coming out about the game and it'll turn out to be disappointing.
It's not just that storytelling has taken over at the expense of gameplay, it's that we haven't even really developed our own storytelling capability.
When games tell stories they stop the action, freeze player agency, and go into full Hollywood mode. Game studios trip all over themselves to excitedly tell us about how their new technology will allow them Hollywood-like cinematic camera angles (see: Mass Effect), movie-quality camera effects. Hell, a lot of games even letterbox the screen to give it a more film-like quality.
It's one thing to take storytelling expertise and technique from cinema, it's another to clone it obsessively and completely fail to develop your own storytelling medium. Imagine if movies were invented only for "filmmakers" to simply film a book from top-down and a hand turning the pages!
One game I've been enjoying is Kentucky Route Zero - the story I find is fairly normal, but the way it's presented takes pretty clear inspiration from traditional stage plays. This is cool - even if it is still derivative, but at least it's taking another medium and adapting it appropriately to a game.
There are lots of great games below AAA and even some AAA titles have good content by surprise (for example the interactive movie "The Last of Us" was great in my eyes, not as a game but as a movie, which you can enjoy for free on Youtube).
It's frankly the main reason it is such a promising time for mid tier indie developers. Games with interesting mechanics and concepts ARE getting traction and rewarding risk taking. Modern game development studies are ripe for disruption.
I think Fallout is a perfect example. When you look at Fallout 3 one can easily have that impression, that the good things from Fallout 1 and 2 are lost in modern games. But if you then go on and play Fallout: New Vegas, you see that even a modern game can still have everything good from back then, right now.
I think it's not about the time, it's about choice, about which games you play. For every call of duty there is a Deus Ex, Alpha Protocol, Spec Ops: The Line, a World of Goo or a Minecraft.
Apart from the subjectivity caused by nostalgia I think it is impossible to look at our times and the awesome games created today and to think there are no good ones. Games like Oblivion - which he cites as a negative example - are exactly the old sandboxes in which the player can act somewhat freely. And with auto-leveling of the enemies disabled via mod it was even not a bad game. But sure, the good games are not always the most successful ones, and there is crap on the market. But that is not new as well.
Oh come on. You dismiss a whole page of text to such a simple argument ? That old stuff was better than the new ? Did you even read the article ?
There are measurable ways to look at games, and it's actually very clear that while game hardware has been evolving very fast, game design and options left to the player have been decreasing exponentially with time.
Why do you think there's a retro game movement? No, it's not pure nostalgia, there are genuine reasons to prefer older games over the new ones we have in 2014. And in all media there are ups and downs, there are "golden ages" where stuff is discovered, invented, discovered, and darker ages where nothing much happens and it's just rehashing the same thing over and over again. You see this kind of things in every form of culture, why would Gaming be any different? Why do you think Games would be linearly progressing towards an ideal state ?
If you say that the number of choices in game design and options decreases over time, you should back that up with data. Otherwise it's just an opinion and as you've already read in my comment my opinion is different.
We have yet to see ANY RPG being as feature full as Ultima 7, out in 1992. Real time weather changes, AI companions with personalities, open world, huge story, NPC who actually feel real (they work during the day, go back home and sleep at night). There's nothing like that still in 2014, despite numerous attempts and failed promises.
Where are the flight simulators ? They are completely extinct. The best ones were made in the 90s and the genre disappeared in the 2000s. They were complex games too.
GTA is maybe the only game that you can show as going against that trend. That does not mean the game industry as a whole is making more complex games as they go, quite the opposite.
I bet if you look around hard enough you might even find an open source implementation of your favourite flight simulator with better graphics. Wish you the best luck in finding one. :-)
If someone said Hollywood was better in the 70s than today, it would be a completely uncontroversial statement. Why is it so hard to accept that games may have been better at some point in the past?
And there are awesome games today. I'm currently playing and enjoying Bard's Tail and McDroid. Before I played the new X-Com which I enjoyed a lot. And I've spent so many hours in Civ5 and Crusader Kings. While I enjoyed games 15 years ago with a passion I can't have today, I would never change playing the new games for the old ones. The graphics are better, the games are more complex, but better userinterfaces make them easier to handle.
And I also disagree that linear level design prevents good story building (not story telling) by the player. Good examples abound, one of them being Mass Effect, which the article criticized.
In System Shock 2 there was no need to lock anything behind you. The world you were in was built small enough and diverse enough that it remained in your mind as you traversed it. You weren't just going through anonymous tunnels, but exploring a space ship where you always had at least a rough idea of where you were.
Mass Effect 3 has a gigantic world, and has you enter, again and again, dungeons that simply start out as holes in the ground with little guidance for the player as to how they're structured, built with repetitive (though high-detail) 3d assets and textures, thus making it necessary to lock things behind you, since there cannot be a reasonable expectation for the player to keep their bearings.
Every bad experience with navigating a level is because of shitty level design. Every bad experience with "I don't have enough health, I don't have enough ammo" is because of shitty level design.
Go back and play Blood, or Duke Nukem, or Doom, and pay careful attention to the way that the levels are made. It's vastly, vastly different than the funhouse rides created for modern shooters.
I played Duke Nukem as a teen, with truckloads of time on my hands. While fun, the game requires teen-levels of free time to get unstuck here and there. Nowadays I would definitely not spend the time I did.
Make a level big enough and people will get lost. Different people will get lost in different points. So, the solution is to either make smaller levels or to lock out areas. Even Fallout, a master piece for these games, closes out areas in critical puzzle points so it can reduce search space.
It is fun to think about creating a virtual world that is as rich and complex as the real one, but we already live in a reality that often sucks so hard we want to retreat into fiction. Stories with minor interactive components are a fine genre (if well done and compelling) as are puzzle and action games. The fact that they are different than reality is their primary feature, not a flaw.
X-Com games are a common example of "open" games. The "story line" is single, of course, so if you're only talking about story they're very linear. However, how you get through is much more up to you. It doesn't force you down the right side of the bunker and require you to throw a grenade inside before you can proceed in the story; X-Com puts aliens in the world, and gives you some tools and options to fight them, and whenever something particular happens, story also happens (for a simple example: you lose all your forces and bases, the aliens take over the world! Game Over)
The desire to make games that are open is clearly not "inherently flawed"; Risk is a very open-ended game, yet I've never heard of anyone complaining that the way it divides the story into branching paths just boils it down to choosing the best two or three storylines.
But at this point I think it's more convenient to ditch "open-ended" and find other words to associate less confusingly with those notions. "sandboxy", above, is my first candidate. I have no good ideas for the other kind at the moment.
And they made $500 million on the first day despite this…
I thought this point was very insightful, and not one that I'd considered before.
I had the chance for that pleasant walk down memory lane because of your comment, so thanks!
I have something to add specific to competitive FPSs (or any other multiplayer game with a player results table) like Quake and UT. It's my personal measure of whether an online FPS is any good and there's a distinct difference and it's testable (somewhat objectively if you get many people to do this).
1. Play the game without any prior knowledge - just launch the game and play (obviously, look up the controls first).
Good FPS: you end up bottom of the table with negative points having killed almost no one and probably dying from environmental hazards. In team games your own team is likely to vote-kick you.
Bad FPS: you end up middle of the table and have managed to kill people from all over the table.
2. Play the game after putting in an hour.
Good FPS: you started contributing to the team effort and whilst still near the bottom you get in some kills. You know all the mechanics and none of the high level strategies.
Bad FPS: you finish the game at random positions of the table, even near the top. You don't know all the mechanics.
3. Play the game after putting in 10 hours.
Good FPS: you consistently finish in the middle or higher up - but the point is your position is stable. People playing for the first time pose no threat to you.
Bad FPS: you're still all over the place, sometimes at the top other times at the bottom and you sometimes get killed by people who are playing the game for the first time.
The reason it ties in to OP is that this used to be the norm in FPS games, now accessibility is king.
I can get better at playing the game, or I can get better at speaking English/Chinese in the same time slot. A day only has 24 hours. So I decide to prefer one over the other. It's simply that improving my coding or language skills is more important to me.
On one hand you imply that playing games is a waste of time compared to learning Chinese on the other hand you say you prefer your games shallow.
You can spend the same amount of time playing a good game or a bad game. The difference is with a good one you have to stick with the same one for longer, with the shallow ones it's a different one every week which I guess is what the publisher would've liked too.
Anyway, you like what you like - I feel somewhat stupid for arguing about preferences - wasn't my intention at the outset. I was just saying this is something that got lost along the way in the same way as in the genres the article talks about.
Maybe it's because the discussion not being about different preference but about the existence of different preferences. "A good game" is a game with higher quality than others. A game can be "shallow" and good (at least according to what I assume would be your definition of shallow)! I'd argue there is even depth without the requirement for anything but basic skills. There are even people (I'm not one of them) who consider games like Counterstrike, Starcraft or LOL shallow because they _only_ focus on skill and nothing else to offer.
Btw there isn't even a discussion if you just say "I like hard games" instead of "games are bad if they don't require skill". Quality is not preference. And we are basically done.
I have played a table-top game, where one player was eliminated before her turn. It was clear overall that there were much randomness in this game, and not much skill. To me, this is boring. On the other hand, many people around me thought it was fun: there's always something unexpected.
My current guess: to each his own. Your dichotomy is between good and bad competitive first person shooters. Some people might just want something flashy and random and fun.
This sounds like a good litmus test for me. If you're still thinking about a game many months after you finish it, then it's probably something more than a mere diversion. In this sense, perhaps, the best game reviews should be retrospective, rather than reactionary on the day of release.
The closest a game has come to that mind-altering experience is Go. I've heard myself relate to and judge new ideas through Go when I say, "... like in Go..." Or I generate new ideas and ways to express myself by using concepts developed while playing Go.
We might hear things like, "Life is like that grind in World of Warcraft except it ends," become common place some day... except with some more culturally-relevant analog of some future incarnation of what we call an MMO.
But video games are just so darn young as a medium of expression that I don't think we've reached that level yet.
Other mediums have had their brush with economy too. Painters once had to labor under the patronage of certain religious institutions in order to earn their keep and try to make their art on the side. Writers have always had to suffer in some level of Dante's hell, specially crafted for writers, in order to make bread. The poets never made any money and were free.
Can a commercial game developer produce a work of art? Perhaps. We hang those works of religious patronage in the most esteemed museums in the world today. Publishers have capitalized on literature before. Music has tried to make it into a machine. Significant works have been produced even when money has been involved.
Have video games produced a significant work of art yet? In my opinion, no. A significant work of art is a psychic program that mutates the human brain that interprets it. The less variation in the outcome of that mutation amongst a significant population of individuals the closer it is to expressing some universal truth of our condition. You can point to a work of Van Gogh, Kafka, or Mozart and explain its significance. Anyone who has experienced that art may have some personal interpretation of the experience but the significance of it remains much the same amongst a very large population of individuals. I haven't played a video game which has communicated such an idea through my interaction with it.
Many games have borrowed or stolen ideas from other media in order to express their authors' intent or idea: but that isn't novel or new to video games as a medium.
Will video games produce a movement? I think we're seeing some of that. We're seeing examples of games that show indications that we're developing a vocabulary capable of expressing ideas and emotions through interaction and interplay of strategy, choice, and value. However I don't think we've seen our Mozart or our Kafka -- yet.
Until then... grind on. We just need to keep making them and experimenting. And I don't think it's valuable to point out that a game is AAA or indie. We still consider The Last Supper to be a great work of art even though it was essentially commissioned by the church at the time. The new religion is Capitalism. In time we may view some of these games today as beautiful.
Though for now it seems like they're mere amusements.
However, if simply having a strong emotional response is enough then something as simple as Unreal World can be really intense. Fear, Joy, despair, angst, longing, it covers just about every base except love. http://www.unrealworld.fi/
In the end what separates video games from all other art is the experience can vary greatly. Go and see Mad Max and sure you might respond differently but you see the same movie, play in a sandbox game and our experiences can be wildly different.
I'll make the argument that a large portion of the population experiences the same mutation because we are far removed from the original works. Society has come to agree on a set of truths a certain piece portrays. With time being the primary factor in determining the truth in a work of art, it makes sense why "classic" games get more attention than modern games. There are likely a number of significant games that have yet to be labelled and agreed upon as such.
Indeed, I agree! That's why, for me, the indie vs. publisher dichotomy doesn't make much sense in the long term. I wonder what the artists of the time thought of commissioned works such as Leonardo's The Last Supper. Later movements were defined by eschewing religious iconography and realism, etc. Today that painting is revered for various reasons but its significance is well understood... and perhaps time was the largest contributing factor.
That's generally not true at all. It may seem that way, but level systems are similar to a proof of work scheme. Player puts in some time and receives some fair reward for his time. Level systems are a way to facilitate this transaction without invoking pay2win overtones.
Do you think that was the idea when levels were added to classic pen and paper RPGs like D&D?
Levels are a way to give players choices about how their character develops over time. The choices they picked as their character levels up make up part of the story of their character that makes it uniquely yours.
This is why I hate easy respec mechanics that a lot of modern RPGs have. When you respec your character you destroy it's story. Your level 60 paladin is now the same as anyone elses level 60 paladin. A blank slate divorced from your personality. You have broken the illusion that even the very term Role Playing Game was intended to be about.
In the game I work on, Path of Exile, we have specifically made respec something that has a cost. The more you want to change your character the more costly it becomes. Changing your character then becomes part of the story of how it was created.
So theoretically, assuming players are somewhat rational. Then they'd always go for the optimal set up and most RPG players will end up converging onto the same optimal stats anyway.
This is where level systems shine, they can make the path to the optimal set up extremely painful, but players will still grind for it, since it's the optimal (and players like to be optimal).
But sometimes people like role playing an actual character, not just grinding to get 'best' character. As an example there are plenty of suggested SPECIAL setups for Fallout3.
One of my favorite twists on mechanics ever.
It's okay that you act like that because following towards a goal that you think is optimal is fun for you.
However, it's our challenge as game designers to make it so that opinions will differ in the player base as to what is optimal. Once you have a diversity of player builds than you will still feel a bond to your character because you still picked between different efficient options that were presented on the internet.
Optimal is different for different players and will change over time. A good RPG has a very high number of optimal or only slightly suboptimal paths you can choose from. I would even argue that sometimes the suboptimal paths are the more interesting ones (real roleplayers play their character in way that they might be scared of rats and run away, even if their character is able to one-shot the end boss; another example is above me deciding to only use melee weapons and make the most of it).
In a MMO, most players are going to be chasing the most overpowered build. Which is why MMO developers change things all the time - not for supposed "balance", just to keep players on the treadmill.
I think the fact that you can min/max a game easily is a testament of bad, or at least simplistic, game design. In games like System Shock, one of the examples in the article, there is no simple optimum but multiple viable paths to victory.
Of course simplistic game design has it's place, for example in mindless shooters like left 4 dead. That one is extremely linear (on a level that really killed immersion for me), but it perhaps aids the game designers goal of completely braindead (hah) entertainment.
It's perhaps the same thing as in literature: The author asks for more Goethe but only gets Tolkien & Co. Both are fine, but Tolkien selling more copies doesn't make it good literature, "just" great entertainment.
I avoid leveling system games, I guess because I feel like they are abusing some stimulus-reward system in my mentality, but I am asking what you think there, not trying to be snide.
The core game mechanic is actually playing out some role, and interacting with others playing out their roles, sometimes conflicting and sometimes cooperative. The game starts, and you are given a job on the space station. The mechanics are complex, pretty punishing (permadeath lasts until server reset, or someone clones you etc), and partially irrelevant; incompetence is realistic, and expected. Dysfunction abounds. Some people might be assigned as secret agents and given tasks automatically like theft or murder. Most of the time, however, is spent playing the drunk police officer, crusty cynical mechanic, horribly unhelpful bureaucrat, or janitor who "forgets" to put up wet floor signs for amusement. The chemists and farmers trade goods, the scientists perform dangerous experiments for dubious ends, etc.
The irony for me is that the only way to restore a true feeling of "playing a role" was removing the stats, and many of the normal objectives, and building a theme where the only optimal play is, essentially, to play sub-optimally and just go for whatever is fun (excluding things that get you thrown out an airlock or tossed in jail for a few hours).
I guess I just got a different idea of what RPG meant from pen-and-paper roleplaying games, and my coding background makes me a bit allergic to games that could be "solved".
My gaming group gave PoE a very serious try, and all eventually got bored, and I think this "feature" you boast of is part of the problem. To me, the good part of PoE was in evaluating different combinations, trying them out, seeing what combos work well together, etc. The gem system is fundamentally very good (except see the next graf). But locking in passive-tree choices prevents players from fully exploring the system you built (unless they're willing to invest thousands of hours). With an investment like that, any moderately-serious player will be driven to spend more time studying the wiki than playing, because a wrong choice is very expensive (though at least respecs are not impossible).
An even bigger problem, while I'm pointing out this I didn't like in PoE, is how a major factor in creating a potent build is grinding for "currency items", for dozens or hundreds of hours, to do things like reconfigure links on items. I think this sort of system is exactly the sort of thing that validates the sort of cynicism demonstrated in the parent comment. High performance is predicated on meeting a certain minimum skill level, and then investing the (many) hours.
And the latter two issues tie together, btw... because the respecs are expensive, you have to ensure that even Very Bad Choices are still viable, which is part of why there's never any meaningful challenge, except the challenge of staying awake while you grind.
Since you mention "story" and "illusion" and "role playing game", PoE's story, like nearly every other game's story, is basically total garbage. And the claim that a character is "uniquely yours" is laughable. Go look at your character creation process: choose one of 7 uninspired archetypes, listen to the dopey grimdark backstory, and sign up for the railroad characterization. You appear to want to hang your hat on writing that, in the realm of novels, would consign you to a vanity press, which baffles me.
I can't know this for sure, but if we had offered you free repecs I doubt you would have stuck around much longer anyway.
As to your comments on our story, that isn't what I was referring to at all.
When someone talks animatedly about their memory of an online RPG experience they don't talk about the game storyline. They talk about how they found this item or used this upgrade which made their character awesome. That is the story of your character and it's what forms your lasting memory of the game.
And you made it so I have no idea what I should be taking and not taking. And you made it so the game heavily punishes me for unknowingly taking the "wrong" thing and not being perfectly optimal. This is why everyone stopped playing so quickly.
Putting in some time and getting some reward is a poor bargain. In particular, it makes replays agonizingly painful. My time is actually valuable; I'd much rather put time into learning a skill or technique that I can start using immediately in a replay.
1. Pacing. The timing that determines when the story should move forward needs to be tuned so the player has just about exhausted the fun and interest of the current level.
2. Controlling complexity. When a game begins, only the simplest world and player abilities should be available. When it is assessed that the player has a good handle on the world and game mechanics, new abilities and areas should open up. Leveling up should always be about giving the player more options instead of giving an existing option a +1 (and then giving the corresponding challenges a +1 to stay balanced.)
One of the main founders of the company is an incredibly bright guy named Steve. He made an interesting wager many years ago: http://www.fullbrightdesign.com/2008/02/wager.html
Seems he's now out to prove it false, and making good progress.
Another thing that would help is prefacing this and similar statements with "in my opinion". Should clear up any ambiguity.
In Japan, there exists a video/picture book called Visual Novels. They run on a computer, either with video or pictures, along with sound. They also have light amount of text, as 3D landscapes aren't terribly used as of yet.
This Gone Home should be more part of a Visual Novel genre. Like I said, it does look like a game in some aspects. Admittedly, having not played it, I cannot say there aren't game elements in it.
Well, that would be a good criteria for what a game "is":
'Is there a chance of winning or losing? And if you lose, does it cost you a loss in resource (including time)?'
You're welcome to that first opinion, but not the latter: http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/gone-home
I like it when people directly link something that disapprove their saying. User Score: 5.4. And yeah, I don't care about "professional game journalists" in a world where everyone can actually provide their opinion on a game, and when we know the practices of the people who are paid to do that kind of job.
Says who ?
Virtually all of the negative user reviews for Gone Home demonstrate the "Gone Home is not a game" meme. These are not reviews from people who think for themselves and engage in actual criticism. These are the reviews of people who are mad because the "gamer" milieu tells them they should be mad about Gone Home.
It's the same thing as when people ding Fez because "Phil Fish is an asshole." Or they write off Minecraft because "Notch was lucky."
I think user reviews can be great. I read a lot of them before buying a game. They are often way more detailed than anything coming from actual "journalists", because a number of users can be expert a certain type of games instead of journalists playing any kind of junk out there for money.
Don't discard social media, you are on Hacker News after all.
I found user reviews more useful the professional when deciding what to buy. Professionals tend not to tell me what I need to know to decide and tend to like games I do not.
So, if the gone home is target, #gamergate activity hardly budged its score.
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20140122201259/http://www.metacri...
[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20140213065923/http://www.metacri...
What's a "real game" and what is an "actual gamer" anyway?
I know that some people put more limits on the definition (minimum number of hours played, type of game etc), but I did not meant to do so for the purpose of my previous comment.
Real game for me would be something that requires more activity from player then just passively experiencing it. Either some skill based challenge or puzzle and possibility to fail or at least get week score.
Not a game is not necessary derogatory descriptor. I love reading and watching movies, but neither are games. Comics read on phone or laptop is not a game, but you click things to turn pages and occasionally have to think to put together clues. A thing can be interactive experience (e.g. not game) or whatever and still be fine.
I'm ok with the fact that there will by grey zone between games and non-games. If you say "X is somewhere between game and non-game" you still conveyed much more of useful information then as if you lump everything with pictures into large group "game".
I think hundreds of 0s and 1s in the User Scores is evidence of nothing but trolls.
[citation needed]
I've already addressed why I dismiss the user scores (in this specific case). And instead of resorting to conspiracy theories, I can actually justify my dismissal using the publicly available content of the reviews themselves. They're trolls plain and simple.
The really hilarious part is that you want to accuse a studio composed of 3 people working out of a basement of handing out bribes.
[1] http://www.joystiq.com/2014/02/06/gone-home-finds-250k-sales...
Slight Spoilers I missed the next to last diary entry on my initial playthrough. This entirely changed what I though had happened.
If it was a game or not, Gone Home was a good experience, and worth the money.
What's sort of ironic is that I had also purchased Dear Ester at the same time, and started playing it afterwards. I was severely disappointed at the lack of interactivity (I had not read any reviews of it up to that point) in contrast to Gone Home, where there are items to pick up, and puzzles to solve.
"...in a market that moves very fast, saturated with product..."
even worse
"...there has been a counterpoint: the wave of DRM-free indies..."
Look at Steam Greenlight.
"Why don't we enjoy the video games of today as much as those we played when we were twelve years old? It's because the video games of these decadent times lack [insert whatever the particular author's imagination can come up with by way of special sauce whose secret has been lost]."
Sorry, no. It's because we're not twelve years old anymore.