Cold Constructs Blog

From the perspective of a game designer, people are stupid. Okay, that can be a perspective anyone can have, but the reason game designers have is that people aren’t buying the games they’re asking for.

Doesn’t make sense at all, does it? As a hardcore gamer (also casual when my Free Time Meter^tm is low), I’m deep into the gaming scene - forums, news feeds, modding, and so on. While in these trenches (actually they’re pretty comfy chairs) it’s obvious that originality is lacking and every gamer knows it. We want more original titles! But hey, don’t pay attention to the sales figures on that last Madden game or MMO expansion - we really don’t like endless franchises (pay no attention to that Final Fantasy XIII).

Yet every time an excellent original title comes out, it falls short of even the most conservative financial expectations. Okami, Rez and Psychonauts are just a few of the many original titles that hit huge critical acclaim but fell flat on store shelves. Why?

It seems there’s a pattern to all this. I’m probably wrong, but I wouldn’t know that until you said something (there’s a comment section for a reason eh). Anyway, it appears that each original yet unsuccessful title had a vague objective (or many diverse objectives) like attack monster in a variety of unfamiliar ways or explore this illogical realm and so on. On the other hand, all the successful titles were very clear - win football games or kill anything that moves or conquer bases by building your own and so on.

So could it be that the reason original games are failing in the market is because we don’t understand what they’re about in the 5 seconds we take to consider it? This isn’t too far fetched, considering the fact that the average American has the attention span of the average goldfish (goldfish are shiny). If we don’t understand something at a glance, well, forget about it. Literally.

But is this really surprising? We’re overloaded with massive amounts of information every hour, so in order to continue functioning well enough to do our jobs (studying or writing memos, whatever) we have to be damn good at filtering out the noise in the signal. There’s already a ton of stuff about the attention economy and whatnot, so this certainly isn’t new. What is new is how we’re coping with it all - we still haven’t quite figured that out yet. We’re still developing the necessary tools to get us back to pre-internet info loads.

So how do we design around this? In games, the way I would do it is to present a very clear objective, but while you’re playing the game, slowly introduce a new and (hopefully) interesting gameplay mechanic, without ever confusing the player about what the goal is. If you try to slap the player with a new concept from moment they look at the cover, forget about it. Alternatively, you could take the Katamari approach and have the only objective be so incredibly simple that it could be translated to the potential player in so few words or pictures.

This could also be applied to anything else really. You just have to make sure your design is a natural extension of what they already know in order to keep people’s attention - grabbing it is easy. Even better though, you could stick to simple designs. (But oh wait you have to have real talent to do that, so it’s an unlikely course of action for most designers, unfortunately.) There’s a lot of hubbub regarding simplicity in everyday designs (software, internet and other types of interfaces, other products or even architecture and so on) and how we should probably scale back the features to the point where the purpose of the object is pronounced so clearly that the user wouldn’t have to think twice about it. Because they won’t even if we want them to.

Earlier in my lifetime I sincerely believed that violence depicted in video games wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s just a video game, an artificial and often a poor representation of reality. I know that it’s fake–isn’t that all that matters?

Turns out I didn’t care about violence in my games–I just wanted to play violent games. But now that I can play and see whatever I want, I’ve dedicated a lot of time and effort discussing and thinking about the issue seriously. Thing is, video games aren’t “just another” medium for creative folks to play with. Video games are the first truly interactive form of art we’ve created due to its computational qualities (capable of true simulation). There’s been others before, but they’ve been extremely limited and rare (non-computational), and video games standardize the interaction as an accepted method of expression/entertainment. But what makes VGs potentially harmful is not only that they’re a complete audio/visual experience, but they’re fully interactive–they can react to our in-game decisions in ways not possible in other forms entertainment. This makes all the difference.

In books, the reader supplies the imagery for the story being told. With VGs, everything is drawn out for you, and since the PS2 generation of consoles (much earlier for PC games), the imagery has been vivid and detailed enough to desensitize us to blood and gore. Movies have been doing this for some time. However, with VGs, the experience is much more immersive (due to the interactivity) and therefore more potent as a medium of relaying new audio/visual experiences.

So after we’ve played so many games where we (not the distant actors seen in movies) hack apart and gun down virtual people, we no longer feel repulsed by scenes (real or not) that used to be considered disturbing and otherwise repugnant. Many of us wouldn’t think about doing such hideous things in real life, but because of the extreme desensitizing of doing the acts ourselves virtually, it becomes easier to do them in real life. Now, video games can be used as a tool to vent our frustrations, but more often they tend to teach us, subconsciously, that violence isn’t all that bad–in fact they teach that violence can be fun.

Think about that. Fighting and killing = fun? No. Sex is fun; building cool stuff is fun; going to new places is fun; playing real sports is fun. Harming other people (and other animals alike) as an action by itself is fucked up (unless you’re defending yourself!) but harming others as an act of entertaining yourself is ground for wiping you off the face of the planet. If you think violence is ok, then I’ll smash your face in and see how you feel about violence afterwards. (Come to think of it, inflicting pain on yourself and friends is a common passtime these days, but such activities have been around longer than video games. Some VGs simply enforce the belief that such violence is fun.)

And that’s the problem. Violence in video games is helping immensely to desensitize us to violence in real life, which builds the belief that violence in real life can be fun. That’s pretty fucked up and needs to stop.

But don’t get me wrong–there are some games that depict violence in a way that is actually disturbing, enhancing the story-telling, and not an explicit part of the gameplay. This way, the game is accurately telling the player that violence is wrong and not at all a good time. And that’s awesome. It’s other games where the objective or a level-progressing option is to beat, murder, and otherwise harm virtual humans that is disgusting and wrong.

The problem is that these types of violent games (that depict it wrong, like it’s some kind of reward) are readily available to ages that they should not be. If you’re a teenager or younger, you shouldn’t get to play those games because you’re still very suggestible (no, really) and in a fragile phase of your life. You’re still developing your mental abilities and fortifying perspectives of reality, so during these times you should be exposed to experiences that enforce creativity (with certain RPG games or non-violent sandbox-style games like Spore), strategic thinking (like Supreme Commander–it’s war, but there’s no humans getting brutalized), analytic skills (…I personally hate games of the puzzling variety, so I can’t offer any suggestions, but most people love them so you should have no trouble finding good ones on shit like Xbox Live or your local VG store), and many other valuable mental exercises, as well as spatial reasoning and even eye-hand coordination.

There are endless ways to make a game really fun, so developers who make bloody games either lack the talent and/or creative resources to do so, or they simply lack a mind of their own, much less a sense of social responsibility.

I think the gaming industries around the world will finally get a lesson they won’t forget: just because it has a lot of content and great graphics doesn’t mean it’ll sell. I’m not talking about the gameplay factor, but rather the complexity of a game.

When we say we want to get in and out of game without hassle whenever we want, we don’t mean we can press Esc then confirm and then wait a couple minutes for the damn thing to unload its shit so that we can finally use our computer again. What we mean is, Esc and BAM there’s the desktop in all its working glory. It’s easy - if it was an accident, the next time you fire up the game you’ll have the option to return exactly where you left off. If it’s not easy, too bad. Focus on the customer, the people who pay you, the people who you share the world with, and the people includes yourself. If only everyone actually used the products they created. If only.

The industry fucks got the point that some of us like simple fun little games, but those simple fun games weren’t so little. Apparently, no one’s heard the idea of a complete game costing less than 10 bucks brand new. This can happen if you license game engines to cut down development time, consistently follow a narrow focus (eg what specific effect or experience are you trying to show the player), and keep the dev team itself consistent. You’ll slow yourself down if you keep having to explain everything to the n00bs (just ask the guys who made Metal Gear Solid 2).

There is a market for massive games obviously, but they don’t have to stomp over the smaller ones. Yeah, smaller/simpler games exist, but you really have to dig deep into the net to find any good ones. By ’simple’ and ‘fun’ I don’t mean a million Tetris rip-offs or card games. There is such a thing as graphically advanced games using simple concepts for gameplay and take up less than 20mb of hard drive space (heard of .kkrieger?). Of course there’s others, like that one off-road top-down racing arcade game, called something like Super Off-Road Racing… I love that game.

But anyway, it seems this topic is receiving a fair amount of attention lately… ’bout fucking time.

Gabe of Penny Arcade fame finally expressed my thoughts when he said he was tired of seeing info about a game that won’t be released until a year later or more. It’s good to know that I’m not the only one that feels this way, and that people with his amount of influence say something about it.

I say the ideal expose time for an unreleased game is ONE MONTH. Otherwise I become sick of the thing and left with no surprises when I actually play the game. I just want to know its basic premise and all about the gameplay, nothing more (nothing on what happens in the story, not more than a couple levels, etc.). No more shit with all the hype, delays, and well, bullshit.

Every major game publisher is guilty of this. Fix it or I won’t buy the game. As it is, I’m not buying Doom3, Half-Life 2, or Tribes: Vengeance, among others.