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One thing that often bothers me in discussions of video games is the way that many people within the games community want to pidgeon-hole them. I find it really bothersome how frequently I hear that games should only be X or should never do Y.
In the end I don't know that this really holds games back at all - people who want to make games that do Y are probably going to do it anyway. But it does hold back our discussions about games, and in the end, I think the ability for certain kinds of games to be widely enjoyed.
I'll give a couple of examples of statements I've often heard to try to illustrate what I'm getting at here.
Games Should Be Fun
This is probably the one that bothers me the most. It is, in all likelihood, because we use the word "game" to describe our medium. And a "game" generally means a leisure activity with a clear set of rules for determining a winner and a loser. And that kind of thing does sound like it should be fun, doesn't it?
But that doesn't really describe all video games. They all have clearly defined rules, as any piece of software must, but those rules are not necessarily there for the purpose of determining a winner or loser, or even an overall objective. The rules can simply be a framework within which the player works interactively.
I recently created and released an abstract art game over Xbox Live Community Games (in order to avoid this becoming a discussion about my game specifically, I'll avoid mentioning its name). I got a lot of interesting feedback, but one of the things I heard from a significant majority of the people who played it was that it wasn't fun. "I really like the idea, but you need to find a way to make it fun" is typical of the responses that I got.
Now, issues of execution with this particular game aside, why does a game have to be fun? Not only was the game not fun, it wasn't supposed to be. I find it extremely strange that so many people feel the need to make games fit into narrow categories.
Some of my favourite books (Crime and Punishment), movies (Before Sunset), and music (Stars of the Lid and Their Refinement of the Decline) are not fun. They all still add things that I find quite meaningful to my life. Personally, I would love to see a game that was quite similar to Crime and Punishment.
The point I'm getting at is that we shouldn't be judging games on whether or not they're fun unless being fun is the intention. If a game isn't trying to be fun, then it can not possibly fail at it.
There is plenty of room in interactive media to engage the player in ways that are not intended to entertain them. I'm not really a huge fan of entertainment. I want to engage in activities that I feel enrich me as a person. If you don't, that's fine, but there's no need to act like only one particular thing should be available.
Games Shouldn't Talk About Politics
The wording there is important. If any particular player doesn't want to play games that have political messages, then that's cool. The problem is that many people claim that no game should have a political message, as in, no one should be playing political games.
This actually ties in to my previous point, in that people who don't want games to be political often simultaneously suggest that one of the reasons is that games are just "fun" or "entertainment".
And again, if that's all that you personally want out of games, then feel free to only play those games that are intended to be "fun" or "entertainment". But please stop trying to tell the rest of us that we shouldn't be able to enjoy something different.
I know this may seem like hyperbole, but I have heard quite a few people say things along the lines of "video games are just entertainment, stop trying to make them serious!" or "I hear enough about politics everywhere else, I don't want to start hearing about them when I read about video games!"
In fact, I think that games, like every other method of communication between humans, should be used to communicate the full spectrum of ideas that we have. I don't think that anyone should be forced to play political games if they don't want to.
But I also feel that games, because of their interactivity and their ability to ask players to reflect on their decisions, could be an incredibly powerful tool for discussing politics, so to say that "games shouldn't be political" is just silly.
Games Should Be Interactive
OK, at a really basic level this is obviously true. Interaction is pretty much the thing that makes a game different from a movie or a novel. What I'm against is the idea that, because interaction is the defining aspect of games, that games must always focus on interaction.
The argument against parts of games being non-interactive (especially cut-scenes) is usually something along the lines of "movies/novels already do that better, game should focus on what makes them different."
Well, I've never seen a movie whose characters were as strong and well-defined as the characters in the best novels I've read. So are we now also going to say that the thing that makes movies different is motion, so they should stop pretending they can do characters well and just try to take advantage of their visuals? Of course not.
We fully acknowledge that there are a wide variety of techniques available to film-makers to use their medium to obtain different effects. Why do some people want to take this priviledge away from game-makers? (There is a corollary to this, which is people saying games shouldn't try to do narrative at all, but I think that argument has pretty much been settled, right?)
Now, I'm not trying to convince anyone who doesn't want to play serious games, or political games, or less interactive games that they should change their mind. But can we all at least agree that there is no list of things that games "should" or "must" be and just accept that other people might view games differently?
There is a huge variety of things that we can do with games, and it strikes me as silly that so many people seem to want to limit other peoples' ability to take advantage of that.
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Another variable you have to consider is the medium and the method of distribution you are using and the audience that is connected to those things. Does the audience of XBox Live Games want to experience an art game? What percentage of these particular users would this interest? Maybe I am being overly cynical when I say that a majority of the XBox Live community is not looking for art but a "game", as we know it in the traditional sense.
Now cut to distribution channels on the PC, such as Steam or Greenhouse Games. You'll find Call of Duty and Battlestations: Midway, but you'll also find games like The Path, or The Graveyard, and they have been received with a little more enthusiasm.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is, tied into a metaphor I think works, is that as you shouldn't be trying to sell "Pride and Prejudice" in a comic book store. Only a small amount of your target audience is going there, and the rest of the onlookers won't be interested.
I think this flows from a couple of things.
First, not every gamer has the same definition of what's "fun." For example, I might like exploration and simulation and perceiving the internal structure of things; she prefers story and roleplaying and relationship development; he's into winning as quickly as possible and collecting high scores and achievements. All of these can be satisfied with a "game," but not all forms of gameplay are equally satisfying to every player.
Second, most gamers aren't game designers. Unlike game designers, gamers aren't trained to be aware of what other people consider "fun," or of how other players will respond to some element of a game. The typical gamer tends to think only of what he personally enjoys, and assumes that it's what everyone else must enjoy as well.
I think these two effects account for most of the confusion when people try to talk about what's fun.
Games Shouldn't Talk About Politics: "... games, because of their interactivity and their ability to ask players to reflect on their decisions, could be an incredibly powerful tool for discussing politics, so to say that 'games shouldn't be political' is just silly."
From an artistic perspective, I agree with you. It should be possible to make games that have an overt political message, regardless of whether you or I might agree with some particular message or not. And then, as long as the game is up-front about its message, people should be free to choose whether to play that game or not.
From a commercial perspective, a game that's all about some political agenda is one thing. Put it out there and let the market decide. But a game that is not intended to convey a specific political message should, IMO, not choose sides politically in any way at all, because all that can possibly do is drive away some potential customers... and that's commercially dumb. People of all political beliefs and parties play computer games -- why alienate some of them by taking sides or making gratuitous political cheap shots?
It's possible to make games that address political subjects without turning off lots of players by pushing the developer's politics as the one "right" answer. Deus Ex remains the best example of this kind of balance. Despite wrapping the entire game around the question, "How far should one be prepared to go to defend liberty?" which could easily have been used as a soapbox, the developers at Ion Storm in Austin used NPCs and gameplay to explore the question, and allowed players to choose their own answers to that question.
If there's a model for making a commercially viable game with political content, I think Deus Ex is it.
There is an exception though. When I am working in a professional setting I am usually forced to make the "pigeon hole" games, because those are the games that sell. But, when I work on my own games at home I am of course free to experiment.
Anytime someone says games should be x or games should be y simply take it with a huge grain of salt. If you believe games can be Z then make it so and to hell with naysayers.
1) Games should be engaging. True, a game doesn't need to be "fun" in the traditional sense, but it should at least be though-provoking, artsy, or interesting in some other way. This sounds obvious, but I've seen a few art games that were neither fun nor particularly interesting.
2) Games should *try* to be interactive. I have no problem with cinematics and other passive storytelling techniques, but too often I feel like they are used as a crutch by the developer. Think about it: if you saw a movie where half the story was told through text scrolling across the screen, it'd really make you wonder why the director didn't just write a novel instead.
I, for one, don't think that the majority of game players -- or game developers, even -- are primed for the more radical game design paradigms out there. I don't think that they HAVE to be, either: saying that games "should be fun" isn't terribly narrow advice, and I doubt that it's crippling anybody's growth either. It has been mentioned already how developers are going to create X, Y or Z regardless of what people say: I daresay that the onus is on them to accept -- and then shrug off -- the inevitable criticisms that come their way. That's the hazard of being an artist in any field, after all. ;)
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Oh, heck, I think that these common paradigms actually serve another useful purpose: to weed out the less determined developers and give us art games and the like from only those who are the most prepared to promote and stand by their message. Because of the popularity of the "games must be fun" viewpoint, we don't get too many art games ... but when one DOES crop up, it tends to be crafted by somebody who knows what they're doing and who I tend to respect as sincere creatives, if only because the idea is not yet "fashionable".
Does this make sense, or am I just rambling?
The reason that they have to be fun is because they are an Active Medium, the player has to put forth effort to continue. If there is no reason, no fun, then they won't. We too easily forget the fact that nobody cares about the story, nobody cares about any of the pretense. They do not care what you set out to do, only if they are enjoying themselves doing it.
A game is not defined by being fun, pleasurable or even interactive. It's merely a set of rules in which (or by which) 1 or more "players" exist, often (but not exclusively) to accomplish some goal.
That said, a game is ALWAYS fun. Fun is the real misnomer, because it's a word that lacks a concrete definition, and is so subjective to the individual. Do you enjoy doing something, find it pleasurable in some way, perhaps not directly but it enriched your life and provoked of your thought process, did you enjoy that on some level? If so, the game was fun. Fun is an ethereal concept that will always run hand in hand with anything we as humans do, anything can be enjoyed on some level by someone. When people say, games should be fun, I think what they mean is, "the game should be immediately fun to the general populace", as opposed to it being fun to some 2nd or 3rd degree and only to a niche subset of the populace, and that, personally, is not a view I share.
AS for interactivity, a book and a novel are both "interactive" media, for to not interact with them would make a poor form of media. They are a "static" form of media though, in so much as no matter how many times you interact with them the result will always be the same. The things that set video games apart are really that they're a more complex media, with more mechanical techniques to immerse the player (they pretty much incorporate everything other than stage's ability to physically break the 4th wall), and that they can quite possibly be dynamic, in that each play through is different. A game developer would be doing very poorly to not make use of the best techniques he possibly could in any given situation, if that situation calls for a cinematic as the most effective way of reaching the payer in the desired way, then so be it, a cinematic it is.
As for the politics dealio, completely agree, there should be no real limitation on the subject matter a video game can cover (legality issues aside for a brief moment), for one some people enjoy their politically motivated games, and secondly because they become a legitimate way of expressing the makers political opinions. Sure some people find it tiresome to be confronted with politics in a video game, sad reality is, those people just won't play, same way some people refuse to vote, and others change the channel during politically motivated adverts, doesn't mean we stop having votes.
@Christopher Wragg
Books, novels, movies, etc. are not interactive they are reactive as in you react to them, but they don't react to you. Interaction implies there is a reaction from both the audience and the storyteller. A story in a traditional book or movie cannot react to the audience.
This is the kind of statement that I find problematic. If you do not personally care for any of those things, then that's perfectly fine. But many people do care about story, and many people care about story even more than they care about gameplay, so it seems silly to me to make these blanket statements about what is actually a huge market made up of hundreds of millions of people. I'll give you a couple of personal examples.
Dreamfall: The Longest Journey has a very interesting story and probably the best dialogue I've ever heard in a game. But there's not a whole lot of "gameplay", and the gameplay that does exist is pretty mediocre. But I've played through the game multiple times, because I find the story to be so interesting.
Final Fantasy 8 would be another good example. The character progression system in that game is really broken. The battles - which make up the majority of "gameplay" - are generally not that interesting. Even still, I've played through the entire game 3 or 4 times, and the reason I've done it is because I find the story and the setting to be so fascinating. The gameplay I couldn't care less about, but the story keeps drawing me back in.
Tutt tutt, how very computer science of you, both movies and books are interactive in so far as the user chooses when and how to watch/read them and also in how to interpret them (one of the lowest forms of interaction, but interaction still). What you're now debating is "open interactivity" vs "closed interactivity" (quite new concepts really). My original point being more that interactive is a very poor word to use when talking about games unless you're going to delve deeply into exactly what level and type of interaction is being specified.
It's a common fallacy to assume that video games "need" to be fun in order to get a player to progress. Even if you don't think people care about characters/stories (which I think Adam Bishop has already done a pretty good job of proving wrong), there are plenty of other instances where players will force themselves through boring game play. For example, I don't know anyone that enjoys grinding gold/levels, yet most people that have played an MMO or JRPG have done so at one point or another.
I think the trick is making sure that there is a purpose and an appropriate reward for game play that isn't fun. Readers of literature are willing to trudge through frustrating techniques such as stream of consciousness writing (which takes a lot more effort to read than many "games are more active than other mediums" people would like to admit), so why wouldn't players be willing to do the same with frustrating game play?
We always have to remeber that the Gameplay is what the game is all about.
@Michael, "Why wouldn't players be willing to do the same with frustrating gameplay?" Simple, there are a dozen other things that they can do or play that are not frustrating. You also use the false analogy that MMOers (I think I just made that up) grind for the sake of grinding, and that isn't true. They grind for Endgame.
You're right, games don't have to be fun to get them to progress in the game, they just need to be fun to keep them playing the game at ALL. If a game isn't fun then it's either boring, torturous(aka frustrating, annoying, etc) or remarkably neutral (I'm not 100% certain that true neutrality of emotion could ever be generated from a game, one day someone might prove me wrong). If the player is bored they'll perhaps persist in the absence of better things to do or in the hope the game improves, else they find something else to do. If the game is torturous they'll stop quite quickly (unless they know the game improves) and are unlikely to ever return.
@Eric Carr
"Saying that the story is good, hence the game is fun is not quite correct either is it? No matter what, a story by itself will never make a bad game good. It will be a mediocre game with a good story."
That statement irks me. Let me edit it;
Saying that that the story is good, and a player enjoyed it, hence the game was fun, is entirely correct. No matter what, a story by itself will never make a bad game good. It will be a mediocre game that some people find fun because it has a good story.
Perhaps I'm not explaining myself well enough here. I agree that in the absence of any other rewards players will of course refuse to play a game that isn't fun. However, that doesn't mean that frustrating game play is an impossibility. There are plenty of art games use frustration in order to make a certain point, just as there are a number of independent films that use unpleasant imagery for the same reasons (just look at this year's Cannes entries). Whether it's a frustrating video game or a frustrating movie, the audience always has the ability to turn the screen off (or walk out of the theater), but if a work is well made then the majority of the audience won't. Braid, Mirror's Edge, and The Path all use somewhat frustrating mechanics in order to further certain themes, and while they may have gotten a bit of criticism for "not being fun", there are also a number of people who enjoyed them more for that.
Now a couple of qualifications:
1) You would obviously never use frustrating game play in a mainstream game that's trying to appeal to as many people as possible. It's the same reason you never see anything too extreme or disturbing in summer blockbuster flicks.
2) There needs to be a thematic purpose for the frustrating game play, and that purpose needs to be clear to the audience. Otherwise the player is going to think the game is frustrating just due to bad/lazy design.
3) There needs to be a light at the end of the tunnel. Eric Carr is correct that MMO players only grind for some sort of reward, and the same is true of any player. People WILL subject themselves to boring/frustrating/bad game play, but there has to be an adequate reason for them to do so.
I realize not everyone is interested in art games and "boring game play" but realize that there are some people that enjoy this sort of thing. You see the same sort of phenomenon in other mediums (film, literature), so I don't really see why games are any different.