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Difficult Questions About Videogames:
How Can You Tell if a Videogame is Rubbish?
Difficult
Questions About Videogames is a book about contemporary thinking
and opinion on video games. In this excerpt, James Newman and Iain
Simons touch briefly on their methodology in putting together the
book and provide their reasoning behind one of the questions they
asked and include a choice selection of the responses they received.
Methodology, Progress, Caveats
For
around a month we talked about what questions we'd really like to
ask. Once agreed upon, a contributors guide was written and a website
created. Fairly early on, we decided that email was going to be
the principal contributing conduit, in the absence of any significant
resources for travelling around and interviewing. This also gave
us a continuity of response that individual personality relationships
couldn't pollute. Email addresses were procured from company sites,
weblogs and the kind support of a few partners who advocated our
project to the esteemed members of their address books.
The
following is one of the questions we asked:
How
Can You Tell if a Videogame is Rubbish?
There
is an oft-repeated convention in the developer interview,
"What
are your top five favorite games?"
There
appears to be a very shallow pool of excellence from which the usual
answers are drawn. Zelda 3, Super Mario Bros 3, Defender…
A small, elite collection are endlessly (and rightfully) celebrated
again and again. We are running out of adjectives with which to
prefix Miyamoto's genius. He's great, but our hands hurt from clapping.
So, just for a chapter, we're going to ignore the 'brilliant' and
turn our attention wholly on the 'rubbish'. For there is a rich,
deep seam of rubbish to mine - and perhaps it forms a fantastic
resource.
We
chose this negative qualification in this question for a very deliberate
reason. The use of a blunt, catch-all dismissive like 'rubbish'
tends to form the beginning of our critical language. It's lazy,
it's value-driven, it's inarticulate and it's ubiquitous in the
conversational language of every player. Surely there must be other
ways of learning 'great' than just studying 'greatness'? Aren't
we supposed to learn from our (and others) mistakes?
Let
us be clear. This is an investigation into the presence of 'rubbish',
not the absence of 'brilliant'…
…Our
arrival at this question was not prompted by the concerns of the
consumer. For the player, it should come as no surprise that rubbishness
is measured in terms of the equally nebulous value-for-money, or
in relation to audio-visual presentation, the integrity of the code,
the generosity of the rules, the flexibility of the simulation…
The question was suggested from meetings with developers. What had
fascinated us throughout our discussions and interviews with the
people who make the games we play and discern as brilliant or rubbish
were two associated questions. The first emerged as a managerial
issue. Today, the demands of current videogames hardware systems
are such that the large team of diverse individuals is practically
inevitable. How do you manage a team of people with increasingly
specialized roles who perhaps know nothing of each other's work
and who don't, perhaps can't, have a sense of the overall vision?
How do you keep them all pointing in the right direction? How can
you predict what is going to work before you actually play
it?...
A
selection of answers:
*
* *
You
don't want to play it anymore. The shorter the playtime spent,
the worse the game. If there was a perfect formula for this then
someone would get rich very quickly :)
I
simply made games that I thought would be a challenge to play
but fair. I also tried to avoid violence and make my games family
friendly for all ages.
--Scott
Adams
*
* *
It's
funny - and sad - that we have such a scant aesthetic understanding
of videogames that we'd even have to ask this question.
But
we do, and we should ask it.
Like
film, art, and literature, videogames should do something to their
players. They should elicit a response. That response can be cathartic,
emotional, social, political, kinetic, even anaerobic. But it
has to do something. The truly rubbish games don't speak
to players in any way.
They
seem to think that games are mechanical affairs.
--Ian
Bogost
*
* *
Nobody
plays it, or if they do to the end, they don't want to play it
again. And even if they play it, they don't want to admit that
to anyone else. And during the game they have to force their attention
NOT to wander. For me, one example was Myst. Conversely,
if I am sweating in an air-conditioned room after 10 minutes of
gameplay, that is a good game. A game that your attention cannot
help but be focused on.
--Erik
Champion
*
* *
A
videogame is rubbish if one or more of the following are observed
in the course of playing it:
1)
Its content is inexpertly created or presented. This includes
some or all of: badly-rendered, clichéd, or sophomoric
artwork (including user interface artwork); dull, repetitive,
clichéd, or badly-played music; badly-written, clichéd,
predictable, hackneyed, incomprehensible or juvenile text or
dialogue; badly-acted scenes recorded by live actors, whether
in audio or video. This also includes visual errors caused by
poor display technology, e.g. "skating" characters,
objects projecting or passing through what are supposed to be
impenetrable walls, unrealistic physics in realistic environments,
and so on.
2)
Its responses to the player or players' inputs are inconsistent,
unpredictable, or too slow to enable the player to achieve his
goals.
3)
The design of its menus and inputs is inconsistent, awkward,
unobvious, counterintuitive, or require a long time to learn.
4)
Understanding the goals and internal mechanics of the game requires
more time to learn than the player feels is justified by the
entertainment that it offers.
5)
It is too hard, i.e. the probability of a player of reasonable
experience achieving a given goal in the game is still below
50% after the player has attempted the goal ten times.
6)
The computer running the game crashes in the course of playing
it.
7)
A large number of the game's challenges can only be solved by
trial-and-error or brute force. This encompasses a variety of
design errors far too great to list here.
8)
Any game that does not allow the player to save his or her progress,
on a gameplay device equipped with a save mechanism, at the
player's own convenience and at any time of the player's choosing,
is rubbish.
--Ernest
W. Adams
*
* *
Bad
videogames can be judged based on lack of passion. Therefore,
any game that does not produce high-pitch shouting, sore thumbs
or instants of introspection, is technically rubbish.
--Gonzalo
Frasca
*
* *
First,
the useless answer: you can't. All you can tell for sure is whether,
to you, a videogame is rubbish or not. I'm sure we've all played
games that got terrible reviews and word-of-mouth that we actually
kind of liked, and we've all seen games that got great reviews
that we didn't enjoy at all. Everyone's different, and what's
a joy to you may be a chore to someone else and vice-versa. Which
is an important thing to remember: all too often I've run across
opinionated game designers who think their aesthetic represents
The Truth, and if a game they didn't like gets good reviews and
word of mouth they wonder how so many people can be wrong.
Now,
the useful answer: there are games that appeal to a large number
of people and games that appeal to very few; just like ice cream
comes in chocolate, mint, and anchovy flavour. If you go around
saying, "anchovy ice cream is rubbish," you won't find
many people who disagree with you. So, if the question you're
asking is, "Will this game be a hit?" or "Will
lots and lots of people like this game?" the best thing to
do is to playtest and be receptive to feedback. If everyone you
try the game on seems to love it, the game probably isn't rubbish.
What you can't do is say, "I like this game therefore everyone
else will like this game." You're operating from a very small
statistical sample there. (But it is a good place to start. You
always have to start making something you'll like and then see
if others like it too.)
If
some people like your game and some people don't, you may still
have a hit. Believe it or not, there's a huge number of people
out there who don't like GTA,
one of the most successful games of all time. And there's a huge
number of people who don't like The
Sims.
And so on. I don't think videogames have an equivalent of chocolate
ice cream, a flavour that absolutely everyone likes. Even Zelda
and Mario
have their detractors: "I don't like puzzles," and "I
don't like platformers."
The
answer you'd really like would be for me to tell you how to anticipate
how the public is going to feel about a game before they even
play it. There's guidelines you can apply here, but it's really
all guesswork until you get your game into the hands of playtesters.
For any guideline I could dream up, there's a game out there that
broke that rule and still worked. Still, some of my guidelines
would include:
-
Is the game the best at something? Does it have the "best
graphics" or "best sound" or "best stealth
gameplay mechanic" or "best World War II simulation"?
Here's where it's nice to do something novel and unique; if
your game is the only game that offers a new core gameplay mechanic,
your game is by definition the best at that until a competitor
usurps you
- Is
what your game is best at something "cool?" Here we
get into small sample size problems again - what you think is
cool may not be what someone else thinks is cool. But you can
poll people and find out, even before you start developing a
game, whether most people think an idea is cool or not. If it
does, then all you have to do is pull off the execution. (Which
is no small feat! I've bought many games that sounded great
from reading the high concept on the back of the box only to
discover that their great high concept was turned into an exercise
of frustrating tedium.)
- Does
the game make the player feel like a hero? You look at the top
titles and you'll see this recurring theme through almost all
of them. It doesn't matter if your player is a warrior or a
quarterback or a spy or a spaceman or a master criminal, he
still feels like a hero. Even GTA
makes you feel like a hero. The player does something heroic,
something cool, and then says, "Look what I did."
- On
the execution side, you can ask: is the game always fresh? That
is, a player should never be forced to repeat the same challenges
multiple times. Many games violate this rule by providing save
checkpoints that are too infrequent and the days of customers
putting up with this abuse are coming to an end.
- A
game should not have Shelf Level Events, meaning moments that
make the player put the game back on the shelf, from where it
may never return. These can range from a challenge that's so
difficult that the player gives up to a bug that prevents them
from completing a section. On the difficulty front we're always
in a quandary: if you make your game too easy, you lose the
hardcore players who thrive on a challenge. If you make the
game too hard, you lose the masses. It's important to err on
the side of too easy, here: talent is not a bell curve, but
a power curve. There are lots of people at the low or no-talent
end of the graph, and only one person -- the champion, the best
player of your game in the world -- at the other end. Since
you're the one who designed the game, you're probably fairly
close to the right yourself, which means a challenge that's
just right for you is going to alienate most of your players.
I've found that even if I make a challenge so easy that I can
complete it 100% of the time, it still stymies the people who
have only been playing my game for a few hours.
The
only way you can tell for sure is playtesting.
--Jamie
Fristrom
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Difficult
Questions About Videogames: How Can You Tell if
a Videogame is Rubbish?
