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Opinion: If You're Not Having Fun, Play Something Else
by Leigh Alexander [PC, Console/PC, Mobile Console, Columns, Exclusive]
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October 8, 2009
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[Gamasutra news director Leigh Alexander makes a case in favor of game difficulty as genre feature, and suggests frustrated audiences don't need better game design -- but different games.]
Welcome to the Era of Accessibility, where video games' once-uncertain climb from nerd niche to global cultural phenomenon has become an all-out storm on the battlements. Motion controls, intuitive design innovations and other seductions mean games are becoming both interesting to and playable by a broader audience than ever.
Bullet Hell is no longer marketable, only old-schoolers want to level-grind, and because nobody reads tutorials, games must teach you how to play them and play them well, without you ever realizing you're learning.
Games should hook you fast and easy, but you should be able to pick-up-and-play -- and then put it down again after a few moments, feeling satisfied and successful. "Bite-size chunks" are the holy grail. If anyone ever gets bored or frustrated, the designer has failed.
Aw, c'mon now. All these wussies are totally ruining it, man.
I kid, of course. The focus on accessibility -- drawing new audiences and better engaging existing ones -- means we're learning more about intuitiveness and experience than ever before. Sorry, hardcore market, but video games are for everyone now, and you're fast becoming an irrelevant niche.
Okay, so maybe I'm kind of kidding there, too. But only kind of. There is a middle ground between total ease and controller-chucking frustration, and if games are to inherit their rightful place in The Future Of Entertainment (!!), we need to find it.
Why Different Strokes Are Essential
Entertainment media that is penetrative on a broad and permanent scale features a broad swath of "levels," and we accept them. Just because 'Twilight' has more mass appeal than, say Roberto Bolano's challenging '2666' doesn't indicate that either of them needs repairing.
Music buffs enjoy ignoring the Billboard charts in favor of lo-fi, shoegaze, shitgaze, bloghouse, chillwave or no-fi, but are they "wrong" if Lil' Wayne is still what sells? Who's the bigger film buff, the gal that religiously hits the cineplex for every single blockbuster to reach the big screen, or the one who regularly watches difficult foreign language indie flicks every night on her laptop at home?
A Street Fighter II tournament is no more or less useful than a Rock Band bar night, even though the latter is more common and better-attended. Right, I'm being heavy-handed, but you get it.
The era of accessibility has unfortunately become one of entitlement. Now that Nintendo can make a game that even your mom can love, and now that Blizzard has made a game you can talk about with even your lamest coworkers, it's easy to address traditional genre design -- say, the brutal shooter, the Japanese RPG, or the obsessively detailed world-builder -- and demand that it should make concessions to accessibility. Y'know, so you can be really awesome at it.
It's Gotta Be All About You, Now?
But one man's frustration is another man's feature. Even within those well-acclimated to gaming, two players can have oppositional reactions to the same title: It's too easy for one, too hard for another. There should be less hand-holding; there should be more.
What does a player's enjoyment of challenge have to do with cultural relevance? Some games do have a single baseline difficulty level that can be enjoyed by all, but these by default must be enormously simple experiences -- say, Tetris. If all we had were games that everyone could enjoy, we wouldn't have too many different kinds of games. And in the end, we wouldn't have a very diverse audience, either.
Instead of thinking "core versus casual," we'd be served to look at things like complexity, challenge, difficulty and tedium as components of specific genres, rather than universal concepts that must be reduced across the board for a title to be considered accessible.
Many critics and fans, for example, bemoan RPGs' overwhelmingly enormous worlds with too many sidequests, too much grinding, too many tiny objects to find (as columnist Lewis Denby did right here at Gamasutra last week).
But to genre devotees, those aren't minuses -- those are an identifying part of the experience. Yes, it's obtuse when an adventure game asks you to break into a museum not with the fire axe in your inventory, but by giving a fruit pie to an orphan in exchange for a length of string used to fix a wind chime you can trade to an antiques dealer for a ticket to a costume ball where you have to ring your alarm clock to cause a distraction so you can steal a club soda to spill on the guy in uniform so that he'll take his outfit off and you can wear it in order to con your way into the museum by pretending to be a security guard (as long as you remembered to get the fake ID from the floor of the taxi cab in the game's opening sequence).
But guess what? That's why people who loved old adventure games loved them. Raise your hand if you're thinking, "man, I wish they still made them like that." If your hand isn't up, then hey! You don't like traditional adventure games! To Lewis and friends, I say: If you don't like too many sidequests, then maybe you don't like RPGs.
"Everything For Everyone" Means Nothing To Most
"Something for everyone" is a worthy goal for games in an era when we're trying to reach everyone. Those who find a sticking point with nearly everything they play these days are being underserved, perhaps, by a lack of breadth and diversity in genre.
But the concept of "everything for everyone" won't help. In fact, perhaps the hesitance to embrace specifics about which design components should and should not be difficult, and a lack of understanding on to what degree certain audiences do and don't enjoy being challenged means a landscape where many people just can't tell whether a game is for them or not.
And naturally, some frustrations are "features" to no one. There's certainly a fine line to be explored between appropriate components of depth and stuff that just doesn't serve the title or genre in any way. No one who likes adventure games likes pixel-hunting; no one who likes RPGs enjoys five-hour gaps between save points, for example.
The styles of modern literature evolve over the ages. Lord of the Rings, for example, is -- let's be honest -- much more valuable to us today for the precedents it set for fantasy, and not so much for its writing. Some pieces of difficult, classical drama may be irrelevant today, but others are enormously important (Shakespeare? Euripides, Aeschylus?).
If a player's not having fun, that might mean there's something wrong with the game. But it also might mean the player's simply playing the wrong game. Let's use design innovation to make them the right games, instead of trying to fix what ain't broke.
As we look to the future, let's refine the traditions of our past, not regret them as design flaws just because they're frustrating to more moderate audiences. Those big babies should just go play Wii Fit or something.
Okay, I'm a hundred percent kidding there.
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But overall, I agree. Potential sales will disagree, though.
You could easily extend the argument to say all adventure games should be rubbish, because so many of them are.
Besides, my argument was never that *all* games should be easy enough for everyone to play by default (though I'll say it again: why can't you include a *very* easy mode, that those up for a challenge could completely ignore if they so choose?), but that certain types of games require heavy difficulty while others don't. And it's the ones that don't, but that still insist on horrible spikes or unnecessary, tedious, repetitious challenge before you can actually crack on with the meat and bones of the game, that are a huge problem, and need to be thrown in a furnace.
I think the problem you describe though is happening, but due to lack of options one can either play the games anyhow or quit altogether...
I know I suck at games, but I still consider myself a gamer. I play all these hardcore games because there's always one specific element that draws me, specifically the world. Sometimes, I see all the difficult gameplay as fluff that gets in the way. But I still play these games because they are the only options available! It's just that the ideal game that I want to play does not exist yet. This is why some people become game developers...
I also have to point put that it is not just us "old school gamers" that still enjoy tough games. There are plenty of young gamers out there right now that love the old school toughness. I know lots of younger gamers that love Devil May Cry because it is really challenging and uncompromising. They would be pissed off if it suddenly got really easy just because other gamers could not handle it.
There are enough games that all ready cater to the crowd who is more casual in their game play needs. Why should they also have to encroach upon the more difficult genres as well? I say keep them separate. Lets easy games be easy and let challenging games be difficult. The two groups should not be forced to game in the same camp if you get my meaning.
I guess in the end I just don't want "hard core games" to go by the way side just because of the desire to make all games accessible to everyone. It would be unfair to the gamers out there who will always love difficult games.
I think you should be able to tell the story / design you WANT to tell ("easy" or "hard"), and then market it to the right niche as what Stardock, etc. are doing.
As with (mostly) everyone here I came from the brutal and punishing background of games like the original Bard's Tale, Wizardry, King's Quest, Space Quest and the World of Xeen series that did everything they could to kill you.
Not every game from this point on *should* be designed for the iPhone, or the individual attempting to multi-task between tweets.
And we also need to keep making the brutally sucky games to keep AVGN going.
It's not wrong to expect gamers to know their limits.
But game designers also have a responsibility, which is to expand those limits when they can.
That isn't to say we're going to be left with nothing. Even though Beyonce, Taylor Swift and Kanye West are topping the music charts, I still have my collection of Zao and Kitaro albums. It's all great music from musicians that are still getting payed to make great music even if there is little to no chance of them becoming Billboard chart toppers. We'll probably be seeing alot more commercials for Imagine: Beauty Queen and Rock Band 17 but we also see commercials for Beyonce and Britney Spears albums. Even though we're still listening to Zao.
We'll still get innovative, creative, and very fun hardcore games. We just have to swim through the crap to find them, much like the film and music industries.
@Lewis Denby: Sorry mate, but you're missing the point that some people really like "formulaic, obtuse or lazy design" within their games. In many cases, it's largely due to what they grew up with, or perhaps other features of it (ridiculous puzzle solving, for example).
Maybe you disagree that rose-coloured glasses isn't a good reason to like a game, but clearly companies like Telltale, Capcom, et al, think you are very, very wrong.
Of course, most of the time, I would agree with you that there are a lot of games that really do need easier easy modes (or perhaps one to begin with), but I certainly disagree that every game should have such features. Reasons can range from technically infeasible/expensive (a multiplayer game needing more servers for different difficulties), to just not meshing well with the style of the game (a puzzle-solving game may not be feasible with puzzles that have any more hints then they have).
When I was a kid there was this really popular cartoon called Robotech that EVERYONE in the class watched religiously. Maybe you did too, or maybe you're one of those whippersnapper millenials I keep hearing about. Each student got something different from the show, some really liked the love triangle between Rick, Minmei and Lisa, others enjoyed the action and still others appreciated the music most. Nobody's experience was hindered by the show requiring a preference for one of its elements in order to see the whole show. Entertainment is often appreciated on many different levels, even by the same person over the course one's life. Shakespeare plays, as I'm sure you're aware, were written for and appreciated by high and low members of Elizabethan society, not just the "elite" they are associated with today.
Can we agree then that this issue of not having fun is not about players lacking skill, whining or being spoiled at all but simply about good game design and a market savvy enough to know what it wants? As painful as it may be to hear for some game designers, the value of a game and what is important about it is decided by the gamer, not the game designer. This true in any industry. Ferraris are the best cars they have ever been despite being required to have pesky things like seatbelts, automatic transmissions, airbags and reliability. And how many Ferrari owners ever drive those cars near their full potential, yet they appreciate them no less than the ones who do. Let's not get bent out of shape now that games are being required to mature as well. We have only the very best and most challenging games to look forward too!
I go back and play Super Mario on NES and I don't make it very far, even though I've been playing it for years."
ROFL! That is funny because I have been playing through Mega Man Powered Up on my PSP. It has the original game on it as well as the newer updated version. Both are hard as hell but the original so unforgiving. It drives me crazy sometimes yet I keep playing.
The same goes for the new version of "Ghosts N Goblins". People HATED that games because it was so hard, yet I beat it. I had loads of fun. So did lots of other people as the game sold reasonably well on the system. Sure I guess they could have made it easier for "everyone". But would the experience have been the same? I say it would not have been the same.
This makes me want to go back and play the original Super Mario Bros just to see how badly I get my tail whipped on. :)
@Christopher Braithwaite
To a point you are right. But the games market is large enough to support games that are easy and games that are hard. Why should every game be accessible to everyone? There are many movies that not accessible to everyone. Eraser Head comes to mind. There are lots of books that a defiantly not accessible to everyone. War and Peace anyone? Why should games be different? I just don't understand this need by some gamers and game designers to be accepted by everyone everywhere.
It's all well and good to want a game to be "old school", but you do need to remember that the old school is a SMALL school, by modern standards. We are far past the days when 100,000 sales was considered to be a hit. Just how much of a budget will 100,000 sales return a profit on? And if it's somebody else's money, it had better be a dramatic profit. Investors aren't charities, and the cold fact is that one investor/publisher's successful games have to subsidize all of that investor/publisher's unsuccessful games and projects that never completed. If they want a game to be "accessible" as a condition of taking their money, you either make it accessible or you don't get to have their money. And once you accept their money, you have a moral obligation to put financial success ahead of personal philosophy.
If you want to be "pure", do it on your own time and your own dime... or hope you can find an investor who shares your vision (but even then, once you take the money, you'd bloody well better deliver).
"Old school" and "retro" may have a place in our hearts (for that subset of "our" who are old enough to remember and care), but the modern market is much larger and less tolerant of what are seen as errors of design. An old-school fan can rant about how those "errors" are the point of the game, but that argument can be reduced to "I'm right, and everyone else on the planet is wrong. KIDS THESE DAYS". Yeah, good luck with that. Times change, and if you don't roll with it you're irrelevant. Charming, maybe, but irrelevant.
And as for the current "new school"... guess what. 20 years, maybe even just 10 years from now, YOU will be the "big baby". That alone is certain.
Devil may Cry 4 and Ninja Gaiden 2 are both "old school" hard and they both sold very well. Capcom and Tecmo made big bucks off of both of those games.
Also like I pointed out earlier there is still a market for super hard games in the younger crowd of gamers. Sure it is not a huge as Wii Fit or GTA4 but it is there and they have money to spend. They would also be upset if harder games went by the wayside.
I basically think a gamer should have a way to see all the content they want to see. War and Peace may be inscrutable to many people, but there is nothing preventing them from reading it in it's entirety. As I mentioned in another thread, Ikaruga is one of my favorite shooters despite not being able to get past the first sub-boss because it lets me see replays of the best pilots play through the whole game. I'm pretty good at the game until that sub-boss though. Even though Ikaruga "is not my kind of game" I can still enjoy it and feel like I got my 10 bucks worth. Something like that should be available in every shooter. I'm not arguing for diminished challenge in games at all; in fact I believe that these kinds of features will actually encourage players to *increase* the challenge of the games they play.
I'm not saying there's no place for games that require you to decipher complex systems or figure out 26 button control schemes (hello Steel Battalion!); that can be a fun exercise in it's own right. But if we're talking about making a good game, something that will stand the test of time and be fun for years to come, accessibility can only help.
@Lewis Denby: Just as it doesn't sit right to you to excuse "formulaic, obtuse or lazy design", it equally doesn't sit right to me to accommodate lazy, obtuse, or unskilled "gamers" (I refuse to call those unwilling to get better gamers) by declawing all the interesting elements of a game, and simultaneously cheapening the experience of overcoming the challenges the game presents. Isn't the point of playing the game overcomming challenges in the first place?
Just as picking up a basketball, a golf club, or a bowling ball does not entitle me to be a 95% free throw shooter, to shoot a hole in one, or to complete a perfect game, picking up a videogame ought not entitle the owner to complete all the content in the game.
I'm currently playing a game that has had some backlash for simplifying. While the game is enjoyable, and well crafted there's little to no depth to it and I just don't have an attachment to it anymore. Of the core group of 15 - 20 people who played, all of them have now left within a few weeks having 'finished' the game. They've seen all current content and with no incentive to replay the content over and over, they're done. Same group spent hundreds of hours on a single encounter in a previous incarnation of the game.
Compare that to another game that I played through a by all accounts disastrous revamp. Even when I hated the game, and lamented the loss of my character's identity and class, I couldn't let go of my house and supplies and guild town, and collected goods and yes, even my shadow of itself character. The emotional attachment kept me involved where easy mode 'shoot, loot, scoot' development philosophy had turned me off. However, I never would have bought the game as a new player. The simplified game style did not appeal to me. I need a game with barriers to entry to keep me interested and involved.
Long story short, designing games with easy modes seems like an appealing idea on the short term, or perhaps as a single player, but could end up shooting yourself in the foot as an MMO designer.
The point is, games must be made for very specific target to reach a very specific and high quality in one genre. By trying to make games for everyone (you totally messed up your public target), you modify the core mechanics of the game to let them feel more casual, but in reality you just destroyed your own rules and the true fun factor behind all of them.
Since Halo 2, Game Developers are destroying shooter games trying to make them casual when there, in reality, is no difference between both - it's a playstyle, exactly like Marios Bros NES is both casual and hardcore.
Unfortunately, HQs/ Publishers/ Merketing guys, etc. do not really understand how to make great games or really understand their own public targets.
If the game design includes mechanics that are inappropriate for the game's genre or if the implementation of the mechanics aren't sufficiently balanced against each other, then the fault lies with the game designer. For example, if in a survival horror shooter the ammunition is SO limited that the guns become useless in stopping enemies and advancing through the game, then the implementation of a mechanic was improperly balanced and the game designer should correct this. If the game designer then decides to tackle this balance issue by adding power-ups that make the player invincible, then they now have added an inappropriate mechanic for the type of game they are making and it is further unbalanced. Again, the designer is at fault.
If the real issue is that the player themselves are trying to play the game as though it were an action shooter with plentiful ammo, and the perceived difficulty is in restricted ammunition, then the player is really reporting the symptom of a problem that they have created. It's not the game design, it's not the game balance, and it's not because the game itself is "too difficult." The issue here, clearly, is that the player needs to, in popular MMO parlance, learn2play. The player needs to learn to play this particular game as it was designed, not *as they wished the game to be*. The player needs to take responsibility for grokking the experience the game designer created by shooting tactically and with more accuracy. I can, and will, go on at length about this particular topic in my own essay, but suffice it to say that the more a perceived difficulty lies with the player either disliking or willfully ignoring mechanics that are fundamental to the genre of the game they are playing, the more likely it is that the player should be playing a different game or genre. After all, they already are in a way.
In the end, IF a given game is designed balanced and internally coherent, then difficulty is an indication that I, as a player, am not playing the game correctly. If I keep dying while playing GoW because I am standing out in the open under fire, then the perceived difficulty is my own damn fault and I need to readjust and figure out that I should be using cover religiously because *cover is a fundamental mechanic of GoW*. Refusing to change the way I play on the one hand while simultaneously crying foul on the other displays, as Leigh Alexander so eloquently put it, a sense of entitlement that imho is both alarming and ignorant. What makes a good game is hard to pin down, but assuming that a game IS good, then an an unwillingness to change the way you play shows that you either can't or really don't want to play a particular game or even game genre.
As far as the arguments about catering to players and how not doing so will make you 'irrelevant'...yes and no. The ultimate point Alexander is making is the old saw Lincoln coined about not being able to please everybody all the time. If you know anything about marketing, you'll intuit that you'll go broke marketing to everybody. Instead, focus your marketing to a target audience. Games are largely defined by the way we categorize them--what genre they fall into. All genres have hallmarks that are flexible to some degree. However, diluting a game to accomodate the complaints of players who aren't really fans of a genre risks alienating the fans of that genre. The key point here is that, due to the nature of game design, changing any one mechanic often has pervasive effects thoughout the design that the designer will need to re-balance or even change altogether. To the degree this happens is the degree that the game itself fundamentally changes and becomes a *different gamegenre of game*. Inevitably, this leads to the conclusion that the player should be playing a different game or genre altogether instead of finding flaws with a game that very well may not exist anywhere besides in their game preferences.
I actually created an Gamasutra account just to comment on this. I want to fully agree with you but I can't for the simple reason that I played an old TRS-80 game called the "Madness and the Minotaur". Yes it was text and it was brutally challenging but if game companies continued to make games that difficult it wouldn't be able to have the mass appeal they have today.
I believe easymode is for players that don't want to put up with the 'hardcore' nonsense and just be entertained. What's wrong with that?
I think a problem a lot of people have is classifying "a game is too hard" as one lump observation . There is a difference between if a game is hard because it requires a high amount of skill to play and hard because of arbitrary mechanics and broken design. I do feel that games should be made accessible without being simplified, "easy to learn, hard to master" should become a game designer mantra I think.
I'll echo the statement that games should not be made for everyone. I've played just about every genre of games and there are some that I don't like. Not because of the gameplay but because it's not my cup of tea. Should the designers remake the game for me? No they shouldn't and I'm perfectly fine with people enjoying it.
"And large demographic also tends to mean more potential buyers, though I would think the casual market is quickly reaching the saturation point. (and in terms of MMORPGs, probably already has)"
You know, people have been saying for a couple years now that "casual" (meaningless term) gaming is some sort of "bubble" or has reached a "saturation point." Yet every year, these alleged "casual" games continue to sell.
OK, so if there's a bubble or saturation point, explain Wii Fit Plus and Wii Sports Resort sales.
"I go back and play Super Mario on NES and I don't make it very far, even though I've been playing it for years. I beat New Super Mario Bros. on DS in ONE DAY(and ended the game with 34 lives)! It was far easier than any of its predecessors. I noticed the same trend in Super Mario Galaxy also: Shigs is making the games much easier."
Whoa, wait a second there. Super Mario Galaxy is not an easy game. The Matter Splatter Galaxy (I hope I got that right) is by no means a push over. I must have died 10 times straight on that level. A lot of the end-game galaxies are quite difficult.
"Difficulty and accessibility are not the same thing. Accessibility means making something as accessible as possible to the widest audience possible. It doesn't mean it needs to be easy. Take Pac-man, a game that takes only moments to learn and understand. Pretty much anyone can be sat down and taught to play Pac-man, regardless of their gaming skill (or even age or language, to a point)."
But difficulty and accessibility are correlated. In order to be accessible, the game's concept and controls have to be easy to understand within a matter of less than a minute. That's the secret to arcade game play. Easy to learn, difficult to master. The game itself can be challenging (like Pac-Man or Donkey Kong), but the controls cannot be (like several first-person shooters).
Which, I believe, brings up a very important point about the correlation between difficulty and accessibility: A game can be extremely difficult, but still rewarding and accessible, by having extra (non-essential to normal game completion) tasks to fulfill. In most new Mario games, this is getting all of the stars (ie completing all levels). Achievements are used in many games. Special in-game collection systems are also used.
Having the game be easier but having difficult AND non-essential (again, for game completion) extra portions of the game is a useful way of making a game both accessible for many people but still appealing to many hardcore enthusiasts. Still doesn't work in every case, of course (there will be those that thirst for the next Nethack, Ninja Gaiden, etc).
'I Wanna Be the Guy', ladies and gentlemen. Even with the fatal game design flaw of 'learn by dying', even with being excruciatingly hard even under that same ideology, the game still boast incredible game design. Unfortunately, most people will only be able to appreciate the game through a Utube video.
You old school NES folks might want to have a look at it, if you don't' know what it is, for entertainment purposes. I think most game designers would at least benefit by watching a video run through.