What’s Wrong With Video Games

I have to applaud that sentiment, and loudly. I’m a graphics junkie as much as the next guy, but gorgeous visuals is really a small piece of the overall fun of a game. Observe The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. Most of the graphics in that game could be produced, at least passably, by previous generation machines. The game was pleasant to look at, sure, but it was fun because it was deep and engrossing and simply a hoot and half to play through. Combat mechanics were precise, the puzzles were challenging but not frustrating, the story was interesting and the secondary elements (music, mini-games, controls, level design) were superb.

Now look at a game like Final Fantasy X, a gorgeous game by all rights… but a gorgeous mess. The digitized acting was cornball, the battle system was tedious and dull, the gameplay was stale and static, the level design was focused more on looking nice than being navigable. I wonder if the people who claimed to like the game were actually enjoying the game or enjoying their sightseeing trip sometimes.

I play some Nethack on occasion. We’re talking about a game that uses ASCII characters to represent a fantasy dungeon crawl. When the letter Z can inspire fear, there may be some decent gameplay happening. What Nethack gets absolutely, positively right is that it is deep… crazy deep. It’s frustrating, aggravating and endlessly enjoyable because you can do so much. Learning the game is part of playing. Chatting about the game is part of playing. Complaining about the game is a huge part of playing and it doesn’t get old. Sure it uses randomized dungeon maps to help keep things fresh, but a simplistic game with a randomizer wouldn’t be any fun, so they gave you so much to do you could play the game—just the first level mind you—for a year and probably never do everything possible. It’s a game whose source code is less than four megabytes; we have DVD-ROM games capable of holding over ten times that amount and we fill it up with licensed pop tunes and mammoth textures and don’t bother to worry about whether the game is any fun.

At this point in time I should have to be impressed when a game like Fable lets me change my appearance with age and experience. That sort of innovation should have happened long before reflective surfaces in quarter panels and ragdoll physics. I want a role-playing experience that is actually role-playing, that gives me a chance to develop how I want and achieve goals in clever ways without being tied to a rail for the sake of a few cutscenes.

3. The Funnel Factor

I have the sense that while game developers are busy seeing how sweet they can make their graphics look, they are ignoring the role of game designer to the extent that they are becoming like Hollywood in terms of originality.

Don’t misunderstand, I’m not one of those people who bashes sequels just for being sequels. At least, unlike in the movies, video game sequels are often superior to their predecessors because usually (hopefully?) a good game gets refined and has a few mechanical defects tweaked and improved in later versions. But a sequel of a First Person Shooter at this point is just another First Person Shooter.

Because so many developers don’t want to have to come up with an original way to play a game, they continually fall back into a tired cliche until the number of genres in video games is funneled into a handful. Shooters (First Person), Strategy (Real Time), Platformer (Devil May Cry-style or Grand Theft Auto-style), Racing (Driving), Role-Playing (Full Motion Video-fest): any license or concept has been shoehorned into one of these styles or, if the developers are feeling really nutso that week, multiple genres.

I understand that there are limitations (odd as that sounds) with 3D. Cameras become a problem in three dimensional environments, field of vision and scope of action have to be considered. Controls are tricky, too, because 3D implies realism and while old sprite-based games might have gotten away with some abstraction of controls 3D gamers assume that controls will function in a way that is consistent with a world that, relatively speaking, operates under the same rules as their own.

But the problem with funneling all games into a handful of genres is that they begin to define the limits of what should be a more or less limitless medium. Instead of finding cool game concepts and building worlds and stories into and around that, people think of genres and find minor tricks and tweaks to set them apart that will fit with the theme of the day. Games have started to become detail-tweaks with every one subgenred down into their minutiae with literal differences such as “stealth action like Splinter Cell… but with camoflauge!” Is this the extent of the originality game developers have left? When individual death animations for each type of foe is a selling point, I’ve already halfway checked out. Wake me when someone does something worth mentioning.

What happened to turn-based games? Why does strategy have to be “real time?” Why are all massive role-playing games online multiplayer? Doesn’t anyone see the appeal of a massive solo campaign? Maybe a small-band cooperative online role-playing game? And I don’t just want to see top-down racers or even a return to 2D games, necessarily. Show me something unique; something that has a cool concept or a great license that doesn’t do something stupid with it. When Shadowrun is a first-person shooter, something is seriously wrong.

4. It’s the Writers, Stupid

Games have gotten more complex. I’ll give them that. Sometimes, complex is better. Sometimes complex can suggest the ability to delve into artistic realms. I don’t know if I believe it has happened yet, but I think that at some point games could be considered art.

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