For years, I’ve had to deal with a certain mentality from developers that just drives me up the wall. It prevails mostly in Europe, the land of Psygnosis and other sadistic developers. This mentality makes me wish they were wearing those torture belts from Star Trek, and that I could simply punish them with a push of the button. It makes me wish I had access to industrial strength hydrochloric acid or Jeff Gilooly’s phone number.
What is the mentality? It's this: the harder a game gets, the more fun it must be.
And to respond plainly: BULL. And I'm going to make the Commandments of Gaming right here and now, to teach game developers what "fun" is.
For one, these developers must need their noses pressed into a dictionary. The Wikipedia definition is as such:
A game is a structured or semi-structured activity, usually undertaken for enjoyment and sometimes also used as an educational tool.... Games are generally distinct from work, which is usually carried out for remuneration, and from art, which is more concerned with the expression of ideas.
Ah, there's another word they need to learn. From the Webster dictionary:
Main Entry: work
1 : activity in which one exerts strength or faculties to do or perform something: a : sustained physical or mental effort to overcome obstacles and achieve an objective or result b : the labor, task, or duty that is one's accustomed means of livelihood c : a specific task, duty, function, or assignment often being a part or phase of some larger activity
Aha, so we garner the first rule of games: games must not be work. Granted, there are some tedious work games that some people enjoy, but I'm taking about regular games. You know, games that we play to enjoy.
Now, I'm going to exclude multiplayer games, because, basically, that sort of play is variable, and only as hard as your human opponents. I'm going to stay with single player experiences, and narrative ones - so this leaves out games like Guitar Hero or Dance Dance Revolution or even just plain old arcade games. Those are designed to be repetitive (and that would be getting ahead of ourselves.)
One of my biggest pet peeves are repeatable missions, some of the sort you see in Grand Theft Auto or Saints Row, and so forth. Some of the missions go out of their way to not only be excrutiatingly difficult, and illogical (the toy helicopters in the first GTA springs to mind), but also bring the narrative to a screeching halt - for no reason whatsoever, which stretches any sort of suspension of belief to the breaking point. Honestly, if some idiot who is only tangential to the plot gets killed, would that really end the story? I mean, if Frank can't stop some loon in a motorcycle in Dead Rising, and runs away instead, would that end the story? Early in GTA: San Andreas, so WHAT if you can't get that guy on the motorbike, who had sex with Loc G. Maybe failing to get him makes him turn around and attack you for failing. It would be a different story, sure. But is that so bad?
Will Wright in his many seminars has talked about his GTA3 avatar Moe. Will seldom went on missions - he just had Moe do stuff in the big, wide world of Liberty City. Why? Because none of the missions would ever be as interesting as the ones he'd make up. Heck, I would turn on the cheats to give the peds all of the weaponry, then have them riot. I would see how long I could last with maximum police wanted levels, or go on a rampage with a spawned tank. After getting to a point where I couldn't complete any of the missions, I simply lost interest in the story itself.
But then again, God forbid game developers would allow for branching story arcs. True Crime: Streets of LA had the brilliant concept of giving you the option to try a mission over or simply accept the failure and allow the story to go in that direction. The punishment came from not having the optimal storyline, but at least it continued. Of course, at some point it meant "Game over, your hero died a crappy death", but that was fine. I played the story the way I wanted to. It's a pity that game wasn't very good, because it might have helped improve "GTA-style" games immensely.
I refuse to call them "free form" because, hey, they aren't. Not in the least. You do what the developer wants you to do. Will got it right in wanting the player to control everything in Spore. I mean, think of it this way: imagine Barbie was developed with the mentality of today's developers. You could only do with Barbie what the instructions said you could. Who'd want to play with a doll with that kind of restriction. Me and my friends were making Darth Vader a good guy with his action figure long before George Lucas made him Luke's father.
Hence, the first commandment:
COMMANDMENT 1: THOU SHALT ALLOW PLAYERS TO FAIL MISSIONS AND GET ON WITH THE GAME
I mean, come on. If you can't account for multiple storylines, then hire a writer, or stop trying and just make an arcade game. I mean, Space Invaders is one huge repeated mission, no? If you're going to have a narrative, don't hook a player then say, "If you can't do this, the story ends. Stops. Sorry." Get off your lazy butt and have multiple storylines, or just account for failure.
Besides, who wants to do the same mission, over and over, anyway? Which brings me to the other pet peeve: repetitiveness.
I was enjoying Psychonauts a lot, even as it got increasingly more difficult. And then I got to the Meat Circus. And then I stopped playing. Because, frankly, it was too difficult for me, and hearing the same dialogue and insults spewed over and over and over again. It was just too much for me to bear. Ditto the final boss of GUN. I don't care how witty the dialogue, or how clever, hearing the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over is annoying. How annoying was it just to read that?
As human beings grow older, they're less amused by repetition. A good example of this is Teletubbies. As discussed in a review of the show, "Designed to engage baby-size attention spans, Teletubbies is startlingly repetitive, minimal in a Dr. Seuss-meets-director Robert Wilson kind of way." I'm sure you've seen them play a video, then have the Teletubbies scream out "Again! Again!" and they play the same video, in its entirety, over again.
Adults can't handle that. Imagine watching a 5 minute block of Friends 20 times in a row. No matter how funny that segment is, it becomes Chinese Water Torture. This, of course, relates to the first commandment about having to do missions over and over again, but this touches on something I like to call "save anywhere".
As a PC gamer since 10, I've been spoiled by the concept of being able to save my game anywhere. Consoles depended on typed codes and checkpoints. Checkpoints, in the hands of a skilled developer like Bungie, can be unobstrusive. Unfortunately, most developers aren't skilled. Even some of the best, like Tim Schaefer, don't know where to put them.
But there is something that must be told to these developers: consoles have hard drives now. You no longer need checkpoints. Of course, some games need to have artificial repetitiveness because if they had a save anywhere, they could be completed in less than 5 hours. My response: tough. Who's fault is it that you can't creatively make a 20 hour game without having to artificially increase the time with checkpoints, some so annoyingly placed you have to run an entire 5 minute segment over again just to get back to the death point.
Hey, if you like to make your levels hard, a save anywhere allows you to make them even harder. Just ask anyone who's played the Xen missions in Half-Life. Even GTA-style missions - imagine the joy of being able to save within a mission!
Thus comes the next commandment:
COMMANDMENT 2: THOU SHALT ALLOW PLAYERS TO SAVE ANYWHERE THEY LIKE
I would have gone through Psychonauts, by the way, had I been allowed to cheat. I loved the story, but after a while, I simply gave up and stopped playing. But I wanted to see the rest of it - but the cheat codes didn't work.
Hey, look, it's a single-player experience. I cheated in the first Half-Life at certain points. Heck, sometimes I cheat in a FPS that I've already played because the gameplay in that level is boring and I just want to get through it as fast as possible. And I have a 5 time philosophy - if I can't beat something 5 times, I cheat and get it over with. Thus the third commandment:
COMMANDMENT 3: THOU SHALT ALWAYS ALLOW PLAYERS TO "CHEAT" IN SINGLE PLAYER
After all, it's my game. I should be able to play it my way. Who am I upsetting? The computer? Heck, if you're so worried about the computer segment of the population not buying your game, don't worry about it. I can guarantee they won't complain.
And finally, some constructive (finally) advice for developers. Let's examine golf courses. Every golf architect from time immortal had one mantra when designing a course. The mantra was this:
Look hard, play easy
Heck, that's the entire game mechanic of Sid Meier's SimGolf. The object of the best games are to present a challenge that looks mind-numbingly difficult, but in actuality, is quite easy. The best example of this is Halo: Combat Evolved. The entire game on normal difficulty gave the illusion of being much harder than it really was. While the AI was top-notch, a player never got to the point of being stymied to the point of frustration. It didn't hurt the checkpoints were always perfectly placed, but the game gave a lot of leeway.
The ending is a perfect point of this. Normally, timed missions are the bane of all existance. In fact, that's the next commandment:
COMMANDMENT 4: THOU SHALT USE TIMED MISSIONS SPARINGLY
And it was a scene in which Master Chief never even used his gun! No, it just consisted of driving through hundreds of battling Flood and Covenant. And while it looked hard, it was quite easy, and allowed the gamer not only the thrill of the moment, but to enjoy the spectacle as well, catching glimpses here and there of the frenetic action. And all without the idiotic contrivance of a level boss.
(Which is another commandment, by the way:
COMMANDMENT 5: THOU SHALT KNOW THAT THE FEWER THE LEVEL BOSSES, THE BETTER THE GAME
Okay, Shadow of the Colossus is the exception, but that game is one, big level boss game. That's its raison d'etre. But level bosses are usually tacked-on, lazy level contrivances that are just either cheesy or hard or both. Half-Life got away with it to a limited extent - the tentacle beast was a fun level, but Nihilanth was not. Why? One was organic to the level, the other was not. And the aforementioned McGruder final boss in GUN just made me want to hire hitmen and off the devs. And Halo was a far better game than Halo 2. Why? Halo 2 had a final boss. 'Nuff said.)
People want to feel empowered by a game, not subordinate to it. Keep in mind, look hard is far more difficult. No one wants to go an entire game without a challenge. A game can get harder, of course, if it has a save anywhere, simply because the player can choose their own checkpoint and try another strategy.
Basically, to boil everything down, it is this: games must be games, not work. Most adults have work they want to escape from. That's the appeal of games. Kids don't mind repetitive games because 1. they're young, and 2. they don't work. For them, games are the "work". Games have to be fun, and the developer must understand they're not competing against the player - they're catering to the player. If the devs want to tell a story, they'd better give the gamer a reason to enjoy it. Thus the final commandment:
COMMANDMENT 6: THOU SHALT MAKE GAMES LOOK HARD AND PLAY EASY, AND IF THOU HAST A CHOICE BETWEEN TOO HARD AND TOO EASY, PICK TOO EASY
People want a challenge, not a Sisyphean task.
Anyway, that's the end of this rant. Hopefully, a developer will read this and be inspired. What do you think?
