“At the most fundamental level you play a console game on a TV, which is an entertainment medium about linear sequences of highly non-interactive, highly driven-at-the-consumer, somewhat passive experiences. On the other hand, the computer is about typing and doing and moving your mouse. Even when you’re doing word processing, you’re much more active. The console always had both less reach and more reach. There are fewer consoles than there are PCs, but they’re all clearly for games. So I think that did allow the marketing side to commit more as those numbers went up. And it just sort of fits together: you see characters walking around on your TV screen and you kind of expect a certain sort of experience to happen. There’s a different mental space between ‘Let’s go sit on the couch and be entertained’ and ‘Let’s go to the PC and do some stuff.'”
“That is the low-hanging fruit when you want to advertise more, when you want to communicate to more people and get them involved — entertainment is the easy hook. Humans have had a long period of learning how to sell two sentence high concepts and a lot of little cut scenes: an explosion and someone running, the girl going “aaaaah!”, and the guy riding off into the sunset, or whatever. We know how to advertise that and we do it a lot, whereas talking more deeply about the play experience isn’t something we seem to know how to do very much of at all. You start trying to figure out how we get to a bigger space of non-enthusiasts: people less steeped in the culture and the language. Which is fair enough, the more people that get to play stuff, the better. I’m certainly not against that. But until we can communicate more clearly what experience they’re getting I think the entertainment angle is going to continue to dominate, because it’s the thing that’s easier to explain in two sentences.”
– Doug Church, 2004 (Gamasutra)
It’s scary how prophetic how these words are as video games continue to become less and less player directed and increasingly focused on rigidly structured worlds aimed at aping the more visually stimulating aspects of film.
Bad enough it is that those raised during the golden age are today’s game developers. They’ve seemed to have completely missed the point.
The defining aspect of video games, that which separates them from other media, is their gameplay. And from a gameplay standpoint games these days are shallow, full of scripted checkpoints with binary outcomes.
Everyone talks about immersion like its a question long since solved. Immersion doesn’t come from a soundtrack, blood decals, blurred vision, or Being Batman. It comes from the player choosing their own way to interact and the game interacting back; from being presented a problem and given the tools to create your own solution; from the simulated world co-existing with the player, rather than the player being the sole participant.
Technology is at a level where the concepts of agency and emergence can by fully realised, instead its being used to blow chunks of concrete into smaller chunks. In Bulletime™. Its used on cutscenes telling the story, rather than on creating a world that reacts to the player, creating a rich and unique experience every time. It’s used on dichotomous speech wheels, a Choice Menu, rather than choice being the game’s reaction to what the player does. It’s used on snapping-to-crates in 3rd person detective vision, rather than hiding in organically hidden areas.
Simply put, the player directed experience is pretty much dead.
And I blame the gaming press. They continue to endorse this shift away from truly dynamic and malleable games.
They live in this bizarre belief that they are part of the gaming industry (as evidenced on an episode of Good Game when one of the hosts said just as much) when, much like the music journalists in Almost Famous, they are The Enemy.
And with this belief comes a sense of over protectiveness. Videos games have to be accepted as Mature Adult Art Forms or the house of cards will come tumbling down.
This rant was somewhat encouraged by the bizarre reviews coming out for Modern Warfare 3, where the tone of the article is at complete odds with the score attached. Some of them express complete apathy to the game they just played yet they still award it a 8 or 9 out of 10.
I hate scores, but in this metacritic world scores have become more important that the words that precede them. They ultimately end up as marketing devices, an indication to the consumer of the quality of the product contained within.
Its like deep down these reviewers wanted to give MW3 the pasting it deserves, but they didn’t have the stones to follow through.
Reviews these days simply seem to be an assessment of whether the game functions, rather than a critical analysis of the design at play and whether it truly fulfills the potential of an interactive medium.
Exceptional gameplay can excuse sub-par aesthetics. Sub-par gameplay cannot be excused.
According to reviewers though, this is not the case. They’re all to happy to heap praise on the Michael Bays of gaming.
Sorry Ben Kuchera, gaming is not amazing.
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