What ever happened to the Video Game?
“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.
reebzblog 
I am pretty sure this post is all about how games should be more like Dues Ex.
I don’t disagree.
Critics of the linear, heavily-scripted game fail to acknowledge the pre-existence of such a style of game design. It has always been around, and it will always continue to be around. Classic PC adventure games are one of the worst offenders of such design! Its immense rise in popularity does not signal the end of days for a more player-driven experience. The Modern Warfare games deserve the praise they receive because their single-player delivers a brilliantly designed example of this style of scripted game wrapped up in an addictive, fast-paced multiplayer package whose style of play mirrors the days of TDM in Quake II.
Let us observe the manner in which 1990s PC developers have moved to release “simplified” versions of this open-ended design on the current generation of consoles through games such as Mass Effect, Oblivion & Deus Ex: HR. Yes, one can argue with the notion that the games have become simpler due to their publisher’s aspirations of coin and audience. Even in the realm of graphics, which have technologically stagnated in recent years; nowhere more is this evident in the beautiful early PC videos of Oblivion, with graphics that emulate the prowess of Crysis and even exceed those of Skyrim.
However, it is foolish to ignore the potential long-term benefits of weaning console gamers onto the basics of 80s and 90s PC game design. To simply release this complex style of game design upon console gamers would have potentially been financial suicide, undoubtedly words such as “convoluted” and “overcomplicated” would have been thrown around in message board arguments. The mass market of gamers of today are growing up with this mere taste of choice and freedom and, with the advancement of technology and the huge expense of graphics, developers can move to utilise this technology not to make leaps and bounds in graphical design (though this will no doubt occur) but in a complex, emergent game world. With the technology available to create mass-market level graphics as well as complex scripts and AI, along with the console mass market readiness of freedom and complexity and thus publisher satiety, such design will be limited only by the creative prowess of the developers themselves. We can only trust that they have not forgotten how to create such rich worlds they once used to make!
Yes, it is unfortunate that the maturity of the game industry has been stunted by the pursuit of money, but observe the maturation of any medium in history – when has this not occured at some point? Do not forget that video games are an incredibly young medium; its current timeline is but a tiny speck in that which will succeed it. The now-passed “golden age of gaming” as perceived by many will, without a doubt, return in the future.
I’m well aware of the pre-existence of linear scripted games.
But at least point & click adventure games benefited from character, decent writing and fantastic logic puzzles.
CoD is essentially pro-west propaganda with the gaming equivalent of a shooting ducks.
Speaking of CoD, while I was referring to it’s single player component, the multiplayer deserves to be equally chastised. How can anyone justify praising something that is merely another map pack and tweak. Many people have voiced their displeasure at having paid for something that is just as much. And comparisons to Quake 2 are laughable, CoD is merely auto-aiming and quick scoping.
You point to the pre-existence of linear scripted design as an excuse for its current existence. Yet you maintain we need this simplicity to ease gamers into a future of potentially more complex games.
You’re basically saying games are on the same level as they were 20 years ago.
We’re heading into our 3rd (?) generation of video gamers, how much longer do we need to maintain this easing in period?
The next generation is more technologically savvy than the previous, should we not give them some credit and provide more dynamic games?
You point to improvements in technology paving the way for more complex worlds. But like I said, we were there 10 years ago. Deus Ex showed us a visually stimulating world of agency and emergence.
But designers opted to regress.
DXHR pulled back on the promise shown in DX, steering away from an immersive sim and further towards a 3rd person cover shooter. Instead of YOU being JC, they made Adam a character unto himself. They talk of pulling to 3rd person because Adam looks cool, or that shadow based stealth is weird – what kind of design logic is that?
A player directed game doesn’t result in an inaccessible one. You don’t provide accessibility by simply restricting a player’s movements and options. Hitman Blood Money is no more or less accessible than Metal Gear Solid or Batman Arkham Asylum, yet it provided a level of agency and emergence that those two got no where near touching.
Video games may be young, but games themselves are millenia old. Chess is quite possibly the most perfect game, with a near infinite number of strategies open to the player. It isn’t sullied by having the pieces move themselves, or recite lines about how the knight has betrayed the king, or making all the pieces move the same way, in the same sequence, every time.
Just because linear scripted design and selling out has happened in the past doesn’t excuse the continuation of such trends. But unless the resulting games don’t get heavily criticised for their shallow design, nothing will change.
By the looks of the new XCOM, Hitman and Syndicate, the steady decline continues unabated. You think the future is bright, to me it looks pretty bleak.
This is a very good post. Thanks! 🙂