Games are a lot like fruit. When a game becomes too heavy with content, it drops to the ground, and while there's a grace period of a few days where it might be salvageable, it inevitably begins to rot.
This is an old refrain for me; I have a powerful compulsion when I begin a game to mine it for every last bit of content. This compulsion starts strong, my complex aggressively asserting itself as I scour every inch of a game world for collectibles or upgrades or any other dry piece of flotsam the designers have left drifting around. As I push further in, that compulsion begins to fade, or transform into boredom, and I begin to question myself.
Why am I doing this? Why am I grinding through this tedious exercise for rewards that feel increasingly less fulfilling? While at first I may feel little surges of excitement every time I discover some wayward collectible, eventually it stops being fun and starts feeling more like busywork, like a job I've paid someone else for the pleasure of doing.
This is almost inarguably a failing on my part, rather than the designer's. Sure, in the vast majority of these cases, I could just ignore all the peripheral distractions and focus on the meat of a game, the main campaign or narrative. But my OCD rarely allows me that luxury, and perversely it's the games that I enjoy the most that most often drive me into these fits of mindless tedium.
I find that I have to draw arbitrary limits for myself. As I played through Sleeping Dogs, a game that has for the most part surprised and delighted me, I had to decide to ignore some of the wealth of distractions on offer and focus only on the ones that I'd already invested in, or that would provide meaningful rewards. Hunt down the health shrines, ignore the lock boxes. Find the jade statues, ignore the security cameras.
The problem isn't that I dislike collectibles. Clearly they satisfy some base need in me to scavenge a game world that I'm immersed in for its hidden gems. The problem, I think, is when those collectibles come in such a staggering volume that finding them all devolves into the modern equivalent of a pixel hunt. I wonder what narrow percentage of the market such a numbing abundance serves, and how many resources and development hours are committed to providing it.
There are solutions, some of them elegant enough that they don't have the sour taste of compromise. Games like Spec Ops: The Line manage to assuage that collecting compulsion while preserving some of the joy of discovery. The key is that finding intel in Spec Ops not only never feels like a chore but adds some meaningful context to the story.
Instead of swelling an experience with so much content it starts to bend the bough, design needs to be about balance. For their sixty bucks, gamers deserve an end result that's perfectly crisp, ready to be plucked, and not a chore to devour.
Friday, August 31, 2012
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