The Pure, Written Word

Assassin's Creed III has a lot of issues.  It is, in fact, so replete with issues that in almost any other case, it would be rendered a cold, inert mass; I'd shove this lump aside, perhaps disdainfully with the toe of my boot, and move on to something less "troubled".

The worst offenders are technical.  While I understand that console players and a large number of PC gamers have had few or no issues with it (excepting the loss of a few incidental frames), inside the bizarre architecture of my machine AC 3 is a hot mess.  It stutters constantly, crashes like a derby car.  It howls in open rebellion at the inadequacy of my aging computer.  It is nearly as likely to fatally malfunction as to work properly.

Sidebar: the effect of this regular implosion has led me down a dark hole of .ini editing, feature disabling, and dust annihilation, hours of which have yielded no appreciable results.  I'm reminded of the bad old days, when the similarities between convincing a PC game to run properly and the practice of black magic were strongest.  My conviction that all of the work I've put in, trying to adapt the mold of machine to best accept the pour of Assassin's Creed III, has borne fruit is purely faith-based and anecdotal.  But even this clockwork, horror-show dimension of my time with the game did not deter me.

A perfect condensation of my experience:  early on, young Ratonhnhaké:ton is inhabiting the body of a hallucinated winged animal, soaring through and above a surreal landscape that is startlingly beautiful and otherworldly.  The liberating sensation of flight and the day-glo magnificence of this alien landscape are so breathtaking, that I completely miss a lot of the critical narrative being delivered via voice-over.  Then, I careen into a tree, failing an optional objective.  Because I'm a masochist completionist, and committed to perfect syncing the entire game, I restart.

This time, I'm so focused on listening to the narrator that I completely lose track of the spectacular moment passing around and through my winged avatar...and then violently hurtle into another bit of errant lumber.  Restart.  More progress this time, trying to keep a laser focus on navigating; another failure.  Restart.  I make it almost to what I assume is the end, and then a sharp change in elevation has me crashing through some dangling tree roots.  Restart.  Success!  I even have some rough sense of what the narrator was expressing, and while I'm boiling with frustration, there is also relief.  As the sequence ends, I gratefully lower my controller and the screen fades to white.

Hard lock.  The game is frozen with my progress unsaved.  That dazzling white screen and the hideous shriek my speakers are emitting are the only mementos of the last thirty minutes of my life.

Why material objects exist in this fugue state is beyond me, but more importantly, stealing the breathtaking impact of this moment by shoehorning in a failstate is almost unforgivable.

But I did forgive you, Assassin's Creed III.  I kept on; there was a tremendous amount of keeping on.  When I began, I debrided my mind of all the criticism I'd heard regarding your lengthy open and found myself thoroughly charmed and delighted.  While I saw systems beginning to mature in the world around me, and felt a fierce keening to plunge recklessly into them, I let you guide me instead.  The subtle story you spun surprised me, the tantalizing power of your secret narrative compelled me forward.  You sloughed off your flaws, even transcended them.  I was wholly committed; I had grown with Ratonhnhaké:ton; I would liberate his people; I would save the world.

And then, that old saw.  By the time the world opened up, and I found it littered with a staggering number of collectibles and diversions, my desire for non-linearity had reached a fever pitch.  I threw myself into them happily, gorged on them.  The crashes got worse.  Days later, I was sated, but nowhere near finished.  Feathers.  Trinkets.  Hunting challenges, hunting missions, frontiersman challenges, frontiersmen missions, naval missions, treasure map missions, homestead missions, assassination missions.  Almanac pages.  Stockpiling, crafting, trading.  The underground.  Masonic puzzles.  Sync points.  Liberation missions.  Fort assaults.  Convoy attacks.

So.  Many.  Things.  Such a shameful feast of THINGS that my appetite for them rebelled.

I lost the thread.  More importantly, I lost the sense of place, and the connection to these people.  They'd been distilled down to icons, icons that represented systems, systems I'd begun to resent.  I got you all of those feathers, Assassin's Creed III:  a fucking outfit?  Really?

Again, I know that the failure is mine.  I could've should have stopped.  Gotten back to what mattered.  I will.  I'm nearly done.  I still love you, Assassin's Creed III, though it is a brutal love that a future version of myself will look back on cringingly.  Perhaps, come Assassin's Creed IV, after Ubisoft and I are both thoroughly exhausted, one of us will have learned.  Will know better.

I wonder, though.

Spoiled

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.

Why is it always "video games encourage violence" and never "video games encourage the stacking of blocks"?