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"?

Constriction

So I haven't seen any of the NPDs for Alan Wake or Red Dead, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that latter is crushing the former in sales. There's the argument that Red Dead was more heavily marketed and that Rockstar has a much weightier pedigree than Remedy, and that may account for 10 percent or so of the difference, but there's something larger at play that we need to address.

It's about freedom.

It's one of the first things you learn as a DM in a table-top RPG: don't railroad your players. Gamers don't like being pushed along a narrow canyon; that's a gameplay element we tolerated once only because there was no alternative, and in fact the alternative seemed impossible. At the very least, the modern gamer demands some sort of side diversion or alternate path, or a sixty dollar game doesn't work as a realistic value proposition. Witness Final Fantasy XIII. Sure, that game sold a mess of copies, because it's a game that has the words "Final Fantasy" in the title followed immediately by a (as video game sequels go) ludicrously high number. But as immediately as it was released, and even in the pre-release press, there was a ton of criticism about it's linearity. Sure, stalwarts held that 30-50 hours into the game it opened up, but that's a very difficult way to snare casual gamers or gamers who aren't already interested in your franchise. Even "hardcore" gamers or those of us that have always had a fairly vested interest in that series balked at the idea of a JRPG that runs you along a straight path between lenghty cutscenes.

I love the idea of Alan Wake. I love a company, especially Remedy, attempting to sell a video game on atmosphere. And who knows, maybe it's a compelling experience. But I'll never find out, because I'm not going to burn 60 dollars on a game that pulls me down a narrow, one-way path. A decade into the 21st century, I don't feel this is an unreasonable position.

I will mount my horse, ride across the frontier, and occasionally wax a little bit mournful that it's not just a tad bit darker in New Austin.

-a

Bewitched

So after an extensive Borderlands addiction finally started to subside yesterday I began a flirtatious little fling with The Witcher.

Borderlands was an odd experience. I began feeling pretty lukewarm about it, and then lost interest in it completely for a while. But then, needing something fairly mindless to play while I listened to podcasts, I cracked into it again and it got it's hooks very deeply into me. I finished the main quest, downloaded all the interesting DLC (read: the two packs without Moxxi in the title), and burned through those, devouring every scrap of gameplay I could extract from them. Then I started a second playthrough, which is something I almost never do. On top of that, I have two other characters I play exclusively with my friends, both of which are now around level 30. This is a rare enough phenomenon with me that it's almost unique in my video-gaming history.

But finally yesterday I started to crave it less, and leapt on the opportunity to sample The Witcher, a game I've been interested in for some time but never committed to actually installing and playing.

First impressions are good, I like the deep customization, and the combat system is just novel enough to be interesting. I don't know if it'll stick (I picked up a ham sandwich today, alongside several other food items, and when my inventory started to look crowded I experienced a certain nervousness about the game's longevity) but it's amusing, and delightfully German. And I need a little more deutsch in my life.

I love the idea of putting an Intuition button in your game, but doubt I'd enjoy any game that included an Intuition button. What a terrible and completely irrelevant dilemma.

Mass Effect 2 Postmortem

I finished ME 2 a few days ago and have come away from it convinced that Bioware has on it's payroll a coven of dangerous psionics with direct access to my mind.

I've never found loot-lust compelling, I've always been a sucker for narrative, and though I enjoy an epic adventure there's a razor's edge between a satisfying, fully immersive experience and tedium.

Though most modern releases that exceed the 20-30 hour mark give the player some ability to truncate their experience, I have a fairly serious OCD complex that drives me to experience every last bit of available content. The problem with this compulsion is that I almost inevitably become bored with a game well before thoroughly exhausting it. and end up trudging through the last 10-50 hours out of some ill-founded sense of loyalty.

Imagine my delight, then, upon discovering that the techno-priests at Bioware had crafted a game that balances almost perfectly on that edge. Though I lost my appetite for canvassing every square inch of planetary mass that might yield resources well before I'd finished scanning them all, I felt no guilt in bypassing the last few systems. It's the possibility that somewhere in the vast abyss of untapped content might lie something awesome that triggers my OCD. EDI's soothing presence, assuring me that a given planet held nothing anomalous, quelled those demons and let me push the narrative ahead free of the shackles of consumer guilt.

Every time I sat down in front of my PC prepared to play I did so to satisfy a powerful craving, and not out of obligation. I can't say the same for Dragon Age, or Neverwinter Nights 2, or any of the Final Fantasies. I hope this perfect balance metastasises through the rest of that honorable studio and then relentlessly infects every corner of the industry, so that all games eventually become optimally designed to feed directly into the pleasure center of my brain.

War whilst the Sun is Rising

I've been dabbling in Dawn of War 2 lately and it's had the odd effect of making me crave a traditional RTS, a genre I've been burnt out on since the early aughts. In fact, the only reason I decided to give DoW 2 a look was because it was very non-traditional.

But at some point tonight when I was wading through a vast green sea of angry Tyranid I began to crave the ability to lay down a nice barracks, perhaps a wall or two. Maybe harvest some quantity of Unobtanium or some similarly ludicrous resource.

Don't get me wrong, the premise is charming: a squad-based isometric game with heavy RPG mechanics and the trappings of a strategic meta-game. I think part of the reason I'm not totally infatuated with it is because I'm getting echoes of Dragon Age, which I spent over a hundred hours playing and with which I'm thoroughly exhausted. I suppose I'm not fully ready for another game where I pause the action, issue orders to individual characters, and watch passively while they're carried out.

I'm not done with it, certainly, and I'm enjoying my time with it. But there are moments, like tonight, where my thoughts stray irresistibly towards Tiberium.

-a