Back again.

I suspect it will last approximately as long as last time, but here I am again!

I thought I'd way in on the controversy stirred up by N'gai, Leigh Alexander, and Ben Fritz, among several others.

Basically it boils down to the question of whether video game reviewers are considering innovation when judging and scoring a game. Mirror's Edge is the game of choice for the concerned, who feel it's lower review scores are due to, if not petty then, simplistic gripes about the execution of the game without taking into account the innovation it provides. So is that a realistic concern? And, as a developer, do I worry that innovation is taking a back seat to execution in reviews, and the sales we seem to believe are tied to high scores?

Well, to briefly answer the first question, no. There are a lot of valid points made by all of the commentators who raise the issue and I don't want to dismiss the concern out of hand. It is scary that innovation might be less important to people than execution because we are a hit driven industry, one that only continues to evolve when innovation is rewarded with sales. That is a sad fact and one that isn't easy to get around. However, innovation is, at least on occasion, rewarded by sales. Portal, Little Big Planet, the original Half-Life are all examples of games with some level of innovation and at least good, if not great sales, certainly enough to justify further experimentation with their basic mechanics, etc. The issue arises when one gets to the review stage. If a game is released to be reviewed it is done, as done as any game can be at least, so at that point the reviewer has no choice but to take the game at face value. I've heard many people, Warren Spector among them, say that ideas are a dime a dozen, but execution is golden. So, even if Mirror's Edge has some innovative ideas, and it certainly does, if those ideas aren't executed well, it becomes a muddled mess. I have yet to play through the game beyond the demo so I will refrain from actual comment on the game, but if reviewers felt that the experience wasn't as good as it should be, wasn't fun, they shouldn't give a game high marks for trying.

This leads to what this all means to me as a developer. I like to think that I can be innovative, whether I can or not is yet to be seen, but innovation alone isn't enough to make a good game. If the experience of a game, it's meat, is in the gameplay itself then a fantastic idea doesn't matter if the gameplay isn't tight. Frustrating gameplay, whether it be to controls, level design, difficulty, or whatever, is frustrating. I don't want to be frustrated when I play games. Being challenged is fine, but being frustrated isn't being challenged it is being unnecessarily smacked down by something arbitrary. Having a great idea isn't enough to get you a pass on executing that idea poorly. The real innovation is in doing something well and making it fun. If the level design of Mirror's Edge is annoyingly repetitive, then the game has a problem. Again, I haven't played, so I don't know, but I will not continue to play a game just because it's a cool idea.

As a topic for another post, it is very, very likely that all of this ties into the value of a game. I haven't bought Mirror's Edge and I won't until it is cheaper. It's very possible that what is a flawed $60 purchase is a perfectly good $30 purchase. But I don't want to go into that right now. Hopefully I can come back to it, you know, instead of not blogging for a year or so.