Tuesday, December 09, 2008

Games as art or games as consumer good?

So, as promised, and way earlier than promised, I want to say a little bit about games and price and how that effects our perception of them.

Right now there are several levels of price stratification in video games. PS3 and Xbox 360 games are $59.99 when new. PC games are $49.99, often for the same experience as their console counterparts. Wii games, $49.99. Downloadable titles, whether they be WiiWare, PSN, Xbox marketplace or something casual can range from free to the same price as console games. If we are talking about reviews though, does this matter? Should it matter? The answer to the first question is yes, yes it should. Criticism of mediums outside video games may be more advanced in the sense that they can look at art for art's sake and make a judgment, but they still use a grading system of some sort to tell their consumer if they should spend the time to get to know whatever artwork is being reviewed. When the now defunct GFW magazine did away with scores for their reviews, there was a revolt and the scores came back. So, obviously readers expect some sort of quantitative something, whether it be numbers, grades, a buy recommendation, or whatever. That doesn't mean that it should be the sole purpose of a review to decide if people should buy a game or not. Rather it provides a base metric for determining if it is worth the money. A game like Portal was and is worth more than Valve charged for it and I believe that reviews reflected that. It may be short, but it is fantastic. If Valve was charging $300 for Portal, could anyone really say that the price wouldn't affect their view of the quality of the game. We are always making decisions based on how much we will get out of our money. It's no surprise that video games are affected as well.

Wait! You say. Doesn't that make game reviews simply a consumer guide and not a meditation on the artistic value of a game? Well, it certainly makes the consumer angle something to consider. I think we would do ourselves a disservice if we completely disregard the fact that people come to reviewers to see if a game is worth their money. However, that shouldn't be the sole purpose of reviews. When I read reviews, the first thing I look for is a reviewer I know. If I know their likes and dislikes and how those align to my own, I can compare their thoughts to mine. I also tend to look at the score. That colors my reading of the review, possibly a problem I admit. If I am interested in a game, though, the most important thing to me is the review itself. Did the game lose points because it was too easy? I don't care, that's fine by me. Did it lose points because the gameplay gets repetitive and boring? Warning lights. Did it lose points because the story is ridiculous and poorly written? That's not helping it in my book. These things matter more to me than the score itself. I wouldn't buy a well reviewed game that was extremely repetitive or overly difficult. I'm not buying Mega Man 9 and I don't feel bad about it. In that sense, the review can speak to the game as a game and not a consumer product.

I'm not sure I've really solved anything here, but I do feel that examining games in isolation of cost is foolhardy. Cost should never be the primary concern, but I have limited financial resources and a limited amount of time to game. I'll gladly play a flawed but interesting game if it is cheap, but I'll be damned if I'm going to pay $60+ for a fundamentally flawed game. It doesn't make sense to me and I want reviews to reflect that concept.

Also, keep your eyes to Shawn Elliot's blog.

Wonderful man that he is, he's got some good stuff brewing over there. So read it.

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.