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.

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.

Places you should be going, regularly for your video game goodness.

So I figured it would be a good idea to link to some of the great places I go for news, messageboard fanboyism, journalism, the inside scoop, and general gaming goodness.

First stop of the day, Gamasutra. This is a great spot for interesting industry articles, as well as a good spot for news. Also where to go if you are looking at job listings. I usually visit this site several times a day and I'm always perusing their backlogs for good stuff.

Next up, my favorite video game blog of multiple updates a day, Kotaku. Home of several writers, Kotaku is another more frequently updated place to find your video game news. It also allows for reader comments, meaning you can get your fill of fanboyish glee at the foibles of whichever console happens to be foibling at the moment. Originally I was a bit put off, because of the far less formal nature of Kotaku, which belies their extremely high quality journalism. Seriously, check out some of their heavier hitting pieces.

On to my favorite blogger, who I believe I've mentioned not once, not twice, but thrice; N'Gai Croal of Newsweek. His blog is called LevelUp and is possibly the best place to go if you want to see what game journalism could be. N'Gai does a great job of delivering both hard hitting interviews and ruminations on the nature of gaming itself.

Another blogger, who is inextricably connected to N'Gai via their excellent Vs. Mode exchanges is the full time video games reporter for MTV news, Stephen Totilo. His blog, which just recently became a group blog of MTV staffers, is found here. He is another wonderful journalist who covers not just what games are, but what they can be in a way similar to Mr. Croal.

Whatabout podcasts you say? Gamasutra has several amazing podcasts, both from GDC sessions and those just involving interviews run by Tom Kim, who is amazing. I also listen to a wide variety of the 1up.com podcasts, from the wonderful 1up Yours to the much more zany GFW radio, home of the irascible Jeff Green.

Finally, if you really want to dive headfirst into the gaming culture, check out NeoGaf. This is where you will find posts from all manner of intelligent gamers, as well as the rabid fanboys of the various consoles. NeoGaf is a far more daunting site, one I have yet to wade into. I've merely dipped my toe in its chilly waters.

P.S. Penny-Arcade is funny, really funny. They don't always know what they are talking about, but then who does?

All in all a worthwhile list for anyone who wants to know more about the industry on a regular basis. Not to mention it lets me post without actually posting any new information. How's that for awesome!?

Games that hurt us.

Well, hurt our emotions anyway. So I've been thinking about the reward-punishment mechanic of video games, mainly because I was reading another Vs. mode from N'Gai and Stephen Totilo. By the way if you haven't read any of those, stop reading this and go do it, they have far more to say than do I about games. It's a very complex system which has grown in many ways since the days of punishing arcade games that were trying to suck another quarter out of your pockets. Xbox live has certainly created a new class of gamer, the achievement whore, that previously didn't have the same forum for gloating as they now do. So even punishing Xbox games have some level of reward built in. However, what do games do nowadays to the player in response to their abilities? Is it better to have a punishing game mechanic or mechanic that rewards players for good play? Maybe it is best to have a little bit of both the carrot and the stick.

This was mostly sparked by the card game scum, also known by less savory names. The game actively employs both a punishment and a reward mechanic. The worse a player does, the more likely things will go poorly for them and vice-versa. The idea seems to be that as a player does worse they will have more motivation to win in order to be the one with all the benefits. In a somewhat real-life scenario, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. My first experience with the game left me with a sour taste in my mouth, undoubtedly due to my position at the bottom of the food chain for the end half of the game. I did however question the value of punishing a player for playing poorly, especially in a game with other players. When you examine the punishing nature of multiplayer games at the morning, you see a multitude of games with tight-knit communities of dedicated players that are not accessible to new players. This seems to be especially true of FPS's and RTS's where learning the game requires time, time that isn't available when playing experts. Now, these games don't have a punishment system built in to them per se, although the purchasing power of a game like Shadowrun or counterstrike could be seen as something of a reward for the good, while punishing the loser. So maybe examining multiplayer games is the wrong way to look at this issue.

So then, we are left with single player games. The most trenchant example of not punishing a player for their lack of skill is the dynamic difficulty of the Naughty Dog games, which become easier if you die repeatedly and more difficult if you breeze through a section. I think it's a brilliant decision on their part, something that sits under the hood of the game and rewards the player for skill by presenting a greater challenge, but also helps a player if they are having trouble. During the 3rd round of the most recent Vs. Mode. Stephen said the following

"Let's radicalize morality systems by turning them into something else: difficulty settings. Want to take the scumbag, Sister-killing approach to get through a game? Well, guess what, buddy? It's going to be harder to win the game. You're going to be given access to fewer tools and abilities. Or...shocker...maybe taking the right path would make the game harder."

In this case the punishment isn't tied in to any lack or display of skill on the player's part, which leads me to agree with Stephen. The idea of punishing a player seems so inextricably tied into the arcade mentality, where every player death represented another potential quarter that to continue to have punishing mechanics that disadvantage the unskilled seems antiquated at best, and decidedly unfun. I'm one who gets easily frustrated at a game that seems to be piling on the hate and the possibility of magically climbing out of the pit I'm in doesn't excite me. Rather I think the concept of giving to a player when they fail in order to help them through the game is much more important. After all, don't we want a player to complete a game no matter their skill level? I did some work on a game during which the difficulty became drastically toned down to cater to the common player, something that I agree is good from a business sense, but that still could be supplemented by containing a greater challenge for the more accomplished player.

This is one of the biggest things that worries me with the Wii. I think Nintendo is missing out by essentially avoiding the hardcore. Yes, catering to the casual gamer is helping their bottom line, but they could have both if they were able to provide that game that was simple enough for the casual gamer, yet could be made a greater challenge for the experienced gamer. Wii sports boxing frustrates me to no end, because the line between new player and experienced player has been blurred to the point of almost not existing. I can flail around and win just as often as when I try to do specific things. There must be a better way to meld the two. Hope to see it soon.