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Games Are Supposed To Be Fun, Right?
The Game Chair has up an editorial examining the increasing complexity and learning curve that pervade todays games. He examines the reality that, for many people, games are becoming simply unfun. From the article: "As a Gamer, I am amazed and delighted that games have advanced as far as they have. I'm still blown away everytime a new Final Fantasy or Legend of Zelda game comes out, and I look forward to spending hundreds of hours with them exploring all of their intricacies. That being said, the same things that attract me to these games might repel others who are casual gamers or non-Gamers. The importance of the 'pick-up and play' style of games, for me, lies not only in the nostalgia that I feel for them, but also in the importance of having games that are accessible to everyone."
As a new user I'm not even going to try to learn the 37 finger twisting combos that you use to move. The game looked good, got great reviews, but it's going to get me some credit at the game store next week now.
remember when it was {of|for|by} the people?
It's really hard to come up with a concept for a pick up and play game. Most titles attempt to refine existing formulas because there's so little left. For example, Will Wright's Spore is designed to be pick up and play, and look at the huge amount of technology required to introduce it. Basically, the low hanging fruit are already taken.
Math has become increasingly more *unfun* stated one high school student...
...not Pac-Man.
seriously though... gamers have evolved... games have to evolve with them... what once held a challenge to the average gamer... no longer holds tru for today's gamer. Those kids are getting alot smarter...
I once thought Super Mario Bros. was *too hard*...
There are still plenty of *easier titles* available out there for the casual or non gamer. What you will notice however is those games tend to be cheaper... Most gamers who are the ones willing to spend the money today's games command... are the ones who want a challenge...
Of course I could be waaaaaaay off base here...
"why don't you just slip into something more comfortable...like a coma!"
As a rule, games should be easy to learn, but difficult to master. This is accomplished by making the basic game play not require many various button presses at the start. Hense the easy levels. But as the player goes on in levels, more special equipment is picked up, and the game play becomes more challenging.
God spoke to me.
There is a similar dichotomy in board games at the moment. The casual board gamers (i.e., the typical American family) continue to buy "classic" games (Monopoly, Risk, Yahtzee, etc). Anyone can put these things on the table and play them (albeit, frequently not as the rules actually are spelled out...)
Meanwhile, there are several "hard core" gaming communities (Eurogamers, Grognards, etc) that demand games that fail to generate any interest at the Toys 'R Us level. The *interesting* thing is that (at least in America) the mass market controls board games (i.e., war-games are not sold at toy stores, nor are eurogames). In the computer game community, the Hard Core gamers seem to still control the gaming direction. Which seems a little weird to me, but enjoy it while you can, because once the development houses figure out they can sell 50 million "generic-easy-to-play" vs 5 million (if you are lucky) hard core games, the game industry will be nothing but forgettable tripe like the American board games available in the average store. I guess the only thing that keeps this unusual situation possible is the larger free time pool that the "hard core" can expend and the fact that $50 x 5 million looks acceptible compared to $10 x 50 million (especially with cost of shelf space, etc). If casual gamers continue to gain marketshare, expect that calculation to change.
Sig under construction since 1998.
As an amateur/hobbyist game developer and game student, I spend a lot of time examining interfaces and trying to put myself in the shoes of a non-gamer. I think the poster is both correct and quite wrong. Some thoughts:
1 - Games, as a whole, take too much time to learn how to play and enjoy, ESPECIALLY for non-gamers. Too often, "learning how to play" means learning how to avoid pitfalls and problems that are due to sloppy execution or short-sighted production, rather than genuine "rules" of the game.
2 - Counterpoint: All games should not be Katamari Damacy. All games should not be Steel Battalion either. It is OK to have complex games, simple games, long games, short games, etc. VARIETY IS GOOD. IF we demand that the industry make everything accessible, that is just as bad as making every game inaccessible. Choice is king! (is that a burger king thing?)
3 - TFA uses the Zelda and FF series as examples of nice, easy to learn games. I don't think the author is stepping back quite far enough; these games, to non-gamers, are incomprehensible and confusing. Do your parents play Zelda? Do your parents play FF7? Games like Bejeweled or Rocket Mania are much closer to the point.
4 - In response to many of the posts that have already been put up, Pick Up And Play does not mean Simple and Boring. Super Smash Bros (both iterations) was a pick up and play title that offered successively deeper levels of gameplay and strategy the more you played. It required zero to little instruction and was instantly fun. I admit that most current Pick Up And Play titles ARE simplistic and get boring more quickly than complex games. However, I hope that the example of Super Smash Bros sheds a little light on the possibility of avoiding those problems in the future.
5 - I think that fixing this problem is easier in multiplayer games than in single player. Most of the examples listed previously (starcraft, etc) are still interesting not because of their complexity (or at least not wholly) but because they are a way of competing with friends or strangers, something people love to do anyways. Multiplayer gaming has a chance to really "lead the charge" here, as it were. Super Smash Bros is an almost invisible interface that allows you to fight your friends; Starcraft is the same, though with a steeper learning curve.
6 - Here are some things non-gamers don't understand:
A - If there is a blue key, then there is a blue door.
B - The big key is the boss key.
C - Red bad guys are harder than blue bad guys.
D - In all likelihood, your avatar is nearly invincible by real world standards.
E - Invisible walls are commonplace and accepted.
F - Animation isn't a real reflection of your interaction with the game world (is changing though - compare Prince of Persia: Sands of Time to Onimusha: Moonwalking In Place).
7 - I call at that stuff in #6 "game grammar." It's something that everyone who reads Slashdot has schema for, its hardwired in after 1000s of hours of Nintendo and Sega Genesis. It is a much larger stumbling block for non-gamers than many people realize. That's why the Sims was such a HUGE hit (and also a good candidate for pick up and play with complexity).
This is a lot of unorganized crap. But I hope it speaks to some of the concerns related to the topic at hand.
Steep learning curves and complexity add a richness to many games, maybe at the price of "pick up and play" qualities.
Tedium, however, sucks the fun out of games and adds no great stimulation to make up for it. Sometimes it's unintentional tedium, like bad inventory management systems or lack of non-repetitive content.
Oftentimes though, the tedium is artificially added. The best examples of this are in MMORPG's where "timesinks" can literally account for DAYS of gameplay over a long enough period. In WoW, for example, you can expect 15-20% of your gaming time being spent travelling.
If you want to make games fun, don't bother with the learning curve- just get rid of the tedium.
It reminds me of when I tried my wife's copy of The Sims once. I friggin' live my life already. I don't have time to help a bunch of digital homunculi work, sleep, pay bills, and indulge their neuroses. Despite the popularity of it, I lasted three days with it and was done forever.
My favorite PS/2 game in the past year was Simpson's Hit & Run. Just silly mindless fun. I'm old (old enough anyway) and I like to play games to unwind a bit, not to get wound up. If I want to engage my mind in something deep and complex, I look for a game of Go or a good book.
So you have casual gamers, hardcore gamers and non-gamers all playing games. The hardcores want the latest and greatest stuff and are generally satisfied. The casual gamers can usually pick up a console game and most PC games and be happy. The non-gamers that use their PC for solitaire or bejeweled -- why aren't these games on a console?
I personally have had enough of fixing people's PC's that are used for online games like Bejeweled. These are the people that mess up their PC's with spyware and adware quite a bit. So where the heck is the relatively cheap console that plays Bejeweled for $20 and Solitaire for $10 ? It doesn't exist as far as I know... Knoppix or some bootable distro with a bunch of games you say? Well I either haven't found the right distro or I'm just looking in the wrong place. Someone please - do enlighten. I want to put something together, or find something that my Uncle or Mom can sit down and play with for 45 minutes or 2 hours before the kids get home.
-Adam
As said before, it's good to have a mix of simple games and complex games.
But if you're going to make you're game complex, then teach people how to play. Most games will attempt to teach you controls in the first level of play (or training mode), but most of them suck at doing so.
Example: Timesplitters Future Perfect. When you play the first level, it will tell you really basic stuff like how to move move, shoot, switch weapons, etc, but it neglects to teach you a lot of important controls, and gives you zero information on what kind of tactics you should use. In other words, people used to FPSs made this game, and the obviously don't understand what it's like to not be an FPS player.
In short, companies really don't spend enough time on tutorial modes, especially when the game is of a common genre.
(Personally, I love playing tutorials, even when I'm familiar with the game).
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
The problem isn't the length of the game, but about interface complexity and learning curve. If you put it in terms of time, it's the length of the time needed to learn even the basic controls or interface, i.e., time _not_ actually spent enjoying the game.
I figure I might count as a die-hard gamer, having played computer games since 1983 and currently totalling some 60+ hours of gaming a week. (Ok, so I don't have a life.) But even for me a lot of games are basically non-fun because they expect me to devote a few days just learning what my options are, wtf I can do and how.
I can think of games that were long and yet had a gentle learning curve, and which basically you could play right away. E.g., Diablo is the classic example.
E.g., I once nagged mom into trying Tropico. The game isn't short and isn't simplistic. For that time it was IMHO _the_ most complex city-building simulation. And yet lemme tell you after the tutorial and a few hits from me, mom was playing like a pro and enjoying it. Sure, didn't yet know _all_ the options and subtleties, but knew enough to build a city and learn more gently along the way.
E.g., I decided to one-up that experiment by introducing grandma to Sierra's "Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom". We're talking an 80 year old woman who is completely computer-illiterate and doesn't even own a computer. Ok, so it took a bit more tutoring, and every once in a while she'd hold her fingers wrong and use the left mouse button instead of right or viceversa. (Ok, Apple fans can feel vindicated.) Well, it was the first time she ever held a mouse, so can't blame her. But still, she did get the general idea, was doing an adequate job of building farms and roads, and most importantly was having fun with it.
That's basically the point: a game can be complex and it can be long (mom got about 2 months of playing out of Tropico) without having a vertical learning curve. It just takes good design, you know.
The trick Sierra's city building games did, for example, was to flatten the learning curve along the whole campaign. You start with just needing to build a well and houses in the first mission, and every subsequent mission gives you just a little more complexity, and a little bit more to learn. You can start to enjoy your game long before you know half the possibilities.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
While he indeed picked on the difficulty, as opposed to the learning curve that was the real topic, I think he does have a point, though. IMHO:
1. The difficulty can make a lot of people get frustrated and abandon a game even if the learning curve was ok.
2. More importantly and more on topic, difficulty levels can in fact ease the learning curve. A game, let's say an RPG, that a master can beat on Hard by min-maxing their char and knowing the exact best combination of spells, potions and attacks, becomes manageable on "Very Easy" even if you didn't learn all that. Lower the difficulty enough and a newbie can just run around poking things with a wooden sword, and not worry (or even bother knowing) that he was really supposed to use some complicated combination of spells, skills and special equipment there.
The problem is that most of the industry can't seem to get their head out of their ass^H^H^H mentality that "waah, but a challenge is all we can offer the players! without a challenge a game is nothing!"
Well, no, they need to get over it. Something can be entertaining without requiring more skill than operating a remote control. See the hordes of people who find it perfectly entertaining to watch football on TV or a movie on DVD without needing to learn arcane button combinations or overcome heroic challenges.
_The_ most sold PC game ever was The Sims. Funny thing is: it's a game with _zero_ challenge. You have to actively try hard to "lose" the game. Otherwise you could pretty much do what you wanted, take it at your own pace (e.g., if you wanted to give a party instead of making Bob Newbie learn for a promotion, go ahead and do just that) and the negative consequences would range between non-existent and mild/short-term.
Think of other games that sold well. Diablo? It was really one of the least challenging games of that era, and you could win pretty much no matter how you built your character. Max Payne? If you died often enough, the game basically automatically put you in God mode.
On consoles, you know what sells remarkably well? "Cheat" programs like GameShark, Xploder or such. A helluva lot of people are willing to even fork over cash to be spared from a challenge they don't want.
But, no, most game designers are still locked in a mentality that "nooo, it must be challenging and difficult!" So even when they do offer a difficulty setting, they just have to over-balance it to discourage people from using it.
For example half the RPGs actually get it backwards: it's actually _more_ difficult to finish the game on the "very easy" setting. Because they also cut your XP in half, so by the end of the game you're 2-3 levels lower than the enemies, your status effect spells (e.g., "turn undead") don't stick, your warrior can't actually hit the enemies (3 points of THAC0 can make a helluva lot of difference), etc.
Congrats, they've just kicked someone in the nuts when that someone basically chose "I'm a newbie, I don't want a challenge." Is that stupid, or what?
And again, this affects the learning curve too. Because that kind of game starts easier, but becomes harder than normal by the end, the learning curve actually becomes more abrupt in that mode. Someone who played on "very easy" will have to do _much_ more advanced tricks to be able to survive by the end, and will have to learn them very very fast.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
You forgot about the arcade games where harder games meant more profit. Back in the 2d console days many games were arcade ports. Of course these ports were just as difficult as the arcade games themselves despite no longer making a profit from more credits used. Since so many games were arcade ports or of comparable difficulty you needed more skill to play those games. Nowadays games are much easier because credits no longer mean profit, winning makes the user happier than losing and a finished game makes way for a new game. The gamers adapted. Harder games don't sell as much today not because the casuals are new and lack experience but because they have been trained to a lower skill level and a hard game would stand out as too hard whereas back then it was just another game.
I.e. now that they have a choice they choose the easier games.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
I'm sure there's more, but these are the ones I could rattle off at the top of my head. So, stand tall, video game developers, and continue providing the level of excellence that has stood the test of time in the video gaming world!
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