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Should Games Be More Boring?
An anonymous reader writes "At Gamasutra, serious games creator Ian Bogost is making the case that video games should be more mundane, particularly discussing of Nintendo' Brain Age: 'It's certainly a very different kind of game from Halo or even Miyamoto's own Zelda series, games that allow the player to inhabit complex fantasy worlds. Instead, much of Brain Age's success seems to come precisely from the ordinariness of its demands.' Would games become more accessible if they tapped into everyday things a little bit more, as opposed to spiralling off into fictional realities?"
I notice the actual question has to do with fantasy realities, and that the motivation is making games more accesible. This is analogous to saying "should we stop making fantasy books so that people read more books?" After all, not everyone is for 800-page novels with dozens of characters (often with unpronounceable names) and make-believe politics and geogrpaphy. Not to mention magic and possibly mythical creatures.
So should we stop writing fantasy?
How about we just keep writing fantasy, and also let people interested in straight-fiction just read straight-fiction. We can also have mysteries, educational books, sci-fi, horror, philosophy, etc.
Why criticize a genre to "help" a medium? Computer games are a medium. Fantasy games are a genre in that medium. If there's great response to brain age: make more games like it. There's no more reason to cut fantasy than there would be to cut the fantasy section of a bookstore.
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.
Hello Ian and welcome to the games industry! (You noob.)
You might want to look up games such as The Sims, all the various Simpsons spin-offs or even Skate or Die or Paperboy from a previous generation. (i.e., its been done many, many times before.)
It's absolutely ordinary for there to be shootings in South Central LA, but it's not boring.
To say Brain Age is boring because the tasks are ordinary displays stupidity and a lack of vocabulary. Rather simple vocabulary, I might add.
Also, the link is to the third page of the story, which is where Brain Age is discussed, but it is bad form.
Enough about the stupidity of anonymous cowards and their story submissions, on to where I talk shit about the article!
The article is just pathetic. "television is so familiar, it's not even startling to think about television programming produced solely to discuss other media forms." This is in response to a comment about TV shows about making movies. But there are movies about making things, and on this planet we call them documentaries. This lack of ability to stop and notice reality pervades the article, which is split into three pages to garner ad impressions, but has little enough content to have been on one page of this size.
His summary (which is not actually a summary - this not being an essay, but a meandering rant) follows: "we should want games to be more boring. Not just some games, we should want many of them, maybe even most of them to be boring, so that the ones that are not can become the Casablancas of our future medium." What he seems to be saying here is that we should want games to be crap, so that the non-crap can look even better by comparison.
Say it with me: mundane does not equal boring. Sure, most things which are mundane are also boring. But then there's sex.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Games are distractions. Viewed from a clinical perspective, they are all chores. Why should I blow up the bad guy's superweapon again? Or take out that legion of storm troopers trying to kill me? Why should I bother solving some random number puzzle to access this door?
Most gamers would reply, "that's different!" But is it really? If you're not all that interested in video games, living out a fantasy like that might not be interesting. In fact, it may very well feel like a chore. (
(As a side note, this is why I stopped playing first person shooters save for those that take place in fictional universes that interest me. e.g. Elite Forces. FPS games were becoming a repetitive task of "avoid the zombie attacks, shoot the bad guys, avoid the zombie attacks, shoot the bad guys." Online gameplay was marginally more interesting with, "shoot other guy, get shot by someone else, shoot the other guy, get shot by someone else." But I digress.)
Generally speaking, when you view or interact with entertainment you are looking to invoke an emotional connection of some sort. A highly developed sense for a particular form of entertainment allows one to appreciate complex forms of it more readily than others. Meanwhile, some just want forms that evoke a simple reaction to a simple form of that entertainment.
To use music as an example, Beethoven can evoke a lot of emotion in those who have developed an ear for classical music and enjoy such music. Others prefer a more direct approach of a shouted out emotional state as found in Death Metal Rock. Still others are looking for a quick attack/release cycle of emotions as found in pop and techno music. (Ever notice the 90's techno always dropped the background music for a few seconds at the height of the song? It's a cheap trick, but it has serious emotional and cognitive impact on the listener.)
Taking this back to video games, it's not the chores themselves that make Brain Age interesting. It's being placed in a situation where you have to react and think quickly. Simple math and puzzles are used as the vehicle for such tests. For some players, the pressure being placed on them to get a better score is reward in of itself. This is similar to the reward one gets by blasting through a shoot-em'up while avoiding the gazillion+1 enemies that are hogging the screen space. Pressure is put on you to perform, and a certain reward is felt when you achieve a good performance level. One can even be proud of their achievement by sharing their score with others. In the old days, this meant entering your initials into the arcade machine. For Brain Age, this means having a normalized and easily relatable score to brag to your friends about.
My end point is that these games aren't "boring" at all. They are just as interactive as other forms of gaming. The only difference is in the audience they appeal to. Just as country music appeals to some while death metal rock appeals to others. It takes all kinds.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
"Fantastic" does not apply solely to games with swords and dragons -- GTA is fantastical in many ways. Furthermore, GTA sold well mainly because it is a fun game. There have been other games that have tried to copy the same style of storytelling and "realism" in the GTA games, but without the fun, and most of these games haven't come close to copying GTAs success. However, I think you a very flawed in saying that realism wins out over fantasy in America. Final Fantasy is still one of the top selling game series. Madden is up there too, however. Shows like CSI and Grey's Anatomy, though hardly 'realistic', are probably not considered fantasy and are very successful. Shows like Lost and Heroes, however, are very fantastic and also garner fantastic ratings (well, Lost is falling, but that is for other reasons). I think my point is that American culture embraces a mix of both dramatic realism and escapism nearly equally. Some people completely shun realism, some completely shun fantasy, but most are okay with both.
"Let the market decide"?
Thank you Captain Obvious. Since the author of the article wasn't suggesting that such games be given special government funding, or that people be forced to play them at gunpoint, then the market will decide anyway.
He's quite entitled to make suggestions, companies are free to ignore them, or consumers free to not buy them. You seem to be implying that anything outside some artificially restricted concept of "The Market" is not valid; i.e. software houses decide what to produce based only on their own opinions/research and consumers either buy or don't.
Chanting "let the market decide" like a mantra isn't meaningful or insightful; it's redundant.
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The biggest thing here is that Gamasutra is missing the point.
Brain Age is not a popular game because it is boring or because it has such a broad appeal. It is popular because it is good. Just like Zelda and Halo (NIMHO, but that isn't the point). Good games will always be popular. Bad games will go the way of Diakatana.
When it comes to games, the point is make something that is quality work. If it is, it will find a market to appeal to. Again, look back a number of weeks when Geometry Wars was being talked about. Is that game boring? No. It is simple, but the real key, it is really fun. Hence, why it is so popular.
I will say this, if a Game "Magazine/web site" is making this article, I really have to question their credibility.
RonB
It is human nature to take shortcuts in thinking.
I sincerely hope this isn't taken as a troll, but George W Bush himself always came across to me as someone playing a movie-style president for an electorate brought up on the same thing. Not just the gung-ho mentality, but the whole package.
Maybe I'm wrong, but my gut reaction is that you're so soaked in this that you can't see it. Or are you implying that US society is much *less* influenced by images in popular culture than others are?
And you have an aversion to abstraction? Advertising and branding, the red-blood of All-American capitalism *is* abstraction of values. How else does a simple tick-shaped "swoosh" symbol, or some pretty white writing on a red background saying "Coca Cola" have so much meaning? It's not that Nike goods or Coca Cola are so much better than the competition; it's that they have so much imagery associated with them. It's bordering on hyperreality. I think this sorta explains the rise of GTA over fantasy games, GTA realistic? It's not exactly Ridley Scott's "Legend", but it's still a white boy's safe fantasy of black urban life. but I think it also begins to explain the distinction between Brain Age and fantasy/drama titles. Wasn't Brain Age/Dr. Kawashima a Japanese success to start off with before it did well in the US? The stereotype of American entertainment isn't "small-scale realism", it's big-bucks blockbusters.
I appreciate that there's been a move to "reality" TV in recent years, but if your reality shows are anything like ours in the UK, then they're contrived situations set up like a lab experiment designed to provoke drama and edited to play out like a real-life soap.
If reality TV reflects anything, it's the increasingly artificial and contrived direction modern society is moving towards, everyone's life played out as 15 minutes of TV fame.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
The real problem is the concept of "The Market." Games like Brain Age appeal to a different audience than RPGs. Economically, they are barely related. They aren't substitutes or complements. They just run on the same systems as different genre games. People don't go to a store looking for an FPS and walk out with Pong. Asking "should games be more boring?" is like asking "should everything on TV be more like soap operas?" Like with TV shows, the market for video games is too broad to really be treated as a single market. What TFA should have asked is "have the video game companies been paying enough attention to the arcade and puzzle game markets?"