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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?"
But yes, I think it would be good (for developers and for gamers) for games to break out into more genres. Here's a quote from Rod Humble, Executive Producer of The Sims, which neatly sums up a good way to think about this:
Just to get the imaginative juices flowing for developers here are some great ideas:
Virtual paint drying
Virtual grass growing
Virtual lawn mowing
Virtual gutter cleaning
Virtual root canal
Virtual hoop-pushing down a virtual dirt road with a virtual stick
I'm sure developers could take these a long way and I'm sure we can all agree we greatly anticipate the results
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
Heh no. I sort of he's coming from but he missed the boat, badly. I think that what developers should try to understand is that there is no "magic formula" for creating a good game. You can't feed the "fun" factor into a checklist and hit every point to get a good game. I think that in order to design a good game, it's necessary to try to think in entirely different terms. Great games are born from innovative and creative concepts, which are then mobilized using creative and fun stories, interfaces, graphics, etc. I'm not at all saying it's a crap shoot - I'm saying that once you start thinking in terms of formula, you lose the creative aspect of the game, and arguably, the fun factor as well. And that's what makes a game great - and of course it's also what ultimately makes it sell.
Deja Moo: The distinct feeling that you've heard this bull before.
Having a few 'mundane' games is one thing, particularly if we're talking Nintendo's type of mundane in terms of Nintendogs, WiiPlay, and the like.
The fact is, Fantastic games are what sell systems. I begged for my first PlayStation (one) thanks to Spyro the Dragon, and had Sega been on the ball a little more, NiGHTS would've let 'em sell quite a few more systems too. Brain Age is an okay game, but when I reach for my DS, I have Elite Beat Agents, Mario, Sonic, Cooking Mama, FF3... you get where I'm going with this.
Brain Age is a good secondary game as a 'pick up and play' offering. It's NOT what made the DS a success.
If by games, you mean Slashdots Games category, I really do not see how it could be any more boring.
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.)
This article reinforces my belief that most people are complete and total idiots and don't have anything better to do than show everybody else how much they just don't get it.
Yeah, yeah, I know... kind of like this post.
-- toolie
If you want "boring", there's a place for you in Gold Farming.
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.'"
Mundane != Boring.
This title is just wrong. Zonk, is there any way we could please change it?
Mundane means commonplace, everyday, ordinary. Boring means uninteresting. Not the same. The article is not saying that games should be less interesting -- the article is saying that games could do well to apply more to real life, and to real skills (I.E. Smooth Moves having players balance brooms on their hands).
I'm all for making games more mundane -- I think it's a great idea, and it's a phenomenal idea for making games ultimately more fun. If "fun" is about learning patterns (as Raph Koster posits), then it only makes sense to build off of patterns that are found in real life (hence why driving games are so much fun).
However, I'm [b]not[/b] in support of making the games boring.
When i wake up after my Halo induced nap.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Brain Age's success doesn't come from being "ordinary," otherwise the myriad of chess, sudoku, and crossword games would have brought in massive sales. Its strength is derived from its accessibility and simplicity: not everyone has the time, energy, skills, or desire to learn complex building trees, resources management, or practice their trigger finger. Every man, woman, and child above the age of seven can add simple numbers, count objects, and match things. Further, the assigned tasks are short and mentally satisfying, not appealingly "ordinary."
I think this is just phrased so bad, maybe brain-age is boring to you. But it's obviously not boring to all those people playing it and enjoying it. If something is boring why the hell would people enjoy it? I personally find all those MMORPGs boring as hell but to my friend who is addicted it's like crack, I mean I don't say "Should more games be boring--just like MMORPGs". Anyway just a bad title....
Use existing graphics, cut your graphics/sound/artist dept. down by 80% and use the rest of the time to make an interesting game. Doesn't matter the genre, just make it fun/interesting/etc.
Look they are people out there who are all over ass sweat on the body they just shot. Great. Too bad ass sweat doesn't actually make the game good.
Given X the total time from start to finish how much of X is not on something relating to actually game play experience?
Accounting: The Game
Paperwork IV: The Redemption
Diablo III: Excel spreadsheet edition
1080p Crossword Puzzles
Starcraft 2: Zerg Human Resources
Grand Theft Auto V: Insurance Adjuster
Half Life 3: You actually work out the half life of a given element
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.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
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.
Hmm. Exactly. Why is the article equating boring with games like Brain Age? Maybe games which don't have a whole complex world in them can be..umm what's that word.. oh yeah.. FUN. Complex games can be boring.. Quite a lot of them are.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
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).
It sounds like the writer of this article does not really grasp the reason why Brain Age, and for that matter, all games, are fun. Brain Age is fun because we learn as we play. Halo is fun because we learn as we play. Brain Age does this transparently; openly offering challenges to the player that test certain skills. Games like Halo do the same thing: we are constantly seeing new challenges that test our skills to navigate, aim, conserve ammo, etc. Games are not fun when they are too hard, as there is too much noise and we can't get a worthwhile signal out of it without excessive effort filtering out the noise. I don't particularly like FPS's, nor do I enjoy jazz music, and you could say it's because I don't understand it enough to learn from it. Games are not fun when they are too easy, as we feel that we've grokked the game, and there's nothing else to learn from it. After you hit the glitch level in Pac-man, what's the point in continuing?
The author clearly shows his lack of understanding in this quote: It is a game of chores, really, not of challenges. Games like speed arithmetic and number tracing actually become maddeningly dull after only a short time, but many players persist because they want to have the sensation of keeping their minds sharp. [...] [It] makes people feel as though they are improving their long term mental health. It satisfies a mundane need for personal upkeep.
I played Brain Age daily until I unlocked the final challenge-dealie (I think it's the one where you say the numbers instead of write them?). Then I stopped. Along the way, it was nice to see improvement in each challenge over time, but after a while I would plateau, and that game would stop being fun to me. I kept playing so that I could unlock the other games, as they would offer me new situations to learn. If all the games had been available to me at the start, I would have stopped playing far earlier, and that unlock system is one of the great ideas that other games of Brain Age's ilk have adopted. I would love to know how many people keep playing regularily after all challenges are unlocked and they are not seeing significant improvements.
Of course, all of this is not something I thought consciously as I was playing. I realized it after reading A Theory of Fun for Game Design. A great read, and really has made me think twice about why I enjoy some games and not others.
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?"
We do have boring games.. World of Warcraft. In fact boring games are equivalent with easy games.
Games should go back to being games, rather than video based reincarnations of choose-your-own-adventure books or 120 hour movies with semi-interactive cut scenes (by which I mean the actual game play in between the cinematics). Games have put eye/ear candy above game play and plot for the last decade.
That partly sums up what I felt; namely, that the current up-its-backside-with-Hollywood-production-values games market is just a small percentage of the total *potential* market. I felt this before games like Dr. Kawashima/Brain Age, and it was games like that which persuaded me to buy a DS Lite; and also the reason that I didn't even consider the PSP.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I think this is also taking it a bit far. I shall rephrase the question:
With popular franchise games becoming more engrossing at each subsequent release, would game publishers be better able to serve their existing customers (or, alternatively, expand the market for a particular game) by making it less exciting and immersive?
The answer here seems to be "Games like that are for weenies. We don't want any, but hey - if the publishers want to bang their heads against the wall, more power to 'em." I, for one, would like to see *larger* RPG and adventure game worlds, with more casual gameplay that doesn't require me to perform upkeep on my in-game knowledge and dexterity. Principally, the skill curve and knowledge curve should be very shallow as the game progresses. That is, I should be able to pick up the game after a hiatus and enjoy it without being frustrated or studying a notebook or having to replay the lower levels. That kind of boring could appeal to me.
True science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith.
I think what makes brain age different than every other game is that the sole focus of the game is self-improvement; it's like an RPG where you are (rather than control the main character). Let me explain.
In most RPGs, you get better primarily by gaining levels or acquiring new equipment. In Zelda, you get a new boomerang or a better sword. What's unique about brain age is that rather than doing better because you got the +10K dagger of Pwnage, your skills actually improve. You become better at adding and lower your "brain age". It's just like an RPG; you gain rated levels based on how you perform, but the focus is on your performing better, rather than giving your character special skills or equipment that allow them to perform better in your stead.
I can't think of too many other games where the focus is on self-improvement rather than avatar-improvement (or just simply a high score).
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
I think the author's point is a good one, though poorly expressed.
Probably a better way to put it is,
"Should there be more games that are cerebral or contemplative rather than action oriented"
Put that way, the answer is probably yes. There are a lot of activities that people enjoy that are not excitement-oriented. And there have always been games that tapped into this kind of entertainment: board games, puzzle games, virtual pets, classic adventure games, resource management games, weird abstract games. Games like Brain Age reveal that this category is hardly mined out. But the factors that make such games enjoyable tend to be more unique and difficult to anticipate than, say, first person shooters, so they will probably always remain a minor component of the market.
Bullshit.
What will "take off" is what is backed by the biggest capital, which in turn buys ads and "reviews." Without this, nothing takes off.
Do you even know what games are on the market today? Just take a look: three or four genres, each clogged with half a dozen clones vying for the same shelf space. And these clones are likely to be sequels, which means they are even less original than their last iteration.
Recycling the same old shit month after month, year after year is hardly "the market" deciding. It's the suits deciding.
Gaming is now a market with a high barrier to entry. That's a complete reversal of the situation we had even fifteen years ago, when publishing opportunities were great and the variety in games even greater. As a result your fictitious sentient "market" is simply a puppet on a string, dancing the way corporate money tells it.
1.Games for people who want to have fun.
2.Games for people who want to have challenge.(e.g. Skill based games)
Bith tyopes have some fun,and some challenge but game focuses on something singular.