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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?"
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.
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.
"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.
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?"