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Are Games Worth Complaining About?
A few days ago, the Opposable Thumbs blog ran a piece titled, "In gaming, everything is amazing, but no one is happy." The thrust of the article is that discussion about modern games focuses almost entirely on flaws, which are often blown out of proportion. "Every game is too short, although we never finish the games we play. Every game is too expensive, although we demand ever-increasing levels of interaction, graphical fidelity, and length. The same people who claim every game was 80 hours and a masterpiece 10 years ago are 10 years away from saying that today was the golden time, once they have the distance needed to scrub the bad games from memory." Today, gaming site Rock, Paper, Shotgun offers counterpoint, saying that video games need active criticism for the industry to improve. "Everything is amazing, and sometimes people are happy. That’s how it will always be. And we should probably make the most of it, and then strive to make it better."
In almost any kind of software other than games, the stock response to "If only" is "Patches are welcome." But for some reason, games as a whole tend to be more resistant to free software principles than other kinds of software. I've written a couple reasons why that might be.
We should still criticize games, no matter how good they are, because pointing out problems is how things improve. Nothing is perfect, nor will it be, but we should always strive for perfection. To talk about Deus Ex, since the first article mentions it, the endings are something that need improvement. It doesn't make it a bad game, heck it doesn't even reduce it from being a great game, however it is not up to par with the rest of the game. It should be pointed out that it needs improvement.
However I will say they are right that many gamers need to shut the fuck up and stop whining. There's a difference between offering some criticism of things that could use improvement and crying about small things as though they ruin everything.
Again to use the Deus Ex example I saw a number of people online just slam it for having shitty graphics on the PC. That was odd, since supposedly they worked on making the PC version higher end, but then maybe that was all marketing. Then I get the game. No, it is just people being assholes. The game is beautiful. Not the best graphics EVAR or anything but very visually appealing, better than many games. I can't see how it would ruin the experience for anyone, at least to the point of being all pissed off about it.
What gamers need to do is offer suggestions for improvement, not cry that everything isn't perfect.
If everyone stopped complaining, nothing would ever improve. Think about it: if you're a video game exec and people just shut up and bought anything you put out, why would you bother investing in better graphics, better narrative, better design? People think it's bad enough now with CoD17 and Madden2200, but it can get much worse. Without constant complaints we would see a race to the bottom, with even more unoriginal ideas and simplistic gameplay. Dissatisfaction drives innovation and change. Companies aren't going to fix what their customers don't see as broken.
Anecdotally, when I was younger, I was never able to finish video games. Now, I finish the majority of console games that I buy within the first day or 2, with the exception of sandbox games like Red Dead Redemption and Fallout. Either the games have gotten shorter, or they've gotten easier. Either way, something's wrong
It's not complaints that motivate companies. Creativity is driven largely by gamers working within the industry. Where I work, we're mostly a company of gamers, and we all really, really want to produce the most kickass game we can (this is fairly typical in the gaming industry). We're pretty fortunate that our management are also gamers, and support us both financially and creatively (which unfortunately is not so typical). The other motivator, of course, is sales. No matter how creative we wish to be, we're doing this as a business, and we need to be paid for our time in order to live (housing, food, etc isn't free). Complaints are inevitable to some extent, because people like complaining. Typically, a company can tell when it does something *wrong* by listening to complaints, but believe me, it's not a driving force in most cases.
BTW, as to why games have gotten shorter... there's no simple answer, but the general trend has been that high-fidelity content (meaning 3D, high-resolution graphics, fully voiced, fully orchestrated scores, movie-quality sound effects, etc) are unbelievably more expensive than games of a few decades ago. The game I'm working on now has over a hundred artists working for the past few years (it's a huge, huge game). Most games simply don't have the budget to do this. Huge worlds used to be created with simple 2D tilesets, and populated with sprite-based characters that only needed to speak in chat bubbles. Once you move to 3D graphics, this same open-world concept becomes incredibly difficult to achieve. I'm not trying to offer excuses for shorter games - it's just the reality of the situation. You *know* that if a game lowered the graphics standards or did too much copy and paste of content, they'd get creamed in the reviews. If they don't, people complain about the game length.
The good news is that I believe we're going to reach a relative plateau of fidelity, and from that point, the bulk of the development effort will be in finding ways of producing more content in a more efficient manner. It's still going to be expensive, as there are some tasks that just can't be easily animated, but there are still many things in the industry that we tend to do by brute force, unfortunately. It also doesn't help that we need to recreate the same types of assets for each new generation of hardware as capabilities increases. Once the tech settles down and we can start re-using more core assets from game to game, and we can focus more of our time on developing advanced content generation tools, you're going to start seeing much larger and more complex games, even from those with relatively modest budgets.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.