What’s Wrong With Video Games

I feel myself drifting away from video games.

Call it a between-console-generation lull, call it the belated maturation of a stubborn man-child, it may or may not be a permanent drift, but it is nonetheless real and it is significant. Video games have been a staple interest in my life since… well, practically for as long as I can remember. From my earliest memories of Chuck E. Cheese’s dimly lit arcades to the hours spent in front of my brother’s NES to my well-chronicled passion for XBox, Counter-Strike and Game Boy Advance, being a gamer is part of who I am.

Or rather, it was, until about eight months ago. The last game I played from start until completion was Resident Evil 4 earlier this year. I’ve managed to play maybe a total of eight hours worth of video games since then and not for lack of spare time but for lack of real interest. None of the new portable consoles (PSP, Nintendo DS, Gizmondo) really interest me and while there are some far-off titles that have me vaguely intrigued (Zelda: Twilight Princess) nothing that is currently out or slated to be released soon holds much more than passing interest, if any.

What’s going on here?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and I think I’ve narrowed down the problems that plague my enjoyment of my once favored pastime to five things the video game industry is doing wrong and one thing that I’ve done that has no bearing on anything else other than to redirect my attentions elsewhere. I guess I’ll start with that to get it out of the way.

0. Non-Video Gaming

My recent fascination with war gaming has probably more than a little to do with my reduced time with a controller lately. When you have 3,000 points of Warhammer 40K and 1,500 points of Warmaster plus three teams of Blood Bowl and a sack o’ Napoleonic minis to assemble, prime and paint that tends to suck up the free hours. This is not a complaint, merely an observation.

I might also observe before moving on to more interesting points that war gaming has provided me with a lot of the things that I feel are missing from video games, such as tolerable (enjoyable even) human interaction, strategic gameplay and creative involvement. Plus, hour for hour, I’d wager the two are comprable in terms of cost which probably explains why one had to wane for the other to flourish.

But my vide gaming hours being spent elsewhere doesn’t explain why that even when I do want for some downtime in painting, sanding, gluing and sculpting I don’t automatically reach for a controller any more. The reasons for that are in fact more due to what I see as failings on the part of the video game industry as a whole.

1. Stupid Human Interaction

I may be accused of assaulting a fallen equine here, but while the proliferation of online gaming is in my mind a Good Thing, it has so often taken the form of player versus player that the aspect has become synonymous with the whole. Don’t get me wrong, competitive online play certainly has its place and some games are ideally suited to it. The problem is that it has so overshadowed the cooperative possibilities inherent in online games that there have only been a handful of games which even bother to explore the possibility. Those that do (Full Spectrum Warrior, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory) do so in a way that betrays the lack of experience developers have in getting players to work together to achieve a common goal which typified competitive online gaming of ten years ago.

Games which sorely need cooperative play (hello, Halo 2) ignore it and games which could be developed with cooperation as a primary means are, as near as I can tell, never given a chance to see the light of day. I assume that game manufacturers are operating under the assumption that modern gamers don’t want cooperative modes in their games, and perhaps gamers themselves perpetuate this. The problem here is that gamers who feel they wouldn’t be interested in cooperative games don’t realize that a lot of the problems they complain about in player versus player (annoying opponents, unfair matchmaking engines, repetitive gameplay) would nearly disappear with strictly cooperative games.

In fact, many competitive games which have enjoyed a great deal of success incorporate passing nods to cooperation that suggest working together is not something players have no interest in: Witness Counter-Strike which more or less perfected team-based (nee cooperative) competition. Also note the extremely popular versus mode in the latest two Splinter Cell games in which two teammates work against an opposing pair. These hybrid type games (and their accompanying popularity) suggest that they are drawing from both the inherent fun of working with a friend (who may not even be in the same hemisphere) and the standard means of challenge of working against a thinking human foe, when in fact there is nothing being drawn from on the team-up side of the coin, and what should be half of a well-matched pairing is relegated to a novel concept due to nothing more than lack of previous example.

2. Misplaced Focus

I am impressed with modern graphics engines.

OK?

Now enough. Nintendo head honchos came under a lot of fire when the next generation consoles were being discussed because they started a mantra that went something like: “We’re not trying to produce the machine that generates the most whizz-bang graphics. We’re trying to produce a machine that generates the most fun.”

I have to applaud that sentiment, and loudly. I’m a graphics junkie as much as the next guy, but gorgeous visuals is really a small piece of the overall fun of a game. Observe The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. Most of the graphics in that game could be produced, at least passably, by previous generation machines. The game was pleasant to look at, sure, but it was fun because it was deep and engrossing and simply a hoot and half to play through. Combat mechanics were precise, the puzzles were challenging but not frustrating, the story was interesting and the secondary elements (music, mini-games, controls, level design) were superb.

Now look at a game like Final Fantasy X, a gorgeous game by all rights… but a gorgeous mess. The digitized acting was cornball, the battle system was tedious and dull, the gameplay was stale and static, the level design was focused more on looking nice than being navigable. I wonder if the people who claimed to like the game were actually enjoying the game or enjoying their sightseeing trip sometimes.

I play some Nethack on occasion. We’re talking about a game that uses ASCII characters to represent a fantasy dungeon crawl. When the letter Z can inspire fear, there may be some decent gameplay happening. What Nethack gets absolutely, positively right is that it is deep… crazy deep. It’s frustrating, aggravating and endlessly enjoyable because you can do so much. Learning the game is part of playing. Chatting about the game is part of playing. Complaining about the game is a huge part of playing and it doesn’t get old. Sure it uses randomized dungeon maps to help keep things fresh, but a simplistic game with a randomizer wouldn’t be any fun, so they gave you so much to do you could play the game—just the first level mind you—for a year and probably never do everything possible. It’s a game whose source code is less than four megabytes; we have DVD-ROM games capable of holding over ten times that amount and we fill it up with licensed pop tunes and mammoth textures and don’t bother to worry about whether the game is any fun.

At this point in time I should have to be impressed when a game like Fable lets me change my appearance with age and experience. That sort of innovation should have happened long before reflective surfaces in quarter panels and ragdoll physics. I want a role-playing experience that is actually role-playing, that gives me a chance to develop how I want and achieve goals in clever ways without being tied to a rail for the sake of a few cutscenes.

3. The Funnel Factor

I have the sense that while game developers are busy seeing how sweet they can make their graphics look, they are ignoring the role of game designer to the extent that they are becoming like Hollywood in terms of originality.

Don’t misunderstand, I’m not one of those people who bashes sequels just for being sequels. At least, unlike in the movies, video game sequels are often superior to their predecessors because usually (hopefully?) a good game gets refined and has a few mechanical defects tweaked and improved in later versions. But a sequel of a First Person Shooter at this point is just another First Person Shooter.

Because so many developers don’t want to have to come up with an original way to play a game, they continually fall back into a tired cliche until the number of genres in video games is funneled into a handful. Shooters (First Person), Strategy (Real Time), Platformer (Devil May Cry-style or Grand Theft Auto-style), Racing (Driving), Role-Playing (Full Motion Video-fest): any license or concept has been shoehorned into one of these styles or, if the developers are feeling really nutso that week, multiple genres.

I understand that there are limitations (odd as that sounds) with 3D. Cameras become a problem in three dimensional environments, field of vision and scope of action have to be considered. Controls are tricky, too, because 3D implies realism and while old sprite-based games might have gotten away with some abstraction of controls 3D gamers assume that controls will function in a way that is consistent with a world that, relatively speaking, operates under the same rules as their own.

But the problem with funneling all games into a handful of genres is that they begin to define the limits of what should be a more or less limitless medium. Instead of finding cool game concepts and building worlds and stories into and around that, people think of genres and find minor tricks and tweaks to set them apart that will fit with the theme of the day. Games have started to become detail-tweaks with every one subgenred down into their minutiae with literal differences such as “stealth action like Splinter Cell… but with camoflauge!” Is this the extent of the originality game developers have left? When individual death animations for each type of foe is a selling point, I’ve already halfway checked out. Wake me when someone does something worth mentioning.

What happened to turn-based games? Why does strategy have to be “real time?” Why are all massive role-playing games online multiplayer? Doesn’t anyone see the appeal of a massive solo campaign? Maybe a small-band cooperative online role-playing game? And I don’t just want to see top-down racers or even a return to 2D games, necessarily. Show me something unique; something that has a cool concept or a great license that doesn’t do something stupid with it. When Shadowrun is a first-person shooter, something is seriously wrong.

4. It’s the Writers, Stupid

Games have gotten more complex. I’ll give them that. Sometimes, complex is better. Sometimes complex can suggest the ability to delve into artistic realms. I don’t know if I believe it has happened yet, but I think that at some point games could be considered art.

I know it isn’t just games (watched any TV lately?) but writing is bad all around—and as bad as it is in movies and on TV, it’s 20 times worse in games. Writing dialogue and stories for games needs to not be something that just the mega-budget games can afford (or something that mega-budget games horribly abuse). Games need to all be given the benefit of a native-language speaking writer who actually knows how to write stuff. Ideally, it would be someone who knows how to write games. At least someone who understands the mindset of the gamer so we don’t end up with crossovers gone awry.

Movies are expensive. They cost about $9.00 per person around here for non-matinee showings and I grumble for days if I pay for a movie with crummy writing. Video games cost an average of $50. The math is yours to do if you wish, but anything past the price of a badly written hardcover book is too much to pay for this kind of thing.

5. Pushin’ Forward Back

My final beef with video games is games that continue to make mistakes that should have been resolved as soon as the technology or the innovation to correct them appeared. I’m talking about things like save-anywhere. Really, in today’s day and age of gargantuan quantities of dirt cheap disk space, games that require you to “find a stopping point” don’t deserve shelf space in the bargain aisle of Jimmy’s Vid Shack. People are busy, adults with responsibilities play games too, let us save where we are and come back later. No, I don’t want to collect save crystals or typewriter ribbons: I want to save where I am exactly and come back to the same point when I have time. No backtracking, no save-of-doom, no hassle.

This same concept can be applied to entire games such as the Tomb Raider series who, in spite of ever shrinking sales from gameplay that was broken by way of overexposure, continued to be rehashes of the previous games for years. Reluctant kudos go to Resident Evil 4’s design team for finally doing something about the oft-maligned “tank walker” control scheme of the previous games, but it certainly shouldn’t have taken five games to get the clue. I have yet to see a Tomb Raider game that does anything TR2 didn’t. Oh, I’m sorry, is it still possible to defeat a skilled Soul Calibur player with some random button mashing? Wow, that’s some great fun there—and a real incentive to practice, too!

Let Me Explain. No, There is Too Much. Let Me Sum Up.

I suppose that at some point I will probably find a new system or game or something that will attract my attention again. Perhaps I will one day be complaining as much about war gaming as I am now about video gaming. But with so many games being showcases for some 3D artist’s portfolio instead of something I really want to spend my time playing, I have a hard time wondering if I’ll have to wait a long time for video games to catch up to my expectations or if at some point I’ll just have to lower them to make do.

In the meantime, I’m keeping busy and while I’m not sure if I’m excited yet for the new systems to launch, I’m still open to trying a great game that flies below the radar and gets a lot of this stuff right. Got any ideas? I’m listening.