I have returned from a long break from blogging due to being busy over the Christmas period and such. I probably would have written something sooner but I’ve been too bummed out with this head cold I’ve been suffering for the past two weeks.
Firstly, I’d like to mention that upon returning to WordPress, I’ve noticed a spike in my page views this month. Some sort of WordPress wizardry allows me to see the search terms to which people have happened upon my blog. The top search term is “Dahvie Vanity” and for some reason this does not surprise me. Other terms however, include things like “Lara Croft bondage” and “Skyrim porn”. If you have found my blog by using similar search terms, please be assured that I am judging you.
Judgement Owl judges you
Moving on, I’d like to talk about a topic I’ve been mulling over for a while. It’s not an original topic, but I’d like to swing a different perspective on it. It’s something that any veteran gamer will agree with and it’s that video games these days are too easy. Now there is a merit to this in that it opens up a market that simply didn’t exist in the past. Many old school console titles required the player to survive an entire level without dying, or they would have to start all over again. This usually meant dedicating hours at a time to video games. Nowadays, we are given rechargeable health and an abundance of checkpoints, and while I know that game designers’ hearts were in the right place with this generosity, I can’t help but wonder if we are now being too spoiled or too pampered by video games.
Most games, shooters in particular, have a difficulty setting, and generally “Hard” mode means more enemies, less power-ups. But I’m not going to talk about these types of difficulty mechanics here and discuss something I’m a little more concerned about. There’s an awful lot of hand-holding in today’s video games. I find that if I need to stop and think, for even the shortest time, about what I need to do to progress through a level, the game very intrusively butts in with a glaring hint. Gee, thanks. It’s like working on a Sudoko puzzle with someone looking over your shoulder and saying, “No, you can’t put the nine there, it will clash with the other nine. Heavens, what are you doing? Do you know what, just give it to me, I’ll do it right.” Indeed I do find it condescending when the game thinks I’m too stupid to figure something out for myself. Hints are fine, but not those that tell you exactly what to do.
What I used to like about games was figuring out their mechanics. After Duke Nukem 3D was released, I used to use the action key excessively in every game since, just to see what was interactive. Now I don’t even bother because if an item doesn’t glow, jingle or display a giant green triangle when my character stands next to it, then I know it’s not interactive. Where’s the fun in that? What’s the point in a game that practically plays itself? Playing video games has become such a passive activity that it’s really difficult to gain a sense of accomplishment from them. The stereotype of the mindless zombie gamer may become a reality if video games continue this trend.
To contrast the differences between a current generation game with an older one, I’ll use an example based on my own experience. My favorite game genre is probably action adventure or puzzle platformer (usually both go hand in hand), so I was quite excited about Uncharted when it was first released, mainly because it wasn’t the millionth sequel of a 90′s title. I thoroughly enjoyed Uncharted despite some of its flaws. However, there was one pet peeve I had about it that I refuse to forgive it for. In a game in which you play an adventurer, you are somewhat discouraged from adventuring. Like I said before, I enjoy checking a level out, looking for pick-ups or interactive objects. So when I spend a little extra time searching for the treasures scattered throughout Uncharted, I am often nagged by the secondary characters to hurry up. Gah! Shut up and let me explore, dammit! They even give away the solution to the next puzzle before I have a chance to look at it. I actually don’t recall solving an Uncharted puzzle by myself because either the characters told me what to do, or the solution is in Drake’s notebook. Come on, Naughty Dog, give your fans a little credit here.
Make the statue look like this picture. As tough as Uncharted puzzles get, unfortunately.
I have recently started playing Ico, which has been re-released with Shadow of the Colossus on the PS3. I had never played Ico when it was initially released in 2001, so I suppose my first realization when I started playing was that this game made me sit up straight and pay attention. There was no tutorial. There was very little dialogue. Nothing glowed or jingled or pointed me in any direction. It was just a young boy and girl alone in a castle and it was all up to me to help them escape. And this is what I missed about games: the freedom to explore the environment and to tinker with objects until the pieces of the puzzle fell into place. The game depended on you to unravel it, rather than you depending on the game. There is nothing more satisfying than logically connecting the elements of a level to progress through a game.
Today, there are few immersive titles that let you think for yourself, apart from maybe Portal and some Xbox Live Arcade games such as Braid. Why is this? Why are we spoon-fed in-game walkthroughs? Why have games devolved from immersive experiences to passive interactive stories? I had considered the possibility that this generation of young gamers will only play these types of games because anything without hand-holding would be too difficult for them. I remember an occasion at work where a mother wanted to exchange Lego Indiana Jones because her 8 year old boy could not figure out what to do in it. Even the mother said she could not figure out how to play it. Lego Indiana Jones. With a PEGI of 7. I’ve played Lego Indiana Jones and heck Tetris is harder than that game. What has happened to gamers? I was playing Duke Nukem at 9 years of age and today not even an 8 year old and his mother could figure out Lego Indiana Jones. This goes back to what I said about being spoiled by video games. When we’re so used to games hinting and nudging us in the right direction, anything that encourages thinking for ourselves is suddenly off-putting. Feel free to prove me wrong here, this is something I’m rather upset about.
Lego Indy - It's not for kids, apparently.
So in conclusion, I’m all for making games easier to appeal to a larger market. My vision of a perfect world is where everyone has some interest in video games. My problem is when video games start to become so dumbed down that they lose what we loved about them in the first place. Like I said, what’s the point in a game that plays itself?
Pazma
January 18, 2012 at 10:47 pm
We have video games that get more and more like movies everyday and movies that look more and more like video games every day. Right now I’m actually watching the Puss In Boots movie which is all CGI. It’s a topsy turvy world we live in.
Jesus
January 19, 2012 at 12:01 pm
If you look at how gaming has grown in the last 15 years, becoming part of mainstream society, a bigger part than movies seem to be, you have to look at catering for the mainstream. Uncharted was created to appeal to a broad consumer base, placed in a genre that was one of the early mainstream successes with Tomb Raider, and given a look and feel similar to Indiana Jones. The mainstream market now exists because of people casually playing so called “hardcore” games, not catering to the mass market, with a project intended to have mass market appeal, would just be poor business. I’ll admit some games take the hand holding to the extreme, but then on the flipside there are games that give no hand holding at all.
Look at the movie industry, summer blockbusters are made to appeal to the mass market, how many of those summer blockbusters can you call deep or meaningful? The transformer movies make hundreds of millions, but could you call those difficult to watch?
It all comes down to looking for the difficult games, Demons’ Souls or Dark Souls are the foremost in peoples minds for hard games. Looking around the more niche genres will give you less handholding, things like Tactics Ogre on the Psp, the Disgaea series, even Super Meat Boy and the Binding of Isaac. No mainstream, no handholding.
The point in the end is, mainstream games are always going to be designed to pander to the most common player. Mainstream games are always going to have to be designed to train you in its mechanics as early as possible, because it’s needs to encompass their entire market, and new players are part of the market they want to attract.
So while difficulty has taken a beating, you are also introducing new players to a medium and genre that has been loved for years.
Joanna
January 19, 2012 at 1:05 pm
“The transformer movies make hundreds of millions, but could you call those difficult to watch?”
Inception also did pretty well =P
But I see what you’re saying. I’m glad that games are easier in some ways so that they are more user friendly to new gamers. On saying that, I don’t want games to patronize the gamer either, which is what a lot of them are doing. There was a sort of happy medium between 1996, say and early 2000′s. You could save when you wanted, you could chose your difficulty, you were given a tutorial, but you also were given the freedom to play the game without being told what to do. Let’s go back to that. =)
OverlordTomala
January 19, 2012 at 2:55 pm
This is something I haven’t really paid attention to. All the games I play only give me enough hints on how to use things, like zooming or how to use a weapon or interact with the world. One game comes to mind though, and that’s Tomb Raider Legend. I found that one to be fun, but at the same time I found it to be a little too easy at times. I also found Anniversary a little easier compared to the original because it was more linear than it’s predecessor.
Another thing to keep in mind; what may be simple to one person might be difficult to another. For example there was this guy in a chatroom I frequent in and he’s playing Portal 1 for the first time. He gets stuck on a test chamber. Which one? The one where you get the second part of the portal device (so you can shoot 2 portals instead of one). Which to most people would be a really simplistic puzzle. But this guy ended up having to watch a walkthrough because it was “too hard”.
I think in the end it comes down to the type of game or genre that you’re interested in. I’ve seen some things that were well balanced, too easy, or were fine but made too hardcore for the 1337 gamers who felt Normal mode should be equivalent to expert. It’s possible that the game might really be too easy, or you might just be too smart for your own good.