Playing It Safe

For me, fun isn’t the end of the equation.

That sentence is there to address the fact that often gaming critics are brought down a peg for thinking too much about video games. It’s a fair argument, and for most consumers of gaming, I don’t think there’s much else to worry about beyond the fun factor. But serious people spend serious time and resources in a multibillion dollar industry that provides entertainment content for the world. There is nothing wrong with occasionally considering the implications and the shortcomings of an adolescent industry that commands so much time in the neural pathways of the masses.

I appreciate a fun game as much as the next guy, and this year has been positively choked with safe bets and easy playtime. I walk away from 2008 with some nice memories of time spent happily indulging my pastime, but few moments of gaming that challenged me on anything but a functional and mechanical level. I take part of the blame for that, but I share that with a complacent industry stuck playing it safe.

Grudging though I am to admit it, the most challenging gaming phenomenon of the year was the moral dissonance that is Grand Theft Auto IV. Let’s be specific about the definition of challenging that I’m employing here, because this has nothing to do with the difficulty of the game. This is about the ways that games can challenge expectations, norms and mores. When I say GTA IV’s moral complexity was challenging, I’m talking about the compelling simulation of a character that both regrets and revels in the violence he dispatches. As the year has worn on, Nico has become caricaturized by corners that revel in sarcastic deconstruction. Though the execution was imperfect, credit has to go to Rockstar for trying to create a morally complex character in a world that simulated a spiral of inescapable violence despite illusions of freedom.

I can not stress how disappointed I am to place such accolades on this game, but as we run out the clock on the year it is inescapably relevant and daring in development circles where all the salmon swim downstream. I grow tired of being asked to be reasonable about not expecting too much from high profile games. Some developers and publishers constantly reinforce this idea that being creative, innovative and daring with games is a risk not worth taking, and worse they seem to have convinced us that demanding otherwise is completely impractical if not unreasonable.

Were I an investor in these companies, my perspective would be functionally and appropriately different, though I think an equally substantive argument can be made that this kind of spineless approach to the medium is a prescription for mediocrity. But, as a critical analyst, a pundit, a blogger or blowhard I embrace my opportunity and increasingly I think my duty to put whatever pressure I can on the industry to evolve. There is no shame in demanding better.

It’s not that I take any particular or individual exception with games like Fallout 3, Dead Space, Resistance 2 or, yes, even Wrath of the Lich King; obviously they are games I have enjoyed playing. But, they are original recipe KFC in a red bucket, Venti half-caf cappuccinos from Starbucks, TBS reruns of House or virtually anything by Counting Crows; they are good enough to make us comfortable without being individually memorable in the long run. They are the slop in the trough that sustains us somewhere between complaint and inspiration.

Individually I can take no exception with any of those games, except perhaps to say that I will look back and remember I liked these games without really remembering anything about them. I won’t remember enduring characters that bent my expectations, or mechanics that asked me to look at the way I play games any differently. They are old, brown comfortable shoes that have lost their luster but never squeeze wrong at the ankle, and at the end of the day no one remembers anything about them. They are representative of their class, the commonplace game that is designed to be a product rather than an epiphany.

Call it idealistic longing for days gone and never to return, but I grew up in a time when games were daring. Now they are commodities, and worse they are so by choice. I realize that there are people who stand on the fringe and impart underfunded genius, but I don’t feel like it’s satisfactory to cede the common ground to the clinically practical just because we’re all supposed to care about business goals, investors and marketability. We’ve seen triple-A titles be daring and succeed, so I don’t swallow the line that it just can’t be done anymore.

I look at the turmoil surrounding LittleBigPlanet, a game caught between attempting the daring and bending to the will of intellectual property attorneys, and I see the front in this war teetering on both victory and defeat on crucial ground. Here is a game that dares to change notions and reinvent and it is stagnating at the will of litigious pressures, stifling the creativity of what may have been the very heart of the game. The stakes of this fight are not just the individual creations that represent hours of work by players, but perhaps in the long run the very frameworks that allow players to act as a creative force in a game.

As an observer, I can choose to be practical and address the uncertain nature of law in public online spaces, or I can champion gaming that is subversive and unrepentant. In a world where good enough is the new great, where a night out is picking up take out from Sonic, where games, like popular television, music and movies are less reality altering medication than placebo, I’m comfortable eschewing the bounds being reasonable in favor or beating some fists against the brick wall just in case it cracks.

Comments

Youch... you seem a tad despondent. I suppose you're right, in that this Q3-Q4 'feast' of gaming is dominated by sequels that are, practically by definition, recursive and familiar rather than daring and new (Fable II, Fallout 3, Gears of War 2, and so forth). Some of these games actually shank what made their predecessors so good (GoW 2's multiplayer setup is atrociously slow and not very fun... no more finangling over team selections!).

Innovations... innovations... hmmm. Left 4 Dead adds some new elements to dynamically generated gameplay, although if you were to show your average individual five minutes of L4D and then five minutes of any other FPS game, they'd probably be hard-pressed to note any significant on-the-surface differences.

Braid was pretty rad.

Otherwise... business as usual.

I feel compelled to give a Barbaric Yawp of "F**k Yeah!" to this.

Bravo.

I think the game industry has become rather like the film industry. When millions or tens of millions of dollars are at stake, investors that know nothing about games and care about them even less are interested only in guaranteeing a return on their investment. So marketing teams put together analyses and assemble criteria for "successful" games based on historic data. However, I think everyone would agree that the result is generally tripe, and fantastic failures still occur fairly often. Have we seen the Waterworld of gaming yet?

Kevin Smith had an interesting anecdote about the film industry in one of his lectures to college students (available on Netflix). He ended up in a position to write a script for a Superman film for some big name studio. When critiquing his submission, the executive asked about a sequence where Superman goes to the Fortress of Solitude for one reason or another. "There's no action," he said to Kevin, "you need to have an action beat every ten minutes or the audience will get bored." Kevin replied that it was called the fortress of Solitude for a reason, and explained that an action sequence there didn't fit with the story. So the executive asked, in all seriousness, whether Superman could perhaps fight an angry Polar Bear on the way up, and refused to green light the script without a change, as well as similar market study-driven changes to other parts of the script. The end result was utter garbage and I believe Kevin refused to direct the film.

I can only hope that indie and foreign groups continue to produce original and entertaining games, because I have no more interest in the big budget garbage game than I do films. On the up-side, it's certainly saved me some money having so few good games to choose from.

The game industry is again becoming more like the other big entertainment mediums in that you've got to hunt for the really different, groundbreaking stuff. Don't expect the multi-million dollar blockbusters to offer you up something radical and new. If you really want something different, start digging into indie games (and be prepared to tolerate some rough edges along with the new ideas). There's lots out there, you just have to look for it.

complexmath wrote:

So the executive asked, in all seriousness, whether Superman could perhaps fight an angry Polar Bear on the way up, and refused to green light the script without a change, as well as similar market study-driven changes to other parts of the script. The end result was utter garbage and I believe Kevin refused to direct the film.

My favourite part was the suggested addition of a giant robot-spider for Superman to battle, which was eventually ramburgled into a different movie (the timeless classic Wild Wild West). Executive gets what executive wants!

Hey, i'm right there with you.... just, when they come for us i'll point them to my 'ringleader'...er, that's you btw!

I keep asking - if games are so expensive to make because of the graphics then why not tone them down a little and spend more on the artistic style/gameplay design side of things? I'd be really happy if the next generation of consoles didn't come around until 2015 because not only would that give time for the market to grow to a point where it can sustain these mega-bucks developments but it would also provide enough time for development tools to become standardised and therefore cheaper and easier to use - therefore less costly in terms of development/personel time.

The biggest exclamation point of the year was supposed to be SPORE according to many game industry sources. Delayed 3 years+ and hyped to the max I thought it was expected to "revolutionize" the gaming industry and trigger a landslide to new gaming concepts. It seems to have fizzled out in only a couple of months. Was it because they dumbed down the game to "play it safe"? That can be debated for some time. At least they ATTEMPTED to make something fresh as opposed to jumping on the sequel train with the others.

Don't expect the multi-million dollar blockbusters to offer you up something radical and new.

This is the core of my complaint. Why not?

Why shouldn't I expect them to do it, even if they don't then we need to stop just being satisfied with saying "oh well, it's really expensive and they said no." The hell with that, let's tell them to take chances anyway. Practical is just another way of saying complacent.

Elysium wrote:
Don't expect the multi-million dollar blockbusters to offer you up something radical and new.

This is the core of my complaint. Why not?

It's kinda like expecting a decent missile defence system, school facilities, transport network etc. etc. For some reason the more expensive a 'thing' is the less likely it is to work as wanted. I guess there must be some 'law' (like Murphy's law) that governs this phenomenon.... maybe we can name it?

Elysium wrote:

Practical is just another way of saying complacent.

Bingo.

We as consumers have become the opposite end of the spectrum. Somewhere along the timeline of this industry (or any other that gains the title of "Big"), the retail consumers become a shapeless mass. We become so obscure and hard to understand that millions of dollars worth of marketing research need to be invested to intelligently guess what 'we', the incomunicado need or want.

We saw it happen to Hollywood and now we'll see it happen to videogames.

In a perfect world where game designers, game coders, game producers, game publishers and game distributors and game retailers are ALL fans of games; product quality is insured because people that ARE the customer, and obviously will UNDERSTAND the customer.

Instead, decision makers focus on ROI and market penetration.

I would love to know the exact moment gaming became successful, because I was loving Grim Fandango one minute, and out of nowhere 'Halo' became good story telling.

You know why Valve is such a successful company? It's privately owned. That means there's no outside influence that cares about money more than they care about games.

Duoae wrote:

I guess there must be some 'law' (like Murphy's law) that governs this phenomenon.... maybe we can name it?

The Michael Bay law?

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aaaargh! double post!!!

Hobbes2099 wrote:

You know why Valve is such a successful company? It's privately owned. That means there's no outside influence that cares about money more than they care about games.

Agree completely and that's why i hope Stardock never fold to become publicly traded.

Hobbes2099 wrote:
Duoae wrote:

I guess there must be some 'law' (like Murphy's law) that governs this phenomenon.... maybe we can name it?

The Michael Bay law?

Nah, that's the law of diminishing returns on the number of explosions within a certain time frame.

I'm waiting for Michael Bay to release a movie called "Explosions: The Movie" that will be two hours of awesome explosions and nothing else.

So what actually did break new ground this year?

muttonchop wrote:

I'm waiting for Michael Bay to release a movie called "Explosions: The Movie" that will be two hours of awesome explosions and nothing else.

Doesn't he already do that?

I think I started losing faith in videogame creativity the moment LucasArts stopped doing Grim Fandango and started doing Star Wars.

ApplepieChamploo wrote:

So what actually did break new ground this year?

Braid. Man that was an awesome game.

Elysium wrote:
Don't expect the multi-million dollar blockbusters to offer you up something radical and new.

This is the core of my complaint. Why not?

Why shouldn't I expect them to do it, even if they don't then we need to stop just being satisfied with saying "oh well, it's really expensive and they said no." The hell with that, let's tell them to take chances anyway. Practical is just another way of saying complacent.

Big publishers don't say no out of a sense of complacency. It's the responsibility of the people managing the company to bring products to market which produce an upward trending bottom line. You can point at any industry that produces things directly for the public and see that the largest and most consistently profitable companies do not get that way by taking big risks. If it can't be measured to be reasonably popular with a target demographic, it doesn't get made.

Successful businesses manage their risks. They don't go off and do some risky thing because it might be cool. If they do take a risk, you can be sure they have several tried-and-true products to offset most of the potential losses of the risky one.

EDIT: And really...

GTA IV is the most challenging gaming phenomenon of the year? GTA IV? Even putting aside the cash-in-on-the-name issue, there's no moral ambiguity in GTA IV. You can't finish the game as a good guy. You can't even play most of the missions without running someone over, sideswiping other cars, or in many cases killing people. Maybe the story provides the illusion of moral ambiguity, but the gameplay puts the player solidly in a the shoes of a bad boy. Maybe a bad boy full of self loathing, but still, not a very nice man.

Hmm.

I guess I disagree in some ways. While it's wonderful to play wholly unique games, I think that we should still praise games that try and innovate at all - even if it's on a pretty small scale.

Dead Space tried really, really hard to immerse players, and maybe it didn't work perfectly, but an attempt was made (the lack of a HUD, the no-pause-a-la-Bioshock cutscenes) and I think that these are elements which we will see cropping up down the line. Similarly, Resistance 2's co-op multiplayer aspect is pretty different, I'd say. It isn't the first time we've seen the class idea, but I've rarely seen it work better. Even a game like Left 4 Dead, which is just people pulling the trigger, forces - on harder difficulties - players to play together instead of against each other (there is also the IDLE mode, which is a great addition to online games; and there is the Director, which, I feel I don't need to say anything about). Gears of War 2's horde has something similar to L4D. I know - really, be nice - that these are mostly tweaks on the creations of others, but these tweaks are departures from the norm, I think. And that fact that these are getting pushed over Deathmatch is super, no doubt about it.

We haven't been presented with any characters that are really anything special in a long time, but I think we've made small strides were it counts. Jump back to Gears 2 and Left 4 Dead. Both games are trying, in their own way, to push visuals. I know what you're thinking - Not Left 4 Dead, surely! - but consider the facial animations, which we've seen all over the place nowadays, and how far they are being pushed. Consider how much personality has been afforded to the characters through graphical fidelity. The same can be said about the environments from Gears of War 2. Some of the "vistas" (hate that term) produce far more of an emotion than the "story" does.

Similarly, the upcoming Prince of Persia is building on that Shadow of the Colossus you-fight-relatively-not-enemies style of gameplay. It's not the first time, but the fact that a major development house is pushing it is something special on its own. Meanwhile, Far Cry 2 is taking the STALKER route, and while it isn't as open the latter, its a push in the right direction. Shooters like CoD:WaW are great for what they are, but FC2 is part of a very, very small group of FPSs that have tried to move the genre forward.

I feel like I've spoken too much.

I know what your saying, Sean, and I agree in some ways, but I think you want too much at once. Slow innovation is better than none.

Two final notes:

1) There's no reason we shouldn't take video games seriously. Literature, pop-fiction, music, film, art, whatever - if we take it seriously, it will take it self seriously. We should ALWAYS consider the implications!

2) Gamers should be proud - damn proud! - at the quality of our "Blockbusters". Maybe we don't all care for a lot of the more casual Wii games or whatever, but compare our best sellers to the box office tops in film, to the billboard top 40, to whatever - I think video games are doing well for themselves. If Fallout 3 is our equivalent of Michael Bay, than we should all be very, very happy.

Hurrah for games! (Don't stone me).

Sitting atop the mountain of demands, I spot him just a few blocks down. A cigarette falls out of my mouth, tumbling into the abyss of broken promises and unmet expectations.

My hand raises, shakily - "You -".
"Shut up", he says wearily. "Just shut up."

Sententia wrote:

I think I started losing faith in videogame creativity the moment LucasArts stopped doing Grim Fandango and started doing Star Wars.

you my friend, have spoken truth from the soul, earning a heart-felt hug, let me know whenever you need a pick me up.

I think the current debate is a sign of the maturity/immaturity of the games industry.

The industry is growing up in a time where debate is very easy and widespread, so gaming is under a microscope unlike movies, music or books were in the past.

Media has always been focused primarily on commerce, as this is the motivation for the creation of the media. It's only as it matures that it truly becomes something creative and expressive.

Gaming is still in the growth phase, and creativity and experimentation are secondary to income and expanding shareholder value. But when the consumers are sick of the blockbuster games and start to be more demanding then the time will be right for the more experimental works to be created.

The gaming industry is still in the summer blockbuster/romantic comedy period, the Pan's Labyrinth period is still ahead. But a lot of commentators are wanting it to grow up faster than the current model supports.

I sometimes wonder if gamers are just too analytical: we look at a game, look past the outer trappings, reduce it to its absolute basics and declare it identical to some other game.

Which misses the point that the outer trappings are what mainly distinguish games now that they're a mature medium. Virtually every film can be reduced to one of the basic stories, isn't it the same for games?

I think you are right, most critical analysis in literature and film looks for unifying elements between works. Gamers look for differences, and when they find that things are fundamentally the same, they are disappointed.

Personally, I think that the two greatest game industry (for PC at least, as I don't own a console) triumphs of the year were Sins of the Solar Empire and The Witcher: EE.

Sins I'd say was groundbreaking due to its gameplay. It hearkens back to the golden days of strategy games. It attempts to capture the essence of what is fun about a strategy game, and then add new layers on top of it that have not been done before. At least not in this manner. The end result is superb. If you can invest the time required to actually play it, and have the social circle to enjoy it to its fullest through multiplayer, it is a phenomenal game.

The Witcher: EE would be an odd choice for a revolutionary game, as it is a re-release of an already existing game that in itself was not so revolutionary. Great as a game, but not revolutionary. What was revolutionary about the EE version was the circumstances under which it was released. Think of it in terms of a revolution in publishing. Hopefully more greedy publishing houses can learn a lesson or two from it.

Someone should convince the Weinstein Brothers to get into funding computer games.

pneuman wrote:
ApplepieChamploo wrote:

So what actually did break new ground this year?

Braid. Man that was an awesome game.

I would argue Left 4 Dead broke some new ground. Though it depends if your definition of "broke new ground" is "completely reinvented every element of the gameplay". Left 4 Dead has done some new things with a traditional co-op multiplayer shooter underneath.

Elysium wrote:
Don't expect the multi-million dollar blockbusters to offer you up something radical and new.

This is the core of my complaint. Why not?

You cannot demand multi-million dollar budgets and then ask them to take very risky chances with that money. Money that isn't theirs, btw, it's the publishers. If you are a billionare and want to back some very risky creatively innovative multi-million dollar games, feel free. But you can't seriously ask publicly traded companies to make that kind of investment.

Creative innovation is risky. You never know when your new innovation is going to be appealing to consumers. There's a good chance it won't be, and then you've sunk tons of investor money down a hole. You can't really determine it's appeal without getting it in front of tons of real people and just seeing if they find it fun. That's why we have indie games.

I'd also like to point out that Fallout 3 and Dead Space may not seem innovative to you because you've been playing every game that's came out for the past 15-20 years. If a small niche game comes out with some pretty cool gameplay innovations, and then someone does a good job of rolling it into a blockbuster, that's very innovative to 95% of the population. Should they not release these games because you've already played the niche title?

Blockbusters seem "safe" to us because it's the second tier of innovation and we all usually play the first. They do that because it doesn't make sense to blow several million dollars without testing it out first.

I reject the notion that "innovative" games are the best ones. I claim that if you look at most of the best games ever, even the favorites in this very forum, they all took existing frameworks and polished them up and made them shiny. Innovation in games, like in user interfaces is less important than good design and intelligent production, IMHO.

Oh wait, OK there was Portal.

psu_13 wrote:

I reject the notion that "innovative" games are the best ones. I claim that if you look at most of the best games ever, even the favorites in this very forum, they all took existing frameworks and polished them up and made them shiny. Innovation in games, like in user interfaces is less important than good design and intelligent production, IMHO.

Oh wait, OK there was Portal.

Portal was polished up version of a game called Narbuncular Drop, IIRC.

PyromanFO wrote:
pneuman wrote:
ApplepieChamploo wrote:

So what actually did break new ground this year?

Braid. Man that was an awesome game.

I would argue Left 4 Dead broke some new ground. Though it depends if your definition of "broke new ground" is "completely reinvented every element of the gameplay". Left 4 Dead has done some new things with a traditional co-op multiplayer shooter underneath.

I was going for the complete reinvention thing, but I think that'll probably be near-impossible to achieve, as mentioned you probably can reduce every game into one of the given "genres". Case in point, a platformer with time control? That would be Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, then. That said, Braid did a much better job of it.

A lot of very practical, very reasonable, very investorly responses.

I reject the notion that "innovative" games are the best ones.

Good thing I didn't make that claim, then.

You never know when your new innovation is going to be appealing to consumers. There's a good chance it won't be, and then you've sunk tons of investor money down a hole.

Probably true, and I couldn't possibly care less. I think these publishing houses hire enough people to give a crap about their bottom line that I don't feel like I should.