The Cargo Cult of Game Mechanics

The author seems to have completely missed the biggest gaming sensation of recent years - Minecraft is exactly the kind of game he&#x27;s talking about (so is Kerbal Space Program). That list of &quot;classics&quot; also seems very parochial - more like &quot;the best games when I was growing up&quot; than any kind of &quot;all time greats&quot;.<p>Freedom and choices can be used as artistic elements. I&#x27;d cite e.g. <i>Saya no Uta</i> or <i>Phantom of Inferno</i> as the purest form of this - the interactivity of these &quot;games&quot; is absolutely minimal from a conventional &quot;gaming&quot; point of view, but it&#x27;s vital to the narrative. You couldn&#x27;t make these as movies, because the whole point is to make you complicit in what&#x27;s happening, because the outcome is a result of your choices.<p>But not every story has to be about such things. Many of the best-loved gaming classics - Ocarina of Time, or even FF7 - are those cinematic games, that maybe have puzzles (almost minigames, really), but where the overarching narrative is purely linear.<p>If you can take a movie, or a movie-like narrative, and by sprinkling a few puzzles or quicktime events turn it into something more engaging, a better way to tell your story - why the hell not? Why is that not a perfectly valid form? Criticizing a game for being cinematic seems as pointless as criticizing a sculpture because it could have been done as a painting.

The article advocates &quot;building a game that&#x27;s meant to be played rather than just reacted to.&quot; That sounds right, but, then, it&#x27;s sufficiently general that I&#x27;m not sure who would disagree with it.<p>The last paragraph of the article seems to equate &quot;a game that&#x27;s meant to be played&quot; with &quot;real sandbox simulation, autonomous agents and language-capable AI&quot;, and that seems like a narrow idea of what &quot;playing&quot; means, one which equates interactivity (which is the distinguishing feature of games) with choice or nonlinearity. Providing players with lasting choices is one way in which you can use interactivity to structure an experience, but it&#x27;s not the only one. There&#x27;s some interesting comments on this in a review by Emily Short of the IF game &quot;Howling Dogs&quot;: <a href="http://emshort.wordpress.com/2012/10/10/if-comp-2012-howling-dogs-porpentine/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;emshort.wordpress.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;10&#x2F;10&#x2F;if-comp-2012-howling...</a><p>&quot;Howling Dogs&quot; is something of a masterclass in the different ways games can use interaction, and I&#x27;d recommend people check it out as a supplement to the vision of gaming put forward in this article.

For me there are 4 properties that make a game great.<p>Number 1: breadth of options. Games like rollercoaster tycoon are fun because you have an incredible range of options. There is no linear progression from start to finish with only a few choice points in between that have little impact. There are choices everywhere. The opposite is a game like mario, where there are almost no choices.<p>Number 2: reflexes. Games like pong and mario are fun because they require actions at the right timing. Turn based games do not have that.<p>Number 3: collection. You collect items or upgrades or in game currency that help you later. Although I have never played it myself, an example is World of Warcraft. You collect items, money and levels. There is something satisfying about this. Game designers often exploit it to make a game addictive.<p>Number 4: human adversaries. Playing against AI or against some in game metric (e.g. get X amount of people in your rollercoaster park) is not very fun. Playing against human opponents is much more fun because they are unpredictable and intelligent. It&#x27;s not enough to just compete, there has to be interaction. If you put 2 games of tetris next to each other where the players compete for the highest score that&#x27;s not good enough. First person shooters have this point right. The decisions of the players influence each other, rather than only competing via a score. Chess &amp; go are the epitome of this.<p>The games that come closest to hitting all these points are real time strategy games. You have a large amount of options. Not as much as in a sandbox game like rollercoaster tycoon, but still far more than in the average game. You need reflexes to react to threats. You collect resources, upgrades and units. Last but not least, you have human opponents who also have a large amount of options that you need to react to. Not as strategic as chess, but far more so than your average game.<p>Sadly rts appears to be a dying genre...

The tl;dr to me feels like this: The games when I were young were cooler.<p>He argues against it and brings good arguments for what made the games of his youth cool, it&#x27;s still missing the point. Guys ten years older than him won&#x27;t enjoy the 90s titles as much, considering them too fancy etc. They would have also reasonable arguments why the 80s titles were better. The same goes if you ask a currently 14 year old child about the games he plays. He probably ignores most (like we do) and can state why he enjoys the ones that are good in his eyes.<p>Imho you can spend all your life being sad about missing the old days and hoping someone revives them, but instead it make you more happy to learn what makes the great new games great in their own regard. They won&#x27;t be great in the same way Fallout 1 was great. They will be great in other regards, and discovering these can be as entertaining for a 40 year old as it is for a 14 year old guy.

I, for one, like the chutes and doors that lock behind me, reducing the search space when I inevitably get lost after missing an essential key needed to progress. Yes, there&#x27;s the Internet and walk-throughs and YouTube, but that kind of defeats the purpose. It means the game complexity has exceeded the fun threshold.<p>And I also disagree that linear level design prevents good story building (not story telling) by the player. Good examples abound, one of them being Mass Effect, which the article criticized.

I feel like this article suffers a lot from multiple rant syndrome, which is what happens when you get partway through a rant and are so locked into full-on rant mode that every time you mention something that pisses you off you go off on a siderant about it. I&#x27;m only about 80% sure which of his rants is the one that embodies his main point.

I think the desire to make games &quot;open-ended&quot; is inherently flawed (if you also want players to enjoy themselves.) The more complex and unpredictable a game becomes, the more difficult it is to balance. A certain (probably small) number of paths will be gravitated to leaving most stories unexplored and ending up equivalent to a linear story line (with a lot more work.) One way to attempt to fix this is to create multiple balanced paths (essentially a &quot;choose your own adventure.&quot;) This can be brute-forced by adding more and more optional story lines, but in the end it is just many linear stories which is functional equivalent to selecting from different games to play.<p>It is fun to think about creating a virtual world that is as rich and complex as the real one, but we already live in a reality that often sucks so hard we want to retreat into fiction. Stories with minor interactive components are a fine genre (if well done and compelling) as are puzzle and action games. The fact that they are different than reality is their primary feature, not a flaw.

Good article and pretty timely with the release of Destiny, which suffers greatly from the issues mentioned here: masking addictive random-number-generator gameplay and lackluster storytelling with great visuals and promises that this is just the foundation and the game will become much better with DLC. Many things that Bungie had been famous for doing, such as great story telling and smart AI, were completely absent with this game.<p>And they made $500 million on the first day despite this…

&gt; For a while, there was a really good match between the complexity of the game world and the way it was represented, and I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s a coincidence that this window is where we find many beloved gaming classics.<p>I thought this point was very insightful, and not one that I&#x27;d considered before.

OT, but the root site (<a href="http://acko.net/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;acko.net&#x2F;</a>) has some great web animation work

I violently agree with the author.<p>I have something to add specific to competitive FPSs (or any other multiplayer game with a player results table) like Quake and UT. It&#x27;s my personal measure of whether an online FPS is any good and there&#x27;s a distinct difference and it&#x27;s testable (somewhat objectively if you get many people to do this).<p>1. Play the game without any prior knowledge - just launch the game and play (obviously, look up the controls first).<p>Good FPS: you end up bottom of the table with negative points having killed almost no one and probably dying from environmental hazards. In team games your own team is likely to vote-kick you.<p>Bad FPS: you end up middle of the table and have managed to kill people from all over the table.<p>2. Play the game after putting in an hour.<p>Good FPS: you started contributing to the team effort and whilst still near the bottom you get in some kills. You know all the mechanics and none of the high level strategies.<p>Bad FPS: you finish the game at random positions of the table, even near the top. You don&#x27;t know all the mechanics.<p>3. Play the game after putting in 10 hours.<p>Good FPS: you consistently finish in the middle or higher up - but the point is your position is stable. People playing for the first time pose no threat to you.<p>Bad FPS: you&#x27;re still all over the place, sometimes at the top other times at the bottom and you sometimes get killed by people who are playing the game for the first time.<p>The reason it ties in to OP is that this used to be the norm in FPS games, now accessibility is king.

&quot;but they lack lasting power once you <i>stop</i> playing.&quot;<p>This sounds like a good litmus test for me. If you&#x27;re still thinking about a game many months after you finish it, then it&#x27;s probably something more than a mere diversion. In this sense, perhaps, the best game reviews should be retrospective, rather than reactionary on the day of release.

Game developers are exploiting game mechanics and human behavior to raise funds, market, and capitalize on their investments.<p>Other mediums have had their brush with economy too. Painters once had to labor under the patronage of certain religious institutions in order to earn their keep and try to make their art on the side. Writers have always had to suffer in some level of Dante&#x27;s hell, specially crafted for writers, in order to make bread. The poets never made any money and were free.<p>Can a commercial game developer produce a work of art? Perhaps. We hang those works of religious patronage in the most esteemed museums in the world today. Publishers have capitalized on literature before. Music has tried to make it into a machine. Significant works have been produced even when money has been involved.<p>Have video games produced a significant work of art yet? In my opinion, no. A significant work of art is a psychic program that mutates the human brain that interprets it. The less variation in the outcome of that mutation amongst a significant population of individuals the closer it is to expressing some universal truth of our condition. You can point to a work of Van Gogh, Kafka, or Mozart and explain its significance. Anyone who has experienced that art may have some personal interpretation of the experience but the significance of it remains much the same amongst a very large population of individuals. I haven&#x27;t played a <i>video</i> game which has communicated such an idea through my interaction with it.<p>Many games have borrowed or stolen ideas from other media in order to express their authors&#x27; intent or idea: but that isn&#x27;t novel or new to video games as a medium.<p>Will video games produce a movement? I think we&#x27;re seeing some of that. We&#x27;re seeing examples of games that show indications that we&#x27;re developing a vocabulary capable of expressing ideas and emotions through interaction and interplay of strategy, choice, and value. However I don&#x27;t think we&#x27;ve seen our Mozart or our Kafka -- yet.<p>Until then... grind on. We just need to keep making them and experimenting. And I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s valuable to point out that a game is AAA or indie. We still consider <i>The Last Supper</i> to be a great work of art even though it was essentially commissioned by the church at the time. The new religion is Capitalism. In time we may view some of these games today as beautiful.<p>Though for now it seems like they&#x27;re mere amusements.

&gt;The role of game mechanics should not be the oppressive tyrant telling you to fetch and grind and be thankful for your crumbs of XP and DPS as the scenery blazes past.<p>That&#x27;s generally not true at all. It may <i>seem</i> that way, but level systems are similar to a <i>proof of work</i> scheme. Player puts in some time and receives some fair reward for his time. Level systems are a way to facilitate this transaction without invoking pay2win overtones.

I think the indie crowd is actively working against these game mechanics. A great example: <a href="http://fullbright.company/gonehome/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fullbright.company&#x2F;gonehome&#x2F;</a><p>One of the main founders of the company is an incredibly bright guy named Steve. He made an interesting wager many years ago: <a href="http://www.fullbrightdesign.com/2008/02/wager.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fullbrightdesign.com&#x2F;2008&#x2F;02&#x2F;wager.html</a><p>Seems he&#x27;s now out to prove it false, and making good progress.

It seems to me that if there was ever anything in the cannon of collective behaviour which didn&#x27;t seem to the participants to be a game, but nonetheless actually happened to have some of the most uncannily engaging &#x27;game mechanics&#x27; ever to grace a non-game, it is that decidedly odd phenomenon that is the cargo cult.

Making an issue<p>&quot;...in a market that moves very fast, saturated with product...&quot;<p>even worse<p>&quot;...there has been a counterpoint: the wave of DRM-free indies...&quot;<p>Look at Steam Greenlight.

Overall good article and food for thought, but the last paragraph is a non-sequiter compared to the paragraphs that came before it.

I&#x27;ve seen this article template rerun any number of times over the last couple of decades.<p>&quot;Why don&#x27;t we enjoy the video games of today as much as those we played when we were twelve years old? It&#x27;s because the video games of these decadent times lack [insert whatever the particular author&#x27;s imagination can come up with by way of special sauce whose secret has been lost].&quot;<p>Sorry, no. It&#x27;s because we&#x27;re not twelve years old anymore.