What We Lose With Good Design
Damion Schubert talks about the early days of Ultima Online. He remembers them fondly. The fans do too: particularly, the thousands of ways in which they could exploit game mechanics for fun and profit (or just griefing). Click through for some choice examples, such as building a staircase out of spoons to steal a fellow player’s loot.
It’s a point worth noting: we’ve all had tremendous amounts of fun with broken and overly punishing game systems. In some cases it may be impossible to separate the bad part of the system– i.e. the reason we’ve left it behind– from the good it caused. Sure, mob training turned into a PvP tool on PvE servers, but it did make for a more intense dungeon-running experience. I’ll never again play a game with Everquest-like corpse runs, but they did make for a tighter-knit community. Oblivion’s leveling and item-creation systems were ridiculously complex and exploitable, allowing you to become invincible well before the end of the game– at which point finishing the game becomes a bit of a dull chore. On the flip side, I spent many hours thinking about my character build, reading Gamefaqs, and developing my equipment.
While playing the latest game with meticulously meted content or scientifically calibrated action/exploration intervals, do we lose a sense of surprise or even individuality? Do we gradually catch on that our next reward, from what it is to when it happens, from its sound effect to its flashy graphics, has been a little too finely tuned to our primitive brain? What’s the alternative: a game that leaves us bored, frustrated, and confused? And would you buy that game?
October 3rd, 2007 at 1:36 am
I think at some point, yes - games that get too much polish will feel like you are just clicking your way through to a guaranteed success (or at least along a near robotic path). Sadly, I think it novel games that introduce something new (control scheme, genre, fantastic universe, compelling plot) that keep the industry moving; but it will often be a more polished refinement of those new games that end up being hugely successful and synonymous with the genre.
I think one of the things that makes games stand out as an entertainment medium is the level of control and participation that is allowed. TV and Movies can take you to similar (in these days, the same) fantastic universes with superheroes, aliens, magic and lara croft’s bust line - but games allow us to participate and feel a sense of action and accomplishment. And even a sense in individual experience - sure, I share the experience of driving a Warthog across the back of the Pillar of Autumn with everyone who finished the first Halo game - but I had my own experience with the pitfalls and challenges along the way. If a game ever gets to the point of being so polished and scripted that the experience doesn’t feel right - I think that game will have lost something.