There are loads of ways to improve our gaming experience. I’m sure there are more than a few out there who’ve happily guzzled some mind-altering drugs and freaked when they came across their first feral ghoul in Fallout 3. You’ve also got those people who like to immerse themselves in the game: from the people screaming sexist and racist insults over headsets while playing [insert FPS of your choice here] to the people who spend mortgage-sized chunks of money to bring their MechWarrior fantasies almost to sweaty life. That’s not forgetting the bunch of mates who get together, have a few drinks and gradually get more sullen with each other over Need for Speed or FIFA 2012*.
Just like any art form it’s as much about what we bring to the table that determines our level of enjoyment. I mean, studying a Matisse for colour and technique in a gallery is just as valid as sitting in your underwear of a night, playing Modern Warfare 3 and eating Doritos from your navel. It’s all about what makes you happy. The medium is there to form a framework on which you hang whatever experience you want to create. It depends on what that framework is and what you want it to do for you.
Of course that doesn’t divorce developers, creators and publishers from giving us, the average gamer, the framework and experience on which we base our leisure time. If they could get away with it publishers would release ‘games’ like The Life of Sticky the Stick in which the whole game is moving the eponymous character from one side of the screen for two thousand levels. No variation, other than which side of the screen you started on, for hours of mind-numbing fun. And they’ll charge you fifty or one hundred of whatever currency you use for the pleasure of doing it. If you don’t think this is true your cynicism is woefully underdeveloped and I suggest you go and read some comments sections and some forums. Once you’ve wept the first time things get so much easier.
Fortunately we don’t live in that alterna-world where consumer rights are so flagrantly disregarded, and we don’t have to suffer through games in which we convey simple shapes from left to right, right to left, endlessly and forever. It would make game pad design that wee bit simpler, mind you, only having left and right buttons. We live in a world of glorious complexity in which control pads consist of arrays of buttons, D-pads and analogue sticks promising to take us through adulthood with carpal tunnel syndrome and arthritis. The games we play demand this level of hand-crippling controller design in order to deftly or, as is often the case, not so deftly negotiate the games of the 21st century.
Humanity, however, has this habit of not being completely satisfied with anything. There had to be a few people who looked at Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man and said, “Whoa! Do we really need to see that?” or thought that the Mona Lisa looked a little on the podgy side. Then again we have to thank the guy who looked at those early cars trundling out of the Ford factories and considered them a bit boxy. Without a bit of critical thinking nothing in the world would ever improve. We wouldn’t have dazzling games like Uncharted, Batman: Arkham City or the constant stream of indie games that challenge those who want to go looking for them.
With this in mind, I would like to offer some of my humble thoughts on what could be tweaked in order to make our mainstream games that little bit more enjoyable. Now, there are well-worn paths in this kind of thing: story, blah blah blah; mechanics, yada yada yada; and offensiveness, um, wibble, wibble, wibble. These are THE BIG ISSUESTM and I think I’ll avoid them as much as possible, because, frankly, they activate all kinds of crazy. I don’t want to get crushed under that particular juggernaut, thank you very much. My wife would be pissed at me, I’d never hear the end of it and I’m not a courageous man. What I’m going to suggest here are some minor(ish) things to perhaps make things better in just small ways.
Number one: Bigger, clearer text. Start with something small, shall we. Or something I perceive as small. We don’t all have wall-sized screens that show reality-altering vistas from the dimensions of sight, you know. Some of us semi-luddites still possess CRT televisions** that were once considered big. I’ve come to accept that sometimes not seeing a character because my TV doesn’t have the chops is going to happen. But the least developers could do is give us the option of larger text for those prompts or important bits of information that make the game go easier. My ambitions in this really are quite humble.
Number two: Let’s split off the hardcore gamers from the casual gamers. Yes, I’m using some quite fascist language there, just to get your attention. I love getting trophies on my PS3. I’m not afraid to admit that. It stabs at the poor, twitching OCD part of my brain when I can’t get all the trophies for one game. Batting all the arguments about challenge and playing games for fun aside, I feel somewhat downhearted when I see a trophy for something that I clearly will never have the skill to do pop up on the list. I’m not going to sit for hours or days vainly trying to perfect my skills in this area to get the trophy, even though I want to complete the collection sooooo much.
It’s crazy and is aimed at really good, often dedicated, gamers. My proposal is an alluring one for publishers: have two tiers of trophy, one of which you pay extra for. When you buy and install your game, you get a basic set of trophies or achievements to collect that are straightforward (but can still be weird and time-consuming) to do. If you feel you want more of a challenge spend a little bit more, something like a dollar or a pound or a euro to get those tougher trophies. People with the same head-sickness as me can sleep easy and the dedicated gamers can still have their prizes for having skills I can only dream about.
Number three: Graphics aren’t everything. Okay, thinking about it, I may be wrong, this does encroach on THE BIG ISSUESTM, I think. But does every game need to have such insane work done on the graphics? Realism doesn’t always improve a game. Take L.A. Noire, for example, it was an okay game with a lot of ambition. You can’t fault what they were trying to do with the facial motion capture business. It didn’t quite work. Trying to read the expressions in an interrogation turned into an excruciating exercise that makes you question just how far along the autism spectrum you are.
Graphics take up a huge amount of space that could be used for interesting game mechanics and more content. Squeezing in more realism doesn’t instantly make a more enjoyable game. It doesn’t even always guarantee greater immersion. Using L.A. Noire again, it could have been done with simpler, stylised cartoony graphics. I can’t imagine it would have taken more work than the hours of filming actors and then mapping their faces. Just imagine how huge and immersive games could be if developers had water thrown over them when they get too excited about the pretty, pretty visuals.
So there you go: three minor (or two minor and one not so minor) suggestions to make the world of gaming smoother for everyone – or perhaps just me. Perhaps these thoughts will become moot as the games industry evolves. Though that just means we’ll find different ways in which it can be further improved. And that’ll be nice.
* It kinda looks like I’ve got it in for these games, but I don’t really. Although, strictly speaking, I wrote this article first.
** Since upgraded to a big LCD, but the argument still stands.
Will
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