NoG Blog: Enough Handholding, Already!

I'll preface this post with a quote from a wise, influential sage: "It's fun to have fun, but you have to know how." My argument is that modern game developers have forgotten this simple proverb. They don’t trust that their audience can discover how to have fun with a game on their own, and as a result mainstream games have lost an entire dimension of challenge.

Half-Life 2 is a good example of this, but let’s first refresh our memories of Half-Life. One of the mini-boss enemies is the Apache helicopter, an armored flying machine that’s mostly impervious to small arms fire. The easiest way to deal with it is to shoot it with rockets until it explodes; in fact, your first encounter with one is immediately after you pick up the RPG in a cliff side crag. But you aren’t handcuffed to your rockets. Its rotor and engines are actually vulnerable to pistol fire, if you are brave enough to stare it down. You could even try to air burst it with a few well-timed hand grenades. Contrast that to its HL2 analogue, the gunship. It’s only vulnerable to rockets, and there’s a convenient infinite rocket crate near every single gunship battle in the game. There is a certain technique to aiming your rockets so they can’t be shot down, but otherwise that’s all there is to fighting a gunship: shoot x3, restock at crate, repeat. Same goes for the Strider: the only interesting part about fighting one is the mad dash to the win button---erm, ammo crate, that is. (Final Citadel Strider battle excluded, that one was different and fun.)

As I said in my opening, modern games have lost a dimension of challenge. The dimension that HL2 lost is the balance of resource management, i.e. spending your rockets/cells/summonable ninja squirrels now or saving them for the next big boss battle. If there will be an infinite ninja squirrel token crate next to the mini-boss who’s only vulnerable to ninja squirrels, why even bother conserving your most potent ammo? Other games may have lost different dimensions of challenge, be it self-preservation, or directional awareness, or what have you.

That’s just one example of how modern games hold the player’s hand way too much. If you listen to the developer commentary in HL2 Episode 1 and the Orange Box, you’ll discover that they tweaked their maps to accommodate players who couldn’t or wouldn’t pay attention to their environment. This boiled down to looking up, or deducing that they were endlessly walking in a circle for 10 minutes. Around the turn of the century, video gaming got some much needed good publicity when studies reported that games helped hone spatial awareness and coordination. Can we seriously expect games to keep honing our real-life skills when developers are doing their best to remove the need to use them? Looking up is not “hard mode” for Pete’s sake! Doom 3 might have been repetitive and even a little predictable in the way its monsters popped out of every other wall, but at least it taught its players the valuable lesson: "Just because you're looking forward doesn't mean the monsters will conveniently appear at eye level."

In a way, I think a lot of mainstream game development is being held hostage by the notion that games have to be art. Roger Ebert got gamers’ panties in a twist when he said that games cannot be art, and the industry started trying their darndest to prove him wrong, often at the cost of game play. I think a lot of games were designed to be “experienced” rather than “beaten,” which is to say their primary focus is just to entertain the player for 6-8 hours, rather than present challenges that the player derives pleasure from overcoming. That brings us back to my favorite quote in the world: “It’s fun to have fun, but you have to know how.” Modern games, I contend, are not designed for gamers who can walk up to a challenge and have fun conquering it; they are designed for a mainstream audience, not gamers per se, who (the developers believe) can’t have fun on their own. Well, maybe they'll never even learn how, if developers keep it up.

The perfect hardcore game, in my opinion, is a sandbox with a goal in the middle. It’s also hard; not Nintendo-hard, but it’s a challenge that may require multiple attempts or a lot of problem solving. The worst possible game is a straight, narrow, corridor of game play, with the goal at the end, and which is consumed and subsequently discarded in 2-3 hours. STALKER and System Shock 2 stand defiantly close to the "sandbox" ideal, brutally slaying newbies yet gradually rewarding them as they master various skills; and I have a hunch that HL2:E3 and HL3 are wavering somewhere in the middle, not yet sure in which direction to fall. Modern mainstream games are not necessarily bad, but they are inching further and further toward the "narrow corridor," as developers try to handhold players for the best “experience” rather than the best game.

Editor's note: I'm glad to feature our first community column here on the blog. If you want your article to appear on the blog, feel free to either submit it to nog((at))deadworkers.com or post it at the forums! As always, feel free to comment here, or take it to the forums for more in depth conversation!

Jess, AKA EsBe