The Twelve Steps of GameSpotting
In this sobering edition of GameSpotting, the GameSpot editors come to terms with World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy X, PC hardware, and more.
In this week's GameSpotting, everyone's playing World of Warcraft. Seriously. It's actually kind of sick. We were going to have an intervention, honestly, but then our beta key showed up, and trying to get our gnome warlock to level 14 ended up superseding any of our altruistic motives. Accordingly, the kingdom of Azeroth and the nature of video game addiction are both big topics this week. But don't worry--we have some lighter stuff, too. If you'd like to answer our editorial cries for help, you can do so in the forums, and if you liked this week's GuestSpotting column, perhaps you'd like to submit one of your own?
Ryan Mac Donald/Executive Producer, GameSpot Live
Eiji Aonuma, the current producer of the Zelda series, talks at GDC 2004 about how the franchise has evolved over the years.
Bob Colayco/Associate Editor
"This column is about any game that you know will own your soul for weeks and months on end."
Ryan Davis/Associate Producer
"I knew that, eventually, some PC game would force me to slap down some plastic, but I never could have dreamed that this would be the one to do it."
Greg Kasavin/Executive Editor
"In a certain tone of voice, one could say: It's not good. But who's to say. You can't prove it. Not yet."
James Yu/Senior Hardware Editor
"I'm using my space in this episode of GameSpotting to record some of the answers and advice I've given out in the past week."
D. Jim Maybury/GameSpot Live Intern
"When is the task more of a nuisance than the reward is worth?"
Dru Hartley/GuestSpotter
"The moves were the words and the buttons the letters. A well-played round is a work of performance art."
Melvin K. Poindexter/A Dork With a Story to Tell
Do you have some hilarious/poignant/touching story involving video games? Well stop being a selfish dork and share it with the world in this very forum! Read our GuestSpotting FAQ for details on submitting your own column.
| Bob Colayco Associate Editor |
My Soul Is Forfeit
Let's just get this out of the way: World of Warcraft owns me. I think about playing it while showering in the morning. I ponder where I can find new areas to farm herbs, while sitting on the train into work. Discussions around the office have been completely dominated the past week with talk about the previous night's adventures and where we should go next. And every evening I must resist the temptation to play it all night, because I have other games that need reviewing. But this column isn't about World of Warcraft--it's really about any game that comes along that you know will own your soul for weeks and months on end. It robs you of time to play other great games whose publishers were foolish enough to release them around the same time frame as the ubergame in question.
Now bear in mind, when I talk about a game that takes over your life, I'm not talking about your standard RPG that requires you to play a few hours a day for two weeks in order to beat it. Nor am I talking about a shooter or action game that you play hard for two days to beat and where you mess around in multiplayer for a little while. These games, you just finish the campaign, play online a little bit, and then you put the box back on your shelf and never think about it again because you're moving on to the next thing. Great games. Not ubergames.
No, you know when you've been gripped by an ubergame--when you start thinking to yourself, "There is no next thing. This is it." When you spend your downtime perusing online fan sites and forums looking up the most ridiculously esoteric information about the game, you know you've been seduced. When you peek at your online credit card bill and realize you've just spent $400 on computer parts to get a lousy 15 percent performance gain, you know you've probably gone off the deep end. When you're leaving your phone off the hook, shutting down AIM, and drawing all the curtains of your house to ensure you won't be disturbed while you're playing the ubergame, you know you've been owned. When your significant other has left a Dear John or Dear Jane message in your e-mail box or on your voicemail, and you only found out four days later, you know something's gone bad in your head.
Few games have done this to me. The first was probably X-Com. I was in high school at the time, and I'd literally play the game from sundown to sunup and beyond, skipping as many as three meals in a row. I actually played that game for more than 12 hours straight on more than one occasion. The next two were probably Warcraft II and the original Quake. Both of these games were directly responsible for shaving about 0.5 or 0.7 points off of my GPA in college. Cutting class, not studying, and irate girlfriends were all par for the course in those years, and it was all thanks to Blizzard and id Software. After that came Counter-Strike. For many months between 2000 and 2001, I really had no use for other games. In a lot of ways, I knew de_aztec and cs_oilrig better than I knew my own house.
After arriving at GameSpot, I made a conscious effort to branch out and become a more well-rounded gamer. Though most of my previous professional experience had been with PC games, I sought out projects relating to console games to help broaden my horizons. I also made a point of borrowing or buying hallmark games for each of the major consoles that I had missed over the previous couple of years, just to speed up my on-the-job education. After all of that, I didn't think I'd ever face "the grip" again, because the combined appeal of five major platforms should always keep me from being enticed into focusing so narrowly, right? Right?
As of the time this was written, it has only been 10 days since I started playing. Maybe like a fling or brief love affair, the intense passion for World of Warcraft will burn out quickly, and I'll soon return to a more balanced gaming life. But at least for the short term, my copies of 007: Everything or Nothing, Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow, Battlefield Vietnam, Unreal Tournament 2004, and Far Cry will have to continue to sit, neglected, on my shelf. I must be crazy.
| Ryan Davis Associate Producer |
The Upgrade Path to Poverty
Any of you who spend a serious portion of your gaming time in front of a PC understand the direct correlation between your hardware upgrade path and graphically stunning, high-profile games. You start off with something respectable, something that can play the games of the moment. Then, slowly, system requirements start to rise, and you have to start knocking down the resolution and texture details on the games you're playing, until a game is released that you simply cannot stand to play in anything less than optimal conditions. Shooters tend to make up the lion's share of these games, and I've personally had PC hardware sprees spurred by the likes of Quake, Half-Life, Unreal Tournament, and Max Payne.
I've had roughly the same PC at home for going on three years now, and for the past nine months or so, I've been actively looking for a good excuse to live outside my means and rack up some sizable credit card debt on video cards and DIMMs. The problem is, there haven't really been any recent PC games that have seemed worth the time or the money to me. I don't mean to bag on PC games, but with three consoles' worth of games to choose from, a PC game has to really do something special to warrant the extra grand or so I'd have to add to my outstanding American Express balance to make a significant PC upgrade.
PlanetSide had me real close to upgrading in mid-2003, but the game lost my interest after the first month or so. Around that same time, I saw Half-Life 2 at E3 2003, which provided me with a new and totally justifiable upgrade deadline of September 30. I had thankfully planned to wait until the last minute before taking the plunge, which would have been a real drag, seeing how Half-Life 2 still isn't out. After that came a string of possible upgrade candidates that couldn't quite deliver. Max Payne 2 shot to the top of the list once it became clear to me that, unlike those devils at Valve, Remedy was actually going to be able to hit the release date it laid down at E3. But after I bought it and beat it over the course of two evenings on my incredibly capable Alienware work machine, upgrading my home PC seemed like a moot point. Half-Life 2 and The Sims 2 have both come flirtatiously close to their release dates before getting officially pushed back several times, to the point that the boy-who-cried-wolf syndrome kicked in and I just stopped believing any sort of release information about those games. Unreal Tournament 2004 had been on the fringes of my radar for a while, but it took center stage after I spent some quality time with the onslaught mode in the demo. The game came out, I picked up my copy, and was playing it regularly on this peppy 2.8GHz over CNET's fat-ass Internet connection. Playing it on my Athlon 1.2 didn't seem appealing, and after all that time, it seemed like I had finally found the game that would force my hand.
Then, something really bizarre happened. World of Warcraft went from alpha to beta. OK, so that's not weird, but what's weird is that I started actually playing it. A lot. After just the first night of playing, I knew that the game had its hooks in me in a way that no PC game since SimGolf had managed to pull off. UT2004 ceased to matter, as did Everything or Nothing, Ninja Gaiden, sleep, social interaction, and personal hygiene. Now, my experience with MMOs is pretty limited. I was in on The Sims Online beta for a little while, and like I said before, I spent a solid month playing PlanetSide, but that's really been the extent of it. I knew that, eventually, some PC game would force me to slap down some plastic, but I never could have dreamed that this would be the one to do it.
Not to get on too much of a tangent here, but it's surprises like WOW that really keep gaming fun for me. There are certain genres of games that I know I can go to with regularity and know that I'll at least be mildly entertained by. But my passion for a game really intensifies when it's something I didn't see coming. Before discovering them, I couldn't have imagined I'd be so enraptured by titles like SimGolf, Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, or World of Warcraft.
The funny thing about World of Warcraft is that the system requirements aren't really that high. I had to knock all the detail and resolution settings to their bare minimum on my old machine, but the game scales pretty well. A lot of what makes the visuals in WOW so compelling isn't revolutionary technology but rather some consistently excellent art design. I could wax editorial about WOW for pages, but we'll save that for another time, because this isn't really about World of Warcraft.
So, as of today, I've spent just shy of $1000 on PC hardware over the past week, and WOW looks awesome now. There's still room for improvement, though, as I'm still running on a slightly rustic GeForce 4 MX 440. I wonder how much room I have on my MasterCard...
| Greg Kasavin Executive Editor |
Confessions of a Game Addict
Hands clutch at nothing while outdoors. What helps is knowing home will be there soon enough, crowded in close-big-screened company. Swivel chair bounces between system one, system two, and cheap TV stand with dusty systems three through six. Some black, some gray, some blue. Some white, some gray, some green. Cables and clutter. There's no place like home. Switchbox clacks like a rifle clip. I'd rather be gaming.
If, then, what now. Else, diversion. Sleep is just there. The day's the same. Lives don't revolve. But if this one did...
There was never any other way. There's nothing wrong with it. In a certain tone of voice, one could say: It's not good. But who's to say. You can't prove it. Not yet.
Relationships are gamelike. NPCs say simple things. How's it going. Good morning. How've you been. How's your job. What's up. Who wrote this crap. So-called friends for plot twists. Generic villains. Pointless story threads. Lack of continuity. It's all in there. All filled with statistics. Hit points and experience and levels. Gauges for charisma and intelligence. She's off the charts. He's a lowlife. Meters gauging strength and speed. Fatigue's a percentage. Sleep's loading time. Where do I get the SDK, yo. Where do I get the mod. Where do I get the patch.
I want more stats. Number of people met. Number of friends betrayed. Number of humiliations. Number of times in love. Longest drive. I want a minimap. Worst moment. Best moment. Total damage inflicted. Total percentage complete. Everything is relative. The soundtrack's no accident. The little details are on purpose. The distractions are there to be there. Everything is clear, when you look through the right lens. When you set your field of vision just right. But the stats aren't tracked. You'll never know. That's what keeps you playing.
The day's set on easy. Wake up, buy your weapons, and the round begins. Different outfits. Unlockable costumes. You figure you can't die. The typing of the dead. One long combo string. Different taunts. Speech clips from old games. Old games that were bad. Forgettable, completely, right? It all adds up and swells up. How can anything beat that? But something has to. Ahab had his white whale. Xboxteen16 has Fable. It's exactly the same thing, only one is just sad.
The hands know no greater comfort than an arcade cabinet. Than a mouse and keyboard. Take your pick. It's like love. Knuckles can crack on cue from all that playing. Eyes a little bloodshot. 16-bit references on the tip of the tongue. The first boss from Last Battle. The last boss from Serious Sam. Actraiser's soundtrack. Xenophobe. Xevious. Zaxxon. What the hell's a dragon doing in space. The whole gamut. The first two Gauntlets. Some people have trouble playing games. It's much more troubling not to.
The world shouldn't seem barren, so it isn't. You're surrounded. Options are limited. Messages demand clever response. Choose wisely. You can't pause. Resolution is locked. You only get one chance. Reactions, predictable. But break the plot. Stray from the critical path. Play out of order. Throw the designers for a loop. Fall out of the world, turn around, and watch it shrink to a tiny dot. The frame rate flies off the charts.
Got a fear of heights? Try flinging yourself from virtual cliffs. After a while, it does the trick.
Eyesight isn't great, but the lenses help. Lasik can help. (Lassic is evil. He killed Nero. Did they all die at the end of PSII?) Without the lenses, the world is the N64. Nothing cannot be put into game terms. Chicken restores health. The action takes place on foot and in cars. The action takes place both indoors and out. The action never slows down. Racial stereotypes. Embarrassing portrayals of women. Bad jokes. There are noticeable flaws in the artificial intelligence. Most of the characters are forgettable. The soundtrack doesn't fit. The pace is uneven. The same criticisms all apply.
It's easy to joke about, but it betrays the addiction. Joking about extra lives at a funeral. Joking about team kills watching the nightly news. Joking about telefragging waiting for the bus. Joking about save points at hotels. Jokes and games aren't so different.
You'll grow out of it. Same as you'll grow out of your skin, you'll grow out of it. There's no growing out of it. What if the games all turn bad? Then turn to the bad games. No recourse. No regret. The time bomb is set. Get ready. One lives remaining. Rolling start.
Brief fits and starts. Continuous turns. Who gets to go first. Life is manageable if you look at it the right way. No need to rush. No rush. Plz no rush. There's no rush when you play long enough. You get used to the pace. It gets predictable. Yet you keep coming back. It no longer matters--it's just there and needs doing. You don't stop breathing just because the air is bad.
Game boxes make dusty towers. Game discs like coasters and throwing stars. Someday you'll play them all again. Sadness when saved data gets deleted--a world destroyed. All that time and effort. And what of it? You level up all the time. Pass the test. Get the raise. Get the girl. Get the ball. Get the loot. It's all been done and done better. Yours is a momentary thrill, and then! nothing. There's another level still to come. Endless, spiral staircase. Series of hurdles. Monthly fees.
I can see your stats. I'm checking your equipment. Your script is transparent. I know you need sleep. You have your catchphrase. You have your face and your hair. These qualities make you appear different. But your ping is the same. So are you any good? People on the street, they don't know how to throw a fireball. They don't know infinites. They don't know glitches. They don't know when they're playing cheap. What do they know.
It's enlightenment when it's trendy. Confess enough and it's madness. Society filtered through a HUD. Emotions just for kicks. Emoticons for faces. Licensed soundtrack. 480p. Some downright ugly character models. It's all in here.
You'll grow out of it.
That'll be the day. For an extra life.
| James Yu Senior Hardware Editor |
Random World of Warcraft Answers and Advice
Before joining GameSpot, I was fortunate enough to participate in the World of Warcraft alpha test. I started back in November during the dwarf push and played through the undead and tri-horde pushes all the way up to the current alliance test.
Just when I thought I had to remove myself from the alpha after accepting my new position here (no journalists were allowed in the alpha test), Blizzard opened the beta test and saved me from having to pick up a nasty drug habit to deal with the inevitable alpha withdrawal symptoms.
Since several of my fellow editors here have just started playing the World of Warcraft beta, I'm using my space in this episode of GameSpotting to record some of the answers and advice I've given out in the past week:
How long will the beta last? What classes and races can I play?
First off, Blizzard has indicated that the beta will last for approximately five months, and the current beta push is all alliance. You can play as human, dwarf, gnome, or night elf. The current classes available are warrior, paladin, priest, mage, rogue, and warlock. Other classes and races will become available in future beta releases.
If you're wondering why there are so many high-level night elf rogues running around, it's because the night elf race and the rogue class only became available in the last alpha push before the beta. The gnome race also became available at the same time, but many alpha testers, including me, had been waiting months to become walking clichés.
What's the level cap?
The current level cap is 30, but there are early indications that the level cap will be 60 in the retail release. Expect Blizzard to raise the beta cap as higher-level content becomes available for testing. You can reach level 7 or 8 after a night of playing. According to my "/played" time report, it took me just over 96 hours of gameplay for my character to reach level 30.
How do I turn off the trade channel? The trade chat scrolls nontrade messages off my screen way too fast!
You can enter "/leave trade" into the text box to exit the trade channel, but I strongly advise you to stay in the channel to learn about all the items available in the game and to keep up to date on market pricing.
It is entirely possible to reach the level cap relying only on monster item drops, crafting, NPC vendors, and quest rewards for equipment upgrades, but participating in the trade channel will help you upgrade your gear at a much faster rate. The trade chat channels are divided by geographical region, but Elwynn Forest (Stormwind City) is the only trade channel with any significant activity. Quick tip: You can shift-click an item to make it linkable in chat. Other players will then be able to click on the item name to see its stats.
What can I do with these talent and skill points?
You earn talent and skill points every time you gain a level. You can spend talent points to increase character stats or to develop weapon and attack specializations. Click the "unavailable" box in the view section of your talents menu to see the entire talent tree for your character class. Begin stockpiling talent points once you hit level 25 since a lot of powerful talents will become available only at level 30, and you won't be able to get all of them unless you start saving early. Spend skill points on gathering skills like mining, herbalism, skinning, fishing, and lock-picking or on tradecraft skills like blacksmithing, leatherworking, tailoring, engineering, enchanting, cooking, or alchemy. You can also use skill points to gain the ability to use new weapon classes. Currently, there is no way to unlearn or redistribute talent points. You can, however, unlearn skills and redistribute skill points.
General Advice
Even if you heed the server's message of the day and are careful not to jump while riding the elevator of death in Ironforge City, you can still fall through the floor and, you guessed it, plummet to your death. Your ghost will inexplicably appear at the faraway Kharanos bindstone instead of the Ironforge stone. The three-minute run back to your corpse is as good a time as any to type warning messages to your friends.
Some people consider it rude to inspect someone without asking. Be polite and ask first before inspecting. If you see a nice item on a player, feel free to ask where he or she found the item. You might learn something useful like the spawn location of the named mob (monster or beast) that drops the item. When joining an unknown group, always establish looting rules ahead of time to avoid possible disputes. Common rules are "need before greed" and rolling for any items that multiple party members can use. Enter "/f" into the text box while you have another player selected to automatically follow that player. Use "numlock" to turn on autorun if you are unable to hitch a free ride.
Guardians of Blizzard (GoBs) guard unfinished areas of the game. During the alpha, GoBs appeared as glowing, green infernals and yelled warnings before teleporting you back to town. Players were able to sneak around these easy-to-spot GoBs and explore the unfinished areas with impunity. There seems to be a deadly new breed of GoB in the beta. Now disguised as ambient creatures, these GoBs will slay you without warning once you step into detection range. Be careful if you're near the border of an off-limits area and you suddenly see a large cluster of player corpses with no visible enemies in sight. You could get slain by a squirrel.
There is a very large level-44+ dragon wandering around the Alterac Mountains. If your screen starts shaking and you hear large, booming footfalls, drop whatever you're doing and run. If you are unable to escape, turn around and take a screenshot for posterity.
Finally, if you're currently using a mouse and keyboard setup, pick up a Logitech Marble or another trackball-type device. Switch from the mouse to the trackball between sessions. It won't improve your game, but it will allow you to change up your clicking motion and reduce downtime due to repetitive stress injury.
| D. Jim Maybury GameSpot Live Intern |
Do You Know When to Quit?
I hate to admit it, but if it says Final Fantasy on the box, I'll buy it, no questions asked. I just love what Square has done with this series, and I'll probably stick it out until the bitter end. I have to say, though, after finishing X-2, I was a little disappointed by the way the character advancement system was structured. Changing different classes in the heat of battle is cool and all, but it just wasn't as rewarding as maxing your characters' stats or questing for the ultimate weapons. Side quests seem to be finding their way into every Final Fantasy with increasing regularity lately. These tasks can, admittedly, be tedious, time consuming, and sometime downright boring. Spending 50 to 100 hours on a game is a big time investment. Winning is usually inevitable, so many people, including me, will try to max out character stats and attain the best weapons and armor, just to wring a little more time out of the game. These items lately are rewards for enduring the increasingly pervasive side quests. How do you know when to quit? When is the task more of a nuisance than the reward is worth?
A good Final Fantasy side quest presents you with tasks that exploit many different gamer frailties. There's a vast library of skills we need to play games, and people excel at different facets of different games. When a task is too hard, do you just skip it, or do you try to master that skill? If these challenges didn't exist, most of us would probably just get bored and go do something other than play games. The tricky part, however, is riding the line between a fun challenge and absolute frustration.
I had a hell of a time getting Lulu's Venus sigil to power her Onion Knight weapon in Final Fantasy X. Dodge lightning in the Thunder Plains 200 consecutive times? Sounds easy enough. All said, I ended up spending 13 and a half hours trying, and failing, to dodge 200 lightning bolts in a row. For those who haven't indulged in this particularly cruel side quest, let me explain a little about the process. Stand, wait one to four seconds, dodge, repeat 200 times. It sounds easy, but it requires you to react with split-second accuracy, over and over again. This task was so show-stoppingly difficult, I ended up spending a full night and day trying to accomplish it. Many peripheral factors can hinder your success, such as ambient lighting and the game's sound. All it takes is a minor distraction to bring the counter back to zero. As I continued trying to complete this side quest, I learned not to count, breathe, move, blink, sneeze, or fall asleep.
After a while I kind of got into a groove and would do well for 20 minutes or so. But eventually I would lose feeling in my arm or something and would have to adjust my position, then, zap, my character is on the ground recovering from the lightning strike. Well, after 12 hours of this I was bored with the task and frustrated with my inability to complete it and found myself questioning every minute of every Final Fantasy game I had ever played, just because of this one task. The joints in my fingers started to creak, and I had to alternate which digit was on button-pushing detail. After several hours of teaching my new button finger its sole purpose in life, I managed to successfully dodge lightning for a good 45 minutes. My best time previously was around 40 minutes, so I started getting really excited, and that little drop of adrenaline broke my concentration, and I was struck down just eight lightning strikes short of 200. At this point, I briefly contemplated how well my FFX disc would serve as a boat in the canal behind my house. Still, I soldiered on and was eventually rewarded after a total of 13 hours. I had completed one side quest. A great achievement. Right.
What did I gain from this fool's errand? A silly little weapon, nerve damage to my thumb, and a black hole where 13 hours of my life used to be. I was disappointed in FFX-2's lack of good side quests and frustrated by FFX because of the difficulty. Maybe I'll learn to swallow my pride sooner and move on, or maybe I'll just start playing FFXI.
| Dru Hartley GuestSpotter |
The Medium Is the Massage: the Mozart of Mario
Do gamers read books? I mean, a book is just a big stack of paper all bound up with little numbers at the bottom to make sure they're in the right order. It's so linear, man. A book is the worst game ever. The best games are the ones that require active participation like problem solving, pattern recognition, and hand-eye coordination. It's not that I don't like to read, but games and books are obviously very different media. It's easy to take for granted, but if you stop and think about how quickly you can process all the words on this page, it's pretty amazing. You don't think about the letters, you just see words. Words are patterns in their own right, and much like a button combo in a game, we need to understand the patterns. Obviously the difference is interactivity. The only interaction you have with this article is passive: Hopefully you learn. In a game, the player actually does something. The player pushes buttons and stuff happens. If we were to write out the sequence of a button combination, it would have to be metered to the timing of the game. Much like sheet music, this button combination would need to be set to a beat and given a time signature or else it would be meaningless. Playing a good game should be like performing a piece of music. The two are very similar. Think how intricate the series of button pushes becomes as that combo builds up in Tony Hawk. I bet you couldn't name the buttons that you pressed to make the actual combo; you were just thinking about the moves themselves. The moves were the words and the buttons the letters. A well-played round is a work of performance art.
If you disagree already, chill out. Disagreement is inevitable. There are a lot of different gaming genres. Some games don't even require pattern recognition and are still great. Instead, some games are good because they surprise the player. Some games are visual masterpieces. Some games are more about setting a mood. The better AI a game has, the less obvious or predictable the button patterns become. Music has a similar construct, a similar reason for being. A musician must attempt to adequately fulfill the intentions of the composer. Music sets a mood, creates images, embodies patterns, and surprises the audience. In improvised jazz, even the musician is unaware of what will happen down the road. The gamer, like the jazz musician, is both audience and performer. The gamepad, and in addition, the game, become the instrument. But the gamer is not the only participant. The game itself gives unpredictable feedback. The gamer communicates with the game, and it is this communication that determines the depth of a gaming experience.
Just so we're all working from the same definitions here--books, movies, radio, and games are all types of media. Each one individually is called a medium because of the stupidly idiosyncratic English language and its damn pluralization rules. Anyway, a medium itself is just a way of conveying information. CDs and DVDs are media. A CD is a medium. Every medium contains information. In fact, each medium contains a hell of a lot of information, but the information is unique to that medium. This isn't to say one type of medium is better than another; it's just that movies tell you different stuff than what books tell you. There is a well-documented school of media criticism begun by Marshall Mcluhan and continued by Niel Postman that states candidly that "the medium is the message." Basically, these guys are saying that the way information is delivered, namely the medium, is sometimes more important than its more obvious message. Gaming, unlike movies and unlike books, is an interactive medium. Instead of passively enjoying the image brigade, gamers are active members of the content. Gamers can't just look away if things get overwhelming, like how many people turn their heads at a horror flick. No. Games require constant focus and participation. What does that say about their message?
A book starts at the beginning: page one. If you really wanted, you could flip through and start at page 50, but who wants to do that? That's confusing. Sometimes a book will start out in the beginning of the action, so you've got no clue who the characters are or what they're doing, but you leave it to faith that all the stuff you don't know yet will get explained by the time the book ends. Movies are pretty much the same. Scene one, credits, and bam, you're introduced to a character. Both movies and books need a face because the audience needs some way to relate to this flat screen or page. If a person can't relate to a movie, they'd just be sitting there eating popcorn in a dark room looking at a bunch of stuff they don't care about. Ever try to watch a foreign flick without subtitles? It sucks. It's boring unless there's a kick-ass car chase, because everyone likes car chases. Ever try to read a book in another language!?! See, that's where games are different. In a game, you are asked to relate instantly because you are controlling the movie, as it were, you're writing the book. Like books and movies, though, games are only boring when there's nothing fun or interesting to do or think about in the world they've created.
Now I have no real desire to compare movies to video games. I usually got really bored while watching a friend play Final Fantasy X because of all the damn cutscenes that went on and on and on. Sure, it's a really great game, but it's kind of weird and jarring to go from the boring world of leveling up and random encounters to long-winded discussions of Sin. The strength of that game was in its ability to properly engage the gamer through puzzle solving and strategy and then reward the gamer with really awesome stuff like a plot and some eye candy. Final Fantasy X is in no way a movie. You don't play it for the plot alone, but for the skills and advancement. A 60-hour movie would be dead boring anyway. I would submit that people play games because they enjoy decoding and mastering the very difficult task of communicating with a computer and (in the most indirect of ways) with the programmers who developed the control scheme.
Almost every game has a different control scheme. Almost every game has a different objective. Games are fun because we get rewarded for mastering that control scheme and completing that objective. I was playing F-Zero DX the other day, and I realized it is an incredibly hard game. The movements that I was making with the controller were so exacting, and the action so fast, I basically had no idea what I was doing. I was just being bumped around on a track at 500mph. Yet I still won the race and never fell off of the serpentine track. That was pretty cool. I mean, I don't know what skills I'd developed to be able to decipher the insane maelstrom of information this game was spewing, but I was doing it, and I was kicking some butt. But again, I can't really explain how I was able to maintain my composure in the midst of all this. I had learned something. Granted, I had only learned how to play F-Zero, but sort of like playing a musical instrument, I learned how to play that gamepad, and it was good. I was in the zone. I can't write about my experience, kind of like I can't teach someone how to play the piano by writing about it. They both take practice! There is no other way to be a good gamer. I realized while playing F-Zero that it was sort of a musical experience. The waves of the track resonated with the waves of sound in...see, now I've gotten philosophical...why'd ya'll have to go and make me do that!
Back to my point...I hated piano lessons...but back to my point, playing a video game is like trying to play a piece of music. The thing is, in a game you don't have the music written down in front of you. You learn through trial and error and finally, after you've practiced enough, you have all but mastered the music the programmers had in mind when they made the game. The programmers are like composers, but they usually don't give you the musical score to read. You gotta figure it out, you gotta improvise. Sometimes, like in DDR, you just have to use the skill set they've assigned to complete the straightforward objective, but usually, you're on your own. Again, I'm getting philosophical, but the allegory is such a strong one that I just gotta! It's exciting dammit! For real! In 10 years, people will be practicing video games the same ways they practice piano now. Hell, they are practicing that way right now. Have you ever seen a Tetris master at work? Quake tournaments are like dueling banjos. And don't get me started on Ikaruga! That game's like a 20-piece orchestra. And it's fun, man. I imagine games of the future will look a lot more like kaleidoscopic light shows that move to the music, just because they'll move so damn fast (unfortunately, because of market forces, these spectral challenge games will be in no way profitable, basically because they're hard and people will still prefer crappy movie knockoffs, but the good games will be crazy fun to watch). Hopefully the players of these games won't get seizures, and hopefully they'll read too, because playing piano doesn't pay the bills (unless you're the best of the best, and I know I, for one, am not the best). I'll say in passing that the pattern recognition of video gaming is somewhat dangerous for society because it is almost always entirely visual, and relying too much on any one sense has been shown to be very unhealthy, but that's not my concern right now. In the meantime, I'm gonna practice my damn gamepad! Someday I'm gonna be the Mozart of Mario, baby!
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