GameSpotting


 Greg Kasavin
Executive Editor, PC Games
Recent Favorites: Clive Barker's Undying, Operation Flashpoint, Serious Sam

 Most Wanted: Warcraft III, Soldier of Fortune II

 All-Time Favorites: Ultima V, Street Fighter II, Samurai Shodown, Fallout

Martian Dreams, Part 2 of 2

Last week, I presented you with a hypothetical situation wherein a Martian pulled a perfect three-point landing in your backyard (or, if you don't have a backyard, a lousy crash landing in your living room), politely greeted you, and asked you in perfect spoken English, "What exactly are these games you play, and why do you and other people bother to play them?" This Martian is evidently smart and evidently curious, but it has had no previous exposure to human culture and thus plainly doesn't understand why we do the things we do. And for some reason, it seems particularly confounded about why people like us tend to sit for many hours on end, with blank expressions on our faces, looking at screens while our hands manipulate things such as keyboards, mice, and gamepads.

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Very few games bother trying to justify why you can keep coming back to life. The Soul Reaver games are a rare exception.
As long as we're playing the games we like, we're secretly having a blast even if we're sitting poker-faced. But when confronted by someone (or something) who hasn't played games before, we're suddenly hard-pressed to give a good explanation for what exactly is so appealing about our favorite games. We know they're addictive, expensive, and time-consuming, but we don't want to stress those qualities too much. We know that we have fun with them and that they're challenging--but our challenge here is to explain what exactly is going on in these games that's so compelling. I'm using this Martian story to suggest that games are very alien. We accept certain conventions from them because, for as long as we've been playing games, these conventions have existed. Maybe they shouldn't.

 
 Why do you think more and more people are getting into games?

They're more fun than they used to be.
They're more accessible than they used to be.
They're just flashier than they used to be.
There's more marketing money backing them up.
Games are inherently intriguing--it was just a matter of time.

 
Last time I talked about how a lot of games--most games--focus on a life-or-death conflict. If you don't shoot back, you die. If you don't destroy the enemy's base first, he'll destroy yours. Death in these games has little consequence. In Half-Life, widely considered the best first-person shooter ever made, you die constantly. This isn't part of the plot or the story--after you die, you almost instantly restart moments earlier, depending on where you last quick-saved your game. You could make Half-Life more challenging for yourself if you didn't quick-save as often, since you'd then have to successfully navigate numerous dangerous situations successively, rather than piecemeal. But then you'd just end up having to play through more of its sequences repeatedly, since you'd invariably die anyway. In short, when you play Half-Life, you're permitted to save your progress as often as you like, and this imaginary, completely abstract concept--saving your progress--becomes just as essential to the experience as pulling the virtual trigger of whatever virtual weapon you happen to be wielding. Yet when describing Half-Life to someone who hasn't played it, you probably wouldn't get into as much detail about the save system as I just did. Maybe you should. Maybe the concept of that save system is more interesting to someone who hasn't played a game before than the idea of saving the world from alien invasion, a pop culture cliché.

Games are weird. Most games these days are considered 3D, when in fact they're still being played on flat 2D surfaces. Some games look completely different from others--in one, you're shooting aliens, and in another, you're creating railroads--yet most use the same exact types of controls, regardless of their subject matter.

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I don't know about you, but nothing holds my attention like a good game.
As I alluded to last time, I think a key problem facing the gaming industry is that most games are designed almost exclusively for people who already play them. Ask yourself how many specific instances you can think of when someone you knew became a gamer. It's very possible that you either (A) can't think of any such instances, since everyone you know who plays games has been playing them for as long as you've known them (I'm in this category, actually) or (B) that a specific game drew one of your acquaintances to the hobby. If your answer is B, then there are probably accidental circumstances for why this acquaintance of yours happened to come across that game. He saw it at a friend's house. He got it as a gift. He didn't go out looking for it. He probably didn't go out and buy it himself, having never played it before.

People can't understand games unless they play them. Over the years, we've heard countless accusations of how games may be guilty of corrupting America's youth or how they may be directly responsible for heinous acts of real-world violence. Our instincts tell us that these accusations are unfounded or downright absurd--we know that games aren't real, and we like them because they're not real. Yet, getting back to our Martian friend, we'd probably try to describe to him that games can suspend our disbelief, making us feel as though we're really in hostile, or otherwise exciting, situations. Games let us take part in significant experiences that we otherwise couldn't take part in, either because they're simply not possible or because they'd get us killed.

The Martian shakes its head thoughtfully. Games transplant us, safely, to other places, letting us live multiple other lives. It's another question entirely as to why that's desirable. At any rate, we can offer the Martian this: Games provide a unique sensation that's enriching. For some of us, nothing can hold our attention quite as well as a game can. Look at all the accusations flying around about how the youth of today have short attention spans. Tell that to a member of a Counter-Strike clan.

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Even if you've never played a game before, there's a good chance you'd like Starcraft.
I don't think every game that comes out needs to appeal to a lowest common denominator. I've been playing games for a long time, and I can figure out most of them very quickly, thank you very much. Still, I appreciate that most new games include some basic tutorial information and don't necessarily assume that I'm familiar with all the conventions. Even so, these tutorials frequently do make a lot of assumptions anyway and aren't very effective for either new players or experienced ones. After all, these tutorials are assuming that someone actually wants to use a tutorial. Why would we want something called a "tutorial" if we've just bought a game for entertainment's sake? When I think of the word "tutorial," I think of an old woman with a frock, a sneer and horn-rimmed glasses on her face, and a stick of chalk in her hand, nagging at me from the front of a classroom. That's no fun. The best game tutorials are the ones that are veiled within the content of the game. Starcraft works the tutorial straight into its great story.

I think games are amazing and also incredibly hard to describe, though I try my best to be able to describe them clearly to those who might not know them as well as I do. Games are on the verge of having mainstream appeal--they're always in the news, they're always on TV, and we hear about them all the time. That's great, and we should do what we can to keep them going in that direction by using clear terms when explaining them to people them and by expecting the games we play to be well made and self-contained. You shouldn't ever have to apologize for a game. When someone asks why you think games are so great, you shouldn't have to say anything--you should be able to choose your favorite game from your shelf, boot it up, sit that person down, and let him or her see what all the fuss is about.
 

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