Things people have said recently about games that are wrong
(Visited 5721 times) Game talk
Sep 012009
- “The point of games is to tell a story.”
- “There is nothing you can do in a game that causes actual harm to someone in real life.”
- “That’s just a minigame.”
- “3d is better.”
- “There simply isn’t any sexuality in virtual worlds.”
- “WOW is probably the only game of its design and model which has EVER been successful.”
Just been piling these up in a little note, and figured it was time to briefly vent.
50 Responses to “Things people have said recently about games that are wrong”
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This is just a mini-list! 🙂
Number 2 is one that people don’t talk about enough. Outside of sensationalist news pieces about people beating each other to death with bricked 360s, I mean. Could write a history book just about the machinations of people who ripped apart prominent WoW guilds and the affect this had on the server and the very real people involved.
Ahh geez, I can see why. I guess it’s harder for you, with your hand on the pulse of the industry, but those are some seriously wrong comments.
I agree with all of them being incorrect except for 3 and 4. The two middle comments may have also been incorrect due to their context, but I can also think of places where they’d be valid, especially 4. 3D really is better at some things.
The term “minigame” is insulting. 🙂 A game is a game. We usually define scope of a given game incorrectly when we call it a minigame. As an example, the “macro game” of most open world games like GTA is a SMALLER game than most of the “minigames” embedded within it.
The “3d is better” comment was given as an absolute across the boardw, hich is why I called it wrong. 🙂
A complete game can be ruined by the inclusion of even one bad minigame. For instance, consider Gump’s Terminal House, which would have been a fine room-escape game if not for the infuriatingly difficult twitch minigames within it.
[Aside to Raph: this form eats your comment if you forget to fill in the name and mail fields, and it’s gone when you hit Back, as well. plz fix?]
If we define ‘story’ very loosely, isn’t that accurate? 😛
Play generates a narrative, regardless of whether or not the developer puts it there, so you’re always telling a story, even when you don’t want to be. One could even argue that this is indeed the whole point of playing them, and so it should also be the whole point of designing them.
For me, the point of the game is to be the story. The center of it as well as a supporting cast member. NPC’s are mannequins. They may talk or not but they have no soul, no story. The players, with all their random and scripted acts, are the true storytellers in a game.
I have two:
“Average age of adult computer game addicts is 35, US study shows”
“Playing a video game is not really play”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/video-games/6041337/Average-age-of-adult-computer-game-addicts-is-35-US-study-shows.html
As everything about the headline is false I’ve taken this one up with the Press Complaint Commission.
Possibly what is more worrying is the actual research that the article links to. First paper ‘Health-Risk Correlates of Video-Game Playing Among Adults’ (Weaver III et al American Journal of Preventive Medicine, October 2009 ) is one of those that says look lots of people are un-healthy, look lots of people play games, see the link. Then on the very last line says: of course we can’t say there is a causal relationship.
The latter statement is a paraphrase of the The second paper is better ‘Video Games – Play or “Playlike” Activity’ attempts to argue that playing a Video Game is not really play.
I’m working up to a letter to the Journal as both pieces seem staggeringly un-informed about any research from an alternative point of view and in the latter case any research what so ever on the nature of play.
Pieces are linked from here: http://www.ajpm-online.net/content/pressreleases#2009
I think we gotta have attributions 🙂 #1 and #5 are too awful not to haunt somebody for several years.
Oops didn’t see the above comments!
@Eorlin, I think that much play generates narrative, but not all (Bejeweled?). So it’s hard to say that -the- point of games is to tell a story.
If your goal is to tell a story, there are more effective media to do that. I agree with Judy. The moment you’re dealing with players rather than audience, you cede control of the narrative. If you’re not willing to do that to any great extent, what you end up with is a movie that doesn’t even let the audience sit back and enjoy their popcorn.
I will say that I don’t find “minigame” to be particularly insulting, just a convenient shorthand for “game within a game”. In the not-too-distant future, you may be able to log into Second Life, sit down at a virtual computer and play WoW. In that context, WoW is a minigame… but never “just” a minigame.
How about…
“Our players don’t want good AI in their games.”
Yeah. And that’s why they bitch about bad AI and would rather play PvP online.
Hey Raph… you coming to my lecture on AI in MMOs in Austin? Either way, you and I need to have a beer together. 🙂
“Actual harm” is too broad of a term here IMO.. If its referring to physical harm, I tend to agree (unless someone gets mad enough that they choke on an olive or something)..
Emotional, psycological, yes, those are possible.. That statement needs to qualify those in my opinion, because I don’t see how physical harm is possible..
The minigame comment was directed at a design that has been sold as a standalone title and made millions, which is why it made the list. 🙂
Over on Facebook, more folks are adding their own:
Paul Stephanouk
* “You can’t do that (in a game) because nobody has ever done it before.”
Damion Schubert
* “Games must have top end and/or realistic graphics to have any hope of competing.”
* “You can’t tell a good story in a game.”
* “First person shooters are creating a generation of psychopaths.”
* “The PC is dead.”
Werelord, the original source of the harm quote meant psychological harm.
I have a hard time making sense of this claim. The GTA4 main story line is smaller than, say, the racing mini-game or the vigilante mini-game?
@Bret, Bejeweled generates a narrative. You can tell a story about your gameplay experience. It’s just not a very deep or interesting narrative.
Eolirin, a PLAYER generates a narrative using Bejeweled. That is very different from a DESIGNER generating a narrative and narrating it through Bejeweled.
https://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/narrativeenvironments.shtml
I ran into a perennial favorite the other day;
* Every girl in the game is really a guy
Of course, given the type of boys who usually make that statement, I can fully understand why real women wouldn’t care to correct them.
We never said anything about the designer generating it though. The line said that the game did, and it does, in conjunction with the player. ;p
Yes, but no where is the designer mentioned. 🙂
I’m aware of the distinction, but if you read back to the start of that conversation you’ll see I was using it in the player generated sense from the beginning.
The line you used said the point of games was to tell stories, it never specifies who’s telling the story or why, or in what fashion. It’s, as written, and out of context, using a loose enough definition of story, quite correct.
Eep, sorry, that first one didn’t seem to go through >>
“The point of games is to tell a story.” — As I see it, the implication of the statement is that the game tells the story… although divorced from context, the intent of the author is admittedly obscured.
Yukon, I suspect since Raph takes issue with it, that the original context probably does support lean in that direction.
I’m more or less picking at the fact that that context isn’t provided, and that there’s an alternative interpretation of that line that can have a strong case made for it. 🙂
Also, semantically, by saying “The point…” you’re stating that games have, or serve, no other point(s).
Wow, where did those quotes come from? 🙂
Wow Raph, you really struck a nerve! Well, I ought to say something constructive instead of mindless fawning…
The one that struck me most was the first: “The point of games is to tell a story.”
I would say the point of games is to have fun. A game can tell a story but it doesn’t have to and it’s certainly not ‘the point’. You can tell a story about playing a game, but that’s not the game itself, that’s a different game you made yourself. If you’re not having fun, it ceases to be a game and becomes a chore.
@Peter, semantically, it can be argued that that’s correct too, since if our definition of story is broadly interpreted, fun, entertainment, learning, etc are legitimate side effects of that process. Interaction becomes narrative, and there’s no game without interaction. Additionally, the point of making it a game and not a book, or a movie, or whatever else, is because of that interactivity.
This of course, turns interactivity and “telling a story” into synonyms, at least in this context, which obviously requires a very loose interpretation of ‘story’ 🙂
@Eolirin,
“It can be argued” is an awfully fun phrase, let me first say. 😛
But, in terms of irritance, it would chafe me to have someone else telling me what the point of my game is. Doubly so if it’s in the context of ye old logical syllogism:
The (sole) point of games is to tell a story.
You have made a game.
Therefore, the (sole) point of your game is to tell a story.
…and triply so if they called the things I felt was the point of my work “side effects”. (which I’m just quoting as a phrase and totally not to call you out, yo)
Is the point of Math Blaster really to tell a story? What about a game I coded to refine my programming skills?
“Don’t tell me what the point of my game is or isn’t” is not an unfair reaction, I don’t think. I’d strongly argue that the sentence, as written, is both wrong and flat-out rude. 😛
The quote doesn’t specifically refer to either video games or role-playing games. What games can you think of that aren’t about telling the player a story?
The quotes came from a half dozen blog posts and forum posts that I stumbled across in the last two months.
I don’t think Tetris is a game that is telling players a story. I don’t even think that Space Invaders is telling a story. In fact, I don’t think the original Grand Theft Auto was telling a story. Peggle does, but barely.
Before I chimed in I had a quick check of the Game Studies page on Wikipedia. Isn’t this the essence of the ludology vs. narratology debate? Espen Aarseth, in his book Cybertext, holds that “to claim there is no difference between games and narratives is to ignore essential qualities of both categories” I would have to agree. I believe the story based approach has caused a great deal of harm in the development of our medium. Designers who pretend they are movie directors make crap games. “The point of games is to tell a story” implies a very limited perspective on game creation, no matter if it’s the gameplay experience that creates the story or a preset narrative.
Game Studies page on Wikipedia.
@Peter, It’s to tell a story about refining your math or programming skills, yes 😉
@Gene, depends on how you define narrative, doesn’t it? The more traditionally viewed idea of a story with a plot and characters certainly breaks down.
But defining it as “the representation in art of an event” it becomes vague enough that even Tetris has a narrative. It’s a narrative about dropping blocks on top of each other, but it’s still an event, it’s still being represented, and the only question is whether it’s “in art”.
And tetris does inform the player of something; it talks about spatial relationships and shapes, positioning and response times. There’s an emotional story too: patterns of focus, intensity, the thrill of succeeding as a line comes off, the bigger thrill as several come off at once, the tension and dismay at having the blocks fill the screen, the despondency at losing. The designer has a weaker authorial voice than the player, sure, but by defining the shape of the blocks, the rate at which they drop, etc, the designer defines the scope of the “narrative” that can be formed.
And certainly, using this as a metaphor for design is probably beneficial, as it gets you thinking about the experience of the user, as they play the game, in a different way. The player is the story, the game’s mechanics are how we cut a shape into that story. It’s an imprecise process, and sometimes it’s not a deliberate one, but so it goes.
Instead of screwing around with metaphors, why not just communicate clearly?
That’s a dictionary definition of narrative. *shrug*
But beyond that, if you could point out what I said that was confusing? The comment isn’t really helpful without context. Metaphor is unavoidable when discussing this sort of thing; I’m talking about framing games from a certain angle and the benefits of doing that, and framing is really predicated on metaphor to a great extent.
I understand your comment just fine; unfortunately, the overly complex (and traditionally invalid) metaphor — the allusion to games, a category of media that includes products such as Blokus and Tetris, as storytelling media — is so exceedingly counterintuitive that achieving the purpose of the metaphor (“get you thinking about the experience of the user”) is made needlessly difficult. If your goal is to communicate that the user experience is important and therefore should receive special attention, the metaphor is almost certainly the wrong tool for the job. (By the way, I don’t think anyone involved with product development would disagree that user experience is important, so that benefit isn’t looking so hot.) I’m reminded of my early attempts to explain strategic branding in the context of epistemological phenomenology. Hint: doesn’t work.
I don’t think Eolirin is incorrect… but with a broad enough definition of “story”, the point of everything is to tell a story. The human brain is exquistitely evolved to order events into causal sequences: if no such sequence exists, we tend to invent one. A subatomic particle tells a story to a physicist. A rock tells a story to a geologist. A tree tells a story to a biologist. It’s not that narrative is inherent in the object, rather that narrative is applied by the observer.
There nothing wrong with having elements of linear narrative in an MMO. We all like to sit down with a good book from time to time. But when it’s a central/mandatory element of the game, players will eventually get frustrated because they can’t change the sequence of events. They can only turn the page.
I think one of the gold rings for MMOs is going to be quests that respond to players as if there were a good human dungeonmaster at the helm, customizing, improvising, adjusting and adapting on the fly to optimize the experience for each individual player and group (think of the storytelling program in Ender’s Game). It may take a quantuum leap in computing power and a couple new AI pardigms to get there, but I’m already seeing steps in that direction.
“the point of everything is to tell a story” makes “The point of games is to tell a story.” a content free statement. Many of us have done licence titles based on movies. We’ve had to deal with movie directors that fundamentaly do not understand our medium and want to see the script for the game. They seem largly uninterested in the proposed mechanics. The real trouble comes when producers in our own industry seem to have the same problems grasping our medium, particularly after reading statements by so called experts reinforcing a view that game making and movie making are similar.
The WOW statement would almost be correct if “has EVER been successful” was changed to “has achieved that level of success”. I remember talking with some people at SOE a few months before WOW launched and they were resigning themselves to the “fact” that no more than a million people seemed interested in the kind of games they were making – implicit in that was envy of blockbusters. I agree that there are many forms of success besides blockbusters.
@Eolirin,
So it wasn’t a story about firing a little dude head-first into the ceiling?
<..>
Oh come on, I can’t be the only person that chose wrong answers on purpose to giggle at the guy… 😉
Also, on the topic of broad statements:
The purpose of art is to be experienced.
Discuss. 😛
Morgan, the point isn’t just to think about the experience of the user, but to think of it as a continuum, which is basically turning it into a narrative. I.e. pacing, the coherency of ‘mood’ (dressing and mechanics work with each other), and precise placement of particular verbs are important. This often gets lost to varying degrees, and there isn’t good language to describe the effects of it on the player without moving back into that metaphor. Valve’s work with L4D and TF2 talk about rising and falling action, as a way of creating pacing in the games, and the way that they describe the inclusion of the mechanics that create that in their developer commentaries borrows heavily from literary and film terminology as I recall.
Until we have a proper language to talk about games, it’s hard not to borrow, but you have to look at the entire structure and how it moves from point to point. I mean, it is semantics and you could call the continuum of the experience from start to finish a foozle if you want, but the framework ends up looking exactly the same, and it has more in common with narrative structure than not. It just uses entirely different tools and methods to achieve that structure, a point that often gets lost too, to ill effect.
@Mark, Runescape has 10 million active users. Even that’s not accurate. And there are a number of casual mmogs with many more users than WoW.
Peter, okay okay 🙂 You’re right about that. It definitely WAS about torturing the poor little guy. If it had been about the math, it would’ve given you a better reward for success than failure. 🙂
As to the second bit: Yes.
Success is properly measured against goals, be they financial or artistic or personal or whatever. Measuring one title’s success based on another title’s goals seems silly. Particularly judging past titles back when the current bar didn’t exist (and likely WAS unachievable).
Same as a lap dance.
Lap dance = commissioned performance art. If anyone asks, you were supporting your local art communinty.
I’ve recently had an entertaining time beating my head against a widely held belief that “Multiplayer” apparently means being in a group of players simultaneously and synchronously overcoming the same challenge in the same virtual representation of physical space and absolutely nothing else.
Don’t get me started on Hyper-idealism of characters, either :9.
Considering hyper-realism, I find those Beatles Rock Band commercials (the Abbey Road walk) to be distinctly creepy. Something about the Lennon character from beyond the grave…
Also, on the topic of broad statements:
Aww, you beat me to it. I was going to say, “The point of the universe is to tell a story.” Obviously.