Malstrom,
I am a frequent reader of your site. The first time I read your articles I felt the scales fall from my eyes. I wanted to relate two situations to you which happened to me over break.
Before Christmas my fiance and I purchased Super Mario 5. When we brought it to her family’s house her 19 and 20 year old sisters squealed with delight. One of them proclaimed “Oh! A 2D-Mario! I hate the 3D ones! Can I play next?”
Playing four players with her family was a blast. While it would take awhile to finish stages, there were so many ways to have fun. People would be throwing each-other off the ledges, picking the weaker players up to help them finish the level, seeking retribution on those who either stole your power up or hit you with a shell. It was a great way to spend a holiday. We probably looked like the families in the 1980′s Nintendo advertisements (I attached one to this E-mail).
Next, we took the game to my parents house. My mother (who played the original Mario and Zelda, but hasn’t played video games since Super Mario 3), bugged me several times to hook up my Wii so we could play the game as a family. She also remarked “I don’t like 3D Mario, I get too confused.” She was especially excited that Super Mario 5 returned the matching mini-game (although she was disappointed that it wasn’t matching but test your luck).
My 20 year old younger brother, who is a member of the hardcore, was the only one not to have fun. He would throw mini-hissy fits every time someone would pick him up and throw him down a hole. If someone stole his power up, he would mope. If we decided to end the madness and try to finish the stage, he would take umbrage that I had to carry him to the end. Everyone else had a good time, realizing it was just a fun, hectic, action game. He declared Mario “not fun” and went to play madden and dragon age.
I have a thesis of why he acts this way: Hardcore games make a gamer soft. (I think this dovetails nicely with your “necessity of fear” argument. The hardcore hate uncertainty and fear). in the original zelda and mario brothers there was no intro or story (except that which was in the instruction guide), you just played and made your own fun. No stupid Owl showed up and told you how to kick ass. You learned to kick-ass through trial and error. People found their own way around the world and discussed with their friends the various ways to make it through the game and their exploits. I remember when I was in elementary school that during lunch we would discuss hidden warps and the various paths you could take through Zelda.
Hardcore games hold your hand and slow the action down. My two examples of this are Dragon Age and Gears of War. While I enjoyed Dragon Age, to get through the game on the higher difficulty levels you have to continually pause the game and plan out your strategy after every move. While the battles and powers you gain as the game goes on look epic, the game is really based on precise micromanagement and risk aversion. Gears of War also only rewards the risk averse player. I found that whenever I rushed out from behind cover i would be clobbered by the monsters. The best, and only, way to play the game was to have nearly every fight be the same (shoot-and-cover-shoot-and-cover, move-up, cut scene, shoot-and-cover (another aside, this is also the basic play mechanic of Mass Effect)). This is so radically different from the non-stop action of mario that the hard-core can’t handle it! Despite all the fancy play mechanics and use of complex button combos, the games are slower and offer a less diverse play experience than Mario Wii.
Excellent email! You saw with your eyes how there are people out there who *despise* the 3d Mario. You also saw the hardcore get his butt whipped by ‘girl gamers’ hahaha. (Those housewives on Dr. Mario are ferocious. I imagine they play a mean game of Mario 5 too!)
Your idea of hardcore games rewarding ‘risk-aversion’ is interesting. All the problems of modern gaming could be said to be caused by risk aversion. From the business side, risk aversion has game companies make sequels after sequels. But from the game experience side, things like tutorials came into existence because of risk aversion. From a publisher’s point of view, a tutorial is to erase the risk that someone may not learn how to play the game properly.
Risk-Aversion is the riskiest strategy a game company can take. All roads of risk-aversion lead to boredom. No wonder gaming sucks these days. Perhaps that would explain why there are so many ‘cutscenes’. You cannot ‘lose’ during a cutscene. There is no risk for the player to fail.
Games are being made today with the expectation that players are entitled to finish them. This isn’t how games used to be made. In the past, with arcade-type gameplay (since many console games were arcade ports), you could not finish most games. Most space shooter games I have never finished. But that is OK. They are fun to play. When I play them, I think, “Maybe THIS is the time that I win!” There are countless NES games that I have never finished. I never thought I was ‘cheated’ because I didn’t finish them. For some of the really hard ones, like Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins, I considered it a special challenge.
Games like Zelda were not made with the expectation that everyone who plays it will finish it. Players should enjoy the process of playing. There are many people who didn’t finish Zelda I and Zelda II for example.
With modern games, not finishing a game is considered a problem with the game. With Ocarina of Time, I did not finish the game not because I was dying, but because I was bored. I can understand why people stopped playing at places like the Water Temple. There is a difference between challenging and frustrating.
My biggest peeve about modern gaming is how they change the gameplay on you. Using Zelda examples some more, I absolutely despised having to suddenly be forced to play a Fishing Game or a Snow Boarding game in order to advance in Twilight Princess. If I want to play a Fishing Game or a Snow Boarding game, I would buy those games. Learning gameplay mechanics is frustrating to the consumer. Once the consumer is over that hump at the beginning, they have no desire to learn totally different mechanics.
The old games were arcade games. Arcade games had to be challenging, not frustrating. Challenging means addictive enough for the player to keep putting in quarters to play but being difficult to stay alive. Frustrating is a game where you die all the time but the game is not addictive. A frustrating game would be a game with bad controls, for example.
Some people think that ‘old school gaming’ means dying all the time so they do things like throw instant-kill spikes and cheap kills all over the place. This is what Mega Man 9 did. Mega Man 9 is not hard in the arcade sense. The game is simple in that it is nothing more than memorizing where the cheap kills are and dodging spikes. But Mega Man 9 would never work as an arcade game. Why would someone want to throw in more money to continue? To see more spikes?
The downloadable games I’ve seen and played on WiiWare, Xbox Live Arcade, and PSN all show they still haven’t figured this out. All the games feel flat. It is like this:
Mario 5 is what I demand from a game. But I suppose when I buy a $10 game, I should expect a second rate or third rate product.
People want games that are easy to learn but hard to master. Mario 5, Wii Sports, and Wii Fit all share a common theme that they are all games that are easy to learn but hard to master. Blizzard enforces a strict theme that all its games must be easy to learn but hard to master.
The big mistake the “Industry” makes is that it sees Nintendo or Blizzard games as ‘simple’ therefore they think they should have no problem replicating that success. But it is harder to make a simple product. Making complex products is easy (and is a sign of incompetence).
There is a difference between fiddling with the computer and playing a game. Most gamers do not wish to fiddle with the computer. They just want to play the game. They do not have the patience to go through all the tutorials or to watch bloated cutscenes. They just want to start kicking ass.
How should game developers make games for the ‘Expanded Audience’? Very simple:
Due to risk-aversion, games are losing their souls. A game, by its very definition, is about risk taking. If it wasn’t, no one would try to jump over a hole with Mario. When the player is allowed to risk, only then can there be true achievement. It is this sense of achievement that will cause people to anxiously buy the sequel or to buy games like it.
Or, in other words, Zelda games no longer feel satisfying because there is no danger (and thus, no thrill. No rush of blood. No sweaty controller).It is harder to die in modern Zelda than it is to stay alive. You have to deliberately work yourself to die.
Game series like Zelda have been neutered under the mistaken belief that Every Gamer Is Entitled To Finish the Game. This destroys the game’s value. People will finish the game and sell it at a used game store. What reason would they have to replay it?
We used to say, “I have finally reached level 5 in this game!” Today, we say, “I am five hours into this game…” The first game will not be sold used. The second game will be. From the gamer’s perspective, the first game morphs into an achievement. If completed, the gamer will keep it around as a trophy. The second game, since its progress was only through time, will only be seen as “Time Wasted On Finishing This Game”. Instead of being a trophy, the game will be felt as a type of albatross. It will be sold ASAP.
Every now and then, I adventure into used game stores. I have never seen a copy of Mario 5 used. I haven’t even seen a copy of Mario Kart Wii either. Both Mario 5 and Mario Kart Wii are not pushover games. They can be challenging. But the key word is challenging. I can imagine both of them being arcade games.
On another note, is it not strange that the hardcore had a cow over Mario 5 selling so well? This is very strange. I, and many other people, did not have a cow with Modern Warfare 2 selling well. I just had indifference. But our hardcore friends seem offended that Mario 5 sells well. Why? What offense did Mario 5 do? The Expanded Market doesn’t care what hardcore games sell well. So why do the hardcore get their panties in a knot when Expanded Market games sell well? Why do they care?
