Have you felt that games are losing their luster? Does it feel that games are no longer as good as they were in the past? Does it feel that this regression is occurring on all the consoles with some companies more than others? Remember when you used to say, ‘Wow!’?
One theme I have been trying to hammer here is the game industry’s abandonment of the customer. Customers are annoying things. They return games, they sell games, they buy pre-owned, they put up bad reviews on the Amazon webpage, and they put in a bad word on message forums. In short, customers are very unpredictable and impossible to control.
When a product increases in cost, especially as games reach upward into tens of millions of dollars and years to make, the entity footing the bill, often publishers, will design the game around the predictable. All this time, we thought publishers were ‘risk-averse’. It isn’t that they are ‘risk-averse’, for what is more risky than making a product WITHOUT keeping the customer in mind? Publishers are choosing to design games around predictable elements. You can feel it when you play these games. No matter how much they try to hide it, you can sense it. And it annoys the hell out of you. It is the Formula.
When gaming was young, the developer (I hate that word, I prefer programmer since that was really the only difference between the gamer and the developer back then: one knew how to program, the other did not) would carefully craft a game around the customer. There was no such thing as ‘formulas’ back then. How do I know this? It is because in the beginning, there is no history. All that existed was the customer which was often the programmer himself. While the first games were designed for himself, many began to make games for others not like themselves. But they always crafted the game around the customer.
It is common to hear a publisher say, “There are too many sequels! We must go against this, we must shake up the franchise.” And the result is always the same: the old formula is replaced by a new formula. The customer, smitten by memories of when games were designed around customers, keeps wondering when the magic is going to come back. He cries out in despair realizing that he really isn’t playing games, he is playing digital formulas.
When the NES came out, it was shocking. The gameplay was shocking. It wasn’t because it improved on an earlier formula (how would Japanese games improve on American game formulas?). The games were stunning was because the Japanese didn’t follow the Western formula.
The original Super Mario Brothers, designed around the customer, stunned and delighted. The game kept breaking the ‘rules’ of the formula. For example, one rule was that, underground, the player could not run on the ceiling (since it is underground). Yet, in Super Mario Brothers, you can. And the game broke its own rules by allowing the player to SKIP the exit and enter a bizarre Warp Zone (which broke even more rules).
What is the difference between a game and a formula? A formula is when the rules never change. You know you will eventually beat the ‘formula’. It is simply a matter of time. A game is very different. A game keeps breaking the rules the customer has come to know. Every classic game has the same thing in common. The classic game either ‘broke’ the considered formula of the time (this is often misinterpreted as founding a new formula due to constant copy-cats chasing this title’s success) or the game, itself, is a series of constant breaks in the formula.
Keep in mind the game doesn’t entirely ‘break’ the rules established in the digital escape. Rather, it ‘bends’ them. However, the formula itself is broken.
Why is playing games entertaining while playing formulas boring? It is because games, which constantly keep breaking the formula, are surprising to the player. Entertainment is dependent on surprise. With Super Mario Brothers 2, Miyamoto realized he could not keep the entertainment up unless he broke the formula. Super Mario Brothers 3 entirely breaks the formula of Super Mario Brothers 1 and 2 which is why it was so well recieved. Super Mario World didn’t break the formula as well which is why, when it was released, it did not fare as well (however, Sonic did break the formula and was recieved extremely well). Miyamoto would break the formula again with Mario 64. With Sunshine and Galaxy somewhat having the formulas of Mario 64, the games are not considered as ‘ground breaking’. Although Galaxy’s running and jumping off edges to float around did break the formula of Mario games of ‘don’t walk off the edge’.
The point is that games that are crafted around the customer keep breaking their formulas because the aim of the game is to delight the player, not to lay a foundation for ‘franchise’. The Legend of Zelda was recieved so well, I believe, because the game kept breaking its own formula. You could go to dungeons in almost any order (when people replay games, what do they do? They try to break the formula. Hello Negative World in Super Mario Brothers). You could burn a tree and notice a dungeon entrance. That was not supposed to be the formula. You could bomb a wall and a whole another part of the dungeon would be there. It wasn’t so much on ‘exploration’ as it was on breaking the formula. The formula kept re-writing itself around the player. Elements such as new weapons, from Zelda to Mega Man, would ‘break’ the formula and the player found himself playing in a totally new way.
Many people in the game industry chant, “Hollywood! Hollywood! Oh, why can’t we be more like Hollywood! Let us walk, all pea-cock like, on red carpets too! Let us have our names in lights! Let us have star power!”
I say, “What! Hollywood is horrible! It is behind the times! Why do you want to emulate it? Hollywood is headed for certain implosion, at least many parts of it are.”
Here is a story about Hollywood being forced to change business models because star power is no more. Note that Hollywood is focused on finding a new formula. This is the problem. You do not find a new ‘formula’. You craft the product around the customer. Hollywood doesn’t make movies anymore. It makes ‘formulas’ that we sleep through. We all know and feel the formula. The best movies, what is and what will be considered classic, are movies that broke the formula. It could be a movie like Star Wars or a movie like The Matrix. And look at how many series flame out in Hollywood. Alien was a fine movie. Aliens was cool too. But Alien 3 and Alien 4, the formula was not broken and that is why people hate sequels. It is not because they are sequels, it is because they are formulas.
I love using sci-fi examples, and this is the best example of that: Star Trek. Star Trek was a terrific franchise in how much money and impact it generated. After The Next Generation, there was Deep Space Nine, then Voyager, and then Enterprise. Then Star Trek died. These shows had competent actors, special effects, production quality, and writers (well, maybe not so much with Enterprise). So what happened? What happened was that Star Trek didn’t break the formula. Who wants to watch a formula? I sure as heck don’t. Once people realized the formula was never going to change, they stopped watching and the great Star Trek franchise died. To their credit, Deep Space Nine did strive to break the Star Trek formula which Paramount kept having to reign in the writers. (This would explain why Deep Space Nine became so revered with certain Star Trek fans).
A producer of Deep Space Nine would make the show Battlestar Galactica. With the great lack of financial and other assets Star Trek had, Battlestar Galactica was able to survive and thrive into a show that the sci-fi channel is doing its best in trying to milk. How did this happen? The formula for any successful entertainment is anti-formula. Battlestar Galactica has its inconsistencies, its strange quirks, its bad episodes, its ridiculous mythology, and its silly plot. But what it does do correctly, and does very well, is that the series uses the customer as an axis to revolve around. The show intentionally tries to tease the customer, to suggest the show is going one way while it is actually going the other, and the customer delights in this. The customer loves being surprised. And the customer loves the ‘game’ as, even now, there are countless webpages and forums dedicated to deciphering who the final cyclon is. The point is that a successful entertainment vehicle must, at its core, be anti-formula. As soon as it becomes predictable, as a deju vu on part of the customer, it becomes ‘formula’. And it ceases to be entertaining. A formula becomes nothing more than a time sink… which is what many modern games have become.
The game that I can think of that is relentless in breaking its own formula, again and again, would be the original Metroid. The game is filled with constant items and weapons which break the formula of the game from being able to freeze enemies and jump on them to reach new places to high jump boots. The game is filled with trapdoors, walls that Samus can run through, parts of the wall that can be bombed, to even a fake mini-boss. Metroid is a trippy experience and keeps the customer in a state not of confusion but of constant re-evaluating the rules for the game world as the gameplay keeps shifting and twisting around the player.
You want more examples? Zelda II, despite modern hardcore hate, was extremely popular in its time. The game kept breaking its formula. It surprised the customer by being able to turn Link into a fairy and fly around, to walking on water, to running through walls, to falling in holes to get to other parts of the dungeon where holes generally meant Link would lose a life, to Link being the final boss of the game. A Link to the Past continued this tradition of breaking the formula with the light world dark world. Ocarina of Time definately broke the formula mostly because it was in 3d which changed everything. This breaking the formula would be like a shmup whose purpose is to run into bullets instead of dodge them. And such a game, which became popular, did come out: Ikaruga.
Take Final Fantasy 4. It was surprising that characters would pick up and go and new characters would show up which vastly altered how you fought battles. It broke the old formula and the game never felt like a formula. When beginning the game, no one would ever think the end of the game would take place on the moon, from a whale shaped space ship, fighting with an ally who used to be the main nemesis. When one plays Final Fantasy 6, one senses what the formula would be. But the final boss ends up being someone entirely different than what players suspected at the beginning. And what is more formula bursting than wreaking apocalypse on the world and changing the continents of earth while destroying all civilization?
Many have accussed me of being against HD gaming or against hardcore gaming. This isn’t true. i am against formulas. HD gaming is nothing more than the same formula of graphical increase used for decades. I don’t like movies today because movies feel like formulas. The directors say these movies are ‘better’ because they have better special effects and bigger budgets. But the original Star Wars trilogy is far superior to the new versions because the new versions feel nothing more than a formula… with predictable better special effects and bigger budgets. My problem with so-called ‘hardcore’ gaming is that the games are designed around formulas and rely too heavily on gaming’s ‘special effects’ which is often HD visuals, 7 channel surround sound, or something else.
A game should be seen more as a verb than a noun. And who is involved in the ‘game’? It is the customer. The ‘game’ is twisting and revolving around the customer, constantly shifting, breaking and surprising the customer where he doesn’t know what to expect. When the customer is removed from this, there is no longer any ‘game’. It becomes nothing more than a ‘formula’ whose advances in graphics, in sound, in content is the only reason why customers put down the price for admission. But they don’t stay long. Soon, the formula gets sold to the pre-owned store. Look at the shelves of the pre-owned store and the shelves will be full of ‘formulas’. The games don’t stay there, and players tend not to sell the true games. But ‘formulas’, who wants to keep those?
The reason why players keep multiplayer games is because Humans do not play multiplayer in a formula. Rather, they keep looking for ways to ‘break the rules’ which is why multiplayer is surprising. Since single player development focuses only on formulas, it is no wonder why singeplayer is dying and multiplayer taking over.
Games are not a waste of time. Formulas are. It isn’t that games have gotten too long so much as formulas have become too old. We’re sick of playing the same games over and over. The most risky thing a publisher can do is follow a formula. The most sure-fire path to success is to break the formula. You don’t break the formula so you can plant a flag and declare new franchise; you break the formula so you can begin a duel of teasing and wage a war of wits with the customer. This duel of teasing and wits, THIS is the game.