It is a misguided belief that what paying customers value is gameplay or “innovation” (oh, that word!). I can find nothing to dispute that paying customers’ value content above and beyond anything.
And what is content? It is what is consumed. Value of video games cannot be determined by simply looking at a person’s face while they watch a game. Value is actually determined by the customers thinking about the game when not playing it. In a similar way, a woman does not determine the value of a man she’s dating in the middle of the date. The value comes when she thinks about it once the date is concluded (e.g. all her girlfriends tell him the guy is a loser so she dumps him or the opposite. Her best friend wants him so she decides to annoy her best friend).
A good meal is satisfying not when you eat it but a while after the meal has concluded. If you eat Cotton Candy, it might taste interesting at first, but it is not satisfying. You’ll be hungry soon afterward. The rule of quality content is that it satisfies gaming appetites.
The concept of content is contrary to what the Game Industry desires it to be. In their universe, the Game Industry wants content to be unsatisfying thinking that players will spend more money to get expansion packs or downloadable purchases. Think of all the ‘Episode 1’ type games. What creates desire for more product is satisfaction of the current product. People do not desire more if the first leaves them hungry or unsatisfied. A restaurant will not have repeat customers if it serves only half a meal. Fully feeding a diner does not mean the diner will never eat again. People keep getting hungry even if they are satisfied. In the same way, gamers keep getting hungry even if they were previously satisfied.
The safest risks in gaming are sequels and established intellectual properties. In a way, the two are the same. What is a sequel but promising more of what satisfied before? Established intellectual properties sell well with the movie or comic book tie-ins because people were satisfied, in an entertainment sense, with the intellectual property (say Star Wars) and believe a game about that intellectual property (a Star Wars video game) will be satisfying. Content is king in the gaming medium as well as any other medium.
Super Mario Brothers was very satisfying to people. The game, itself, did not erupt because of its gameplay or ‘innovation’ (what innovation did it have?). The game was an extremely content rich game in an era of arcade-like games. When Yamauchi first saw it, he knew it would be a hit because you could go underground, jump around in the sky, swim in water, go in castles, have multiple worlds, and so on and so forth. Super Mario Brothers 2 came around and sold very well. Then, Super Mario Brothers 3. And then, Super Mario World. People enjoyed devouring the content. Yet, they kept being hungry for more. In a similar way, Legend of Zelda and Metroid made such an impression on people back when they were released because they, too, were content rich games compared to every other game out there. This was the actual reason for Donkey Kong’s success in the arcades after all. In 1981, no arcade game had so many levels or ‘stuff’ jammed into it. Donkey Kong was ‘potent’ stuff and lesser games felt more ‘watered down’ due to the less content in them.
With many of these older games, players will find them frustrating and wonder why anyone saw anything worthwhile in them in the first place. The point about content is that it is finite and must be metered out to the customer in such a way that he or she will willing to pay for it. If the content is metered out too much, the game is ‘too easy’. If the content is metered out too little, the game is ‘too hard’. Game difficulty is confused to be about game mechanics but what are game mechanics but the mechanism to meter out the content? Therefore, the acceptable rate of metering content in 1990 is no longer acceptable in 2012. The 2012 gamer will say, “This game is too hard. It is too frustrating.” But what does that mean? It means the content is metered out in too little doses for the content-spoiled-gamer-brain-of-2012 to become satisfied. Spoonfuls of content were satisfying in the 80s. Today, shovels are required.
As I understand the content evolution of gaming, content development exceeded computer processing for quite some time. It is like long, long ago where the first word processors were ‘crappy’ in that you had to stop typing in order for the computer to catch up. Today, of course, computers are so fast that your typing speed can never exceed the computing processor. In the same way, content production once exceeded computing processing.
What does that mean? It means that a game developer’s artwork would look better than what appeared in the game. It means that the musician’s music would sound better than what was heard in the game. Due to limited computer processing, the game could not convey the content at this time. For example, Gameboy games were black and white even though the game developers knew how to draw in color. When Gameboys could display color images, did content slow down? No.
But soon computer processing began to exceed the content produced for it. While it only took a few people to make an Ultima game back in the 80s, it takes a fleet of artists to make a Skyrim game of today.
The problem is that gamers consume content faster than it takes to create it. But this problem isn’t new. It was around with the birth of gaming. The solution was to meter the content consumption which was successfully done with arcades. You can keep continuing at the latest level, but you need to put in more quarters. Arcades were designed to meter content in such a way to balance player enjoyment and revenue.
Replayability and addictive multiplayer is the ultimate solution to finite content. Both of these are what every gamer craves. Every gamer dreams that the game they buy will be replayable over and over again. Should it not be, it goes to the Used Game Store to use as capital for the next dose of a content fix from the next ‘latest and greatest video game’. Multiplayer is a great way to get bang-for-buck when it comes to content. Multiplayer maps, that are replayed endlessly, are better than single player scenarios which are played once and forgotten (due to having no replayability).
The reader may be thinking, “This is theorycrafting gone amuck,” but while the content issue is not at the surface in console games, it is the dominant issue in MMORPG games. I believe the MMORPG is to future games as PONG is to games today. The current MMORPG is imperfect, incomplete, obtuse, yet delivers something that gamers become incredibly passionate over which is beyond other games. The MMORPG sphere is very much going to be where the seeds of the future gaming will be placed (in the same way the seeds of future gaming were placed with network games… like with a RTS game company named Blizzard who rode Internet gaming to its dominant form of today).
The MMORPG player is orientated entirely toward content. Most interesting of all, this player will take the path of least resistance. All MMORPG games eventually run out of content. Therefore, the End Game content is metered out to a much tougher standard in order to ration out its consumption. In other words, this is why Molten Core had so much ridiculous amount of trash and why you had to do so much ‘farming’ in Vanilla WoW. It was because there was no content at the End Game so Blizzard rationed it out as much as possible. Woe to the WoW players who think this ‘rationing of content’ is the norm gameplay! It is not in the slightest.
The MMORPG player comes to a fork in the road. Does he/she continue content consumption in a much more metered way (End Game raiding) or does the MMORPG player start an ‘alt’ character to level up all over again? An unbelievable number of players choose the second option. The low hanging fruit is grabbed before going for the high hanging fruit.
Another MMORPG appears on the scene. What is actually happening? “WoW is going to die to the new MMORPG!” squeals the reader excitedly. But we see the same pattern over and over again: the new MMORPG remains shiny for a month and then players return back to WoW (or whatever MMORPG they were playing). When we stop looking at this in the context of games but in the context of content, we see a clearer view of what is going on.
The arrival of the new MMORPG is the arrival of more low hanging fruit. The MMORPG player will consume the low hanging fruit but will become just as frustrated at the End Game, at the High Hanging Fruit. And since Blizzard is the top expert in multiplayer game balance due to the experience of Starcraft and Warcraft series, that experience is what keeps players preferring the High Hanging Fruit in WoW beyond all other MMORPGs. In other words, the MMORPG player returns to WoW until the arrival of the next Low Hanging Fruit.
However, Blizzard is running into a critical problem. In Vanilla WoW, Endgame content was metered out in an absurdly small way forcing players to farm. Today, gamers will not accept this. Since gamers won’t accept a small pipeline way of metering content, what is the solution? This is the crisis that has enveloped Blizzard and soon the entire Game Industry.
Blizzard is ready roll out some ‘solutions’ which we’ll discuss in a future post. What Blizzard does here could, very well, shape how video games are to come in the future.
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