Hello,
It’s about the jobs the games do. The Undiscovered Country of videos games that exists before us in the future doesn’t lay in the hardware or gameplay but in the new jobs that video games can do.One easy example is Wii Fit. There may have been other fitness games before it, but none that ever did the jobas well as Wii Fit. And so, Wii Fit becomes a mega hit. Many clone games appear. They are trying to do the same exact job as Wii Fit so that market becomes more red ocean.Many times, a game can exist before knowing where its job is best at. Tetris existed in the arcades and on the personal computer. Tetris was also a NES game. While Tetris was popular on all of these, it performed its strongest job on the handheld.
As both a consumer and an observer of the game market, I always look at video games as the jobs they do. I do not look at the games from the sense of gameplay or content except only in the context of the job they perform.
Take Minecraft for example. Back when the game was alpha, I was in love with the game as many others. Soon, the game would balloon into a huge hit. Why? Minecraft was performing a job that no other modern video games were doing. When gamers say, “This game is giving me something I’ve wanted that I didn’t know I needed,” they are recognizing the game is performing a job that other games are not doing.
The great evolution of video games is the discoveries of more and more jobs video games can do. Some games have the job of multiplayer. Some, single player. And there is variations of that as well. Some want intensity from a single player experience, others want a laid back menu driven RPG.
While I was not in Japan in the 80s, the reason why I noticed such a strong fanbase of Americans toward games like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy was because the games did a job unlike any other NES game. NES games were *all* arcade games or games built from an arcade core (like Legend of Zelda). Most games were platformers or shooters, both high on the reflex demands. Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest required no reflexes whatsoever. The few times I was very sick, stuck at home and couldn’t do much, you just couldn’t watch TV. We had no Netflix then, no satellite, and not everyone had cable. Do you have any idea what was on TV then? It was reruns of Gilligan’s Island, the Price is Right, and TONS of sales commercials for lawyers advertising for ‘Did you get hurt on the job? Hire me and sue your employer!’ I was too slow, with sickness, to play my more normal gaming repertoire. It was then, and only then, that I got into and saw the value of a game like Dragon Quest. It was tedious, boring, but it provided the right job.
Look at your gaming collection. Just go and look at it. I’ll wait here while you do. Go on.
Now that you’re back, unless you’re a freak who buys every video game out there, your game collection should have a variety of different games in it. This variety is the different jobs the games do. I doubt you own only multiplayer games. There are probably single player games there too. And vice versa.
Wii Sports did a job unlike any other modern video game. Iwata commented that living rooms turned into ‘play areas’ where everyone playing with the Wii. But this is exactly what happened with the original NES. Wasn’t Wii Sports modeled after the NES sports games? That *job* those NES sports games did, forgotten after the blur of the 16-bit generation and its console war, was rediscovered and the Wii, with Wii Sports, did a job unlike any other modern game console.
Nintendo does not understand the jobs their products do. This is what leads them into trouble. They keep thinking the ‘job’ is *surprise*or ‘introduce new gameplay’ or one of the bland phrases they use. Honestly, I believe their own developer biases are preventing an objective outlook. 2d Mario does a different job than most modern Nintendo games. Instead of seeing what job 2d Mario provided to consumers, Nintendo’s developers only saw the gameplay or graphics.
It is not the job of the game developer to make a fantastic game. It is the job of the game developer to make a game that does the job consumers are willing to pay for. This distinction, if realized, would solve 90% of all problems in the video game universe.
The job isn’t to make a great game. The job is to make a game that does a great job.
All products perform jobs. This is why we buy products in the first place. Disruption literature is based around this concept.
Let us look at Christensen’s milkshake example. If you wanted to sell more milkshakes, what would you do? “Make a better milkshake.” What does that mean? “More quantity!” “More quality!” etc. But that thinking leads to destruction.
If we analyzed the milkshake from the context of what jobs it performs, we would find at least two very different jobs. One job is for parents to give their kids a treat. Another job is for workers to eat it as a ‘meal on the go’ on their way to work.
If you increased the quantity of the milkshake, that helps the job as a ‘meal on the go’ but ruins the job for parents to give it to their kids as a treat. And if you make the milkshake more ‘sweet’ and ‘less nutrition’, it makes a better treat but worse as a meal on the go.
What eventually happened was that Christensen had the milkshake divided into two new products that were tailored to their particular jobs.
My point is that the quality of the product is dependent on the job it performs.
What is the job, the quality threshold, of a video game? Everyone agrees: “It’s fun!” But what does fun mean in what context? Brain Age is fun to some people but not to others. Is it a good game? Is it a bad game? It is a good game if you understand what job context the game has. Brain Age is not an adventure game that tells a ‘story’.
When the NES appeared, most video games appearing at home were games like Brain Age or Wii Sports. There was nothing really that imaginative. Nothing escapist except for the computer RPGs. Nintendo made such a hit with games like Super Mario Brothers or Zelda because they were imaginative, full of wonderland, which was a stark contrast to a market saturated with non-escapist video games. People, game consoles were once sold with bundled ‘learn-to-program’ software. I kid you not! Ironically, Wii’s success came from putting out non-escapist video games when the market was literally nothing but imaginative video games.
This imagination that Super Mario Brothers sparked was one of its chief jobs. The kids who grew up in the 80s understand this without question. A big reason why games like Super Mario Brothers, Super Mario Brothers 3, and Super Mario World hold so much reverence and attention today is how much they spark the imagination. Modern Mario games feel bland in comparison.
So to answer your question, emailer, we would need to examine all the jobs Super Mario Brothers does. And there are many. But the job I am spotlighting is the imagination, the Mushroom Kingdom, it created. Super Mario Brothers wasn’t just a game, it was a key to another dimension. With each new Mario game, that dimension expanded and seemed to take greater shape and exploration. But somewhere along the way, Miyamoto thought the job of Mario games was not this so modern Mario games feel like someone took old Mario games and new gameplay mechanics and put them in a blender.
Was Super Mario Brothers 3 just Super Mario Brothers with new gameplay mechanics? No. It was a further exploration of the Mushroom Worlds.
Was Super Mario World just Super Mario Brothers 3 with new gameplay mechanics? No. Dinosaur Land was a different, although still magical, world in itself complete with Yoshis.
Take the biggest fan of Super Mario Galaxy and ask, “Does Super Mario Galaxy feel like a cohesive universe or does it feel more like old Mario games and new gameplay mechanics mixed in a blender?” Even the biggest fans will concede this. It is why the hostility is there for New Super Mario Brothers theme since people are reacting, negatively, to Nintendo not understanding the job of Mario games.
Nintendo didn’t even make a distinction between 2d Mario and 3d Mario until just a few years ago. They were completely blind to what consumers were wanting. If Nintendo can miss the need to make a new 2d Mario for nearly 20 years, it is time for Nintendo to sit down and do some heavy analyzing work with their products to understand the jobs they do.
For example, my complaint with Aonuma Zelda is that Aonuma Zelda does not perform the same job as Classic Zelda does. Aonuma seems to think that the job Zelda performs is puzzles and narratives… which were not the jobs Classic Zelda did at all. If Nintendo could miss seeing the jobs Mario used to do, then it is for sure they are missing the jobs in their other franchises.
[As an aside, an interesting observation about the Diablo 3 open stress test is how players, who never played Diablo, reacted. They kept trying to move their character without a mouse click (like with arrow keys) and were frustrated that the game wouldn’t let them do that. Diablo has always been this way. This complaint did not exist in prior Diablo games so what changed?
What game exists where players move and attack, like an arcade game, while exploring a rich overworld full of caves, dangerous dungeons, while improving gear and getting cool items? This game was once called Zelda. People are not frustrated that Diablo 3 isn’t a MMO-Lite, they are frustrated that Diablo 3 is not Zelda. There is a thirst for an actual Zelda game out there which Nintendo keeps pretending doesn’t exist (like how they pretended a thirst for 2d Mario didn’t exist for decades).]
Look at what happened to Metroid. Sakamoto did not ask, “What is the job a Metroid game is supposed to do?” but rather “What is Metroid?” and somehow he came up with ‘maternal instincts’.
Gamers tend to confuse gameplay and the job the game is supposed to do. They say, “The gameplay of Metroid is exploration.” This is incorrect. The job of Metroid is to create a sense of exploration. And in order to pull off this job, the game requires not just crafted gameplay but appropriate art, music, and various sound effects.
During a game’s development, the gameplay and content change wildly. What does not change is the job of the game. The goal is to create a game that performs a certain job. The gameplay and content are fluid and changed, tested, changed, tested, changed in order to obtain that job as best as possible. Since development has a finite amount of time, the goal is to obtain the game performing that job as soon as possible.
Bad games are games that try to be better games. “That Super Mario Brothers sucks! I can make a better game! It will have all of that plus X.” The consumer doesn’t care about X. All the consumer cares about is the job the game provides. And since they already own one game that does the job they want, do they want more that perform the same job? Look at your game collection and you’ll see you don’t buy games doing the same job so why would anyone else?
“Then why would such a game create a new market?” Because it has discovered a new job. The MMORPG did a job other games could not do before. The ‘market’ is just games trying to perform that similar job.
Look at DOTA. That Warcraft 3 map did a job the game, Warcraft 3, wasn’t doing. It was a simpler multiplayer experience based around more teamwork. Other games have come out that do the same job as DOTA does. LOL, DOTA 2, and others.
The *game* doesn’t really exist. It is nothing but electromagnetic magic. The article of substance is the reactions consumers have to the game. It is that which must be analyzed, not the *game*. (E.g. Miyamoto observes the faces of players when they test out his games.)
Discussions of gameplay, content, craftsmanship, etc. only exist in the container of the job of the video game. If the job of the product isn’t understood or realized, it won’t matter what the gameplay or content is.
The next time you look at a video game best seller list, ask yourself, “What jobs are these games performing?”
Malstrom's Articles News 