My Two Cents On How Games Have Changed

Hey guys!

To answer your questions, yes I am still alive. Through a combination of laziness, business, and me revelling in my newfound super powers (the incredible ability to purchase booze), I've found myself finding excuses not to write, but that's going to change now.

But now onto the meat of the issue.

As I’ve been playing games for the last month or so; games I bought myself, as well as games I got for Christmas, and through some online discussion, an interesting question has been rolling around in my head: what exactly is the most important aspect of a game these days?

At first, this seems to be a stupid question with a simple answer: the gameplay, duh. But really think about this for a second. Since the advent of the PSOne, the actual layout of the game controller as we know it has changed extremely little. Yes, there’s motion control, but I think we all agree that motion control has not been utilized to the best that it could be. Now, the actual mechanics of the average game has changed over the course of the last decade, to say otherwise would be foolishly ignorant.

But it would also be foolish to say that games haven’t, in many ways, remained much the same over the last decade. First person shooters made today have many of the exact same mechanics and button layouts as games made in 2002. Action-adventure games are still playing follow the leader to games like God of War and Devil May Cry. Note that this is not a bad thing. You’ve got games like Darksiders, which while a blatant God of War/Legend of Zelda ripoff, still manages to be quite a bit of fun to play, but on the other hand, you’ve got games like Dante’s Inferno, which is also a relatively transparent God of War stand-in. Yet one is entertaining, and the other… well, let’s just say I enjoy the 300 page poem quite a bit more.

Plus, the game has an achievement for killing unbaptized babies. That’s just so ridiculous that I can’t take anything else about the game seriously. Especially Satan’s 15 inch cock. That has its own jiggle physics engine.

NSFW

Think about something: it’s subzero down there. And he’s still slinging Mr. Little Devil around like shrinkage ain’t no thing. Yikes.

Why is all this important? Because what I’ve come to realize is that what is important in games today has changed. Chiefly in that elements like story, setting, atmosphere, and music have become much more prevalent in people’s assessment of whether or not they enjoy the games they play. For example, take a game like Mass Effect 2. The gameplay, when you get right down to it, is a third person shooter with subtle RPG elements added to it. Both are excellently implemented, but think about something. When discussing Mass Effect, what is the primary element you hear people praising? The incredible story, the characters that seem to be real people that you’re interacting with, and how the game allows you to transport yourself into the universe of Mass Effect. Hell, the most recognizable aspect of gameplay is the dialogue wheel.

Well, that and punching women.

What all this means to me is that what is important in video games has shifted over time. It used to be that games could get away with almost a total lack of story, no real characters aside from some vague villain with no real motivations other than to piss the hero off, a hero who doesn’t have any backstory, and perhaps some female interest you have to save and see for like three seconds during the game. Some games made this setup work, and led the path for games since then to follow, like the Mario games, while some (like Ghosts and Goblins) did not. With simple setups like this, the quality of the actual gameplay was the only real motivating factor. Mario had good gameplay, G&G had broken platforming, and bastard hard unfair enemies.

Nowadays, you’ve got games like the Silent Hill series, which the fans of which will freely acknowledge have terrible camera controls and combat, but still love the series for its unequaled scare power, and the engrossing atmosphere, or Shadows of the Colossus, which has a frustratingly clumsy protagonist who’s not very good with his sword, and is prone to stumbling around just when you need him not to. Yet the game is recognized as a masterpiece of minimalist storytelling, and has truly amazing music. Graphics and story are now just as interchangably used as points to indicate the quality of a game as the controls and gameplay are.

Now, I’d be an idiot to claim that a game can’t have both incredible gameplay and an incredible story with engrossing atmosphere (see Red Dead Redemption), but what I think is that developers of games, as well as the media (and not just the gaming media) have to recognize that games are growing up faster than we anticipated. While they are not recognized as being in the same context as movies, I think and hope that someday they will, because to my mind, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be. When film was first being utilized as a form of entertainment, it was many years before people recognized that film could be used as a form of art equally as valid as literature.

And while I don’t think video games and film will ever be truly the same form of art, I frankly don’t think they should be. After all, film is not equal to literature, and literature is not equal to sculpting or painting. What I do think that this is indicative of, however, is that games have started growing up in a very serious way, and that with this maturity has come a new way in which games must be created and judged, which is that sort of intangible level of “atmosphere” that a game has.

Oh, and speaking of maturity in games, be sure to check out Stephen’s article over the new LA Noire trailer; it is really cool looking!