This morning I was doing some research for an article I’ve always wanted to write about Jordan Mechner’s magnum opus, The Last Express. Among the wonderful treasures I found, including an unfinished script for a prequel to TLE, was a link to Michael Chabon’s NY Review of Books article titled, “Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood.” In the article, Chabon laments the disappearance of a form of childhood that all of us (in our 30′s and 40′s and older) remember with conflicting emotion. The kind of childhood where a kid, even in the most urbanized environment, would freely explore every dark forest, alleyway and abandoned lot with a pack of her or his friends. It was a childhood experienced as a neighbourhood of familiar and tempting and scary things. In this article I want to take Michael Chabon’s wonderful article and turn it towards gaming, and see how the disappearance of “exploration” and “excellence” has influenced a new generation of gamers.
I’m sitting in my 13-year-old cousin’s room, my back leaned uncomfortably against the foot of his metal bedframe, watching him play Jak 3 -- a 3-D shooter/racer/adventure platformer. He finishes a level and we watch the intro cinematic for the next quest; the on-screen drama unfolds slowly as the characters discuss what to do next. We are 30 seconds into the cinematic, and already I can hear my cousin becoming restless, thumbing the ‘x’ button so he can skip the cinematic and cut to the chase.
(Herding Leaping Lizards in Jak 3.)
Damas enters stage left and addresses Jak and Daxter (and of course myself and my cousin) in a paternal tone, ”You have a reputation for being rash. Didn’t your father tell you to pick your battles wisely?”
Jak responds, “I didn’t know my father.”
Damas continues, “My point is, sometimes you face your enemy head-on and, sometimes you wait until his weakness is revealed! Patience is a warrior’s greatest weapon.”
(To any seasoned gamer, the discover-the-end-boss’s-weakness-by-experimenting-and-observing-it-at-a-distance tactic has the cornerstone of battle for over 20 years.)
At this point, my cousin who is normally a patient and curious child, is becoming irritated with the “unreasonably” long 1-minute cinematic. I realize that he has listened to nothing in the cinematic, he even misses the crucial mission briefing, “I want you to go into the desert and herd a group of lizards into a waiting transport.”
And he’s off, driving around aimlessly in the desert. At some point the game prompts him with a message, “Drive up close to a Leaper.” After chasing a pack of lizards for a few minutes he is becoming frustrated. The lizards dart off in every direction and his thumbs respond in kind, directing the stick toward the Leaper Lizards, but not quickly enough. They get away. After several tries, he manages to land Daxter on one’s back, unsuccessfully trying to direct it toward the village. The lizard has a mind of its own and resists him, he fails to jump over a small cactus, and the lizard dies. The level resets to a few moments earlier. I can hear him slamming the thumbsticks helplessly as he becomes discouraged, and he eventually drops the controller on the bed.
“See? This game sucks. It’s soooooo hard. Let’s play something else.”
It is the last time he ever plays Jak 3.
I shrug sympathetically and pick up the controller to give it a shot. Despite never playing the Jak series before, my fingers find themselves singing an old song, and I begin exploring the territory with the dune buggy. I get a sense of the geography, the pitfalls and mission targets, and the surprisingly agile driving model. I spot a pack of lizards in the distance and my fingers instinctively accelerate and steer the dune buggy toward them… I accidentally pancake two lizards (the speed of this thing!), but Daxter manages to saddle himself on the third survivor. The encumbered lizard drives like a cat-drawn dogsled, and I laugh as I feebly try to direct it toward the mission goal area.
Eventually, I succeed. It is a silly level and a silly game, with no real consequences for failure -- cute and inoffensive. My cousin is astounded that I complete the level, and shuts off the PS2. Months later, we are talking about the recently-released Prince of Persia (2008) - he is ecstatic about the gameplay feature that prevents the Prince from dying, owing to an infinite number of “saving” catches that Elika makes, preventing any kind of failure.
(feel free to hum along to the amazing tunes of Space Harrier 
)
I realize at that moment, my cousin and I live radically different childhoods. Mine is populated with memories of Black Belt, Police Quest 2, and Prince of Persia. All of these games, for different reasons, were exercises in utterly inhuman frustration -- whether due to a demand for obscenely quick reflexes, a talent for guessing at verbs in a command parser, or repeating the same level twenty-five times just to discover the “trick” to finishing it. Finishing a game enabled a sacred rite of bragging among friends at school; it was a badge of honour and a sign of manhood accessible to only those elite who had done the same, like knowing the secret password for the neighbourhood treehouse. (We even demanded a photograph of the end-game screen of Space Harrier when my friend finally beat the game in grade 10 because it was so unbelievable a feat). At the same time, those experiences came at the cost of sheer uncontrollable rage. When I was 12 years old, after three hours I flawlessly got to the cavern level in Choplifter and was summarily blown out of the sky by the ejecta of an erupting volcano -- I tried to break the controller in half unsuccessfully and instead threw it against the wall leaving a 3-inch hole. I am not, and never have been, a talented gamer.
But for my cousin, none of these experiences are possible anymore. Jak 3 does not inspire frustration or rage, but disappointment and discouragement. When a game becomes difficult it is not a challenge to his identity as a gamer, and because of which inspires no tenacity in him. If he cannot continue with a game, he turns to a different one. He has never finished a game in his life, nor experiences a desire to do so and would rather try the next new game that captures his attention.
I’m trying to avoid being unfair to my cousin whom I adore. He is a very bright teenager, he desires a sense of accomplishment, and he is surprised and enamoured when he sees an old hand effortlessly flying through Super Mario 3 and Mega Man 2 - games he sees so beyond his skill-level that they inspire only fear. But despite owning game systems his whole life, if they were taken away he would simply watch TV or play with his iPod touch instead. Even the thought of losing my Genesis or Nintendo would have chilled my heart as a boy.
But why would this even matter? Isn’t my cousin’s experience of gaming just “different” than mine, and I’m just a gamer-veteran levying my adult judgments on him? Maybe. But maybe it’s something else -- along with my childhood and all of the dramatic emotions, skilful practice, and social confrontations I had in relation to games -- that my cousin’s world is just a little less colourful, a little less distinct, and full of nameless fears that discourage him from really feeling a deep connection to the games he plays. The Jak 3 story would have enraptured me as a child -- an Oedipal story ripped right out of Star Wars about a boy who comes to learn the identity of his estranged father. But my cousin, as a boy raised in a world of confusing gender identities at home and school and on TV, is not grabbed at all by the story; as Baudrillard writes, “The Oedipal drama is not played out any longer.”
So, why are our childhoods experienced so differently in terms of the games we play, and how we play them? This is where I want to leave things open for debate. Michael Chabon suggests that it is because parents have become too safety-oriented, too afraid of the unknown lurking in the urban world. Roger Ebert believes that we live in a fear-inspiring society that discourages us from becoming “free range children”. J.H. Van den Berg believes it is because children and adults are estranged from one another’s lives, and children no longer can mature naturally. Baudrillard believes it is because post-modernity has turned the child into a fetish-object.
Those all seem to be sensible parts of the whole shebang. Yet, rather than finding ways of maturing kids through the games they play, we now craft games to suit a flattened kind of childhood, one with no real consequences for death, or even the chance to die unfairly. It’s a kind of liberalistic ideal: Everyone should win. A game like The Last Express, by definition, will not interest my cousin because it is based on the idea of exploration for its own sake.
I’m not sure what the answer is here, for in my generation my parents were never involved in gaming in any direct way. But for this generation the answer will be in the realm of good guardianship I think: letting your kids fail, letting them get frustrated with the harshness of the world, and gently encouraging them to keep plugging away at it until they grow that kernel of accomplishment and develop a sense of courage for themselves. Otherwise, the games they play will forever remain a distant dark continent that does not inspire them to jump off of their carefully-padded ships and explore them heroically.
Am I being too naive or idealistic about childhood? Has your play style evolved over the years? Or do you have a child/relative/friend that plays games in a radically different way than you do? If so, I’d love to hear about it in the comments!
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Great observations. I’m in my thirties, and I’ve been gaming since I played a friend’s Atari 2600. I think that games have changed significantly over time. I can still remember going over to my friend Paul’s house after school and practicing Contra and Jackal on NES. They required memorization, timing, and precision, and over many months we got damn good at them. We went from needing the 30-man code in Contra just to make it halfway, to being able to make it through the entire game without dying once. I look around now, and I don’t see many games that require the same skillset.
On the other hand, those games didn’t try to tell a story. “Story” was just an excuse to start shooting, and was mostly told in the instruction manual (which I always read, cover-to-cover, before starting the game, which may tell you a little about me as a person). Some games did attempt story – the text adventure games, and then the graphic adventure games. The story games rarely punished you as hard as the twitch games – you might be blocked from continuing, but you rarely had to begin all the way at the beginning. Advancing the game was a process of figuring out what you know, and how to use it.
Over time, I think that these story games brought in more people to play games. They didn’t require the manual dexterity of the twitch games, and they don’t punish failure as harshly. And games that _should_ require twitch gameplay (shooters, platformers, action games) started to borrow aspects of the story games: game saves, fewer deaths, more story told in-game. And they also lost a lot of the figure-it-outness of the story games. Somebody on screen will tell you what you need to do, and how to do it, and then you push the buttons to make it happen.
I think that games have lost some of their purity. Not a holy, noble sort of purity, but a purity of purpose. Shooters have lost the threat of death, which helped provide the impetus to improve, and story games have added twitchiness which just feels out of place.
I think it’s part of the ongoing maturation of video games as a medium. You wouldn’t expect the same things from a romance novel as you would a military sci-fi, even though both are books, and books don’t generally try to mash all tropes together. Right now, video games seem to be trying to mash all tropes together, and they’re losing their focus as a result. But, as gaming continues to mature, I think we’ll start to see them settle back into clearer genres, and then maybe your cousin will find a game he likes.
K
P.S. Sorry to dump so much into your comments. Your post really triggered my brain, and I was trying to get it all down. I hope it made sense.
P.P.S. I’d never heard of The Last Express, and Wikipedia’s description (a story-based game told in something approaching real-time) reminded me of one of my “cult classic” favorite games: D, which I played on the Playstation. It was a horror-adventure game which you _had_ to finish in two hours; no pause, no save. Finish, or die. It was a gaming experience I really remember.
Last Post Script, I Promise: This doesn’t even get into MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, where just playing the game makes your character better at the game, even if you’re not. I say this loving the game, but it’s designed to never make you truly fear that you can’t accomplish something.
I Lied, This is My Last Post Script: I wish your website had a “Preview Comment” button.
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@Kevin – Wow, thanks so much for the detailed and articulate response! I too have many memories of the practice that went into mastering even the simplest of games (Contra among them!) While reading your story I realized that part of what has changed is that kids no longer have much of a desire to cooperate in order to master a game together – the whole concept of sitting together in front of a computer screen or on the basement floor and “taking turns” at a game is now unimaginable for most kids. They’re rather have their own console, their own time at it, and in their own private space.
Story is something I alluded to lightly in the article, and I think you’re bang-on with your observation. In fact, part of my draw towards video games have always been the kinds of narratives told in them; the adventure genre (I’m thinking of LucasArts games here) that got rid of the punitive aspects of failure. I agree completely – punishment (death) for failure in “twitch” games suits that style of gameplay much more than in a text adventure. At the same time, I still worry that we will find it even harder to deliver stories in the future that grab the gamer’s attention. Not because our stories are necessarily getting worse (some are, some aren’t), but because kids themselves no longer have a deep investment in hearing stories of great heroism or deep tragedy… many (such as my cousin) want an emotional fix in under 10 seconds.
If anything, I worry that games as a form of expressive art are “de-maturing”… they are no longer interested in excelling in any particular trope in favour of delivering the most exciting, visually arresting, drug. Like you, I certainly hope this isn’t the case – but seeing the massive numbers of visually spectacular but “hollow” games being released daily, I’m hedging my bets.
“The Last Express” is, I think, one of the finest and most unique adventure games ever made. That claim needs to be substantiated some day, but for now I’ll just say: give it a shot
MMORPGs are definitely a real different kettle of fish, especially because (like other genres) there is so much variance between them. I once showed my cousin how to play Ultima Online, and he quit after 10 minutes. World of Warcraft was much more to his liking, as it was not particularly difficult or complex.
Thanks so much for reading, and posting! Glad to see it has stimulated some thought.
EDIT: I forgot to mention, was the survival-horror PS1 game you were referring to called “D”? If so, that’s now on my to-play list!
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Chris,
Again, thanks for writing such a good article. I was afraid my comment was one massive brain dump. I’m glad you appreciated it.I found the Lucasarts games (Day of the Tentacle, Maniac Mansion, the Monkey Island games) didn’t hold my attention like some others. I found the puzzles to be a bit random. For me, it was the Sierra games – Gabriel Knight and Kings Quest V are the ones I remember most. Gabriel Knight was such a great experience for me, it triggered a life-long love affair with the game’s setting of New Orleans. After visiting the city several times, I moved there, lived there for about a year, and met my wife there. Even after Katrina, the city has every bit of magic I found in that one game. (No “real” voodoo, though. At least, not that I’ve found.) No other work of fiction inspired (indirectly) me to move across the country.
But, that’s not on topic. I’m hopeful that games will continue to grow and improve. But, given the choice, I’ve found that I water-down my twitch gameplay. A few years ago I came across an SNES emulator and played Contra III, taking full advantage of the ability to save my game state, to avoid messy mistakes. It made playing through the game much easier. Though, in the end, not as satisfying.
K
P.S. Yes, “D” was the survival horror I mentioned. Here’s a link: http://www.amazon.com/D-Playstation/dp/B00005BISO/ref=pd_rhf_p_img_1
Wikipedia has a small article, but doesn’t really describe the gameplay, and gives away the ending.
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Part of the problem is the perspective we take on this. As children of the first ‘real’ gaming generation, we grew up with games being a huge part of our childhood entertainment in a way that hasn’t taken with the current generation of kids; partially I would suspect because games are no longer developed with younger audiences in mind. Games in the 80′s through to the 90′s were direct experiences; a minute of cutscene before a mission was an extravagance on a console system. You jumped in, and you just played.
Chris and I in particular were starved for entertainment; if the weather sucked in the hinterlands of Alberta growing up, we could either watch three lousy channels (20, for those of us blessed with cable), we could play video games, or we were essentially out of options that didn’t involve getting together with friends and being bored collectively. As the average kid today has access to cable tv, wireless internet, and other modern conveniences; gaming in and of itself has lost the monopoly on kids entertainment it had.
Back in the nebulous and poorly defined ‘day’, I remember sacrificing time, energy, and a lot of patience at the altar of such unforgiving games as Castlevania and Ninja Gaiden 3. You either were capable of beating the game, or you weren’t. I think that game design as a whole has shifted a lot over the last decade or so; the ‘do or do not’ design that encapsulated the gaming experience of our childhoods has mutated towards ‘keep doing until you get it right’. And that was fine, because I had the time, the patience, and more importantly, not a whole lot else to do. I couldn’t throw something like Battletoads in front of my nephew today and say ‘play this until you can beat level 3′, because he has far more options for what to do then to play an unforgiving game.
As a man in my thirties who knows that beating games on the hardest difficulty impresses no one (…that I’d care to impress) I’m open to the idea that forcing players to retry the game repeatedly takes away from the entertainment of the game. If you’re just going to be quickloading checkpoints all day while missing jumps in Prince of Persia until you get it right, why wouldn’t you make an option for the player to have endless respawns? The 2008 Prince of Persia is a firm popcorn game; the non-threatening romantic comedy of gaming. And as much as we as the hardcore tend to dismiss such things; there’s both an audience and a need for such things to exist.
It’s not like the genre of ball-busting games ceased to exist; Team Ninja’s revival of the Ninja Gaiden franchise is a proud ‘fuck you’ to the casual gamer and an extended (and admittedly creepy) love letter to those that are willing to stick with it long enough to get the bragging rights rewards of beating the games. Hell, even indie darling Braid is essentialy the same thing: you either beat it and feel proud, or you shamefully slink to youtube for video walkthroughs.
The key is that difficulty should be variable: let the player decide what level they want to engage the game on. There are games I play on hard because I don’t feel challenged otherwise, and there are games I’ll only ever play on easy because I’m not willing to bind the quicksave and quickload buttons to the left and right mouse buttons in order to slog through it. Left 4 Dead’s engaging variable difficulty is a good start; set the overall difficulty of the campaign, and moderate it as the playthrough goes on so you get a consistent experience. Make the challenge of the game meet the players level and expectations; if they can beat something on hard, kudos. If they need to play on easy; so what?
I think that we as the older statesmen of gaming feel threatened on some level that kids are picking up our hobby without having to get the scars and bruises we did. 20 years ago I would’ve given my eyeteeth for the ability to have reasonable checkpoints and variable difficulty.
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As a mid-40s parent with 16 nephews and nieces, I have a number of data points. And I think the generalizations are somewhat off.
One thing you have to understand is that school, especially elementary school, is a lot more demanding than it was even 10 years ago. Lessons and subjects have dropped 1, 2, sometimes even 3 grades. (I have family who are teachers and who confirm this.) It’s not exaggeration when I say even 2nd graders are seeing 1-2 hours of homework. As a result, many kids, including my own and their friends, simply don’t have the time to spend playing video games 2-3 hours after school.
So, for kids that don’t want to play punishing games, I frankly don’t blame them.
I disagree with the idea that kids aren’t interested in stories of great heroism and tragedy. Besides Harry Potter, the books that are popular with young readers and pre-teens are full of heroism and tragedy. If you specifically meant to refer to game stories, I’m not sure that is true. But it might well be that they reserve that investment for those themes other than games. It’s also true that ever since Harry Potter, publishers have found a huge market for books in the young readers and pre-teens. These kids have more books to choose from than I had, and probably you had. (On NPR several months ago, a rep from Scholastic estimated that they probably published 2-3 times more books now than before Harry Potter.) \My point isn’t to demean games, but I think kids look at game narratives as unsophisticated compared to what they see now in books for them.
So, I’d agree with your fear that games are “de-maturing.” However, they may be doing that simply by standing pat.
When you first started the article, I thought you were going to talk about how kids explore game worlds like we explored the outside world in our youth. I see that with my kids and their friends. I’ve seen them disregard the game narrative and strike out on their own in a game–almost like making a sandbox game out of anything.
The idea of punishment and risk in gaming and as motivation (in games and beyond) is one that I’ve considered for a long while. When I played the original Everquest, I saw how making the game easier, making game deaths less brutal, actually took away some memorable fun as well as the frustration of hellish corpse retrievals.
Not that I want to “protect” my kids, but I’ve questioned whether we have to have this kind of brutalizing game to have something memorable and enjoyable. One point that jumped out at me in your post is the idea of connecting. You define connecting to games through tenacity, that drive to push through the frustration to see completion and success and that willingness to take on risks of failure. Can a gamer, though, connect with a game without all that?
I think they can. If a gamer feels a kind of ownership of a game or if she explores a game to find something about that makes her feel accomplished, isn’t that as viable a connection? I have a son and a daughter (ages 7 and 10), and the answer is different for both of them. My daughter definitely has an identity agenda in a lot of her play, unlike my son, specifically with feminine characters. She initially latched onto my son’s Pokemon interests but has now gone on her own, playing Pokemon Diamond for hours. (She took it very personally when a boy at her school said that girls don’t play Pokemon. “How do you know Pokemon aren’t girls?” She then bet him that she had captured more Pokemon than he had.)
I think we had a very common experience in how we connected with games growing up. But I think the framing of my kids’ experiences is different from ours, and they are connecting in different ways for different games.
Finally, as for the over-protective parents, I’d agree. I grew up in a small town where I spent a lot of summers on my own, playing in the woods. I now live in Dallas, and I admit my fear is not of rapists, abductions, etc., like a lot of parents I know, but cars. We lived in a much more dense area than I did growing up. A co-worker’s son was skateboarding and was hit and killed by a driver who wasn’t paying attention. Still, I don’t hide my kids from the outside because of that fear. I’ve encouraged my son to ride his bike and explore. The problem is that it’s hard to want to ride for long 100+ degree weather.
Great post and, as always, enjoyable and thought provoking.
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@Kevin – That is a great story! You might even want to tell that to the writer/creator of GK, Jane Jensen (http://blog.graymatter-game.com/). I too have a greater attachment to the Sierra adventures than I do the LucasArts adventures. Teasing out exactly why the games evoke different attachments for different people would make a great article some day. I would say that I remember LucasArts games “fondly” (Monkey Island especially), but remember Sierra games “intimately”. As for the way veterans play today – I fully agree with you. I can hardly do without a save-state now; again I go back to the problem that daily life has changed so incredibly much that it no longer seems feasible to start a game over from scratch. How many games *even have* a Game Over screen anymore?
@Andrew – I agree completely on many points – especially that there is now an audience who does not want games that challenge/frustrate them. In fact, that kind of audience has always probably been around… but there have always been designers out there that don’t give the player an easy-way-out… that difficulty/challenge is a part of the game’s mechanics. (I’m thinking of Tetris, Mario 2, Wonder Boy 2, etc). Those games haven’t completely disappeared, but my god they’re disappearing fast. I agree that difficulty levels/ratings is probably the best solution for this problem as it gives the player an extra degree of freedom … nothing is worse than buying a game you can’t play! At the same time, I love seeing games that reward players for feats of the impossible… extra encounters, features, puzzles, interactions… I’m thinking of Curse of Monkey Island (MI3) as a good example of how to get difficulty right. But let’s remember that as kids we DID have all sorts of back-doors on difficulty … almost anyone who had a NES had a Game Genie (or borrowed one)… but all of us knew that if you finished a game using the game genie, it didn’t REALLY “count”… it was quite literally cheating. Nobody got bragging rights for finishing a game with the Game Genie. But we all used it so we could screw around, and have even more fun in a really bad game for instance. So difficulty isn’t everything – and it’s rarely entertaining or enjoyable to play a game of insane difficulty – but the player who is willing to bust some ass is opened up to an appreciation of games that other players are not.
@guttertalk – Long time no see! And thanks for contributing your experiences with your family — that is very relevant and valuable here. First off, you’re right – I wrote this with some idealizations in mind in order to make a clear point about a certain kind/style of gamer that did not appear until recently. I’m not trying to make a moral judgment on those kinds of players who do not see difficulty as valuable in a game – but rather show that they are not open to the same kinds of experiences that those who are. Certainly every specific child is making their own style of connection to the game – and connecting to games through tenacity is just ONE style of connection — there are many, many others. ie. people obsessed with difficulty/challenge often miss out on some other major aspects of experience, such as identification with the avatar, emotional connections to the NPCs, etc. That is a loss for the player too, with a different outcome. Sure, your kids (and my cousin) both experience games truly differently than we did as kids… but I want to know exactly how their experience of games leads to a different experience of life in general? If they live a life of fear of the outside world (whether that fear is reasonable or not), do games become a place to hide from the anxiety?
What I suspect is that parenting styles have so much to do with this. If your son rides his bike and explores the neighbourhood around his home… he will be the same kid who explores every nook and cranny of the games he plays. And that kind of gamer is someone I have something in common with Thanks so much for the thoughtful (and thought-inspiring) response!@everyone as a clarification…
I guess lurking within my post is the idea that the “uber-gamer” – the person who experiences the game most deeply and most exceptionally – is the person who is able to appreciate and enjoy and be entertained and enchanted by a game in all ways possible. Nobody really lives like that, but that seems to be a respectable goal in my mind. If games, as expressive art, are to change who we are they must appeal to us as a whole, and not only in small ways. A game that appeals to me in a single way is not life-changing, it is only entertaining; that is fine for those who see games as forms of escape. Again, that is not a moral judgment, but an articulation of how certain play-styles place limits on what we experience. -
Hey Chris, I’d like to add a comment but I’m wary of coming across as a bit hostile, so if my tone is off, please forgive me…
This is just me, and it’s just my perspective, but I’m starting to get why people like Michael Abbott and others of an older generation were offended by Ian Bogost’s recent Anti-Beatles: Rock Band tirade (found here – http://www.bogost.com/blog/life_goes_on_within_you_and_wi.shtml). It was quite largely a hand-waving attack on Baby Boomers as a generation and because I’m not a member of that generation I could view his argument with a level of dispassion that the aforementioned members of the Boomer generation could not.
What’s that got to do with this article? Well I feel like you’re doing a *very* similar thing here and as a member of the so-called Gen Y it’s a struggle to not take it personally.
Clint Hocking (who needs no introduction) gave a talk at a meeting of the Montreal IGDA recently that talked about the differences between the generations, and discussed the impact it is having on game design and development (the talk can be found here – http://www.clicknothing.com/click_nothing/2009/04/the-next-generation-of-player.html). One of the characteristics he ascribed to Gen-X (your generation, I’m presuming, Chris) was this “tenacity” you seem to be idealizing, but which Clint describes somewhat differently. Talking about people of his generation, he says,
“We’re elitist, and our games tend to be hardcore, and very skill focused – they go beyond unforgiving right to punishing, even abusive.”Which is to say that I think your attitude is condescending to my game players of my particular generation who have no interest in being digitally abused by games. You say that “Isn’t my cousin’s experience of gaming just “different” than mine” and you’re right – but then you can’t resist revealing your, dare I say it, ‘elitism’ despite the fact that you admit you’re no “talented gamer” yourself!
One of the key values that Clint ascribed to Gen-Y gamers was that of co-operation over competition – and I think we’re seeing that with games like Left 4 Dead, and multiplayer modes like Gears of War 2’s Horde mode.
I’m not trying to say that you can’t have your tough, punishing (dare I say, abusive) games if you want. But please respect younger (and older!) people’s dissatisfaction with that kind of game without decrying the lowering of standards or shouting about ‘dumbing down’ in newer games.
I mean, come on – Jack was *friggin hard*! =P
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@Ben – First off – thanks for reading the article/comments.. there are a lot of dangling thoughts throughout that would take me months to articulate. I appreciate your perspective – In the comment thread I tried to address the seemingly “elitist” tone that comes with the hardcore-gamer-generation. But as I mentioned in the article, I’m not one of them. I never was good at the insanely hard games; I never finished Choplifter and it became a hole in my wall (in my heart!) that’s lasted 20 years. Age-wise I’m not a part of Generation X, nor am I of Generation Y (neither of those describe much anyhow), and I don’t identify with either group in particular.
The article certainly wasn’t written as some kind of offensive on my cousin, nor kids in his age group; I’m not sure that I ‘shouted’ anywhere about “dumbing down” games. What I tried to do is translate Chabon’s (wonderfully written) article for my generation of gamers, and see what kinds of experiences it lead to compared to that of my younger cousin. Chabon certainly sees something worrying about a generation of kids that don’t explore their neighbourhoods or play outside together. Is he being an elitist in saying that? Maybe. But I think calls of elitism obscure the issue completely – what he’s getting at is that kids growing up today are living in a completely different world. Some kids in my day built some kind of excellence in their lives, no matter how small it might seem to us now, on the basis of their video gaming prowess. Even if it produced only virtual courage, the courage of killing a pixellated monster and saving the princess, it was one I felt deeply. My cousin does not feel that kind of courage. He lives in a world where yes – there is cooperation – but it isn’t the kind that gives him a sense of pride or accomplishment. Am I trying to generalize to your particular experience of gaming? No. I’m trying to understand how he lives in his world, and that he’s obviously not the only kid on earth to experience this.
Multiplayer games, with co-op modes, have been around forever. My friends and I played NHL ’91-’96 in co-op mode constantly, and we loved it. We also played those games in competitive mode, and were completely at war with one another. In both cases we were fully, 100%, engaged in it. Shutting off the Genesis and playing something else, or watching something on TV, was not an option. Not because we had nothing else (hell there was plenty to watch on TV), but because we simply wanted to win, to beat the computer, or out-do one another. “Tenacity” as I see it is not some kind of moral weakness or stubbornness – it’s a life-or-death commitment not given up easily. Not all of the games we played were played tenaciously, but some really were. My cousin simply does not experience gaming like that. And *I no longer can play like that*. Why? Because as I’ve gotten older, my world has changed, and demands more out of me in a shorter amount of time. I also don’t draw my sense of accomplishment or mastery or courage from games anymore – although they were the origin of it.
I’m open to all sorts of other possibilities – for instance the idea that *not playing* punishing/abusive games can lead to a healthier way of life – but I’d like to see that experience articulated in some way as I have attempted in this article. It’s not enough to tell me that I’m just plain wrong
EDIT: Y’know – the more I think about it the more I realize that I’d love to be wrong on this one. Any interest in writing a response from your point of view on ‘difficulty’? I personally hate difficult games (some levels of God of War come to mind).. but they are a part of my upbringing and can’t ignore them!
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I’d mimic a lot of the comments above, and your own piece as well. This talk of children and how younger generations approach games is very complicated. I tend to side with Ben when it comes to how we view difficulty. I’m never eager to punish myself repeatedly against a game for no good reason.
That being said, I had a similar experience with a neighbor kid today that reminded me of your cousin. We were playing cooperative cooperative survival mode in ODST, he brought it over and it was the first time he was playing. Within fifteen minutes, he had given up on the game, completely regretting his purchase. I tried goading him into playing intelligently, sticking with me. Instead he dove head first into armies of enemies and was upset he died so frequently. For him, the game was too easy hanging back, but too difficult going on the offensive.
I honestly don’t think its a game design issue, or me being elitist. He just didn’t have any patience, or any desire to learn the rules of the game. I don’t know if this is at all representative of kid gamers at large, but it does seem to fit with Chabon’s opinion that “kids these days” shy away from independent learning through doing. Which, as I see, it largely a parenting concern. I could go on, but I’ll save your eyes. Good post.
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Jorge, many thanks for your thoughts on the topic. I too sympathize with Ben, but cannot come up with a better perspective on exactly why *SOME* people today have the attitude that it’s better not to waste effort on something difficult. As you say, Chabon really does seem to hit the nail on the head for some ‘kids these days’. Interesting re: your experience of ODST. My cousin, I can guarantee you, would have tried the same tactic and got owned after a few repeated attempts at it. We tried playing Pirates of the Burning Sea a few weeks ago and he had a very similar response – he simply had no interest in learning what the PvP vs. non-PvP areas of the game were and instead tried to ‘play things his own way’, and quit the game in frustration.
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I disagree with some of the comments that imply that modern games are somehow more fun because they punish the player less, and with Clint Hocking’s implication that they were ‘abusive’. Games have historically provided a challenge, and surely part of the definition of challenge is the absence of guaranteed success.
I was discussing something similar regarding the old 80s RPG classic “The Bard’s Tale” over at Tales of the Rampant Coyote (see comments on http://rampantgames.com/blog/2009/09/knights-of-chalice-interview.html, although they may only be visible on the Blogger.com page so far). It starts off very hard and your characters can (and often do) die, sometimes in fairly arbitrary circumstances. The game allows for you to continue on, to recruit new adventurers or to resurrect the old ones. But these days, people expect to be able to reload and continue. Let’s just think about that for a moment – the game shows you the consequences of your actions and it explicitly offers routes for you to be able to recover from those setbacks so that you can continue. Yet instead, people just want to reload.
It’s a relatively recent development that people expect virtually no setbacks at all. No wonder there’s an abundance of ‘grind’ in MMOs these days – the absence of meaningful successes and failures means it becomes an almost direct trade of time for resources. How else can you occupy a player who always succeeds except to artificially increase the number of successes he or she needs to get anywhere?
I have nothing against that in certain games, especially those for whom the game is not so much a game but a pastime. It makes sense to cater for that audience by stripping out what they won’t enjoy and leaving the core in place. However, what concerns me is the general drift of most new games towards this, and the expectation of gamers and some reviewers that this should be the case.
Perhaps it is contributing to a generation of kids who expect things to fall into their lap and to not have to struggle for anything. I know I see that a lot on programming forums these days. 10 years ago teens expected they’d have to work hard to make any computer game. Now they ask where they can download an MMO and get defiant when you say that the kind of MMO they have in mind typically takes a team of 50 people 2 or 3 years to make. Instant gratification is the expectation, and it’s not reasonable. Where has this attitude come from?
Being able to fail in games is a good thing. Learning from your mistakes and perfecting your technique or trying something different next time was always part of the meta-game, whether playing Chess, soccer, poker, Pacman, Dungeons and Dragons, you name it. Sometimes the dice would roll unfavourably, you’d draw a bad hand, or some other random event would intercede, but you learned to live with that. You tried again. Games were a metaphor for life itself, showing that success comes from persisting with the attempt -> observe -> learn cycle. This ties in to Raph Koster’s ‘Theory of Fun’ where he suggests that play is a training tool for the real world. If we are forever making games easier to win and removing all negative consequences from poor decisions within them, they lose this educational and empowering aspect. Games become more like television, purely an entertainment medium, losing the other things that they used to offer us.
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@Ben Sizer – Wow! Thanks for taking a strong stand on this one. I agree that consequential loss/death is an important part of games, for they help the player reshape their play style or strategy. That’s a great insight, re: programming. While I was never an accomplished programmer, I did take a few shots at making my own games as a child. I *knew* they would be difficult to do, but the challenge of programming it yourself (and the outcome of having your own game!) was absolutely wonderful. There is something enchanting with really getting to know a system (C64, Apple ][, TRS-80, IBM PC) on an intimate level in order to program it at all. When I spoke with John Romero at the GDC, we spent 3 hours swapping stories about programming old systems – he really had a passion for the challenges of old school game programming as a boy that continues today. I found his sense of tenacity with game programming very inspiring.
I shamefully have not read Raph Koster’s book yet – it has been on my ‘to do’ list for far too long. Perhaps now is the time.
Thank you so much for reading the article and all of the comments, as well as making a novel contribution. Now I’m off to read that Rampant Coyote thread
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looks like i’m late to the party but i’m tempted to dive in just for the hell of it.
my take on this issue is that when the focus of game design shifts towards telling movie or novel style stories it changes priorities altogether. if the goal is to have the player experience a story, then difficulty and any associated impediments (complicated controls, a preponderance of menus) become entirely undesirable since they can only serve to stop a potential player from reaching the story’s conclusion. granted, i don’t think this change in focus is any recent development; from wing commander to myst to final fantasy 7 developers have wanted to use games as a tool for traditional storytelling, and the fact that those examples all made loads of money doesn’t hurt when it comes to convincing others to follow suit. what has changed over time is that less and less people have kept the older design schools alive, leaving us at the point where a seriously difficult or 2d game on par with its predecessors is uncommon not just because of the skill involved but because there are so few studios that concentrate on these styles.
when people try to make difficult games these days they really do come off as simply abusive; difficulty these days seems to be either seen an inconvenience to be done away with, or a philosophy of gleefully punishing the player as much as possible.
bewilderment at old-school titles is a mix of a few factors. to someone who hasn’t had the opportunity to log some time in these games and get over the barriers to entry, the difference between nuisance and nuance is imperceptible – i say this as a fan of bullet hell shooters, a genre that while completely approachable often intimidates people into not even trying. you also have the fact that when the goal is to reach the end of the game rather than building the skills necessary to get there (that’s building, not buying or unlocking), death is stripped of its ability to communicate with the player or teach anything meaningful about design, instead becoming an invariably progress-halting roadblock. gamers like your cousin are of course neither soft nor stupid – it’s more that the design principles behind older titles are slowly becoming entirely alien and irrelevant to modern design, both for better and for worse.
tl,dr; i’d hate if every single game was as hard as some of the titles i enjoy, but the fact that there are so few developers these days that seem to approach difficulty with the correct mindset – that of teaching the player to do exciting things and letting them be awesome on their own terms rather than hitting buttons in a qte – is a damn shame.
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@sharc – many thanks for chiming in. This is an ongoing discussion so don’t feel like you’re showing up late; in fact Jorge Albor has posted a great response based on his experience of ‘difficulty’ here: http://experiencepoints.blogspot.com/2009/09/kids-these-days.html
In regards to your thought, “if the goal is to have the player experience a story, then difficulty and any associated impediments (complicated controls, a preponderance of menus) become entirely undesirable since they can only serve to stop a potential player from reaching the story’s conclusion”, I’m not sure that I agree fully. While insane, insurmountable difficulty, may not fit into storytelling – difficulty or impediments are a major part of any good game story. Think of how senseless any adventure game would be if the player had no particular obstacles to overcome, or puzzles to solve, in order to move on with the story? Without obstacles, it would not really be a game, but a book. In fact, I suspect that adventure games today have taken a great dive in terms of puzzle difficulty, because many players simply don’t want to spends hours or days solving a puzzle – they just want the story now.
I completely agree that developers today make less and less use of older gameplay styles. While there have been a few significant nuances, the vast majority of games are purely focused on a single design. Death has, for all intents and purposes, almost been completely removed from games because death is largely inconsequential as you’ve noted. You are right on the money with my cousin – he is bright, insightful, and curious – but not when it comes to gaming… older designs are truly irrelevant to him because they do not seem to suit his lifestyle. Which is too bad, because I think he’d realize how much more he’d develop by taking the older designs seriously.
Alas, I’m bordering on the kind of ‘Kids These Days’ arguments that Ben Abraham has warned me against in this thread, so I’ll shut up
Many thanks for reading the article and contributing to the discussion!
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ah, true, but those old adventure games never shunned or downplayed their “gamey” elements to focus on traditional storytelling. the developers always put as just as much effort into the puzzles and treated them as a valuable way to further the story – sierra used the various problems to solve as a way to draw you into the world and get you to interact with its unusual elements, whether that means mythological creatures, space exploration or secret voodoo cults. to shamelessly steal a point from cycle of the select button forums (http://forums.selectbutton.net/viewtopic.php?p=573075#573075), lucas arts also found ways to use puzzles as a means for expressing their characters – for example, it’s hard to picture guybrush hauling off and punching a guy in the face, but for full throttle’s lead it’s a perfectly acceptable solution to a conflict.
so in the end you’re still right because i didn’t explain myself very well. what i should have said is that these problems arise when a game focuses on storytelling – at the expense of other elements.
convincing people to give hard games a chance at times feels like selling them on learning dead languages to read thousand year-old poems. regardless of whatever the experience might provide, most people have no patience for the investment involved. i’m enough of a grump that you might catch a few statements from me re: dratted kids on my dadgum lawn, but when it comes to examining behavior in children and teenagers – who are by definition still developing and quick to learn from their environment – i tend to think the place to start looking is not at the subjects but around them. i don’t know if the fundamental nature of ten year-olds has changed completely since the eighties, but the game industry certainly has; cynical old me thinks that inoffensive, easygoing games are seen as easier to make and market, and ultimately more beneficial to certain bottom lines.
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@sharc – Thanks for the clarifications – it appears I fundamentally misread your first comment!
You put it in better words than I could have… the old Sierra games did a fantastic job of drawing me in (as a child and even now) through its complex interweaving of myth and puzzles … the world was more important than the puzzles themselves. This is a major accomplishment I think, and separates games like ‘Scribblenauts’ and ‘Professor Layton’ from truly worldly experiences like the Sierra and LucasArts games of yesteryear. I was playing “Loom” last night with my wife, and I realized that gamers today would find the first half hour of the game *so* tedious.. because it is pure exploration and engagement in the world, rather than puzzle-solving or storytelling for its own sake… too bad, because it’s one of the finest and unique adventure games out there.(btw – I just checked out cycle’s comment in the selectbutton thread – great read).
lol re: dead languages. I have very little success in persuading folks to play even *recent* games (in say, the last 10 years)… old and new gamers alike! As I suggested in the article, I believe that the ways in which games have changed in the last 20 years perfectly reflects how Western culture has come to reshape childhood. Not sure if kids are better off, or worse off, for it though.
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