Once, it was considered highly desirable for games to be dense, packed with cinematics and rife with hours upon hours of gameplay to lozenge at a snail's pace. Now, not so, of course.
Length and slowness are seen as negatives, detractors to engagement. Cut scenes didn't just suffer a backlash -- they are just not to be done any more. Do you remember when the quantity of total FMV hours in a game was a bullet point in its favor, and not a reason to hate Metal Gear Solid 4?
Loosely, one could associate the advent of the long, video-heavy video game with the rise of the
PlayStation platforms; you could also possibly correlate it with Japanese-style game development, even if only because the traditionally Japanese approach to design has waned at the exact same rate as the popularity of this old-school, heavy sort of video game we're talking about here. Incidentally, the PlayStation platform is also decidedly declining, if we're just to look at the numbers.Anyway, whether or not you want to lump together Japanese design, the PlayStation and the long, filmic video game as part of the same entity is up to you. It's more interesting to reflect on why we were once so attracted to that kind of game, when just about every tenet the development community holds as law these days rejects it.
RPG Stories
To explain it at least in part, let's add one more correlation: the RPG. It's a genre popular for its storytelling, and Back In The Day when we had less genre diversity, it was arguably the only genre on the console that was telling much of a story. The most important element in any story is the characters, of course, and up until the PlayStation era, our "characters" were too crude looking for us to relate to them in any detail. Part of the reason Final Fantasy VII was such a watershed is that it was the first time most of us had played an RPG story where we got to see dramatic visuals of the characters in three dimensions.
It's almost comical if you watch those FMVs today, to recall how emotional we found their glassy expressions, but by the standards of FFVII's day, it was nothing short of a miracle, and VIII was even lovelier. Anyone remember bringing friends home from school and oh my god, watch this, sitting them in front of your PlayStation just to gawk at opening movies of popular games?
This Is Sparta?
I'm taking a nostalgia trip here, back to the days of Roman excesses. 'Course, we know what happened to Rome. Since those days, game design has learned a few crucial things: First, all games benefit from story -- it's not just for RPGs anymore. Second, story needs to be interactive, and is theoretically more impactful and engaging when told through gameplay and not static visuals. The player must have equal, if not more, control than the game over the pace at which things unfold. Thirdly -- and most significantly to this discussion -- more doesn't equal better.
We've had so many good games that are quite short -- ICO, remarkably ahead of its time in an era of titles that would fast become slogging relics, and of course, Portal come to mind -- and today's design ideal is relatively Spartan, built on replayable mechanics that are simple but deep. If The Old Way Of Doing Things is attractive anymore, it's probably the gloss of our younger memories, and the fact that we loved the ancient Great Big Video Game for its newness back then.Small Bites
Engagement is the Word Of The Day -- developers promoting new projects enthusiastically use phrases like "bite-sized chunks", "pick up and play". If a game doesn't demand any more than five minutes from you in any given session to be enjoyable, that's a plus. And when we pick-up-and-play these games in bite-sized chunks, we are meant to be immersed and to receive a narrative without ever needing to sit still, watch, read or listen. Oh, and the game is also supposed to teach us how to play it without us realizing we're being tutored, and we're never supposed to feel stumped or stuck.
Lofty goals, ain't they? Perhaps that's one of the reasons we're so easily and continually unsatisfied with much of what's coming out lately -- my general response to most of the "big" titles over the last several months has been, I see what you were after here, and it was a real good aim, but you didn't connect.
And this progress design has made toward the removal of absolutely any burden of paying attention from the player has been training us, I think, to be fundamentally passive players -- precisely the opposite of the increased immersion games have been aiming for. I fear that by habituating players to these design ideals, games are gradually eroding our motivation to take big bites out of the material
we're given.Indulge me in another nostalgia trip, and ask yourself when you loved video gaming the most. Maybe it was a time when a game surprised you -- recall the hairs on the back of your neck rising as you watched some opening FMV or other Back In The Day. More likely, though, you'll remember a time when you surprised yourself -- the satisfaction of completing 100 hours of something, the thrill of finally breaking through a point of punishing frustration, the time at your PC when you realized, all in a flash, that you needed to type "Put Rock On Anthill" instead of "Cover Anthill With Rock," and with that flung open a door to beating a title that had plagued you for months.
I'm not advocating a return to the cut scene-laden, lugubrious hundred-hour video game, and nor am I saying "new stuff sucks." I'm constantly impressed with the ways in which the wisdom of game design continues to evolve.
But I do often wonder if we're not losing something as the PlayStation era gets smaller and smaller in our rearview, as old-school design principles ebb away, and as the "bite sized chunk" becomes the desired paradigm.
I'm always saying "Engagement is a choice." We used to willingly confront obstacles in games, willingly elect to dedicate our time. I hope that games keep asking us to.
