Are Game Developers Getting Too Smart For Their Own Good?

Editorial by: Maverik


Progress is a wonderful thing. Without progress, we'd never have useful things like TVs, microwaves, space shuttles and other essential things. Well, maybe space shuttles aren't essential, but they're certainly very cleverly put-together. And it's a good thing that our existing inventions keep on getting refined and improved. Take games, for instance. It wasn't that long ago that a video game meant moving a little line up and down to bounce a small dot to the other side of the screen, and back again. Nowadays, we have massive 3D levels with believable and interactive environments. We have high-quality sound effects and really deep and enjoyable gameplay that can be constantly varied.

I really enjoy modern gaming, and all the recent improvements are most welcome. But there's a downside to this, too, and that's what I propose to talk about in this editorial.

It's this: game developers are beginning to go too far, and are putting a number of features in their games that are just plain unwelcome. And annoying. And what's worse, it's becoming a disturbing trend. Don't get me wrong, it's not a life-or-death issue by any stretch of the imagination. It's just that many of the recent features cropping up in our games are beginning to detract from the experience of gaming for fun, and I'd like to call attention to it.

The first little problem here is the switch to more-complicated game interfaces. As an example, look at the Nintendo 64. One of the first racing games for the system was Mario Kart 64. The game was fun, and still is fun, but one thing I'd like to note is that if you wanted a game of MK64, you just switched on, pressed a button to get to the Start Screen, then pushed Start to get to the Menu screen. From there, you could get straight into a game with a few button presses, taking perhaps 5 seconds. Simple.

Now take a more recent game, Micro Machines 64. This game is also fun, and perhaps even more so. But the interface here isn't nearly so straightforward. To begin a game here, you first have to wait for a Title screen to fade away, then wait a few more seconds to select the language. Then, instead of getting a menu screen, you get a little car sitting on a road. The car drives forward and you arrive at a junction. You pick the number of players who are playing, and then each player, one after the other, scrolls through a list of characters to use. Once that's sorted, the car drives on, turning left and right along the path. If you're playing with two players, there's now two cars driving along, taking twice as long to reach the next junction. If you're playing with eight players, that's eight cars... At the next junction, you pick the game mode, then all the cars drive on again. Then you pick the game speed, and the cars drive on once more. Finally, you can pick a track to race on. But even then the ordeal isn't over - pick a wrong track and there's no way of backing out - you have to wait for the race to start, then quit. Which takes you all the way back to the start of the drive-thru menus...

It's different to the Mario Kart system. It's clearly more advanced, and very clever. Look at all the little cars screeching to a stop at each junction, one after the other. How fitting. The developers certainly spent some time making their menu system stand out from the crowd. True, but it's just not wanted! Sure, it's cute the first time, but it gets really tiresome doing this rigmarole every single time you want to play. The real fun of the game comes in playing it, not admiring some fancy and very time-consuming little startup sequence. This complex interface purports to be an advancement, but it's really a backwards step. Give me the quick push-and-play of Mario Kart. Micro Machines is a better game, but the need to spend several minutes each time setting it up often makes Mario Kart the one which gets played.

This is just one example of developers creating what they see as an impressive innovation, but not realising that some things just don't need improving. The Micro Machines interface is unusual in its length and overt complexity, but it's by no means the first and last such interface. Another related complaint is the prevalence of annoying introductory screens which must be sat through before gamers can even get to the menu interface. Forsaken, for example, forces gamers to watch four lengthy screens displaying the icons of the producers and developers. Fair enough, creators of quality games ought to get in a plug for themselves. But is it too much to ask that players can push a button to skip these screens once they've read the word 'Acclaim'? Sitting through a good minute or two of this whenever you turn on a game is unnecessary. It's quite common on Nintendo 64 games, though - Forsaken, Donkey Kong 64, Diddy Kong Racing, Beetle Adventure Racing, Banjo-Kazooie... it goes on and on. Early games like Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, Starfox and Goldeneye had similar screens, but you could bypass them with a quick button press or two, and still take in who had made the game.

My most loathed 'innovation', though, and the one I'm most vocal about, is the sudden trend for games to record statistics. Don't get me wrong - I'm all for some recording of statistics. Levels you've completed, high scores you've attained, fastest racetrack times - great! But what I do take exception to is when games start recording every little thing which has happened. 'Total game time' timers, for instance, introduced most notably on the N64 by Rare. Every Rare game, these days, comes with one of these timers. Banjo-Kazooie, Perfect Dark, Jet Force Gemini, Donkey Kong 64, and no doubt Conker's BFD too. Whenever you begin a single-player game, these timers kick in, recording exactly how long you've played for, right down to the last second. Let me say this: I don't want to know precisely how long I've been playing one of these games. Not because I play from dawn till dusk, stopping gaming only to eat and sleep. Nor because I have a rationed amount of gaming time. No, I'm a fairly moderate gamer, playing perhaps a couple of hours each day, pretty much whenever I feel like it. But I object to the constant sense of competition these timers impose. I don't want to be concerned even a tiny degree about whether I'm wasting time in an area, whether I could do this faster, whether I should save now, having spent half an hour solving a puzzle, or whether I ought instead to quit without saving, and go back over the same ground knowing what I have to do, but doing it quicker. I want to play for fun, and not have my total play time written down in stone.

I'm far from saying that such timers are absolutely unwanted. Many gamers, I'm sure, thrive on the competitve side that the timers create, and for whom replay value is enhanced by trying to beat their best time. But surely it's not too much to ask that the timers are given as an option, not as a requirement? Why can't you choose, when starting a file, whether or not it is to be timed? And in a game like Perfect Dark, where once you've finished it, you would never clear your file and start again, instead merely choosing your missions from the completed set now available, surely additional timing of gameplay is totally redundant? Goldeneye never had the timers, and as a result redoing old levels, perhaps to get new cheats, never had any feelings of concern over the time that was 'racking up' - and made Goldeneye vastly better for it.

It's not just game timers that I think are infuriating by being compulsory. Looking at Perfect Dark again, this time at multiplayer mode, there is an option to save your deathmatch character and his/her statistics. In principle, this is a great idea, and the idea of tallying up the awards you earn - Most Kills, Least Deaths, Most Head Shots and Highest Accuracy - as well as the number of wins and losses you've had, is very nice. But what I don't like is the additional unwanted records. The exact number of shots you've fired? Your total accuracy? Total time spent? I don't want to worry about what letting rip with the Reaper is doing to my overall accuracy - I just want to let it blaze away spewing bullets in all directions. Come on, too much detail! Let's put a little fun back into it! Mercifully, you don't have to create and keep a permanent multiplayer character, so there's the option of effectively turning off this recording, though it would have been nice if the saved character option had focused more on saving sensible information only. But that's being hypocritical, and at least you have the option.

But that's by no means always the case. In a final example, Super Smash Brothers, there is absolutely no way of turning off multiplayer statistics, which record games won, each character's time spent, damage dealt and received, etc etc. Even worse, these stats are recorded even when it's a computer player controlling the character, leading to angry insistence that a player's 'own' character is not to be allocated to a computer player when others are playing. The only way to remove this information is to erase the game data, which isn't really an option. The developers no doubt wanted to impress with their recording system, which is a first among fighting games, at least on the N64. But come on, do we really want to know all this? What happened to gaming for fun?

It's not true that all innovations are bad, nor that clever features are unwanted. And no doubt many gamers enjoy and approve of the very features that I and others take a keen disapproval of. What I'm advocating most of all is that game designers recognise that not everyone wants all of these 'improvements', and just give us the choice. If we want our games timed, our statistics recorded in fine detail, and to see lengthy introductions - fine. If not, please let us push a button or select an option, and turn off the things that detract from the simple fun and enjoyment that games are meant to provide. Please.

Tangycheese's response:
I have to confess that I too am sometimes ticked off a bit by all the little quirks that have gone in to modern games. In particular that ridiculous Micro Machines select menu. It's certainly true that programmers do try and add bits where they don't need to - and it's becoming a real pain in the backside. But at the same time, I actually like the idea of a timed game. Obviously Mav takes just a bit longer on games than the rest of us....