Those of us who have put on a few years are often heard to say that things were different when we were younger. That’s true; it is difficult to argue against it. Change happens, and no one can stop it. Talking about how things once were is not a bad thing.
Of course, the problem is that most of us speak as if things were better then; and that means that they’re not so good now. This is a simple problem of perspective, really. There are many things that are better now. I can write books, typing them myself very quickly on a touch sensitive electronic keyboard, nearly as fast as a professional typist could have done when I was a child, and, thanks to spell checkers and auto-corrections and the other wonders of word processing, I can catch and fix the errors before they waste paper. There are thousands of things that have changed. Some certainly were better before, but as many are better now. To want things to be exactly as they were is to want the impossible; to want some things to change and others to stay the same is to misunderstand the nature of the world, a place where nothing is permanent.
I heard the words in the mouth of my eldest son today. That was why it caught my ear. A twenty year old was talking to his teenaged brothers about video games, as they played on an emulator that reproduced some of what to them are the older games, those from the original Nintendo Entertainment System, the Atari, and my personal favorite electronic game system, the Intellivision. They were talking about how challenging the games proved to be, and it was in this context that the older boy made his comment. Specifically he said that the new games are for entertainment, but the old ones were challenges.
I was not part of the conversation, and did not ask what he meant until much later. However, as the father of boys I have watched video games evolve over the past quarter century from Pong and Tank into Final Fantasy. I remember when it became highly desirable to have a Game Genie for every game system you owned, so that you could disable features of the games and make them easier to play. Now it seems that the designers of the consoles and games have co-opted this market for themselves, building cheat codes into the system and publishing books for each game which line the pockets of the game designers and give players the ability to change the difficulty level, enter secret areas, find special items.
The old-timer in me reacts very negatively to all this. It strikes me as cheating; in fact, these are generally called cheat codes. My wife, on the other hand, tells me it’s expected. She’s right; it’s not cheating. It’s a marketing strategy which sells the game with stripped rules and then sells the full strategy rule book separately for those who actually want to play the game. It is the evolution of video game marketing. I might not like it, but it’s not going to change back to the way it was to please me.
Yet the words of my son echo in my ears. The new games are for entertainment; the old ones were challenging.
It’s not too difficult to see how that came about. After all, when Pong and Tank first came out, the systems on which they ran were limited, and the games could only do so much. You played against an opponent, usually, another player whose skill provided the challenge. As the systems became more sophisticated, games like Asteroids and Space Invaders let you play against the computer, and greater complexity and better graphics made the games more challenging, and thus more rewarding to beat. At the same time, there were always those who couldn’t beat the game, whether because they were younger or less skilled or merely for lack of patience, and something of a social prestige became attached to having beaten the games. In the midst of this, the cheats came out, the Game Sharks and Game Genies and whatever else, so that you could still beat the game even if you weren’t good enough. If you got killed too often, you could make yourself invulnerable; if it took you too long to beat the enemy, you could give yourself fatal attacks. Infinite lives, invisibility, maximum damage values–there were many ways you could make the game easier.
However, once the game was easy, anyone could beat it, and there was no longer the same prestige from winning. Now when a game came out, it was only a few days before the codes to beat it were being passed around from player to player, and people who could hardly control a controller were cranking out high scores. In games that are supposed to challenge you, the loss of that challenge is the loss of their value. They become boring. No one plays a boring game.
To save the market, perhaps, an effort was made to make them interesting again. There were still player on player games, in which codes and cheats didn’t really make the game easier because it was still your skill against that of your opponent; but for one-player games, something had to be done that would keep them attractive.
There might have been another answer; but the answer that seems to have emerged is to use the power of the game system to tell stories–interactive stories, but stories nonetheless. The players are told what to do, and they do that, and the story unfolds around them. Moving the characters through the adventure becomes a sort of high-tech page turning that lets the story continue.
Ryan, who made the original statement, says he sees it as a sort of marketing strategy. The market is perhaps splintered into the really good players who can beat any challenge fairly quickly, average players who will stay at a game until they succeed, and others who really just want something to entertain them for a bit. If you make a game catering to players who can play well, you overly limit your appeal. For a game to be successful, it has to be attractive to people with only limited video game skill. Otherwise it won’t sell broadly enough. Thus it’s necessary to produce a large number of games of mediocre challenge; and games with mediocre challenge need some other hook to sell them. Hence, they become electronic stories.
Maybe I’m entirely wrong about this; I don’t play these games, not since I tired of Tetris and couldn’t get anyone interested in a round of Lunar Pool. Yet I see a parallel development in the role playing game world. Many people speculate as to why the earliest games were so very challenge-oriented and the most recent ones are so much more focused on story. You will read (depending where you read) that those early games were really war games with fantasy elements, the characters merely tokens through which combats were won and lost. You will read that there have always been players who wanted story, and were frustrated by what those games seemed to promise but failed to deliver. Perhaps, though, it is something more subtle, more basic, more hidden by the fact that it is so thoroughly revealed. Perhaps there has been a real shift in our culture, away from games that challenge and toward those that tell stories. People who once watched baseball, football, basketball, tennis, and even golf, where skill and luck helped players overcome challenges, are today watching professional wrestling, where they at least suspect the bouts are fixed, and the real show is the soap opera of challenges, banter, blather, and emotion that is thrown around outside the ring. Mysteries, that genre in which the audience is invited to try to solve the puzzle before the story reveals it, have faded from books and televisions to be replaced by police procedurals and crime stories, in which there are no clues for the audience but merely the gradual unfolding of the plot. We’re in an age in which challenge is not so popular as it was, even less than twenty years ago.
That’s not to say no one wants a good challenge anymore. Cultures are never so monolithic that the old cannot continue beside the new. It is to say that things change, and being sensitive to that change and able to adapt to it is an important part of staying relevant. Zaxxon was a great game in its day, and still a challenge now, but the world isn’t waiting for another game like it. We are entertained by something else now.
Next week, something different.
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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc. His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.
