Hey game developers, now that you're all back from not developing games at GDC, I've got a question for you. What's up with all the wishy-washy freedom? No really, I'm sick of it. Have you seen the place I live? In a tiny living room I've comfortably fit all the goodies I need, and in just the way I need them. My TV stand, my little end table, the couple of footstools. The corner lamp! I am a master of my living room, and don't you tell me no different. I do not need a mansion, I need some boundaries! I need things to control, to understand. The point is that I'm comfy here! I am so, so comfy.
How am I supposed to be comfy in a virtual gameworld that's so large I can barely remember where the shit anything is and that gives me forty-five abilities to interact with objects spread so far apart I have to hold up on the analog stick for a minute and a half to get to them?
Let me list a few games commonly regarded as totally awesome and sweet by a panel of experts: Link's Awakening, River City Ransom, NHL '96, Uniracers, and Goldeneye. I will not talk about all these games individually, but trust me when I say they have something in common.
These games are great because we, as players, are allowed to fully absorb and comprehend the skillsets, layouts, techniques, and strategies of the game in a relatively manageable amount of time, and in doing so fully exert our total control of them to create that little thing that devs these days like to call "emergent gameplay." Really emergent gameplay is just a tricky way to refer to a concept called "fun," which occurs when your imagination is limited a dozen times but breaks through the game walls once and makes you believe that if this is possible, anything might be. Only problem is lots of games today have so goddamned much to do that you'll never find the gameplay that emerges cause you're so busy marching through the million enormous tasks they've already given you to do—and by the time you finish you have spent so long playing that you are now totally bored.
You know those people who decorate their Final Fantasy XI or Ultima Online houses and then just hang out in them cause they're so great? How about Animal Crossing? Remember how you dug up those rare NES games and set them up all cool in your little house and then you could just kick it in there and click your little TV on and play your games? You were comfy in there, as comfy as a bug. These elements of compactness, this Delightful Smallness, is ebbing away. The tragedy is that developers are paying more to create bigger worlds, bigger games, massive expansive mansions where we can never be comfortable as gamers! Look dudes, you can spend less! All we want is our own room.
You might live in a country, but where you really live is smaller than that—a city, a neighborhood, an apartment building. I'll repeat it until the end of time not cause I praise the man but because I praise the statement, probably translated dubiously and paraphrased from memory endlessly: "wouldn't it be fun to have a world of playgrounds at your fingertips?"
Mr. Miyamoto did not posit we inhabit a playground the size of a world, he wanted a world full of playgrounds.
When you clear out a room in a warehouse in River City Ransom and realize nothing can kill you except the chains and rocks smuggled in by you and your buddy it becomes a new kind of game entirely. When your life consists of checking a single man into the glass of a hockey ring eighty times a game, the one time you do it and the glass breaks is a revelation. When you earn a feather that lets you jump over pits, the joy comes in seeing if you can just barely squeak by a pit that seems too large to clear. When you wonder if you can really get across this water and over to that other guardhouse at the dam, you have cultivated a freedom allowed by imposed boundaries. In order to be free, we need walls! It sounds weird, but only because it's true.
To make us comfortable, to make us explore, to make us test the boundaries of our world, the best games are compact. The next time I boot something up and find myself in an open field stretching thirty-seven procedurally-generated miles in every direction is the next time I load up River City Ransom and on one screen with two buttons kick an oil drum into a guy so hard it knocks him down and comes screaming back at me then leap over it and kick a rock someone threw at me out of the air and feel like a goddamned king.
How am I supposed to be comfy in a virtual gameworld that's so large I can barely remember where the shit anything is and that gives me forty-five abilities to interact with objects spread so far apart I have to hold up on the analog stick for a minute and a half to get to them?
Let me list a few games commonly regarded as totally awesome and sweet by a panel of experts: Link's Awakening, River City Ransom, NHL '96, Uniracers, and Goldeneye. I will not talk about all these games individually, but trust me when I say they have something in common.
These games are great because we, as players, are allowed to fully absorb and comprehend the skillsets, layouts, techniques, and strategies of the game in a relatively manageable amount of time, and in doing so fully exert our total control of them to create that little thing that devs these days like to call "emergent gameplay." Really emergent gameplay is just a tricky way to refer to a concept called "fun," which occurs when your imagination is limited a dozen times but breaks through the game walls once and makes you believe that if this is possible, anything might be. Only problem is lots of games today have so goddamned much to do that you'll never find the gameplay that emerges cause you're so busy marching through the million enormous tasks they've already given you to do—and by the time you finish you have spent so long playing that you are now totally bored.
You know those people who decorate their Final Fantasy XI or Ultima Online houses and then just hang out in them cause they're so great? How about Animal Crossing? Remember how you dug up those rare NES games and set them up all cool in your little house and then you could just kick it in there and click your little TV on and play your games? You were comfy in there, as comfy as a bug. These elements of compactness, this Delightful Smallness, is ebbing away. The tragedy is that developers are paying more to create bigger worlds, bigger games, massive expansive mansions where we can never be comfortable as gamers! Look dudes, you can spend less! All we want is our own room.
You might live in a country, but where you really live is smaller than that—a city, a neighborhood, an apartment building. I'll repeat it until the end of time not cause I praise the man but because I praise the statement, probably translated dubiously and paraphrased from memory endlessly: "wouldn't it be fun to have a world of playgrounds at your fingertips?"
Mr. Miyamoto did not posit we inhabit a playground the size of a world, he wanted a world full of playgrounds.
When you clear out a room in a warehouse in River City Ransom and realize nothing can kill you except the chains and rocks smuggled in by you and your buddy it becomes a new kind of game entirely. When your life consists of checking a single man into the glass of a hockey ring eighty times a game, the one time you do it and the glass breaks is a revelation. When you earn a feather that lets you jump over pits, the joy comes in seeing if you can just barely squeak by a pit that seems too large to clear. When you wonder if you can really get across this water and over to that other guardhouse at the dam, you have cultivated a freedom allowed by imposed boundaries. In order to be free, we need walls! It sounds weird, but only because it's true.
To make us comfortable, to make us explore, to make us test the boundaries of our world, the best games are compact. The next time I boot something up and find myself in an open field stretching thirty-seven procedurally-generated miles in every direction is the next time I load up River City Ransom and on one screen with two buttons kick an oil drum into a guy so hard it knocks him down and comes screaming back at me then leap over it and kick a rock someone threw at me out of the air and feel like a goddamned king.