Why games should never be P/C

Developers are being asked to fix every dodgy detail, right down to the treatment of digital guinea pigs. But who does it actually help?

There’s been a flicker of controversy around Stardew Valley, the Life Sim / RPG farming game by Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone. It concerns a guinea pig and his treatment. One of the NPCs has a pet guinea pig who is, apparently, being kept in substandard conditions for the animal’s needs.

Not being a real guinea pig, you may wonder why this matters. “It sets a bad example,” goes the logic. “People, especially young and impressionable people, shouldn’t be given information that might lead them to harm guinea pigs.”

A consideration for the future, perhaps; next time, a developer could Google guinea pigs before drawing the cage. The question is whether or not ConcernedApe should go back and rescue the fictional guinea pig already in Stardew Valley.

The problem with altering an existing game is that it censors our reality. The reality is, ConcernedApe didn’t know that you shouldn’t put guinea pigs in exercise wheels, which means that probably quite a lot of other people don’t know that either. His mistake – and most people’s total lack of response to it – tells us something about society that we wouldn’t otherwise have learned.

View full article at this link, on Gamers.

 

Why die in the sandbox?

I live in a house with two older people who don’t play video games. People who don’t play video games often wonder why people who do play video games get so wound up by them. In part, it’s because the engine is inconsistent in achieving what it’s supposed to, compared to real life; think what it would be like if for some reason you go to climb a wall, and you somehow accidentally spring-board off of it straight into the adjacent lake. It should be funny, but you’re having a hard time seeing the joke because, for no reason, you didn’t achieve what you wanted and you got wet.

Doesn’t that sound pointless and annoying? Well, that’s what happens when you die in video games. Non-gaming peoples usually suggest not playing games at all “if they make you so upset”. My response is to say that they’re not likely to become the utopia of fantastical hysteria they’ve been long promising to be if no one plays them and takes to the internet in fury over insensitive game design. When you’re scuba diving in your living room and it feels for all the world like you’re on a real life coral reef, you’ll thank us. And so will the environment.

Day-Night cycles

Since it became possible to have an inbuilt clock in games, time has become something of an obsession with developers. They sit around big tables, asking: “Should we have real-time?” or “Should we have a minute represent an hour? Or five minutes? It must all be consistent, or no one will find our game immersive. We can’t have people not being immersed!”

So began the tedious business of having day-night cycles in games, with night time that lasts as long as daytime. Games that work in real time like Animal Crossing and are at least predictable; if it’s night in real life, the game world will be in night mode, where you will have much the same restrictions as you do in real life. You can’t pop to a friend’s at one in the morning, or go shopping at 10pm. I’m fine with this because it does give you a sense of being in a kind of second life; there is a routine, there are rules, there are habits and patterns, you must learn them and follow them if you are to get everything you want to do today done. The same is true for non-real-time life sims such as Harvest Moon.

Mandatory cinematic sequences

Developers, developers, developers, developers. They know they make games. Probably. They might think they’re making films, though, judging by the amount of fake cinematography in them. One difference between actual cinematography and game cinematography is that filming in real life captures an action taking place outside of the cameraman, thus is a presentation medium.

Video games on the other hand are drawn and programmed, thus when you find yourself watching a lengthily cinema sequence, you can’t help but feel those who designed it are enjoying a spot of autofellatio. That is to say, they care far more about their work than they do about whether or not other people particularly want to see it. See, however good the map and graphics are, they are compliments to gameplay, not the gameplay itself. People don’t boot up video games for a passive experience, they do it for an active experience. The result is that however excellent the cinema, a large proportion of us will skip it.

Inventory space

Inventory space in games is a contrived thing. Assuming that we aren’t so deluded as to think video games have to be realistic; and knowing that the processing power and memory of video games today is such that no one player can ever hold so many items as to break the system; and having seen improvements to inventory design that makes them easy to sort through even when there are hundreds of items; I assume the reason for inventory limits is to artificially make the game harder.

Inventories take a few forms. Some of them have “slots”, where you can only have one or a few of the same type of item. For example, you may have a special weapon slot, where you have to choose between the grenade launcher and the flamethrower, or you may have an explosives slot where you choose between the rocket launcher and the RPG. Some allow you a limit of one specific item but allow you to hold all the items in the game at once. For example, you may be able to hold ten medicines and ten antidotes, and having nine medicines doesn’t allow you eleven antidotes. Others are space determined or weight determined, and these are generalised inventory spaces. You choose whether you fill your pockets up with armour, weapons, health items, drugs, food, alcohol, minions, tin cans, and once the space is full, it’s full. Sometimes overfilling your inventory is allowed but carries a cost, such as slowing you down or preventing quick travel.

Whence we sprung

We’re being forced to return to where we came from.

Home. Home is where the heart is. Or, failing that, the car. And the wardrobe. And the random pieces of crap you’ve collected on your travels. I could quite easily be describing life itself, but I’m actually describing the world of video games where you own a safehouse or some kind of base. Sometimes, several.

I have mixed feelings about homes in games. It does sometimes satisfy the nesting instinct to return home and put a load of things away in drawers. Working up to buying a house or several houses quickly becomes the aim of many a game which is supposed to be about stealing cars or fighting dragons. But, such homes usually create the necessity to return periodically; to drop off, to pick up, to heal, to organise, to faff about.

Replay value

At some point, games reviewers started examining games based on a mysterious thing called “replay value”. It is the idea that, now games have moved more into storytelling, they threaten to be over as soon as completed, as opposed to being playable many times. Since most people buy rather than rent games, you would want a game on your shelf to have replay value, or the ability to remain interesting upon second play. Either that, or you would want a game so long that you forget the start before you get to the end – I doubt video games will reach that peak for a while, requiring as it does far more power and work than simply programming in some collectables.

Cheating

“Playing” implies trivial. Let’s do what we damn please.

I’m disappointed in Rockstar, in the same way as one is disappointed by a very rebellious and reckless friend who stays at home one Saturday and watches The Real Housewives of Orange County. In amongst all the destruction and delicious amorality, there’s a flaw in the direction of their game design which is utterly incongruous to their whole philosophy. What happened to the cheats?

Moral choice systems

The problem with moral choice systems is that there doesn’t seem to be any way to win with them. Gawd knows, developers have tried. They’ve written whole alternative storylines and endings just to create replay value or variety. However, I contest that there is much of either being added. Here are all the ways in which moral choice systems have panned out, and the various ways in which they fail drastically.

Quit yo jibba-jabbin!

Friendly NPCs don’t half go on and on.

The other day I had quite a long day out in company and I found myself thinking how nice it would be to have a Skyrim: The Elder Scrolls companion. Someone who never speaks unless spoken to, never “chats” or wastes a word on anything that doesn’t serve a tidy purpose, and provides a variety of services on demand with nary a complaint and barely a comment. People that carry your bags, go away when you tell them to go away without getting offended, and come back when you tell them to come back.

It had been a very long day.