DYEN: Games Don't Need To Be Difficult Anymore

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Games Don't Need To Be Difficult Anymore

Do games now even need to be difficult at all anymore? If you are from the NES generation I can see why you would think games should be confined to such a handicap, but if you think outside of the box for a second, what are games really? The cop-out answer would be to say that they are entertainment meant to stimulate the senses and challenge the user, hence the name 'video game'. I don't think games need to stimulate you at all, or at least not in the way they did in Contra or Street Fighter. I say you should look to films for a parallel, (and there's a difference between being a parallel to films in their historical progression and just trying to imitate feature films in content and structure) sure in the early days they needed to have some kind of real catch as to why people see them, like the fact that there was a faraway country with beautiful scenery or cutting-edge special effect for the time, but now those coexist with others meant more for your mind, and the medium is accepted as something that can feature content smarter than just eye candy. I think games should be able to stimulate your mind just as well as films can, in fact they have the potential to do it a lot better. The satisfaction you get from doing something in Half-Life 2 is seriously rewarding, and in the way that most games (note that most games besides HL2 use cutscenes- a handicap left over from trying to copy movies) can't replicate. The pure way of telling a story through this medium, one in which the user has at least a little bit of control over what happens, makes all the difference. Any part of Half-Life 2 could have played out in a passive medium such as films, but instead the fact that when a setpiece happens you affected it or when characters are talking, you, not a camera, are looking at them makes it so much more engaging. I have gone on record going so far as to say that games can't be successfully translated to film because film is an inferior form of storytelling. Of course stories made from the ground up as a film or even expertly adapted to one can be and are extremely effective, but games still haven't stopped trying to be half film, half interactive story. Half-Life 2 won't make a bad film because its story isn't good enough, it's because the amount of story gained from it is completely up to the user. Making this a static, and therefore boring sequence of images ruins the way the story in Half-Life 2 pans out. I stick to this statement.

I have also gone on record saying that our entire industry needs to change its name, since developers and people arguing about 'games as art' subjects have used the term 'video game' as a crutch to make their games hang onto bits and pieces of the 8-bit coin-ops of our past. The day when we wake up and realize that we don't need to make players pay by the death anymore is truly the day video games transcend their restrained roots.

Tags: Nintendo, Contra, Street Fighter, cutscene, Half-Life 2, immersion, Nintendo Entertainment System

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Andrew Wilson

May 14, 2009

There are good points... but every medium has its own strengths and weaknesses. For games, the key word is "interactivity." Yes, there does need to be a degree of challenege for a game. Video games are as much about Street Fighter, Pac-Man, and Tetris as they are about Final Fantasy or Half-Life. Even in Final Fantasy, which is one of my favorite game series, I'd feel pretty ripped off if the game didn't make me work for story progression. A lot of the fun in those games is growing your characters and mixing/matching techniques. Games are a superior experience to movies, yes... but that is partly because the best games challenge you to earn your payoff. Without challenge, you might as well be playing Dragon's Lair or Space Ace.

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Robert Keefe

How scary can anything in a horror game be if the player possesses a semiautomatic with infinite ammo that kills anything and everything quickly? If the player can't die in a video game, he loses his suspension of disbelief and then the plot becomes defunct. Although you believe difficulty is superfluous, fans of genres such as danmaku and rougelikes would wholehearted disagree with you. Personally, I don't care about the plot of a video game when my choices can't change it in any significant way, and in most games that is the cases. I also disapprove of using movies as a guide for games because virtually all exhibit a banal plot.

Nick Hawryluk

May 15, 2009

Well, first I don't believe that games that involve challenge should be done away with completely. I am just saying that they can coexist with what I think will be the general direction games should be going in. I think that games where they throw in things to make it 'harder' just because they can are being unreasonable, acting as if gamers aren't smart enough to appreciate what the game had worked so hard to create. For example, almost everyone who saw the Star Destroyer trailer where Starkiller merely rips the craft out of the sky thought it was awesome. When it showed up in-game however, it was an annoying mess where you were constantly hounded by TIE Fighters, obviously there to pad out the length. Sometimes you just want to feel like a Jedi, and the game should be trying to help you do that. You also point out that a horror game would not be scary without difficulty, but that is not necessarily true. The difficulty in a horror game should have nothing to do with it, because if you strip away all interactivity from a horror game you are left with a horror movie, which has proven that it can be quite scary. Was Condemned: Criminal Origins difficult just because you had lead pipes and guns with a few bullets in them? No, these tools just gave the illusion of helplessness, which definitely added to the experience. What really created the tension though, was the atmosphere created through the art and sound design. Also, you point out that game plots are generally bad, but that's because the developers aren't giving the plots a chance. They really think of a good plot as something of an added bonus, much as early films did, but there aren't many artistic visionaries helming games as their own projects. When you see The Departed, you know it is a Martin Scorsese picture, but play Dead Space and who would you credit that to? Only a few leads like Tim Schafer, Kojima and Suda51 can really be credited with making their own projects, and they all tell stories with games in their own ways. What we need is an industry where the creative force driving the game is at the front and center working on the gameplay and story as one entity. I had actually written a second part to this blog which I will be posting shortly for clarification on this subject.