Dear Game Developers: Walking Isn't Fun

Recently, I've been trying a bit harder to work through my oversized backlog of unfinished and unplayed games, which is mostly the result of too many impulsive purchases of irresistibly inexpensive bundles. They never put more than the tiniest dent in my wallet but now threaten to take a substantial chunk of my time left on Earth if ever I am to say I've played them all. My admittedly questionable strategy thus far has been guaranteed quantity over probable quality: rather than trying to play the best games first, I've been trying to knock out a lot of short games to make the perceived size of the list itself a bit less intimidating. This means I'm finally trying a lot of the games which I never would have thought to purchase if they hadn't come bundled with more attractive games. Sometimes, these small-scale indie games turn out to be hidden gems (which, if you were wondering, is why I play them at all). Other times, I'm not so lucky.

Last weekend, I spent about two hours playing through Pneuma: Breath of Life — which is better described as a tech demo than a game, just barely avoids classification as a "walking simulator" with the inclusion of a few mechanically interesting but ultimately far-too-easy puzzles, and tries (and fails) to be deep and meaningful in an obnoxiously unoriginal way. To be fair, I feel that the game would have been entirely bearable if not for the protagonist's incessant pseudo-philosophical jabbering and generally unfunny commentary. Alas, however, I played with the speakers turned on.

This weekend, I got to the end of Neverending Nightmares, which has a great visual style and a nice soundtrack, but suffers from an insufficient density of actual, meaningful, engaging gameplay. There are some monsters to avoid and a few items to find, but most rooms hold nothing at all of interest except for the opportunity to watch the slow-moving protagonist drag his feet from one door to the next. Maybe all this emptiness was meant to build suspense and anticipation for the scary parts, but it doesn't quite do that. It just becomes boring. I'd absolutely love a game with the aesthetics of Neverending Nightmares and the gameplay mechanics of Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts, but no such thing exists as far as I know.

I sometimes consider myself to be a connoisseur of unpopular and forgotten games — those which are not quite bad, but arguably mediocre, rough around the edges and unrefined, charming in a way that the "Game of the Year" will never be, and more memorable than yet another highly-polished but necessarily generic blockbuster marketed to the widest possible audience. Although I do enjoy the more mainstream games, which have certainly earned their place at the top, I also appreciate attempts at innovation and originality even when the final product is flawed. Rather than demanding perfection in games, I simply want to see things I've never seen before.

So I guess I consider myself to be a somewhat open-minded individual when it comes to video games. I am, however, rapidly becoming less tolerant of games in which far too much time is spent simply moving from point A to point B. And don't even get me started on games which consist entirely of moving from point A to point B. It's not original; no boundaries are being shattered; it's not 2007 anymore and you're not Jason Rohrer creating Passage. So stop it.

Don't get me wrong; I love what independent developers have done for the game industry, in general. But at some point, developers and consumers of independent games began to believe not only that video games can/should/must be "art" (an opinion with which I do not wholly disagree) but also that video games can/should/must become "art" by being less interactive (which, I think, is ridiculous). The deliberate abandonment of challenge and consequent loss of any engaging gameplay, in favor of light "exploration" (too often of a mostly linear path) and passive "experience" (of moving through the virtual environment of an interactive story), has become far too normal in indie "game" development.

Although I do acknowledge the value of something like Dear Esther (with the stipulation that such products should not be marketed as games at all), I also believe that an interactive experience which requires constant input from the player should be more engaging than Dear Esther is. The player should never be forced to spend more than a minute simply moving from one place to another, with no obstacles or challenges in between. If obstacles or challenges are not desired, then the requirement of constant input from the player is a nuisance. I used to believe that Dear Esther could actually be a good "game" if there were some puzzles to solve along the way, but "Dear Esther with puzzles" is exactly what games like Mind: Path to Thalamus and Pneuma: Breath of Life try to be, and they're not quite effective. Mind: Path to Thalamus at least has some decent puzzles and less of the pointless point-A-to-point-B non-gameplay, but you'll still spend too much time wishing you could walk faster while the narrator philosophizes.

As for games like Neverending Nightmares, I can only assume that developers sometimes run out of ideas and try to beef up the playtime with lots of nothing in between the good parts. This is an awful idea. If your game has 20 minutes of fun, make it a 20-minute game and set the price accordingly. Don't add a bunch of empty rooms and force the player to walk through them. Don't make the game overly repetitive and decrease the player's movement speed. Increased playtime is worth nothing if the extra time spent isn't any fun.

Game Journalist Attempts to Play Game

Yesterday, notoriously awful "gaming" website Polygon posted the first thirty minutes of the new Doom game's single-player mode on YouTube. There's no indication of who was playing, but it's pretty safe to assume it was indeed a Polygon employee, not just because it came from their YouTube account but because it's likely that the incompetent goons who write for Polygon are exactly this bad at video games:


I don't really need to make fun of this video. It speaks for itself. I don't need to spend any more than this one sentence expressing my mixed feelings of dismay and amusement that there might actually be a real person in the world who is so bad at a video game and yet so sure that the footage is good enough to share with the world, because I know everyone else feels the same.

But even now that I've accepted and learned to live with the fact that someone most likely got paid to record this video, there are so many other secondary and tertiary reasons to be upset:

"Lockdown in effect." Maybe it's just that this is the beginning of the game and the player is assumed to be in need of some tutorial lessons in a controlled environment. Maybe this "lockdown" sequence is a recurring event in a game which turns out to be what I fear most: a series of mandatory fights in a linear series of rooms, with only the occasional open area or branching path. Either way, it's just too "modern gaming" for a product whose destiny, I thought, was to pander to the nostalgic fans of an older Doom which featured less hand-holding and allowed more freedom to explore.

Tiny little cut scenes. I've known about it since the first trailer for the game, but it still bothers me. New gun? Tiny cut scene. New item? Tiny cut scene. Push the magic "look how awesomely I can kill this bad guy" button next to an enemy whose suddenly glowing body is supposedly an indication that he's about to die? Tiny cut scene. Drop from a great height? Tiny cut scene. It breaks the flow of what might otherwise have been a nice run-and-gun game worthy of being called Doom. But hey, what do I know? I'm just some old guy who remembers the '90s.

This bad video makes the game look bad (graphics aside, of course). That's probably why I'm nit-picking about minor aspects of the game instead of appreciating what it does right, like blood and guts.

This video is probably bait. Really, could anyone be this proudly awful at a game? It was probably done for attention. Surely the video has gotten more views for being awful than it would have gotten for being half-decent. And here I am contributing to that.

These people get paid to write video games news and reviews. I'm mad about this whether the video is serious or not. If they intentionally made the video so bad with the hope that their stupidity would go viral, I don't trust them to report on video games. If they are really this bad at video games, I don't trust them to review video games.

Polygon still exists. It's terrible.

People still play first-person shooters with controllers. I certainly don't mean to imply that the use of a controller instead of a mouse is the sole or primary reason for such spectacularly awful performance. However, even such a woefully inept and inexperienced player could have produced a more bearable and less embarrassing video with the use of a mouse, and even the best player's aiming is jerky and unnatural with a controller. The video is hard to watch for reasons that have nothing to do with skill. Every video of a first-person shooter being played with thumbsticks gives me motion sickness. "A mouse makes the game too easy" is always the first retort from people who think they need to defend their favorite toy from my opinions, but in any decent shooter, placing the reticle on a target is more of a basic requisite skill than a meaningful challenge, so there's no excuse for making it artificially hard by aiming with a device which is bad for aiming. Even video game developers know this, which is why console shooters have aim assistance. They don't want you to suck at aiming, but controllers are so awful that the game designers need to help you to not suck at aiming. Every good first-person shooter is better with a mouse and keyboard. Every player who is good with a controller can be better with a mouse and keyboard. No one can refute this with a straight face.

I'm tired and angry now. I can't even finish writing this.