On Game Launchers

If you're a consumer of PC games and you're not clinging desperately to the past, you probably have a Steam account. Valve Corporation's digital distribution platform may have been controversial, when it was first established in 2003 and when the highly anticipated Half-Life 2 launched using Steam for DRM toward the end of the following year — for, at the time, PC games were still most commonly sold on discs, and the thought of digital distribution overtaking physical media was anathema — but over the past decade-and-a-half, those who were resistant to digital distribution in general, and to Steam in particular, have either changed their minds, accepted defeat, or abandoned PC games as a hobby. Digital distribution won, and Steam cornered the market.

Digital Distribution: Deal With It

Of course, some still refuse to use Steam, and some even refuse to pay for digital distribution (whether that means missing out on most PC games or getting them illegally). Among those who do use Steam, however, many believe that the leading PC game store has justified its place at the top, if not earned it outright. As a store and as a download client, Steam is pretty solid; Steam sales are famous for a reason, and the Steam client is a prime example of why digital distribution really isn't that bad.

Yes, I am old enough to remember the good old days when games came on discs. I especially remember entering product keys, manually downloading and installing patches, and needing to put the disc back into the computer every time I wanted to play certain games. Modern digital distribution eliminates these particular nuisances. In many ways, having a fully digital game collection is just more convenient than having a shelf full of discs, so it's no surprise that so many of us have forgiven the fact that we don't really own the games we buy from digital distributors. If Steam ever goes belly up, we will all lose our Steam libraries — but in the meantime, at least Steam games have one-click installation and automatic updates.

Steam's other features help too. Some of them have come to be fairly common in game launchers, such as friends lists and achievements. Others are less common and, when brought together in one (slightly bloated but still user-friendly) package, they make Steam a pleasure to use, even in comparison to other digital distribution clients. Among the Steam client features I've used personally are user reviews, cloud saves, family sharing, in-home streaming, profile customization, group chat, voice chat, an in-game overlay with a web browser, community forums, user-submitted guides for each game, a system for sharing user-created mods, and the ability to add non-Steam games to the Steam interface. (There's also that community market on which you can sell those silly trading cards for store credit, or buy cards if you actually want them for some reason, but I think most causal Steam users ignore that.)

In summary, what was once an annoying launcher for a mid-2000s first-person shooter has become something actually useful that we don't mind having installed. But Steam isn't the only digital distribution platform for games. It's just the biggest. What about the other platforms? Are they worth using?

Everything in One Place

If you just think of each digital distribution platform as a store, it's easy to justify straying from Steam to buy games elsewhere. Whenever you want to buy something, you should at least compare prices on a few different stores. (PC games are no exception; if a game is sold in more than one place, Steam isn't guaranteed to have the best price for any given game at any given moment.) However, a digital distributor is not just a store. It's also an online repository for all the stuff you bought from the store.

Maybe this doesn't matter if you manage to avoid ever downloading anything twice, but digital content is ephemeral and disappears if you press the wrong button, so you might need to download it again. Doing so will require logging in to the account you created at the store from which you bought your digital product. Shopping around and always buying from whichever store has the lowest price on a given thing seems like a good idea, but if you end up using a dozen different stores to buy games then you'll need to keep track of a dozen different accounts in order to maintain access to all of your games.

Most major digital distributors also make you use their client software to download, install, and launch your games, so buying and downloading games from multiple digital retailers also means installing multiple launchers. (GOG is one of a few exceptions, as their games are DRM-free and thus their Galaxy launcher is optional, but if you buy games from Uplay, Origin, Battle.net, and the Epic Games store, you'll need the respective launchers if you actually want to play those games.) Are we okay with having two launchers installed? How about having three or four of them?

Personally, I don't think it's a big deal, but a lot of people don't like it. Some see all launchers as bloatware (and would prefer direct downloads of DRM-free games, as from stores like GOG). Others appreciate the convenience of a launcher, but believe this convenience is greatly diminished as the number of launchers increases. The latter view is actually more common, as most of us have accepted the futility of trying to build a fully DRM-free PC game collection in the digital distribution era, and just want to settle for the next best thing: an entire game collection consolidated on exactly one launcher.

I can absolutely see the appeal of it. Having all of your games in one place keeps your collection organized, and gives you one-click access to every game without logging in to more than one online service. On the other hand, you're also ensuring that you'll lose absolutely everything if you lose access to that one account. Those of us who use more than one platform, on the other hand, would at least have something left if we lost our Steam accounts. Maybe it's a good idea to diversify your game collection instead of putting all your eggs in one basket. The idea of Steam going permanently offline is very hypothetical, as there's no indication that it will happen in the near future; and individual accounts being banned, stolen, or otherwise lost is extremely unlikely unless the account's owner does something very wrong — but all of these things are still possible.

For what it's worth, if had to tie my entire game collection to one launcher, I would choose Steam as well, and not just because it's the most feature-rich and fully developed platform. Unfortunately for its competitors, Steam's main two advantages: the most games and the most users. The appeal of the latter is obvious; your friends are more likely to be on Steam than on any other digital distribution platform. (GOG Galaxy has a friends list too but, for me, it's empty.) Meanwhile, Steam having the most games tells its users that they don't need to go anywhere else, even if they don't really mind creating accounts on other sites and having their game collections split across multiple libraries, and those who do want to limit themselves to one account and one launcher would be crazy not to choose the platform with the largest number of games for sale.

Competition versus Convenience

So competitors with no hope of competing with the volume of Steam's catalog need to find another way to stand out. GOG has its own niche, specializing mostly in selling old games updated for modern systems and selling them DRM-free. Humble Bundle also sells some DRM-free games (in addition to lots of Steam keys) and, as the name implies, still specializes in limited-time indie game bundles (even though the site has long had a full-time store). Both GOG and Humble also describe themselves as curated in order to differentiate their offerings from Steam's nauseatingly long list of games.

Some other digital distribution platforms might not even be considered direct competitors to Steam, as they act primarily as single-publisher stores — namely Blizzard's Battle.net, Ubisoft's Uplay, and EA's Origin. Playing games which are exclusive to these platforms or require their DRM is really the only reason to use them, but people do use them. These stores don't need to be better platforms than Steam, because they know customers will be drawn in by the few popular games over which they have exclusive control.

Steam's newest and most controversial competitor, the Epic Games store, is similar to Uplay and Origin in that it clearly intends to thrive on exclusive games as opposed to trying to create a better user experience than what is offered by Steam. What makes Epic Games controversial is that they're not content to have exclusive control over the games they publish. They've been spending a massive amount of money on exclusivity deals for other companies' games, essentially paying those companies not to do business with Steam. This isn't a new tactic, but they've used it on games which were days away from release on Steam, as well as games which were crowdfunded with the expectation of a Steam release. The fact that Tencent (and thus, allegedly, China itself) owns 40% of Epic Games doesn't help its popularity, nor does the fact that the Epic Games store and client are so pathetically bare-bones in terms of features because Epic Games is more interested in buying exclusivity than improving the user experience, nor does the fact that Epic Games' recent "Epic Mega Sale" was such a poorly planned disaster that some publishers pulled their games.

I started writing this post because the dominance of Steam, the (often exaggerated) rise of Epic Games, and the benefits of a single consolidated game library versus the need for competition among retailers seem to be hot topics lately. In particular, I've noticed an increase in complaints about PC gamers needing too many launchers to play all of the games they want to play. These complaints often boil down to frustration over games not being released on Steam; the "no Steam, no buy" crowd has always existed, but now it seems to me that they're either more numerous or more vocal. Either way, it's clearly a backlash against Epic Games, driven largely by the company's recent attempts to strongarm its way to the forefront of PC game retail.

Epic Games has done some nice things, both for consumers (like the ongoing spree of free giveaways), and for developers (like taking a smaller revenue cut than many other stores), but they've doubled down so hard on the one thing that pisses people off — buying exclusivity for games that were already advertised on other stores — that it's hard to see their negative reputation as undeserved. And yet, despite their credibility being in the trash, there are people who defend Epic in online debates — vicious Epic-versus-Steam debates which, of course, tend to frame the issue as if we each need to choose exactly one store from which to buy our PC games. I don't agree with that premise, but I'm not in a hurry to give Epic Games any money either, given their business practices. The pro-Epic side often cites healthy competition between companies as a good thing for consumers, but I'm not sure how much that really applies when Epic's main strategy thus far has been to take away consumers' choices regarding where to buy certain popular games. Boycotts rarely work, but I must say I'm inclined not to buy any Epic exclusives.

Epic does have a chance with me, though, if the company can stop acting like a super villain for five minutes. Each of Steam's other competitors has found its place in my game collection by doing what they do best. I made a GOG account for the DRM-free games, a Humble Bundle account for their bundles, and a Uplay account because I wanted to play some Ubisoft games, and an Origin account because I bought some Origin-exclusive games. I even have an Epic account, not because they bought exclusive distribution rights for a game I wanted to play, but because (as noted above) they've given away a bunch of free games and I figured I might as well grab them. So congratulations, Epic, you got your foot in the door. Now find a niche that isn't "games whose publishers were paid to stay away from Steam" and you might really have my attention.

Of course, getting me to create an account is the first hurdle, and getting me to install the desktop client is the second. I haven't installed Epic's launcher, because I currently have enough games to play without the free ones they gave me, but I do have GOG Galaxy and Uplay installed on my PC right now. I don't see why it's a bad thing to have more than one installed. The vast majority of my games are still on Steam, so the other launchers are more seldom used, but having them on my hard drive doesn't bother me. Neither does having my game collection split across multiple services, although I realize that's simply a matter of personal preference.

Solutions

The only real problem I've had with using multiple services is that sometimes I forget which games I own. I'm really, honestly, not kidding. Part of the problem is that I buy so many cheap games that my backlog is large enough for me to forget what's in it, but the inability to see all of my games in one library can turn forgetfulness into wastefulness. When Steam had its summer sale last year, I almost bought Oxenfree and Beyond Good and Evil before realizing that I already had both games, on GOG and Uplay, respectively. I hadn't remember purchasing them because I had gotten both in free giveaways, and I hadn't played them when I got them simply because I was too busy. Not seeing them in my most frequently used PC game launcher, I forgot I ever had them.

Given that I had acquired these games on GOG and Uplay precisely because those stores had given them away for free, whereas both games still cost money on Steam, I don't think using only Steam would have been the right solution. Besides, it's too late for that now. To keep better track of what's in my Steam library in the future, I've started using Playnite, which can automatically import games from various accounts — Battle.net, Bethesda, Epic Games, GOG, itch.io, Origin, Steam, Twitch, and Uplay — and act as a front-end for all of those launchers, with the ability to install, launch, and uninstall games. It has some limitations, such as the fact that the current version can only import Uplay games which are already installed (whereas it can import all owned games from other platforms), but it's still pretty nice.

Playnite has been criticized as being simply one more launcher, and thus an unsuitable solution to the problem of having too many launchers. For those who take that point of view, the ability to import all of their games into one of the launchers they're already using would be a better solution. Steam users can import non-Steam games into the Steam client, but that's a manual process, so it's worthless if you have a lot of non-Steam games. The upcoming GOG Galaxy 2.0, a major update to the existing GOG Galaxy launcher, will do much better by including many of the same features as Playnite. This is a pretty smart move for GOG, because many of the people using GOG Galaxy are using it as a secondary launcher alongside Steam. I, for one, don't open GOG Galaxy nearly as often as Steam, but maybe GOG Galaxy 2.0 will be my go-to launcher after I import all of my Steam games into it. It might even make Playnite obsolete.

If GOG Galaxy 2.0 catches on, then there might be a day when every major store's launcher can automatically import games from users' accounts on every other major store. Of course, GOG Galaxy 2.0 will still launch Steam games through Steam and so on, so we'd still need all of our launchers installed in order to make any use of such features.

Conclusions

I've already acknowledged that I think Steam is rather nice while the Epic Games store is, in some ways, obnoxiously bad. However, I'm pretty sure I don't need to choose one. If I really want to play some game that's only on the Epic Games store, I don't need to delete my Steam account in order to play it. Take that simple fact and apply it to every rational consumer, and you'll come to the conclusion that the "Epic versus Steam" debates often miss (intentionally, I'm sure, for the sake of sensationalism): Even if Epic Games' giveaways and exclusive games convince every Steam user to create an Epic Games store account, Steam still won't go out of business. There's really no reason to get so worked up over it.

If you like old games, indie games, or DRM-free games, you likely have a GOG or Humble account (and if you don't, you should). If you happen to like certain Ubisoft or EA games, you probably have a Uplay or Origin account. You might even have an Epic account now, as well, if you noticed the 17 games they've given away for free this year. I have accounts on all of these stores for various reasons. So my game collection is fractured, spread across multiple services, but it saves me the trouble of agonizing over whether a game is available on, or cheapest on, my one service of choice.

Interactive Fiction

Whenever I write about a topic I've already covered, I'm in fear of accidentally contradicting myself. My thoughts and feelings change over time, and this is perfectly natural, but each finished piece of writing is static (unless and until I feel compelled to go through the trouble of changing it). Each and every post on this blog is a frozen snapshot of my thoughts and feelings at a particular time, and all of those snapshots are displayed simultaneously in the same place. When I do change my mind, and if I don't have the time or the patience to eradicate my outdated thoughts from wherever they were written, it might just look like I'm saying two different things at once.

For example, I might have been too kind to a certain piece of interactive fiction in this post about games as art. I dismissed the criticism that Dear Esther was bad for its lack of gameplay because it's not a game and therefore should not be judged as a game. Dear Esther, I wrote, should be judged instead as a piece of interactive fiction or as a work of art. A direct quote from the other post: "A valid criticism of Dear Esther should focus on what's there — the writing, the visuals, and the music — rather than obsessing over exactly how it's not a game." Even now, I stand by all of these claims about how Dear Esther should be judged, but if I ever implied that Dear Esther comes up smelling like roses when judged in this manner, I'm about to disagree with my former self.

The writing, the visuals, and the music in Dear Esther are all fine. The lack of traditional gameplay elements is also fine. The lack of meaningful interactivity of any kind, however, is less so. Dear Esther is a walk through a virtual landscape set to music and narration, and the act of walking (but nothing else) is left to the player. The experience is interactive in the sense that the player can choose where to walk and where to look within the confines of Dear Esther's explorable space; the problem is that those confines are limiting to the point where the interactivity becomes nothing but a nuisance.

The player can move freely, but aside from a few wide open areas and a couple of briefly diverging paths, there's only one way to go from the beginning to the end. The game has no real exploration, and the player's actions have no real effect on the story. The experience is essentially linear, and yet the player is forced to interact; one cannot get to the end without walking there, a tedious and potentially frustrating task when there's hardly anything to do along the way. Dear Esther might even be better if it would just play itself.

It's a common problem in story-driven games, so-called interactive fiction, and everything in between. The story is there, and the player input is there, but the potential for truly interactive fiction is lost when the player is unable to affect the narrative. If the story is the most important aspect of a product which insists on being interactive, shouldn't the story itself be interactive? It's no surprise that a truly interactive story is a rarity in the typical video game, which is gameplay-driven and includes a story only as a contextual backdrop no matter how obnoxiously that story shoves itself down the player's throat during unskippable cutscenes, but developers should take more care when adding game elements to a story instead of the reverse.

A couple of weeks ago, I played To the Moon, which tells a nice (albeit awkwardly written) story and contains more than enough gameplay to be considered a game. Unfortunately, while it clearly strives to be interactive fiction first and foremost, the interactivity and the fiction do not blend well. The only genuine gameplay consists of occasional puzzles and a few brief mini-games, while the bulk of the player's time is spent alternating between reading dialogue and making sure to click on all the clickable objects in a given area. The game is so heavy with dialogue and so short on meaningful player input that, per click or keystroke, the majority of one's interaction with the game consists of telling the game to continue to the next line of dialogue. Yet, for all this time spent manually moving through the story — I used the word "tedious" in reference to Dear Esther's walking and I think it applies here as well — there's no real interaction with the story itself. The ending is always the same. Player choices sometimes have an effect on a few lines of dialogue, but that's all.

I get it. The developers wanted to tell a very specific story. Not every story will have branching paths and multiple outcomes. However, if the story is to remain static and immutable, two things need to happen. First, the player needs to be able to step away from the story long enough to have a satisfying amount of control over something. For To the Moon, this would mean a lot more puzzles and mini-games, or perhaps a totally new gameplay element. Second, the player needs to be able to sit back and watch when no meaningful input is required. This would turn Dear Esther into a movie, but I guess that's the whole problem with Dear Esther.

My examples so far are pretty extreme, but the problems in Dear Esther and To the Moon are things that all story-driven games need to avoid, and not all of them do a very good job. In my old post on Alan Wake, I mentioned the frustration of needing to follow a character around or simply idle about while listening to dialogue and waiting for the next scripted event. The same thing happens in Half-Life 2, thanks to the developers' decision to forgo cutscenes for the sake of having everything (including story exposition) happen in real-time. Alan Wake and Half-Life 2 both have plenty of gameplay to keep the player entertained, but the occasional need to sit through real-time in-gameplay dialogue always left me wishing that a skippable cutscene were used instead, especially when continual but meaningless player input was required (e.g., when following another character down a linear path).

I'm actually beginning to think that the hybridization of gameplay mechanics with interactive fiction is a failed experiment, and that the game industry should stop insisting on doing it over and over again. Games with excellent gameplay don't need mediocre stories tacked on in the form of unskippable in-game sit-around-and-listen-to-people-talk scenes from which the player cannot walk away. Meanwhile, the "interactive" requirement of an interactive story cannot be adequately satisfied with badly implemented gameplay mechanics, like mini-games and puzzles that occur with the frequency of a cutscene in a traditional game.

You want to make a shooter? Don't annoy the shooter fans with superfluous dialogue and scripted action sequences. You want to make an interactive story? Don't force your customers to play through stupid shooting sections. Am I wrong? I mean, clearly, there's an acceptable balance somewhere, but not many developers find it. Why can't the video game and the interactive story be two distinct things, each with no obligation to step on the other's turf? I guess it's because mashing the two things together broadens the target demographic. Shooter fans buy it for the gunplay, people who like interactive fiction buy it for the role-playing aspects or the built-in dating simulator, and everyone is just barely happy enough to keep playing.

Or maybe it's because interactive fiction just hasn't matured enough to stand on its own without being shoehorned into a traditional game or having a traditional game shoehorned into it. After all, a sufficiently interactive story is probably hard to write. Giving the player a satisfying amount of control within a well structured story sounds pretty difficult, if we assume the player's control must be over some aspect of the story itself.

Perhaps most disappointing of all are games which seem to be built on the premise of a player-controlled branching storyline but end up being almost entirely linear anyway. Playing through the first season of Telltale's The Walking Dead was a great experience, but a lot of the magic was gone when I realized after the fact that the ending I got was the only ending. Player choices determine which characters live or die and, to some extent, the characters' feelings about each other, but the protagonist and his group go to the same places and do the same things regardless. Ultimately, the only thing that changes, as a result of character deaths and the relationships between those who remain, is the dialogue.

Obviously, not every game needs multiple endings in order to have a satisfying story. However, in The Walking Dead, the player's ability to shape the story by making (often binary) decisions is the primary mode of gameplay. The rest is just occasional puzzles, and some shooting sequences which could rightly be called mini-games. When gameplay consists almost entirely of manipulation of the game's story through dialogue and moral choices, the ability to manipulate the story in a substantial and meaningful way is pretty important. The Walking Dead provides more illusion of choice than actual choice... but I guess I wouldn't have known if I'd only played once and never looked back.

Dear Esther & Video Games as Art

Over the weekend, I played through Dear Esther with my girlfriend. I'd bought it from Steam for $2.49 because I was curious, and I'd sent it to her account because I'd (mistakenly) assumed she might ultimately appreciate it more than I would. Alas, while I was pleasantly surprised, she was bewildered and irritated by the apparent pointlessness of the trek across the virtual island that lay before her.

A bit of background (with links) for the uninformed: Dear Esther was originally released in 2008 as a mod for Half-Life 2. Like so many popular mods, these days, it was then remade as a stand-alone release, which was completed in 2012. Unlike most things sold on Steam and discussed on blogs like mine, however, Dear Esther doesn't have any goals or challenges and you can't win or lose. It doesn't really have any "gameplay" at all because it's not a game in any traditional sense. It's more like virtual reality made love to an audiobook, had an illegitimate child, and left that poor bastard on video games' doorstep because no one else would take him. But I mean that in the nicest possible way.

At its core, Dear Esther isn't much more than an interactive story, and the word "interactive" is being used here rather loosely. What you do is walk around in a virtual world, admire the virtual environment, and listen to sporadic snippets of metaphor-laden monologue over a calming soundtrack and the sounds of the ocean waves.

Given the nature of this particular piece of software, which may or may not be considered a "video game" depending on whom you ask, you might say I'd be just as well off if I'd watched a playthrough on YouTube instead of buying it. But even with such minimal interactivity and such a linear experience overall, I think watching someone else play is a poor substitute and misses the point entirely. Even though there's no real "gameplay" here, I'd still be denying myself nearly everything that does make Dear Esther a unique experience if I were simply to watch some other person decide where to go and what to look at. The prosaic monologues are wonderful, but the modest potential for free exploration by the player is likely the sole reason that Dear Esther was turned into a "video game" instead of a short film or a short story.

You might also say I could have played the free Half-Life 2 mod instead of buying the stand-alone product, but the newer version just looks so much nicer, and enjoying some nice-looking stuff is where at least half of the enjoyment lies.

Despite all of this, paying for Dear Esther might seem like a waste. There's a rather stiff limit to the number of hours of enjoyment you can possibly squeeze out of this product. Although each playthrough is supposedly a bit different, due to some randomization in the playback of monologue passages, this only gives it a little more replay value than a movie, and a single playthrough is considerably shorter than average movie length. (The first playthrough should take no more than 90 minutes. Mine clocked in at exactly 90 minutes, but that included some aimless wandering, graphical tweaking, and even pausing to get drinks.) While I'm guilty of impulsively buying Dear Esther at 75% off, and while I'm content with that decision, I wouldn't be so enthusiastic about paying the full price of $9.99 and I can't honestly recommend doing so.

Missing the Point

That being said, I think there's some unwarranted hostility toward Dear Esther that stems not from its quality or from any of its own merits, but from a misunderstanding of its purpose, and from a rejection of the concept of video games as interactive fiction. "That's the dumbest thing ever" was the response of one friend when he was told what Dear Esther is like. Opinions are opinions, so I can't really debate that point, but I do think the context matters: When this conversation took place, my girlfriend had just mentioned a new "video game" that we'd played. This guy was expecting to hear about a game, but then he heard there was no objective, no challenge, and no real gameplay at all. So, yeah, of course that sounds dumb.

The whole problem, I think, is that Dear Esther is considered and treated as a video game, but this is only for lack of a (commonly used) better term. You could call it "interactive fiction" but that might not be sufficient to fully describe such a product, and I don't see the term catching on as a way to describe these things anyway. Instead, I'm tempted to call it a "video non-game" because it really is, precisely, a video game with the game element removed. Actually, I think this might be the best way to describe it. The strong connection to video games is there, but it doesn't leave us expecting something we're not going to get.

When judged as a video game, Dear Esther might be called a failure, but let's be fair: the same thing happens when you judge Lord of the Rings as a romantic comedy. A valid criticism of Dear Esther should focus on what's there — the writing, the visuals, and the music — rather than obsessing over exactly how it's not a game. Unfortunately, so much of the criticism I've encountered takes the latter route and fails to make a relevant point. I can't say I'm surprised that everyone gets stuck on the non-game aspect, though; after all, we're still pressing buttons to make things happen on a screen. It feels like a game, and that's what makes it feel so wrong.

Experimental and atypical releases such as Passage, Flower, The Graveyard, Universe Sandbox, and Dear Esther seem to be expanding the definition of "video game" by really pushing the boundaries that separate this medium from others, and this seems to be happening regardless of whether the creators of these products even choose to refer to them as games at all. The result is that, while video games used to be a subset of games, they now occupy another space entirely. Dear Esther is, arguably, a "video game" — and most people will probably call it one — but it certainly isn't a game at all. Consequently, if people install it expecting a game, they're in for a disappointment. However, this doesn't make it a bad product. It just makes it something other than a game.

The Newest Art Form

But regardless of whether we choose to call them games, Passage and Dear Esther seem to be at the forefront of the movement to have video games recognized as an art form. It seems good enough, for most people, that these video non-games attempt to be something resembling art while existing in a video game-like format. Just as often as they are criticized for not being game-like enough, they are cited as examples in arguments and discussions over the elevation of video games to the status of art — arguments and discussions which, for better or worse, tend to revolve around those artistically driven (but, importantly, secondary) aspects of the medium: story, graphics, music, et cetera.

Bringing this up on a video game forum is like bringing up politics at Thanksgiving dinner; that is, it's a good way to upset everyone. The idea that a video game, of all things, can actually be art isn't just a problem for video game haters; it's also enough to offend some "hardcore gamers" who reject the very notion that story, graphics, music, and intangible things like atmosphere can add anything of value to the medium. Any attempt to create a video game explicitly as a work of art, which unfortunately is most often done at the expense of the quality or amount of traditional gameplay, is obviously going to upset these people, and — referring again to Dear Esther in particular — the outright and total abandonment of the "game" in "video game" is obviously going to drive them crazy. The existence of Dear Esther itself isn't really such a problem, but the paradoxical notion that video non-games are actually the future of the medium is anathema to "hardcore gamers" everywhere.

To be honest, though, I don't think it should be a surprise that we're moving in this direction after so many years of video games with increasingly more emphasis on story, character development, visual effects, and other non-essential, movie-like qualities, often with less focus on conventional gameplay and player freedom. (I think I've discussed such things once or twice before.) Even where core gameplay mechanics have been preserved, video games have already become more like movies (presumably in order to grab larger audiences who might be bored with playing just a game), and maybe we've already passed the point where gameplay mechanics truly become the secondary attraction to the mainstream audience.

Is all of this good or bad? (Does such a distinction exist?) What does the concept of video games as an art form mean for the future of video games? But wait; if we're going to ask that question, we first have to answer a couple of others: Is it even possible for a video game to be a work of art? And should video game developers attempt to be artists? Perhaps these are silly questions — no doubt the idea of treating a video game as a work of art sounds downright ridiculous to a lot of people — but this debate seems to be happening whether we like it or not, so I think it's worth discussing.

To these last two questions, respectively, I'd give a tentative yes and a maybe. Whether a video game created specifically and intentionally as a "work of art" can be good, as a game, is certainly questionable, but if music and literature and acting and photography and, most importantly, film can be treated as art, then... well, I need to be honest: I can't think of a good (objective) reason that video games in general should be excluded. That video games, as a medium, should be considered an art form simply because of how a game can imitate and appropriate other forms of art (i.e., music and acting and writing and film) is a dubious argument at best, but I do believe that a good film would not automatically stop being a work of art simply if interactive (game-like) elements were added to it. Perhaps the new generation of video games, which are often more movie-like than game-like, should be analyzed this way instead. And if video games, at least in theory, have the potential to be works of art, then perhaps developers should strive for this... right? I guess. Whether they know how is another question entirely, but more on that will come later.

Comparisons and Analogies

The opposition to the idea of video games as art is largely (but not entirely) from those who don't believe that expensive electronic toys are deserving of whatever respect or elevated status comes along with inclusion in the invisible list of which things are allowed to be considered art. You might similarly argue that Picasso's paintings are not art just because you dislike them. Beyond personal tastes, however, I have to wonder if there's an actual reason for excluding video games when everything else that claims to be art seems to be accepted without much fuss. You can carefully arrange a bunch of garbage and call it art, and other people will call it art as well, as long as you can say with a straight face that the garbage arrangement means something. Or maybe it means nothing, and that's deep. Who cares? It's art if people say it's art.

It's clear, however, that video games are fundamentally different from all other things which are commonly considered art. The whole point of a video game is player interaction. Most art, meanwhile, is meant to be enjoyed passively, and one might even call this a requirement. Such a rule remains unwritten, however, since no one ever had a reason to include the words "passive" and "non-interactive" in the definition of art before video games tried to nudge their way in. Attempts to redefine the word "art" just for the sake of snubbing video games are confusing and unhelpful.

Other arguments against the notion of "video games as art" come from a comparison of video games to more traditional games. Chess is not art, and neither is football. On the other hand, a great amount of creative work, including visual art, often goes into the creation of many tabletop games, notably those of the collectible card variety. Furthermore, the entire analogy is rather fallacious; I've already pointed out that video games are, perhaps unfortunately, no longer strictly a subset of games, and moreover they can do things that traditional games cannot.

Some even try to argue that video games cannot be art because they're most often created for profit, or because they're most often created by large development teams in large companies. Obviously, though, these arguments allow indie games to slip through the cracks.

Ultimately, these debates never go anywhere because the definition of art is notoriously fuzzy, subjective, and ever-changing. It all boils down to opinion, and that's okay. Words aren't invented by dictionaries; their definitions come from their usage, not the reverse. Arguing semantics in this case is effectively a dead end, and once you get past all that nonsense, the most commonly cited reason for excluding video games in particular from the art world is simply that we haven't yet seen a video game worthy of the same praise as a Shakespeare play or a Rembrandt painting. The implication is often that we never will, even if no specified rules would exclude video games on principle, because the quality of creative work that goes into the most critically acclaimed video games is still supposedly mediocre at best in comparison to, say, the most critically acclaimed films.

Again, the opinion that video games will never be art doesn't just come from old men like Roger Ebert who never played a video game. It comes from within the "gaming" community as well, mostly from those "hardcore gamers" who would argue (perhaps correctly) that the industry needs to return to a strong focus on complex and challenging gameplay, and to stop pandering to casual "gamers" with artsy/cinematic nonsense without even a lose state or a hint of any meaningful challenge. Games shouldn't be movies, the hardcore audience likes to say. If you've perceived a significant decline in the quality of video games over the years — that is, I should clarify, a decline in the quality of everything in video games except for graphics — then you'd probably say this is a compelling argument, and I would strongly agree. However, if we want to push for better gameplay via an end to the game industry's distracting infatuation with film, then we should just do exactly that. The argument about the video game's status as an art form is a separate one entirely.

Even arguing successfully that video games should not be art doesn't exactly prove that they are not or cannot be art, and even arguing successfully that they are not or cannot be art wouldn't keep them from trying to be art. More importantly, the notion of "art" being discussed here might be the wrong one for this context. It is possible, after all, for games to be a kind of "art" without relying on the imitation or appropriation the various aspects of other art forms.

Pixels and Squares

It's with some reluctance that I place myself on the pro-art side of the fence, for a number of reasons. First, regarding the more dubious but more common notion of "games as art" by virtue of their essentially movie-like qualities, I must admit that such a definition of art is valid whether or not it's good for the video game industry.

Although I don't think the potential for the inclusion of non-game-like qualities should be the justification for broadly treating the video game medium as an art form, I do think it's fair to treat an individual video game as a work of art based on whatever kind of arguably artistic work was involved in its creation. That is, although I don't think video games should necessarily be praised for how they simply imitate film and other media, the typical modern video game (like a typical film) is the product of many kinds of creative work — music, writing, acting, and of course the visuals which might be hand-drawn or computer-generated — and regardless of the average quality of all this creative work, it's still there. Picasso is still an artist even if you don't like him.

So how can one say that the culmination of all the artistic work that goes into a video game isn't art? I can't think of a non-feelings-based argument to support such a claim. Short of declaring that none of that work is currently done at a level that qualifies as true art (which leaves the door open for better games to qualify as art in the future), the only way out is to say that it ceases being art once it becomes a game — that even though it contains art in various forms, the finished product is not art because its primary function is to provide the player with a challenge or some entertainment. And I think that's a pretty bizarre thing to say.

But let's just go with it. Let's say it's true: video games cannot be art because they're games. Now we get to ask the really interesting question. What happens when the video game evolves to the point where it's no longer a game, as is the case with Dear Esther? Are we then allowed to call it art? And if so, is there really no point along the continuum from Tetris (pure gameplay) to Dear Esther (pure "art") at which games and art do intersect?

Perhaps the right course of action is to reject everything I just wrote and say that Tetris itself is a work of art already. So far, I've followed the typical course of these "video games as art" debates by analyzing the controversial (and perhaps misguided) idea that video games should be considered art by virtue of the way they incorporate other forms of art, e.g., the writing of the story that provides context to the gameplay, the drawing and modeling that result in the game's graphics, and the production of the soundtrack — but you also could argue (and should argue) that a well-designed game is a work of art by virtue of its design, be it elegant or complex or somewhere in between.

That's probably how the concept of the video game art should be understood in the academic sense. I think games can, and should, be recognized as art for the qualities that actually make them games. The defining feature of the video game as a medium — gameplay — needs to be considered, and perhaps nothing else. If architecture is an art form, then it's not because architects like to hang paintings on the walls of the buildings they design. It's because the talented architect will bring a unique kind of excellence to the actual design of the building itself. The same should be true of video games if they are to achieve that same status.

In truth, regardless of what we might say on occasion about an individual game which incidentally borders on "work of art" territory according to someone's opinion, I think the video game as a medium can never be accepted as an art form unless it is recognized as such for the qualities which make video games what they are. For the video game to be accepted as an form of art, game developers need to do more than paste some audiovisual art on top of some game mechanics. The game design itself — not just the graphics, or the music, or the story — needs to be done at a level that deserves to be called art. If you can remove the interactive elements from a particular game without sacrificing any of what makes that game a work of art, then that game isn't doing anything to promote video games as an art form. It could have done just as well as a movie.

In the colloquial sense, however, most people accept a game as a work of art only if it conveys some meaning and evokes some emotion, and thus pasting audiovisual art on top of game mechanics is perfectly fine. Most video games attempt art status by telling a story, and maybe that's totally legitimate as well. I wouldn't object to classifying Max Payne as a work of art for its narration alone, even though Max Payne achieving "art status" merely by way of its writing does nothing for video games as a medium. In any case, on the subject of video games as art via narrative, I only wish it were more often done much better. The typical story-driven game is an alternating sequence of meaningless challenges and non-interactive cut scenes. They could very often be separated from one another and each do better on their own. If developers want their games to be art — or, perhaps more accurately, if they want their art to be games — they should at least incorporate interactive elements in a way that supplements the supposedly artistic value. Too often, these two aspects of a game just end up sitting side-by-side. Ideally, game developers who want to be artists should just study the art of good design instead of stapling a half-decent game design to a half-decent movie.

All of this is just food for thought, obviously. The question at the heart of all this thought is too subjective (and currently too controversial) for a satisfying answer. If you want an objective definition of the word "art" then I have one observation to share: with few exceptions, a thing is considered art if and only if it was meant to be art, created with artistic intentions by one who fancies oneself an artist. (Whether it's good art is another question entirely.) In other words, the creator does have some say in the matter. In 1915, a Russian guy named Kazimir Malevich painted a black square and called it art, and that black square ended up in an art museum, but that doesn't mean every other black square is also art. And of course, the "consumers" of art also have some say in the matter, because that black square wouldn't have ended up in a museum if nobody else had thought it was worth displaying.

And hey, look, there are video games in an art museum now. It's worth noting that the games featured at MoMA were selected for their ingenious design. They are being appreciated for the qualities that make video games a unique medium, and nothing else. That's a step in the right direction both for gameplay purists and for those who want video games to be taken seriously as an art form. After all, how are video games ever going to get this recognition if the way we're trying to make them more like art is by making them less like games and more like movies? The video game itself cannot be art if individual games only become art by branching out into other established art forms. Indeed the game design itself needs to be recognized as an art form on a fundamental level, with or without all the fancy toppings.

In any case, as with black squares, I would hesitate to hail a video game as a "work of art" if it's known that the developers never had this in mind, but if the developers are passionate about their work and if consumers are passionate about enjoying it, the label fits well enough to elicit no complaints from me. The relevant point, I suppose, is that a video game can be art — the art museum has spoken — and, more importantly, it can still be a good game, too. However, with regard to digital entertainment in which the basic elements typically defining the traditional game are drastically demoted or abandoned entirely in favor of other types of artistic expression, I really think we need to update our terminology. In other words, if Dear Esther isn't a game, it shouldn't be called a "video game" either.

Wrong Direction

The fact that Dear Esther and similar releases are considered to be video games, by many, is terrifying to the rest of us because it amplifies the perception that these overly cinematic, overly linear, sometimes pretentiously artsy experiences, devoid of any challenge or depth in gameplay, are the future of our hobby.

There are those who really would argue, instead, that Dear Esther is an extreme example of where video games should be headed. Some say that video games should do more than simply challenge the player — that they should convey a deeper meaning and tell a better story — and that's totally fine, as long as we're talking about supplementing the gameplay, not removing it. Otherwise, the argument is really just a roundabout way of saying "I've realized that I don't even like video games and I need something else to do with this controller I bought" — something else like interactive fiction, perhaps. So why don't we make that, and call it that, instead of pushing to change video games into that? Apparently because, even when people realize that all they care about is the storyline, they still seem unusually desperate to call themselves "gamers" despite the fact that their ideal "video game" is hardly a video game at all. They just really want their nerd cred or something.

Perhaps this is what the industry gets for having attempted for so many years to fit deep story and deep gameplay into the same product. The prospect of an interactive story inevitably attracts people who — let's be honest — just aren't interested in playing real video games. I'm referring, of course, to the "casual gamers" who really do see challenge as an unnecessary obstacle that should be removed so that people who aren't any good at video games can still enjoy what's left of them. To be honest, this worries me. If players see challenging gameplay itself as a nuisance, and developers cater to them by making challenging gameplay optional, we're coming awfully close to throwing out one of the most fundamental properties of the video game as we once knew it.

I think we'd all be better off if we just allowed interactive fiction to become its own thing, with its own audience, instead of allowing the entire industry to be dragged in the wrong direction. It seems to be going in that direction either way, in its attempts to hook that casual (non-)gamer audience, but we shouldn't legitimize this by expanding the definition of "video game" to such an extent that people who buy interactive movies get to call themselves gamers.

Five Things I'd Like to See in Half-Life 3

First, a brief history of the Half-Life series:

1998 — Half-Life
1999 — Half-Life: Opposing Force
2000
2001 — Half-Life: Blue Shift; Half-Life: Decay
2002
2003
2004 — Half-Life 2
2005
2006 — Half-Life 2: Episode One
2007 — Half-Life 2: Episode Two
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012

I've left the uneventful years on the timeline to illustrate the gaps between releases and to show how long it's been since production of the series came to a halt. As of today, it has been exactly five years since Half-Life 2: Episode Two — a game which ends abruptly with a painful cliffhanger — was released to the public as part of The Orange Box.

A continuation, presumably titled Half-Life 2: Episode Three, was announced back in 2006, and it was originally supposed to come out sometime in 2007, but we still haven't seen it. There hasn't even been a demo or a trailer. To this day, the official website for The Orange Box still claims that Half-Life 2: Episode Two is the "the second in a trilogy" of episodic expansions for the popular first-person shooter, but Half-Life developer Valve has given us almost no information except for some weird ideas which, if the game is still in production, have probably been dropped already.

Valve is known for long development cycles, lots of delays, and drastic changes during those long development cycles, which lead to more delays. What makes their silence on Episode Three so frustrating is that the Episodes, like other "episodic" games, were supposed to be released in rather quick succession. The whole point, I thought, was to release content in small chunks, as they were finished, so that fans wouldn't have to wait half a decade for the next installment. But I guess that wasn't working out.

If another Half-Life game is ever released, it almost certainly won't be an Episode; Valve co-founder Gabe Newell says they're done with episodic content, which essentially translates to "Half-Life 2: Episode Three is never coming." Of course, that doesn't rule out a proper Half-Life 3, which is exactly what we need. The next addition to the series will have to be a full game (and a damn good one) if Valve hopes to come within reach of the impossibly high expectations generated by such a long wait.

It's likely that Half-Life 3 won't life up to these expectations at all. Valve kind of screwed things up by promising the prompt release of an episodic expansion which never came to be. The endless wait for Half-Life 2: Episode Three seamlessly evolved into an endless wait for Half-Life 3, and now many see Half-Life 3 as vaporware, despite the fact that the five-year gap in this series is nothing compared to the 15-year development of the poorly received Duke Nukem Forever.

But if we ever get a sequel, there are a few things I'd like to see. (Note that spoilers follow.)

1. A more open world (but not too open)

Nearly three weeks ago, some rumors regarding Half-Life 3 made the rounds on all the usual gaming sites. (This is nothing special, really; it's been nonstop rumors for five years, and they should always be taken with a grain of salt, but at least they give us something to talk about.) According to some anonymous but reliable source — sounds legit, guys — Half-Life 3 will be an open-world game, and will be released sometime after 2013. I'm not digging the 2014+ release date, but an open world sounds nice. Until now, the Half-Life games have been very linear. More exploration, multiple paths, and optional objectives would be a welcome addition to the series.

What we don't need is another S.T.A.L.K.E.R. or some kind of role-playing game. Those are nice, but they're not what Half-Life is all about. While I'm sure Valve is aiming to avoid accusations that their next game is too linear — that it essentially boils down to "shoot everything, move to the next room, shoot everything, repeat" — I hope they don't completely abandon the method of storytelling that has worked so well in their games so far. It would be nothing short of jarring to go from Half-Life 2: Episode Two, an action-packed but story-driven shooter with clear objectives, to something more like a free-roam sandbox with not enough direction and too much empty space.

2. A portal gun (or something like it)

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the Portal and Half-Life stories are intertwined. Portal contained some funny references to Half-Life's Black Mesa, and Half-Life 2: Episode Two brought Portal into Half-Life canon with its mention of Aperture Science in the final act. It's an odd relationship, since Half-Life is a semi-serious first-person shooter whereas Portal is a humorous puzzle game... but there are thematic similarities.

While Portal's humor doesn't quite fit with the general tone of the Half-Life series, both franchises heavily feature teleportation, and this is probably why Valve thought it was appropriate to tie them together. The extent to which Valve plans to pursue this connection, obviously, is unknown — I certainly don't expect Gordon Freeman and Chell to team up against the Combine — but after making such a big deal out of the Aperture Science research vessel Borealis at the end of Episode Two, it's too late to drop the subject entirely. It will be downright silly if the next Half-Life game doesn't feature the Borealis and, by extension, other things related to Aperture Science.

With any luck, that includes some kind of handheld portal device, preferably one that's a little more stable than the Displacer Cannon from Half-Life: Opposing Force. Aperture's portal gun, if featured in Half-Life 3, could (in part) fill the role of Half-Life 2's gravity gun as the slightly-gimmicky puzzle-solving item that's also a weapon if you use it right. I know we've all had plenty of time to play around with the portal gun in Portal and Portal 2, but using it in a combat-oriented game could be kind of fun.

3. The extent of the Combine's power

While Gordon Freeman was in stasis between the end of Half-Life and the beginning of Half-Life 2, we missed an apocalypse. By the time we arrive in City 17, human society has already collapsed under the heel of an enormous alien empire, and the occupying forces, it would seem, have since largely withdrawn, leaving what's left of our species under the control of brainwashed transhuman soldiers.

Throughout Half-Life 2 and the Episodes, we see the aftermath of the Seven Hour War which ended in Earth's surrender, but we never see the Combine display the kind of raw power that could bring an entire planet to its knees in less than a day. What we see instead is a somewhat underwhelming uprising against what must have been a tiny fraction of the army that invaded Earth. This is why we know we're in a world of trouble when Dr. Kleiner speaks, after the uprising begins, of the Combine's "inevitable return and what is certain to be unimaginable retaliation."

But how unstoppable are they? What's their evil-alien-empire power level? Could they take on the Covenant from Halo or the Reapers from Mass Effect? We just don't know.

And this, in part, is what makes the story in Half-Life 2 as good as it is. Just enough is left to the player's imagination. We know the Combine are scary, but the fact that we don't know just how scary they are makes them even scarier. We don't need to see the Seven Hour War to believe it, and I honestly hope Valve doesn't give us a prequel to illustrate it. (That seems like a great excuse for a bad game.) But if Half-Life 3 continues (and perhaps concludes) the story arc left unfinished in Episode Two, it would be nice to see the bad guys step it up a bit.

After one game and two expansions, our alien overlords have only embarrassed themselves in their failed attempts to track down and kill a single theoretical physicist. It seems like the right time to see a glimpse of their true power. Besides, we've already spent enough time shooting metrocops and blowing up striders. We need something bigger.

4. A single-player campaign

This probably seems like a strange thing to hope for, since nearly every game in the series to date is primarily single-player. (The notable exceptions are the PS2-exclusive Half-Life: Decay and the Japan-only arcade Half-Life 2: Survivor.) However, we do have a reason to fear for the future of single-player games. Electronic Arts, for example, has abandoned them, and Gabe Newell himself said last year that Valve no longer had any interest in creating games "with an isolated single-player experience."

Naturally, Half-Life fans waiting for the next sequel were horrified, and even though Gabe later attempted to clarify his statement to let us know that the company hadn't given up on single-player games entirely, I'm still a bit worried. While they might continue making single-player games, they seem to have a lot of ideas about making these games more social.

It seems plausible, for example, that Half-Life 3 might be built for some kind of cooperative mode where one player controls Gordon Freeman and the other controls Alyx Vance. I hope this doesn't happen. I also don't want to see Half-Life 3 loaded with a bunch of pointless social features. I like single-player games, and I prefer to play them without being bothered about friend requests and leaderboards.

I'm sure that Half-Life 3 will have its own analog to Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, but it would be great if they could just keep the single-player and multiplayer components separate, so I can play one and ignore the other.

5. An ending (I know, it's a stretch)

The Half-Life games are fun, but they tend to have terrible endings which hardly qualify as endings at all.

The original ends with Gordon Freeman being kidnapped by the so-called "G-Man" (whose identity and motives are never explained), Opposing Force ends with the same fate for Adrian Shephard (who is never seen again), Half-Life 2 ends with Freeman being whisked away by the G-Man again (leaving the story at an explosion-related cliffhanger), Episode One ends with another explosion (followed by a train crash and a fade to black), and Episode Two ends awkwardly with one supporting character crying over another supporting character's corpse. (It was the worst finale I've ever seen in the history of video games, and perhaps that's because it was never meant to be a finale. Keep in mind that, at some point, they were actually planning to finish Episode Three.)

Blue Shift has a happy ending, but it isn't a particularly interesting one.

So I won't be surprised if Half-Life 3 ends with another suspenseful but unresolved situation — another set-up for another sequel that might take another ten years to make — but it would be great if Valve could just give us some kind of satisfying resolution instead. I'm not saying they should end the story entirely, but they could at least cool it with the unbearable cliffhangers. In other words, if Valve plans on rolling the credits right after an important character dies, or having the G-Man stop by for another inexplicable kidnapping, I'd rather not play the game at all.

Perfectionism: No Fun Allowed

I've always been a perfectionist. If I can't do something right, I don't like to do it; when I attempt any kind of work, I obsess over the details until it's just right.

I'm still not sure whether this is a good thing.

In the context of work and school, it translates to effort and dedication, but more often than not, it also slows me down. Sure, it helped me impress my art teacher in high school when most of the other students couldn't give less of a damn, and it earned me some nice grades elsewhere because I wasn't content to turn in half-assed work. Unfortunately, I think, it seems to have gotten a lot worse over the years. By the time I was (briefly) studying physics in graduate school, I found myself wasting precious time writing long solutions to complex problem sets neatly instead of getting them done quickly. As a result, I slept too little and stressed too much.

In the context of video games, my perfectionist tendencies make me a so-called completionist. If I care at all about the game I'm playing, I have a burning desire to collect every item, unlock every achievement, kill every enemy, find every secret, complete every side-quest, or get the highest possible rating on every level.

The Dangers of Completionism

When I played Metroid Prime — a fantastic game, by the way — I couldn't resist picking up every single missile expansion and energy tank. Maybe I wouldn't have cared if not for the way the game kept track of these things and displayed them as a completion percentage, taunting the mildly obsessive among us. Getting to the end of the game and seeing anything less than 100% felt to me like a minor failure. Of course, missile expansions and energy tanks are pretty useful, so the satisfaction of truly "finishing" the game wasn't the only motivation for finding them. I have no reasonable excuse, however, for scanning every creature, every item, and every bit of Pirate Data and Chozo Lore to fill up the in-game logbook. My only reward for doing so, in the end, was access to a couple of unlockable art galleries. But it wasn't about concept art; it was about not leaving things unfinished.

Only afterwards did I realize that I would have enjoyed the game a lot more if I didn't fixate on finding every little secret. I can't even go back to the game now, because I made myself sick of it.

Games like Metroid Prime are a nightmare for completionists, but we play them anyway because we're all masochists. The really terrible part is that setting aside the carefree enjoyment of the game for the sake of a cruel meta-game in which you pick up a hundred hidden items really isn't as bad as it gets. (With the help of a good walkthrough, if you're not too proud to use it, you can complete even the most tedious item-hunting quest with relative ease.) Being a completionist becomes a real problem when the additional challenges we choose (or need) to undertake are so difficult that untold hours are swallowed up by dozens of consecutive, futile attempts with no discernible progress. In the time I wasted getting gold medals on every level of Rogue Leader and its sequel Rebel Strike, I could have played all the way through several other games. I guess the benefit here is that being a perfectionist saved me some money; I got more time out of these games than anyone ever should.

The Need to Achieve

And what of achievements? I'm no fan, and it's not just because of my wacky theory that they're partly responsible for the decline of cheat codes in single-player games. I think achievements cheapen the sense of accomplishment we're supposed to feel when we do well in a game. A lot of developers have fallen into the habit of giving the player an achievement for every little task, like finishing the first level, or killing ten bad guys, or essentially — in rare and truly embarrassing cases — starting the game. (Only sometimes is this actually meant to be amusing.)

In my opinion, anything that necessarily happens during the course of a normal play-through should never be worth an achievement, but developers so often disagree. In Portal 2, fourteen of the achievements (pictured right) are unlocked simply by playing the single-player campaign. Obviously, there are other achievements in the game, but the player shouldn't need to be periodically congratulated for making regular progress.

Achievements, when done correctly, present extra challenges to the player. But even then, achievements teach players that nothing is worth doing unless there's a prize. We're not encouraged to make our own fun and set our own goals; we're encouraged to complete an arbitrary set of tasks, which may or may not include completing the game itself, attempting the harder difficulty settings, or doing anything genuinely entertaining.

But despite my philosophical objections to the idea of achievement hunting, I can't resist, especially if I only have a few achievements left after I beat the game. Unfortunately, those last few achievements tend to be the hard ones. But hey, you can't just leave the game 99% complete. You can't just leave one achievement locked. Right? Seriously, I can't be the only person who finds this absolutely intolerable.

After beating Trine, I spent far too long attempting a flawless run through the last level on the hardest difficulty to get a surprisingly difficult achievement. (I thought this game was casual!) When I played Alan Wake, I never would have bothered collecting a hundred (useless) coffee thermoses scattered throughout the game if there weren't an achievement for doing so. I even carried that damned garden gnome all the way through Half-Life 2: Episode Two. (Please kill me.)

Too Much of a Bad Thing

But even I have limits; a few of the achievements in Torchlight, for example, are just too hard or too much of a grind. They're far from impossible to get, but the game will stop being fun long before you get them, and if you play for the achievements, you'll become suicidal in no time. (Big fans of the game might disagree; most of the achievements will be unlocked naturally if you're okay with playing the game for 150+ hours, but catching 1000 fish just isn't worth anyone's time.)

Similarly, I have no interest in finding every flag in Assassin's Creed, or every feather in Assassin's Creed II, and I don't know why anyone ever would. Even as a hopeless completionist, I can usually tell when attaining 100% completion in a game will lead to more frustration than satisfaction. There's already so much (repetitive) stuff to do in the Assassin's Creed games that I can't imagine why they thought it would be a good idea to throw in a few hundred useless collectibles as well.

Just to bother me, I'm sure.

Collectible items and other tertiary objectives can be good for replay value, but when they extend the playtime beyond the point where the game loses all appeal and becomes a chore — when even a completionist such as myself doesn't want to try — it's just bad game design.

Self-Imposed Perfection

Being a perfectionist doesn't just mean being a completionist. My first play-through of Deus Ex took twice as long as it should have taken, but only because I developed a terrible habit of loading quicksaves constantly, not to avoid dying but to avoid wasting lockpicks, multitools, medkits, and ammo. If I missed a few times while trying to shoot a guy in the face, I couldn't just roll with it and keep going. I went back and tried again. If I picked open a lock and there was nothing useful behind that door, I loaded my save. (And of course, at the end of the game, my inventory was full of stuff I never got to use, but item hoarding is another issue entirely.)

My tendency to needlessly replay sections of a game is probably worst when friendly NPCs can be killed by the enemies. Even if their survival doesn't affect me in the slightest, I often feel the need to keep them alive, and I'm more than willing to reload a save if even a single one of them die. (This used to happen a lot when I played S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, but eventually I learned that it's sometimes best to save my ammo, let my fellow stalkers die, and scavenge their bodies afterwards. Such is life in the Zone.)

Reloading a save when you haven't lost might seem strange, depending on your play style, but some games encourage this type of behavior with optional objectives that are easily botched. Take the Hitman series, for example. You could choose to walk into nearly any mission with a big gun and simply shoot up the place, but the highest ratings are reserved for players who never get seen, fire no unnecessary shots, and kill no one but the primary targets.

This usually isn't easy, because save scumming isn't an option. The first Hitman game doesn't allow saves in mid-level, and the sequels only allow a certain number of saves per mission, depending on difficulty level. This makes perfecting a mission even more painful, and in my opinion, it's another example of bad game design. While I can see why they would want to prevent players from abusing the save system (thereby adding some real difficulty and making the game more "hardcore"), this is kind of a cruel thing to do with such a slow-paced game that involves so much trial-and-error. If you don't save often enough, you might end up repeating several minutes of sneaking at a snail's pace to get back to where you were.

Somehow, I did manage to master every mission in the second and third games, but I don't recommend it. Having to kill a guy and dispose of his body on the fly because he saw you picking a lock is fun, but in the interest of earning the highest rating, I always had to start over instead. When you try to play Hitman perfectly, it's tedious and time-consuming, and essentially requires you to memorize each map. No fun allowed.

Fixing Bad Habits

As a result of all this, my extensive backlog of unfinished games is only slightly longer than the list of games I've been meaning to replay without hitting the quickload button and without going off-course to satisfy my obsessive completion disorder. (The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games are near the top of that list, but I'd also like to replay those when I get a better computer, which isn't happening any time soon.) Games are more fun when they're played at a natural pace, and I wish it weren't so hard for me to ignore the little distractions along the way.

The best advice I can give to fellow perfectionists, after some soul searching of my own, is the following:

1) Get a screwdriver and pry the quickload button off of your keyboard. Alternatively, I suppose, you could simply go to the control settings and unmap the quickload function. If you can't unmap it, just remap it to a key on the far side of the keyboard, and then promptly forget which key that is. Quicksaving constantly is fine — I won't judge you — but you shouldn't be reloading a save unless you die.

2) Play through the game as quickly as you can; do only the bare minimum. This is normally something I'd discourage, because I believe that games should be enjoyed, not rushed. But if you're getting bored with games before you finish them because you're spending so much time trying to do every side-quest or collect all the items, stop it. Start over. Enjoy the game at its intended pace before you ruin it by attempting a frustrating scavenger hunt. These things are there for your second play-through, and if the game isn't good enough to warrant a second play-through, the optional stuff isn't worth your time.

3) Don't read the list of achievements before you play the game. If you read them, you'll try to get them. Achievement hunting is for replay value, and if it's your first priority, you need to rethink your entire outlook on life. Again, if the game isn't good enough to warrant a second play-through, the achievements aren't worth your time.

Five Great Games I'll Never Play

So many video games have been made over the past few decades that no single person could ever hope to play them all from beginning to end. This isn't an exaggeration; it's pretty clear that there just aren't enough hours in a lifetime, especially when you consider that a third of a life is spent sleeping while another third is typically spent on other irritating obligations such as a full time job. I'll let you do the rest of the math, since I'm not exactly sure how to estimate the average length of a video game or the total number of video games ever published, but I'm certain that you'd have to dedicate your life to video games in order to experience everything this medium has to offer.

Of course, no single person would really want to play all these games, either, since no one likes every genre and a lot of games are just crap. The list gets a lot shorter when you limit yourself to games which are generally considered to be worth playing, and there's an even shorter list of games that are so highly regarded and well known that they're almost considered mandatory.

I have to admit, however, that I've missed out on a lot of supposedly great classics. I grew up with Super Mario Bros. and Doom, and I've played my fair share of Zelda games, but there are a number of immensely popular games that I've never played, and most likely never will. For your reading pleasure, I present the first five such video game franchises that came to mind, listed in reverse order for dramatic effect.

5: Metal Gear Solid

I grew up with two brothers, and at some point my mother must have lost her mind, because by the time the Sega Dreamcast came out, we each had our own console. Of course, though we weren't sharing them like we did with the old SNES, it would have been silly to keep more than one of the same console in the house, so after my older brother got his own PlayStation, I got a Nintendo 64. He got Metal Gear Solid, and I got Ocarina of Time. Fair enough, right?

I watched him play the game for a while. It was pretty entertaining to watch, although I couldn't tell if it was really fun to play because he was the kind of person who would constantly get mad as hell at any game that presented any sort of challenge, which is probably why he hardly plays video games at all anymore. (That, and having a life.) I was really only interested in the story, even if it was hard to follow, but I never had a chance to play through the game myself.

Every time a new Metal Gear game is released, I think, "wow, that looks pretty cool, I should play it." But with a story-driven series like Metal Gear, I could never bring myself to play the latest installment without playing through all the ones that came before it (useless non-canonical spin-offs, if any exist, excluded). At this point, I'm so many games behind that I don't think I could possibly catch up. Even if I wanted to try, doing so would be quite an investment, since I don't even own a PlayStation 3. (The alternative is to watch a few dozen hours of "Let's Play" videos on YouTube, which would be fine, since the later Metal Gear games have such a high cutscene-to-gameplay ratio that they're practically movies anyway.)

Update: I must have psychic powers or something, because a new Metal Gear game was announced just after I wrote this stupid post. Too spooky.

4: Final Fantasy

I have my doubts about whether it's possible to enjoy Final Fantasy without liking anime, and my history with anime was short and complicated. I thought Japanese animation was awesome when I watched Princess Mononoke and Cowboy Bebop and Fullmetal Alchemist, but when I saw what typical modern anime was like, I was filled with shame and disgust.

Okay, so maybe it isn't quite fair to say that this has anything to do with Final Fantasy, but there's also the fact that I'm sickened by turn-based combat.

The Final Fantasy franchise is so famous and influential that I almost feel like I can't call myself a gamer without having played at least a couple of games in the series. Then again, I don't call myself a gamer because "gamer" is a stupid word, and on the few occasions when I actually watched my Playstation-owning older brother play Final Fantasy VII, I was bored to tears.

And don't get me started on the character design.

3: World of Warcraft

I never liked MMORPGs, and I've always refused to play anything that requires a monthly subscription fee (which is why I don't own an Xbox 360). It's probably no surprise, therefore, that I never bothered to play World of Warcraft, and that I fully intend to die without ever having played it, especially now that the newest expansion looks like an homage to Kung Fu Panda, or a strange attempt to grab the attention of the furry crowd, or both. (Okay, so the Warcraft franchise never took itself that seriously, but really, this is too much.)

I wouldn't say that World of Warcraft is a classic; it's not quite old enough for that. But it is — or was, during the height of its popularity — extremely important in the gaming world. I am, though, a bit surprised that the game ever became as popular as it did, considering its connection to a series of RTS games that the vast majority of WoW subscribers have almost certainly never played. Brand recognition wasn't a factor, for them; the game must have earned its popularity by being fun, or something. I can't say I understand it, but WoW just managed to nail the perfect combination of whatever things make MMORPGs fun for those who don't despise them.

2: Counter-Strike

Counter-Strike, the popular Half-Life modification turned stand-alone game, seems like a pretty big deal. However, at the time of its release, I hadn't graduated from console games to PC games, and the only "modern" shooters I can remember having played at length are GoldenEye 007 and its spiritual successor Perfect Dark. I never even played a first-person shooter online until my brother bought an Xbox and a copy of Halo and needed a fourth player to beat some racist kids at CTF via GameSpy Arcade.

Also, I'm ashamed to admit it, but it wasn't until 2005 (when I bought the PC version of F.E.A.R.) that I realized how much easier it is to play first-person shooters with a keyboard and mouse. The downside is that I haven't been able to go back to console shooters ever since. Awkwardly aiming with my thumbs just feels so wrong, and I don't understand how I ever managed to enjoy it.

The result of all this is that I missed out on a lot of competitive online shooters, Counter-Strike included. After the most recent winter sale on Steam, I did end up with a free copy of Counter-Strike: Source in my inventory, but I'm probably going to send it to someone else instead of playing it myself. I'm sure the game is fun, and that it rightfully earned its place in gaming history, but it's... well, it's old.

Don't get me wrong; I can appreciate old games. But Counter-Strike is a competitive and exclusively online multiplayer game. Forget the fact that I prefer single-player games and care little for competitive FPS — when I say that Counter-Strike is old, I mean that its online community, while still active, is almost entirely composed of people who have been playing for hundreds (if not thousands) of hours and already know exactly what they're doing. Considering this and the game's competitive nature, I suspect the players in the average Counter-Strike server would be less welcoming to newcomers than the other guys playing another game that came out last month.

Starting Counter-Strike or Counter-Strike: Source now would probably be like joining a random DotA server with no prior knowledge of how the ARTS genre works. (In case you're not getting the joke here, I'll just point out that ARTS players are widely known for being obnoxious jerks who talk trash more than they actually play and who frequently ban people from their servers not for cheating but simply for being insufficiently skilled at the game in question. I even considered putting DotA on this list, as well, since I have no interest in ever playing a game in which being a newbie is a bannable offense, but then I'd have to admit that DotA is "great" in some way, and I cannot.)

If I wanted to break into the Counter-Strike scene, I'd probably be better off buying Global Offensive... but, again, I still prefer single-player games and care little for competitive FPS. Haters gonna hate, I guess.

1: Sonic the Hedgehog

My first video game console was a Nintendo Entertainment System. (I was actually born just a few years after the console came out and, by the time I played it, the Super Nintendo had already been released in North America, but my parents were thrifty. I'm sure they saved some money by getting an old console, and I was too young to know I was playing with outdated technology, so everyone was happy.) Although I did, eventually, inherit a Sega Genesis from a member of my extended family, this wasn't until years later, and I only ever played the games that I got with the console. Sonic the Hedgehog wasn't one of them.

At this point, I could have gone and bought the game or one of its sequels, but I wasn't interested in collecting old games at the time, and I had no feelings of nostalgia for the spiky Sega mascot. Running fast never seemed like a very cool super-power anyway. To this day, I've never played a Sonic game, with the exception of Sonic Adventure, and that was only for a few dull minutes.

I can't really say I have anything against the Sonic games, since I've never played them. I am, though, a little freaked out by the fanbase with which I'd be associating myself if I actually decided to put the Sonic series on my to-do list. At some point over the past 21 years, the Sonic franchise began to accumulate one of the worst followings in all of video game history.

It's almost difficult to describe what makes Sonic fans so horrifying. While the most hardcore fans of any video game series tend to be a bit kooky, Sonic fans set themselves apart from the rest with some of the worst fan-art and fan-fiction ever created — loads of it — complete with innumerable attempts at "original characters" which essentially amount to badly drawn re-colorings of the original Sonic design. I learned to avoid sites like deviantART because of this stuff.

Almost all fan-art is horrible, and fan-fiction of all kinds is so uniformly bad that I wish copyright holders (particularly of Twilight, Harry Potter, Sonic and every anime) would try a bit harder to crack down on unauthorized use of their intellectual property. At the very least, perhaps this would put an end to the delusion that fan-art is actual art and that a work of fan-fiction will ever be recognized as actual literature. (Please don't use Fifty Shades of Grey as a counter-example; erotic fiction is trash, and by the time it was published, the novel had no doubt shed all connection to Twilight, which is also trash.) Anyone who uploads poorly drawn cartoons of "[insert name here] the Hedgehog" to deviantART, or writes erotic fan-fiction based on Sonic or any other video game involving anthropomorphic animals, deserves to be sued into bankruptcy.

I know that playing the game would not mean participating in this foolishness, but I just can't do it. Playing Sonic the Hedgehog after witnessing what goes on in the terrifying underworld of Sonic fandom would be like watching Signs after seeing a video of Mel Gibson and Joaquin Phoenix viciously beating a small child to death with a couple of crowbars. (Disclaimer: this never actually happened.)