What Makes Video Games Fun?

A lot of "hardcore gamers" (regardless of whether they identify themselves as such) will tell you that the video game industry is in sad shape. It's not just because of the past decade's unfortunate shift toward increasingly more intrusive digital rights management, or the recent trend of releasing "extra" downloadable content on day one to encourage thoughtless and irresponsible pre-orders, or the deliberate efforts to use both DRM and DLC to destroy the used game market. Rather, it's because they think that too many of the games being released today are crap.

And they're not just talking about shovelware that nobody buys. This is popular crap. So what's up with all the hate? Well, it should be no surprise that the games which tend to attract the most violently negative attention are always the popular ones. After all, if you want to complain about a genre, a feature, a console, or a developer, you pick a popular game as an example, and then you claim that the chosen game means the downfall of gaming as we know it. This has been happening for a long time. But in the past few years, I've been reluctant to shrug it off as the usual fanboyism, hipsterism, and attention-seeking antics of a vocal minority. It's more likely indicative of something else.

As I see it, this backlash is due to recent changes in the industry which aren't entirely imaginary. The industry is, in fact, changing, and not just in response to the emergence of nearly ubiquitous high-speed internet service, which facilitates digital distribution and piracy alike. Video games have changed also because of their growing audience. Thanks to cell phones, social networking sites, and a few other things which should never have games on them, games have crossed farther into the mainstream than ever before. Meanwhile, those who played video games back when it was an obscure hobby reserved only for children and computer geeks have grown up, and some of them are still playing. It's only understandable that some of these old-schoolers would be a bit shocked by the current state of things.

So, what is the current state of things?

It's complicated, and there are a lot of little topics I'd like to bring up — e.g., how girls went from "eww, you play video games, you're such a nerd" to "hey, I can be a gamer too" and "tee hee, I'm such a nerd" — but most of these things are too far off-topic and will have to wait for some other week. Simply put, if I can allow myself to get to the point, casual games and social networking have taken over. It's not hard to see that this is an expected (and perhaps necessary) consequence of video games getting a slice of that mainstream pie.

Games directed at casual players get a lot of hate, particularly from the more "hardcore" gamers, many of whom grew up when video games were considerably less forgiving than the ones made today. For these players, the whole point of a game is to provide a challenge. Winning should be a struggle; that's what makes it so satisfying. This is why they fail to understand the casual audience. More importantly, this is why they're angered not only by strictly casual games but also by the perceived "casualization" of modern games as a whole.

Are the majority of today's video games a lot easier than the ones of my childhood? You bet. But is this really a terrible thing? Not necessarily. Difficult games still exist, and we should keep in mind that a lot of older games were only hard because of their lack of a save feature. (Wouldn't a lot of modern games be damn near impossible to beat if saving weren't an option?) Other old games were stupidly hard because of poor design, and still others were intentionally made difficult because they were short and would have been beaten too quickly if they weren't frustratingly hard to finish. (Truly master Super Mario Bros. and you can beat it in less than five minutes; without using warp zones, it can still be done in less than half an hour.) Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, playtime can be extended in ways that don't involve dying repeatedly, and games can be entertaining for reasons other than sheer difficulty.

So now we get to ask an interesting question. What actually makes video games fun? Some say it's the challenge, while others will say it's the story/characters/immersion (for single-player games) or the social experience (for multiplayer games). Still others, I suspect, would say they just like to blow things up. In reality, for most people, it's a combination of all of the above.

How much, in particular, should difficulty matter? From the developer's point of view, a game should be difficult enough to entertain the experienced players — to let them know that winning takes effort so that winning feels good — but easy enough to avoid alienating the casual players who might not even bother to finish a game if it frustrates them at all. Personally, I think most developers have done a pretty good job of accomplishing this. Say what you will about the harm caused by pandering to the casual audience, but most games worth playing have multiple difficulty levels, the easiest of which is usually tame enough for "casuals" and the hardest of which is usually a challenge for anyone who never played the game before. Nobody should be disappointed unless a developer makes a serious miscalculation.

This is why I was surprised to see such a negative reaction to this article on Kotaku a little more than a week ago, in which Luke Plunkett gives a fairly reasonable rebuttal to Assassin's Creed III lead designer Alex Hutchinson's (rather preposterous) claim that "easy mode often ruins games." (It's kind of funny because Assassin's Creed, a game with only one difficulty, isn't that hard, and the same is true of all the sequels I've played.) I'm not a big fan of Kotaku, nor am I a fan of Luke Plunkett, but I have to agree with him here. At least, I agree with his headline. A game can't be ruined by a difficulty setting.

I'm willing to say that the "easy mode" of a game can often be the worst version of that game, as Hutchinson claims, but the inclusion of an easy mode surely doesn't spoil the whole game unless it's the only mode available. Don't like easy mode? Play on hard. If the harder settings are still too easy, or if they do nothing but make the game more tedious, you've picked a bad game. If the harder settings are locked until the easier ones are completed, you better hope the easier settings are hard enough to keep you entertained for a single playthrough; otherwise, you've picked a bad game. Bad game design happens, but if you're blaming it solely on the inclusion of an "easy" mode, you're probably overlooking a deeper problem.

Still, I won't say I agree with Plunkett completely, since he has entirely different reasons for disagreeing with Hutchinson's argument. Specifically, he makes it abundantly clear that he doesn't care about difficulty at all, and that he plays story-driven games only for the story. He probably wouldn't mind if a game like Assassin's Creed III consisted of no interaction besides "press X to continue." And if you're like this, you probably should ask yourself why you're playing games at all, rather than watching movies or reading books. If, on the other hand, you can appreciate the unique things that games have to offer, instead of just complaining that everything is too hard, then your idea of "fun" is just as valid as that of the hardcore gamer dude who plays everything on the hardest setting and skips all the cutscenes.

So where do I stand?

Let's just say I was more than a little annoyed by the fact that it's literally impossible to lose in the 2008 version of Prince of Persia. I won't go so far as to say that the protagonist of a game needs to be able to die, and "losing" is hardly a setback in any game with a save option (assuming you use it often enough), but being automatically revived after every fall in PoP 2008 seemed like a step down from the rewind system in The Sands of Time, which actually required some minimal skill and had limits. If there's no consequence for falling off a cliff, the sense of danger and suspense is gone and the game becomes only tedious where it might otherwise have been exciting.

On the other hand, you know I'm a sucker for story-driven games, and the need for a genuine challenge can be subverted by decision-making and role-playing elements. Since Choose Your Own Adventure books were terrible and there's no equivalent in the movie world, I think it's pretty safe to say that the existing technology used for video games is the ideal medium for straight-up interactive fiction. I see no reason not to take advantage of this. The problem is that what might be described most accurately as interactive fiction, and not as a traditional video game, will nevertheless remain stuck under the category of video games. This tends to generate all the wrong expectations. Story-driven titles are often criticized for having too much "story" and not enough "game" (even if the developer's primary objective, admittedly, was to tell a story).

Regardless of how far a developer decides to take the storytelling aspect of a product, and regardless of what you call it, the fact is that difficulty (and, indeed, gameplay itself) often matters less when story matters more, and if you're looking for a serious challenge, you should probably stay away from plot-driven games, even ones like Assassin's Creed. They make it difficult enough that any given mission might take two or three attempts, but they know they're not serving the hardcore crowd exclusively. Sometimes, though, I think the hardcore crowd still hasn't caught on.

Video Games & Movies

Dozens of films inspired by video games have come and gone over the years, and they're rarely worth your time. It's for this reason that I was in no hurry to start "blogging" when I heard, a couple of weeks ago, that the (supposedly) upcoming Assassin's Creed movie had become a bit too real with the casting of an actual, famous, relevant actor, Michael Fassbender, for the lead role. Needless to say, I'm a bit late to this party.

So why bring it up now? Well, it seems to me that now is as good a time as any to discuss the making-movies-based-on-video-games trend in general, since we've all had plenty of time to process the latest news of this particular game-to-film adaptation. We've gone through the initial excitement of imagining some of our favorite characters appearing in a big-budget movie, the sobering realization that nearly all game-to-film conversions are mediocre at best and that the best part of the game was actually playing it, and perhaps a resurgence of hope that this movie could be the one that makes up for all the bad ones that came before. As for me, that last part might not apply. I'm finding myself increasingly confused by the absurdity of taking a concept designed for an interactive medium and translating it to a medium which involves no interaction whatsoever. It hardly ever works, but they keep doing it.

Might the plot from Assassin's Creed make a good movie? Sure. Will it add anything of value to the franchise? Only if it's more fun than watching someone play the game, and one could argue that a lot of video-game-inspired cash-grab movies fail this test.

Part of me wants to believe that an Assassin's Creed movie could work, but the rest of me knows how unlikely this is. It's not my intention to hate on any particular franchise or developer, but things didn't go so well the last time they tried to make a movie inspired by the story from an Ubisoft video game. Not even Jake Gyllenhaal could save Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, which might have been okay for an action movie if only they had dropped the mind-numbingly obvious (and stupid) parallels to the Iraq War... and pretty much everything else in the script.

An uninteresting plot can be ignored amidst the special effects and gratuitous violence and perhaps a smoking-hot (I mean "talented") female actress, but a downright stupid plot is just too distracting and can ruin a movie entirely. Perhaps I was also a bit overly annoyed by the lack of resemblance between this movie and the video game I so enjoyed, but hey, I can't pretend to be unbiased. And why should I? Wasn't I the intended audience?

In all fairness, I suppose we should be glad that the writers of this Prince of Persia film hadn't decided to follow the storyline of its namesake with deadly precision, since that would necessitate killing all but three characters within the first five minutes, one of whom would then be absent for most of the story. In fact, like many video games (though, perhaps, mostly the older ones), Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time doesn't have very much "story" at all. What's there is very good, for a video game, but it's not enough (and not appropriate) for a full-length movie.

Sure, the game itself takes many hours to complete — there are tons of monsters to fight, some platforming puzzles to solve, and some character development via dialogue during the completion of those puzzles — but the important parts of the story are told through a few cutscenes which don't add up to a whole lot. Of course, they might have instead used the collective plot from the entire "Sands of Time trilogy" (encompassing the sequels Warrior Within and The Two Thrones) — in fact, the film they released did borrow minor elements from all three games — but the disjointed plot you would get by trying to fully combine these three stories probably wouldn't have made a very good film either.

All of this, however, makes me wonder why they ever decided to make a movie based on this game if the story would have to be changed to the point where the script hardly even resembled the source material. If not for the familiar title, as well as the fact that the time-travel-enabling device happens to be a dagger and the fact that the main character is a Persian prince (albeit an adopted one), I never would have guessed that the film was inspired by one of my favorite video games. Actually, given that the film was published by Disney and that the main character is street-rat-turned-royalty and receives magical powers from an ancient artifact, I might have assumed instead that it was some kind of re-imagining of Aladdin. Not even the character names would have given it away, since none of the names used in the film appeared in any of the Prince of Persia games. It almost seems ridiculous to keep the title.

But of course they're going to keep the title, because a movie based on a video game typically has no attractive qualities other than its association with a popular franchise. The only people who see these movies are fans of the respective video games, parents of those fans, other old people who don't know what they're getting themselves into, and, of course, girls who care more about the lead actor than the subject matter. ("Um, a video game? Whatever, nerd, I just want to see Jake Gyllenhaal's abs.") The first two groups are arguably the most important, so filmmakers continue to draw inspiration from video games even though these movies usually turn out to be garbage and subsequently draw ridicule upon the franchises from which they spawned. The movies don't need to be good; they just need to be good enough that you, the video game fan, purchase a non-refundable ticket. In other words, while the critics might scoff, it's a neat way to make a quick buck... that is, unless your name is Uwe Boll and you just produced and directed a film based on BloodRayne.

The fact that lots of people played a stupid video game with a sexy vampire doesn't mean a movie based on its characters and aesthetic will turn a profit, so it's all kind of risky. Unfortunately, coming up with an original idea is riskier, and more expensive. That's why so many of the movies released so far this millennium are one or more of the following:

1. an adaptation of a novel or short story,
2. an adaptation of a graphic novel or comic book,
3. an adaptation of a TV show or cartoon,
4. an adaptation of a video game,
5. an adaptation of a theatrical play or musical,
6. a sequel or "prequel" to a previous movie,
7. a remake or "reimagining" of a previous movie,
8. borderline plagiarism, or
9. crap.

Video game adaptations are particularly problematic because most would argue that the primary function of a video game, like any game, is to provide entertaining gameplay, rather than to tell a story. As such, most video games don't have awesome storylines, and that's okay if the games are still fun. What's so often substantially less than okay is taking a plot which exists solely for player motivation and using it as the inspiration for something that can't be played.

But we might, someday, see a genuinely good video-game-to-feature-film adaptation. After all, a lot of modern games are practically interactive movies already. Some video game fans will tell you that this is the end of "gaming" as we know it, but let's not get carried away just yet. While it's true that we often get stuck with less challenging, less sophisticated gameplay in exchange for a more "cinematic" experience, the industry has churned out a decent number of story-driven games which miraculously nail the winning combination of worthwhile gameplay and an engaging narrative.

Ironically, it's usually the heavily gameplay-driven titles, fun as hell to play but often lacking in depth, that end up having films named after them (see Doom). As a result, these films are mostly the trashy action/horror sort, which only sometimes do well at the box office and almost never do well with the critics. Why not make a movie out of a strongly story-driven game like Metal Gear Solid or Alan Wake or... Assassin's Creed?

Maybe it's finally happening.

Although it's too early to tell if the film will ever be made — a famous name attached to a project does not necessarily guarantee its completion — it's an interesting possibility. A film based on Assassin's Creed could actually follow the plot of the game rather closely without sucking. Furthermore, a film based on the Assassin's Creed franchise just makes a whole lot of sense. The publisher has already branched out into every medium they can afford to exploit. In addition to the five games that make up the core of the series, and a bunch of handheld/mobile spin-offs, they've released several books, some comics, a Facebook application, and even a few short films.

The irritating part is that some of these tie-ins occupy their own space in the series' alternate history, rather than simply re-telling or expanding the story from an existing game. It gives me the sense that I'm missing part of the expansive story if I don't check out all this peripheral stuff (including the one comic which was only printed in French). The film, if they're serious about making it, could be the same way. Rather than basing it on an existing game, they might instead stick it chronologically between two existing games, or give us a new story with a new protagonist and only subtle ties to the familiar story we've all been following. All we know so far is that Ubisoft wants to retain as much creative control as possible, which means they probably won't screw up their own canon.

In other words, it might be cool. Certainly it can't be worse than the short film Ubisoft made to promote the original game's first sequel.

I'm still not getting my hopes up, however, because the very thing that makes an Assassin's Creed feature film seem so natural is exactly what makes it kind of pointless. The game is "cinematic" enough. Modern video games, for the sake of becoming more mainstream, attempt to emulate movies, so creating a movie based on one accomplishes nothing but an upgrade of visual effects and the complete removal of interactivity. Films based on video games are primarily for the video games' fans, and fans of video games don't often wish they could experience a video game without actually having to play it. Playing it is the whole point. (Perhaps somewhere out there is a screenplay based on a game with an amazing story and horrible gameplay — a film adaptation of a game that should have been a film all along — but no one is going to see a movie based on a game that basically sucked.) The only way to make it worth watching is to make the story new and original, but then the fans will say they liked it better how it was.

When fans of a game care too much about the canon, a movie based on it is almost sure to fail in their eyes. Game-to-film adaptations are often despised by the game's fans for changes to the story and, more generally, for not living up to unrealistic expectations. Meanwhile, those unfamiliar with a game often don't care enough to see the film at all. It's for this reason that I'm always surprised by the few adaptations that actually do well (see, for example, Resident Evil... although I guess you can't go wrong with zombies).

Finally, whether the filmmakers appease the hardcore fans and create a faithful adaptation, or take a risk and try to improve upon the narrative, or do something completely off-the-wall and unrelated to the game (see Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within), they also have to deal with the fact that the film's association with a video game can easily do more harm than good. It might snag all the fans, but it might also alienate everyone else, namely the older audiences who think they're too grown-up for video games and, by extension, too sophisticated for such a movie. Then there's everyone else who didn't play the game, everyone who hates the game, et cetera.

But I hope for Ubisoft's sake that I'm just being pessimistic. Maybe all they need to make it work are good actors, good writers, and a good director. It's pretty clear that a lot of game-to-film adaptations have none of these things.

Why We're Wasting Our Lives

As a twenty-something, unemployed, grad-school-dropout "gamer" (a word of which I heavily disapprove but which everyone insists on using), I'd probably make a pretty good example of why video games are bad for society. For the moment, we're going to disregard the fact that most of my wasted time is spent on other distractions, like browsing the web and watching movies with my girlfriend, and that I spend far less time playing video games than I potentially could, because my failure as of yet to find a reasonably decent job has gotten me so depressed this week that I can't enjoy them as much as I used to. For the sake of argument, I'll make things simple and tell you that I just spent all day playing Killing Floor on my computer, because playing video games for hours on end is something I've been known to do. Now, knowing only that I'm unemployed and spend a portion of my (resultantly excessive) free time playing games, how do you feel about me?

If you're more than 40 years old, you almost certainly feel that I'm a lazy punk who should stop being a parasite and get a job so that I can contribute to society instead of wasting my life shooting zombies. In my defense, it wasn't my generation that ruined the economy while I was in college, and while I could be sending job applications to every McDonald's restaurant within a 50-mile radius (which doesn't even guarantee me a position), I can afford to hold out a bit longer for a job that won't make me suicidal; my fingers are crossed.

But I think there's a valid argument on the other end, too. It's not that I should "get a job" — calm down, I'm looking for one — but that I've spent too much of my life shooting zombies instead of building lasting relationships with living people... or something. The same goes for anyone who self-identifies as a "gamer" or any synonym thereof. Are we all wasting our lives on video games? Unless your job is directly related to developing, playing, selling, or writing about them, playing them really accomplishes nothing... I mean, aside from fun. And fun is worth something, right?

Television is commonly cited in response as being just as much of a time waster, if not more, but I'm not going to use this as any kind of counter-argument, because everyone already knows it. What's interesting is that excessive TV use isn't seen as an epidemic. It's hardly even seen as a waste of time. We just accept it, most likely because so many of us are guilty of it that it seems normal, whereas newer distractions like video games and the internet have yet to earn our collective trust. (A few times in my childhood, I was told that cartoons would rot my brain, but that was a long time ago, and I hadn't done my homework.) Why does television get a free pass? Few of the people who talk bad about video games would actually turn around and defend television in the same breath, but television is rarely the primary target of such attacks. If you have something against electronic/video/digital entertainment or the act of sitting on a couch, you turn straight to video games, because that's what all the kids are doing.

Obviously, television is a very mainstream distraction. Our parents watch TV, our grandparents watch TV... it's probably been about 80 years since anyone was considered "too old" for TV, if such a time ever existed. To be without a TV in the United States is almost taboo, and — let's be honest — the majority of home-owning people who don't have TVs are just weird. They're the kind of people who don't let their children eat candy on Halloween. Screw those people. There are also the hypocrites who claim they don't watch TV even though they're downloading entire seasons of the newest TV shows on their laptops, as if that doesn't count. Screw those people too. Almost everyone watches TV at least occasionally, so it's completely understandable that avid fans of popular television shows are almost never seen as unhealthy degenerates by society. When I watched three episodes of Breaking Bad in a row at my mother's house, she didn't tell me to get a life; she went on Netflix and started watching it from the beginning to catch up with me. If I had been playing Killing Floor that whole time, she probably would have told me go to outside.

Of course, people around my mother's age are playing video games these days, as well. They're not quite as accepted as TV, but they're getting there. What bugs me is the fact that negative attitudes about so-called "gamers" persist despite the growing acceptance of video games themselves. It doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense, but there's still some undying belief in our culture that the typical video game player is an introverted outcast who lives in his mother's basement and never showers. This stereotype lives on, even as video games themselves become increasingly mainstream (and even, ironically, as the casual video game players who know nothing beyond Angry Birds try to hijack the word "gamer" in some attempt to be more "nerdy" because they want to be just like the hipsters who already hijacked the word "nerd" so they could feel different without sacrificing their popularity; I hate you guys).

So it's not really video games that are getting all the bad press, aside from the occasional accusation that they're the sole cause of school shootings. It's the people who play them — more specifically, those who play them often — who are essentially ridiculed and demonized. People like me, I suppose. But I can't pretend that I don't see an explanation for the fact that the world still loves to make fun of us. Video games as an entertainment medium are okay because they're only seen, erroneously, as casual time-wasters (for the ten-minute bus ride) and toys for children (despite the fact that the majority of popular games are allegedly too violent for children). No one cares if children waste their time on such trivial things. Any adult who plays video games for more than ten minutes at a time, on the other hand, is going against society's misinformed view of what video games are — he's playing with children's toys — so he must be a friendless, sexless, jobless man-child who never grew up. Have I mentioned the whole thing about mom's basement?

"You think you can get to level ten?"
"Detective... I'm thirty years old, I live with my mother, and I have a Captain Kirk costume in my closet."

After all, only children and losers would spend time on something that isn't a job, a car, or a vagina.

In all seriousness, what you see in the video above is completely bogus and stupidly offensive, but it's the norm. It's the typical television portrayal of a person who consumes interactive media. The average person assumes that you must be good at video games if you're a hopeless loser, and vice versa. (Okay, so the guy in the video above actually wasn't very good at the game — he's bested by a girl, which is supposed to be surprising or something — but what's happening there is still harmful enough.) Most people, even many of those who play video games casually, tend to have a low opinion of those who make a real hobby out of it. This is why it's so easy to say that video games, more than any other trivial and meaningless form of entertainment, are trivial and meaningless.

But I'm not going to war over this. I'm writing this because I think it's an interesting topic, but I don't really feel the need to justify what I do or why I do it. I shouldn't need to. Furthermore, it's not really my intention to sit here defending video games as if I'm being paid to do so, even though I might have done this inadvertently. Playing video games is just a hobby, for me, not a way of life.

Maybe we should really be talking about hobbies of all kinds. Any sufficiently enjoyable hobby is almost always a terrible time sink, even the wholesome ones like fishing and reading books. If video games had never been invented, I'm sure I would be using some other kind of entertainment to distract myself from the economy, my student loans, and the fact that every good job I can find requires an engineering or business degree that I don't have. (They were lying when they said I could be anything I wanted. I've decided that I'm forcing my future children into whatever career is most economically viable at the time, regardless of how they feel about it. You want to be an artist? You're moving out early. Happy fifth birthday, have a suitcase.)

For me (and, presumably, for many others), the act of playing video games is, in part, escapism. This alone makes video games a waste of time, in a way, but it doesn't make them unique. What makes video games unique, if they are unique, is that they're so damn good at entertaining us, which is why it's easy to get "addicted" (and, yes, that might be a legitimate problem for many). Video games are not, in fact, some esoteric "nerd thing" that only "nerds" can enjoy. Of course, everyone probably recognizes this, by now, except for the older generations who have gotten to the point of hating all the new things that they don't understand, like cell phones and the internet. But they'll be dead soon anyway, so I don't have to it to them.

Games, in general, are timeless. Games are something that humans have been using for millennia to escape from the horrors of everyday life. I'd even argue that playing games is a part of being human, and I'd like to see you try to prove me wrong. Any game, by the strictest standards, is a complete and utter waste of precious time, but that's exactly why we play them. A game whose rules are enforced by a computer really isn't so different.