Humble Bundle Strikes Again

As many of us already know, the sixth incarnation of the Humble Indie Bundle is on sale right now, and will be available for another six days. I didn't exactly come here to plug it — I'm not on their payroll — but it's hard not to say a few nice things about a pack of games that you can buy for almost nothing. (If you have no idea what I'm talking about, read this so I don't have to explain.) It's been more than two years since the very first Humble Bundle, and they've gotten a whole lot of good press since then, so there's no need for me to rave about how awesome it is. But, for the record, it's pretty neat.

Of course, despite the pay-what-you-want model, not everyone loves Humble Bundle. Some game developers have expressed doubts that being part of a Humble Bundle sale is really a profitable and worthwhile venture. (Customers can choose where their money goes, and the recommended "default split" for the current bundle is 65% to developers, 20% to charity, and 15% to Humble Bundle, Inc., but the average amount, per game sold, that a developer gets is probably rather low, since so many consumers will pay as little as possible instead of paying what they honestly believe the games are worth.)

Furthermore, a lot of people have some bad things to say about indie games in general. While many have taken the extreme view that so-called "indie" developers are the last hope for originality in a stagnating video game market saturated with too many nearly identical and equally overpriced first-person shooters, others go to the opposite extreme; they look at indie games and see cheaply made, outdated, pretentious hipster trash. In particular, any mention of "retro graphics" is sure to draw a lot of mockery and criticism, though the indie developers keep using this term in marketing their games, probably for the sake of appealing to older players and anyone else who treats "retro" as a codeword for cool.

If you like indie games and you don't have a job, the Humble Bundle is perfect for you. On the other hand, if you're not fond of indie games and other "retro" stuff, you should probably pass on this deal. The games in a Humble Bundle sale generally aren't the big-budget, high-definition, mainstream type. There's no such thing as a Humble Call of Duty Bundle as of yet, so good luck naming your own price for that.

I should also mention that "pay what you want" is slightly misleading... but only slightly. Technically, it's true, but the Humble Bundle guys aren't idiots; they do employ a few tricks to encourage customers to spend more than the bare minimum. (Otherwise, they'd probably never make any money, except from the generous and wealthy few who donate thousands of dollars.) While you can pay as little as one cent for the five core games that make up the bundle, you won't really be getting the whole bundle. There are always a few extra games, some added later in the sale, reserved for those who spend more than the average amount. (You'll also have to spend at least a dollar if you want keys to activate the games on Steam.) Since a lot of people choose to exceed the average contribution by one cent, so they can get all of the games, that average typically creeps upward slowly throughout the sale.

With the four games that were just added yesterday, Humble Indie Bundle 6 is now up to ten games: Rochard, Shatter, Space Pirates and Zombies, Torchlight, and Vessel can be stolen for a penny, but you'll have to beat the average (just above $6.00 now) to get Dustforce, Bit.Trip Runner, Gratuitous Space Battles, Jamestown, and Wizorb as well. Five games for a penny is great, but ten games for six bucks and change is pretty good too.

It's worth noting, however, that Humble Bundles often include a few repeats, and this one is no exception. Specifically, Bit.Trip Runner, Gratuitous Space Battles, and Jamestown were included in Humble Indie Bundle 4, and Humble Indie Bundle 4 included (as a bonus) the first five games from Humble Indie Bundle 3. Sometimes, if you already own a previous bundle, you might find that paying above the average for the next one isn't as great of a deal as you might have hoped. Since activating a bundle's Steam key won't give you giftable copies of any games you already own, there's no benefit to buying a game twice. You'll just have to decide whether the other games in the pack are worth your hard-earned pocket change.

When the fifth Humble Indie Bundle came out last spring, I already owned Psychonauts, and none of the other games seemed appealing at the time, so I passed. In retrospect, I'm starting to regret this decision, since I've heard such good things about Bastion and some of the other games. I can only hope they'll be repeated in future sales. This time, I'm facing a similar dilemma: I already own Torchlight — arguably the most important game on the list, considering the highly anticipated release of Torchlight II last week — and I also bought Humble Indie Bundle 4 last winter — easily the best video game purchase I've made in recent memory. So I already own four of the games in Humble Indie Bundle 6, but six bucks for the remaining six games is still a sweet deal.

To put things in the proper perspective, Dustforce alone is currently $9.99 on Steam.

All in all, you can't really go wrong with the Humble Indie Bundle, since any one game is typically worth more than what you'll pay for the whole pack. And if you're content with only getting the five base games, you could always be a cheapskate and pay only a cent. Of course, if you do this, Humble Bundle, Inc. probably suffers a net loss due to bandwidth and transaction fees. Honestly, you might as well pirate the games, and I guess that's why so many people do so despite the fact that the games are practically free. Or maybe they just can't be bothered to put in their credit card information. Or maybe they don't have credit cards. Or maybe they pirate things out of principle because they're super bad-ass renegades who break all the rules because shut up.

The games in the Humble Bundle aren't just cheap. They're also free of digital rights management, playable on every operating system that matters, and available in torrent form in addition to a direct download. In other words, they've made an effort to appease even the pickiest of players. They've eliminated every good reason to pirate their games, but it still hasn't eliminated piracy.

I'm getting a bit off-topic now, but this is something to remember next time someone tries to justify piracy by citing high prices, intrusive DRM, inconvenience, or a general desire to deliver a slap in the face to big, evil corporations like Electronic Arts. The fact is that people turn to piracy no matter how low the price of the game, or how reasonable the publisher's behavior, just to avoid paying at all. It's not my place to judge those who engage in software piracy — the extent to which it actually harms the game industry is still up for debate — but pirates should just accept that what they're doing is a selfish act and nothing more. They should be able to make their decision and live with it, without trying to rationalize it after the fact, but they still come up with all kinds of excuses and pass the blame around. Simply put, they're in denial.

For those of us who don't mind sending a few dollars to the hard-working people who make our favorite pastime possible, the Humble Bundle is a great opportunity to grab a few interesting games without breaking the bank.

Real Life

Do you ever come home from work, sit down to play video games, look at the clock, realize that you have to go to bed in three hours, wonder if this really gives you enough time to make significant progress after installing your new game and configuring all of the options to your liking and watching the opening cutscene and going through the usual tutorial nonsense, decide to go for it anyway, get five minutes into the game, and quit because you can't stop thinking about real life and it's ruining the experience?

Me too.

I've been kind of busy this week, which is why I'm not actually writing anything except this short complaint. In fact, I'll probably be posting less often from now on, since my current work situation is slightly unpredictable and the job I'm taking when this one ends is likely to suck what's left of my soul right out of my body. But I'll find time, somehow.

Until then, put this on repeat.

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.

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.