Should Games Be More Boring? 180
An anonymous reader writes "At Gamasutra, serious games creator Ian Bogost is making the case that video games should be more mundane, particularly discussing of Nintendo' Brain Age: 'It's certainly a very different kind of game from Halo or even Miyamoto's own Zelda series, games that allow the player to inhabit complex fantasy worlds. Instead, much of Brain Age's success seems to come precisely from the ordinariness of its demands.' Would games become more accessible if they tapped into everyday things a little bit more, as opposed to spiralling off into fictional realities?"
Umm.... (Score:1, Insightful)
Silly Guy (Score:3, Insightful)
Anti-Drama... (Score:2, Insightful)
I think this sorta explains the rise of GTA over fantasy games, but I think it also begins to explain the distinction between Brain Age and fantasy/drama titles.
Fantasy Sells Systems. PERIOD. (Score:3, Insightful)
The fact is, Fantastic games are what sell systems. I begged for my first PlayStation (one) thanks to Spyro the Dragon, and had Sega been on the ball a little more, NiGHTS would've let 'em sell quite a few more systems too. Brain Age is an okay game, but when I reach for my DS, I have Elite Beat Agents, Mario, Sonic, Cooking Mama, FF3... you get where I'm going with this.
Brain Age is a good secondary game as a 'pick up and play' offering. It's NOT what made the DS a success.
boring, or mundane? (Score:5, Insightful)
So should we stop writing fantasy?
How about we just keep writing fantasy, and also let people interested in straight-fiction just read straight-fiction. We can also have mysteries, educational books, sci-fi, horror, philosophy, etc.
Why criticize a genre to "help" a medium? Computer games are a medium. Fantasy games are a genre in that medium. If there's great response to brain age: make more games like it. There's no more reason to cut fantasy than there would be to cut the fantasy section of a bookstore.
Like Skate or Die? Or The Simpsons? Or The Sims? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hello Ian and welcome to the games industry! (You noob.)
You might want to look up games such as The Sims, all the various Simpsons spin-offs or even Skate or Die or Paperboy from a previous generation. (i.e., its been done many, many times before.)
Ordinary != Boring (Score:5, Insightful)
It's absolutely ordinary for there to be shootings in South Central LA, but it's not boring.
To say Brain Age is boring because the tasks are ordinary displays stupidity and a lack of vocabulary. Rather simple vocabulary, I might add.
Also, the link is to the third page of the story, which is where Brain Age is discussed, but it is bad form.
Enough about the stupidity of anonymous cowards and their story submissions, on to where I talk shit about the article!
The article is just pathetic. "television is so familiar, it's not even startling to think about television programming produced solely to discuss other media forms." This is in response to a comment about TV shows about making movies. But there are movies about making things, and on this planet we call them documentaries. This lack of ability to stop and notice reality pervades the article, which is split into three pages to garner ad impressions, but has little enough content to have been on one page of this size.
His summary (which is not actually a summary - this not being an essay, but a meandering rant) follows: "we should want games to be more boring. Not just some games, we should want many of them, maybe even most of them to be boring, so that the ones that are not can become the Casablancas of our future medium." What he seems to be saying here is that we should want games to be crap, so that the non-crap can look even better by comparison.
Say it with me: mundane does not equal boring. Sure, most things which are mundane are also boring. But then there's sex.
I don't agree with Gamasutra's assessment (Score:2, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
How About (Score:3, Insightful)
Look they are people out there who are all over ass sweat on the body they just shot. Great. Too bad ass sweat doesn't actually make the game good.
Given X the total time from start to finish how much of X is not on something relating to actually game play experience?
Missing the point (Score:5, Insightful)
Most gamers would reply, "that's different!" But is it really? If you're not all that interested in video games, living out a fantasy like that might not be interesting. In fact, it may very well feel like a chore. (
(As a side note, this is why I stopped playing first person shooters save for those that take place in fictional universes that interest me. e.g. Elite Forces. FPS games were becoming a repetitive task of "avoid the zombie attacks, shoot the bad guys, avoid the zombie attacks, shoot the bad guys." Online gameplay was marginally more interesting with, "shoot other guy, get shot by someone else, shoot the other guy, get shot by someone else." But I digress.)
Generally speaking, when you view or interact with entertainment you are looking to invoke an emotional connection of some sort. A highly developed sense for a particular form of entertainment allows one to appreciate complex forms of it more readily than others. Meanwhile, some just want forms that evoke a simple reaction to a simple form of that entertainment.
To use music as an example, Beethoven can evoke a lot of emotion in those who have developed an ear for classical music and enjoy such music. Others prefer a more direct approach of a shouted out emotional state as found in Death Metal Rock. Still others are looking for a quick attack/release cycle of emotions as found in pop and techno music. (Ever notice the 90's techno always dropped the background music for a few seconds at the height of the song? It's a cheap trick, but it has serious emotional and cognitive impact on the listener.)
Taking this back to video games, it's not the chores themselves that make Brain Age interesting. It's being placed in a situation where you have to react and think quickly. Simple math and puzzles are used as the vehicle for such tests. For some players, the pressure being placed on them to get a better score is reward in of itself. This is similar to the reward one gets by blasting through a shoot-em'up while avoiding the gazillion+1 enemies that are hogging the screen space. Pressure is put on you to perform, and a certain reward is felt when you achieve a good performance level. One can even be proud of their achievement by sharing their score with others. In the old days, this meant entering your initials into the arcade machine. For Brain Age, this means having a normalized and easily relatable score to brag to your friends about.
My end point is that these games aren't "boring" at all. They are just as interactive as other forms of gaming. The only difference is in the audience they appeal to. Just as country music appeals to some while death metal rock appeals to others. It takes all kinds.
Re:Anti-Drama... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Let the market decide (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank you Captain Obvious. Since the author of the article wasn't suggesting that such games be given special government funding, or that people be forced to play them at gunpoint, then the market will decide anyway.
He's quite entitled to make suggestions, companies are free to ignore them, or consumers free to not buy them. You seem to be implying that anything outside some artificially restricted concept of "The Market" is not valid; i.e. software houses decide what to produce based only on their own opinions/research and consumers either buy or don't.
Chanting "let the market decide" like a mantra isn't meaningful or insightful; it's redundant.
Re:Let the market decide (Score:5, Insightful)
Brain Age is not a popular game because it is boring or because it has such a broad appeal. It is popular because it is good. Just like Zelda and Halo (NIMHO, but that isn't the point). Good games will always be popular. Bad games will go the way of Diakatana.
When it comes to games, the point is make something that is quality work. If it is, it will find a market to appeal to. Again, look back a number of weeks [slashdot.org] when Geometry Wars was being talked about. Is that game boring? No. It is simple, but the real key, it is really fun. Hence, why it is so popular.
I will say this, if a Game "Magazine/web site" is making this article, I really have to question their credibility.
RonB
Who? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:I don't agree with Gamasutra's assessment (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:boring, or mundane? (Score:3, Insightful)
My own personal view is that this has already started to happen, via MMO's. As an MMO player myself (COH), I think we can admit that for the most part, MMO's are boring. They require insane amounts of time and feature a steady stream of simple, repetitive tasks. Yet they are full of people, many with little other interest in gaming.
About as Anti-Drama as Hollywood is (Score:5, Insightful)
I sincerely hope this isn't taken as a troll, but George W Bush himself always came across to me as someone playing a movie-style president for an electorate brought up on the same thing. Not just the gung-ho mentality, but the whole package.
Maybe I'm wrong, but my gut reaction is that you're so soaked in this that you can't see it. Or are you implying that US society is much *less* influenced by images in popular culture than others are?
And you have an aversion to abstraction? Advertising and branding, the red-blood of All-American capitalism *is* abstraction of values. How else does a simple tick-shaped "swoosh" symbol, or some pretty white writing on a red background saying "Coca Cola" have so much meaning? It's not that Nike goods or Coca Cola are so much better than the competition; it's that they have so much imagery associated with them. It's bordering on hyperreality [wikipedia.org].
I appreciate that there's been a move to "reality" TV in recent years, but if your reality shows are anything like ours in the UK, then they're contrived situations set up like a lab experiment designed to provoke drama and edited to play out like a real-life soap.
If reality TV reflects anything, it's the increasingly artificial and contrived direction modern society is moving towards, everyone's life played out as 15 minutes of TV fame.
Re:Ordinary != Boring (Score:4, Insightful)
Here are some more statements he could have made that would grab people's attention:
"Games with animals turn gamers to bestiality"
"Wii games should cost $500"
"Gamers might contract gonnorhea from the PS3"
"One-Dimensional Games: An untapped market"
"GTA4 should not have cars in it."
Re:Let the market decide (Score:5, Insightful)
MMOs boring? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:*Extremely* wrong headline (Score:3, Insightful)
Everybody thinks different things are boring.
I like to read books about physics but I could care less the name of Madonna's husband/boyfriend.
To me the fundamental structure of all of creation is more exciting than a celebrity's love life.
But let's face it I am in the minority.
Re:Umm.... (Score:2, Insightful)
More boring? Of course not. But... (Score:3, Insightful)
Games should go back to being games, rather than video based reincarnations of choose-your-own-adventure books or 120 hour movies with semi-interactive cut scenes (by which I mean the actual game play in between the cinematics). Games have put eye/ear candy above game play and plot for the last decade.
Re:Let the market decide (Score:3, Insightful)
In Brainage, you level up! (Score:3, Insightful)
In most RPGs, you get better primarily by gaining levels or acquiring new equipment. In Zelda, you get a new boomerang or a better sword. What's unique about brain age is that rather than doing better because you got the +10K dagger of Pwnage, your skills actually improve. You become better at adding and lower your "brain age". It's just like an RPG; you gain rated levels based on how you perform, but the focus is on your performing better, rather than giving your character special skills or equipment that allow them to perform better in your stead.
I can't think of too many other games where the focus is on self-improvement rather than avatar-improvement (or just simply a high score).
Poorly expressed concept (Score:3, Insightful)
Probably a better way to put it is,
"Should there be more games that are cerebral or contemplative rather than action oriented"
Put that way, the answer is probably yes. There are a lot of activities that people enjoy that are not excitement-oriented. And there have always been games that tapped into this kind of entertainment: board games, puzzle games, virtual pets, classic adventure games, resource management games, weird abstract games. Games like Brain Age reveal that this category is hardly mined out. But the factors that make such games enjoyable tend to be more unique and difficult to anticipate than, say, first person shooters, so they will probably always remain a minor component of the market.
Re:Make Money Slowly by Gold Farming! (Score:2, Insightful)
On topic now, I always found grinding in WoW to be fun, I'd log my warrior and head to the Noxious Glade to beat crap out of random things. Not for any particular reason even, it's just something I did when I wanted to tune out for a bit. When it comes down to it, beating crap outta things (or setting fire to them, freezing them, sucking their souls out, maybe healing friendly things, whatever lights your fuse) is what you do 90% of the time. If it's not something you enjoy, why play?
There 2 types of games (Score:3, Insightful)
2.Games for people who want to have challenge.(e.g. Skill based games)
Bith tyopes have some fun,and some challenge but game focuses on something singular.