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?"
*Extremely* wrong headline (Score:5, Interesting)
This title is just wrong. Zonk, is there any way we could please change it?
Mundane [answers.com] means commonplace, everyday, ordinary. Boring means uninteresting. Not the same. The article is not saying that games should be less interesting -- the article is saying that games could do well to apply more to real life, and to real skills (I.E. Smooth Moves having players balance brooms on their hands).
I'm all for making games more mundane -- I think it's a great idea, and it's a phenomenal idea for making games ultimately more fun. If "fun" is about learning patterns (as Raph Koster [theoryoffun.com] posits), then it only makes sense to build off of patterns that are found in real life (hence why driving games are so much fun).
However, I'm [b]not[/b] in support of making the games boring.
Arcade vs Hardcore PC/Console gameplay (Score:2, Interesting)
Unfortunately that may only apply to 5-10% of the gaming public. What Nintendo has been doing is making games for everyone else. What nintendo has done is gone to make games for casual players, non-traditional gamers (like brainage puzzles), and cross-age groups. Sony doesn't get it either, as the PSP has been full of long difficult games too, all the while Nintendo DS comes out with stuff like Cooking Mama and creates a fad around pretending to slice vegetables.
Now the arcade paradigm, which doesn't require even more than 2-3 minutes of game play per game, has been disappearing from the consoles too, because of the focus on hardcore gameplay. That is largely missing from XBOX 360 except for the live downloads.
Even last month's Game Informer magazine had an editorial that tore into the general public making hardcore games too easy.
So it's not a matter of "boring games", but rather the games that the hardcore gamer and media have largely chose to ignore, which is what the casual gamer wants.
Article is completely wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
The author clearly shows his lack of understanding in this quote: It is a game of chores, really, not of challenges. Games like speed arithmetic and number tracing actually become maddeningly dull after only a short time, but many players persist because they want to have the sensation of keeping their minds sharp. [...] [It] makes people feel as though they are improving their long term mental health. It satisfies a mundane need for personal upkeep.
I played Brain Age daily until I unlocked the final challenge-dealie (I think it's the one where you say the numbers instead of write them?). Then I stopped. Along the way, it was nice to see improvement in each challenge over time, but after a while I would plateau, and that game would stop being fun to me. I kept playing so that I could unlock the other games, as they would offer me new situations to learn. If all the games had been available to me at the start, I would have stopped playing far earlier, and that unlock system is one of the great ideas that other games of Brain Age's ilk have adopted. I would love to know how many people keep playing regularily after all challenges are unlocked and they are not seeing significant improvements.
Of course, all of this is not something I thought consciously as I was playing. I realized it after reading A Theory of Fun for Game Design [theoryoffun.com]. A great read, and really has made me think twice about why I enjoy some games and not others.
Re:Gosh what a great idea: (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Let the market decide (Score:4, Interesting)
I think this is also taking it a bit far. I shall rephrase the question:
With popular franchise games becoming more engrossing at each subsequent release, would game publishers be better able to serve their existing customers (or, alternatively, expand the market for a particular game) by making it less exciting and immersive?
The answer here seems to be "Games like that are for weenies. We don't want any, but hey - if the publishers want to bang their heads against the wall, more power to 'em." I, for one, would like to see *larger* RPG and adventure game worlds, with more casual gameplay that doesn't require me to perform upkeep on my in-game knowledge and dexterity. Principally, the skill curve and knowledge curve should be very shallow as the game progresses. That is, I should be able to pick up the game after a hiatus and enjoy it without being frustrated or studying a notebook or having to replay the lower levels. That kind of boring could appeal to me.
Re:Let the market decide (Score:3, Interesting)
Bullshit.
What will "take off" is what is backed by the biggest capital, which in turn buys ads and "reviews." Without this, nothing takes off.
Do you even know what games are on the market today? Just take a look: three or four genres, each clogged with half a dozen clones vying for the same shelf space. And these clones are likely to be sequels, which means they are even less original than their last iteration.
Recycling the same old shit month after month, year after year is hardly "the market" deciding. It's the suits deciding.
Gaming is now a market with a high barrier to entry. That's a complete reversal of the situation we had even fifteen years ago, when publishing opportunities were great and the variety in games even greater. As a result your fictitious sentient "market" is simply a puppet on a string, dancing the way corporate money tells it.