The old Blog of Tale of Tales

The games medium is on the treshold of maturity. Maturity, for me, is defined by variety: variety in experiences, variety in the audience. When there’s a game out there for every single person on the planet looking to be entertained, the medium will be mature. I believe that the major thing standing in the way of this happening is what many consider to be the core of the medium: the high priority put on gameplay and fun. And I think we are about to abandon it.

The reason why I think so is because of the growing discrepancy between the narratives that games deal with and the things that their gameplay expresses. In the past, stories in games were simplistic. There were only so many pixels to paint a picture and children were the prime target audience. The gameplay was equally simplistic, so the whole thing felt together. This is why Mario and Zelda continue to convince.

In the past years, however, we have seen an enormous growth in the kinds of stories games try to deal with. Gameplay, on the other hand, has not evolved (or it may have achieved its absolutely perfection and there is no room to evolve further). In fact, I would argue that in essence, the gameplay of virtually all AAA titles is the same, even though their stories are vastly diffferent. Tomb Raider plays the same as Bioshock plays the same as God of War plays the same as Gears of War plays the same as Assassin’s Creed. Gameplay has become a standardized formal layer on top of narrative worlds that vary greatly.
This is probably one of the reasons why the true hardcore gamers have turned away from commercial games in favour of independent games, where stories and gameplay often still form a consistent whole. One could definitely argue that, in terms of pure game design, independent games are often superior.

But pure gameplay holds very little appeal to the majority people. People don’t play Halo because it allows them to shoot things and score points. You can do this in any game. I believe that it is only a matter of time for game designers to understand that what their gameplay is expressing has nothing to do with what they are really trying to talk about. And then they will be forced to take the next logical step: to rid themselves from the archaic concept of gameplay and step into the broader realm of interactive entertainment. When this happens, the doors to the medium’s maturity will be wide open.

There’s something that has always stayed with me from my philosophy classes in high school. In my memory the idea is attributed to 19th century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, whose work I still admire. But it could have come from somewhere else too.
Anyway, they idea goes something like this:

Happiness does not exist. There is only suffering. Sometimes the suffering is reduced a little. When this happens, we call it happiness.

This idea often comes to mind when I’m playing a video game.

It seems like most game designers’ strategy works through the same principle: they start by making life hard for you, and then they remove the problem. The relief that you feel at that moment is experienced as “fun”, “joy”, or “happiness”. While in reality, all the game did was take away the misery it had caused to you in the first place.

It strikes me that this method, while effective, is very different from how Auriea and I design games. If one would call the method described above as subtractive, then our method could be called additive. At Tale of Tales, we try to start from wherever the player is at the moment when he or she starts playing. And we build up from there. We like to think of our games as things that add something to your life, that become a part of it, rather than replace it temporarily. We expect the player to bring something to the game. We expect a human being, who knows what it is to love and to desire, who knows how fresh sheets feel on skin and wet grass between bare toes. We need you to be somebody, not an empty shell, or a shadow without memories. But a strong core around which the game can wrap itself.

If you’re a game designer, you should probably listen to the lecture Jonathan Blow gave at the Montreal International Games Summit.

Not only do the opinions expressed sound similar to our own. It’s refreshing to hear these points spoken out loud, and so eloquently illustrated.

Contrary to us, Mr. Blow still firmly believes in games as rule-based challenges to achieve a certain goal. But he posits that the learning required to engage in such an activity should be worthwhile. A game should teach us something interesting. And game designers should be aware of what their game is teaching players.

The latter could be a serious problem as the quality of games is currently almost exclusively judged by whether a game is fun or not. This is where Mr. Blow’s tremendously insightful analogy with drugs and fast food comes in. He advocates designing games with rewards that are intellectually nutritious and not simply addictive.

Doing so will not only improve the quality of life of the player. But it will also open up the interactive medium to being capable of addressing the many different types of content that have made cinema, literature and music into the dominant forms of entertainment and enlightment that they are today. Mr. Blow urges game designers to design with the intention of making something “worthwhile or deep or interesting”. Something that is oddly very rare today indeed.

A recording of the talk is available from his website.