I am a gamer. I will play any game that I find fun, and will not play any game that I don’t find fun. I suspect you are the same.
There’s something that annoys me though, and it is casual games. You know the ones, Farmville and the like and things on the Wii. Games that are beneath us and we shouldn’t even grace with the title “game”. They’re toys not games.
This is of course utter bollocks, and that’s what annoys me. A game is a game and just because somebody doesn’t like it doesn’t mean that it isn’t. You can keep adding all the qualifiers to what a game is that you want in order to discount them, but in doing so you start classifying things that are obviously games as something else.
Farmville is the perfect example. You gather crops and build things in order to make your score go up a little bit more. You send out helpful messages that other players can profit from and over time you build up a network of friends who are all working together towards the goal of improving that score.
The complaints are obvious. You’re just chasing a score, where’s the game in that? How do you win? You have to be able to win in order to be a game. Of course gaming started this way, the only goal of Asteroids or Pac Man is to get the highest score possible.
But in Farmville you can’t fail! You can’t die, you can only quit. True, but your crops can wither and die, just because it only sets you back a short while doesn’t mean that isn’t a way to fail, it’s just one that you can always recover from. It’s much like shoving another 10p into an arcade cabinet to keep on playing in fact, but just without all the RMT trading real cash for lives that we had to put up with back in the day.
I will admit to having a slight bias here as my brother made Small Worlds, a small flash game that had all these things said about it and more. All you do in the game is move your character around a landscape exploring, and as you do your world zooms out until you have the whole map onscreen at once. You can’t win beyond having made it through all the maps, you can’t die and there’s not even a score. And yet it’s still a game, it makes you think and that’s the point.
You could add more game-like bits to it if you wanted. A percentage complete number, leader boards for completion times, achievements or hidden collectables but all of those things take away from the whole point of the game. By adding more you end up with less, and miss the point. Be honest, we’ve all played games that have done that. Alan Wake, I’m looking at you with those pointless collectable flasks that didn’t need to be in there.
Does the length of a game matter? Is a five minute blast that you’ll never want to play again mean any less than a hundred hour epic? I don’t think it does beyond value for money as you wouldn’t want to pay £50 for a five minute game, but it doesn’t matter as much for 100 hours. iPhone games are designed to be played in short burst when you have a free moment and something like Doodle Jump isn’t any less fun because of it, it’s just designed to be played differently. This doesn’t make it any less of a game either.
The game that really gets me though is Mario Galaxy. It’s considered a casual game by many despite being a really hardcore platformer. Is it because it’s on the Wii? Is it because it’s accessible? Is it because it’s cute looking? I have no idea, but if you think that’s not a hardcore game I don’t think you’ve played it enough.
When it comes down to it I think there are a couple of simple rules of thumb for writing a game off as casual. The first is having a light graphical style like Mario Galaxy. That’s the kiss of death despite there being a long legacy of hardcore games from back in the time before realistic and gritty graphics were even possible.
The second, and bigger one, is killing. I think if you don’t have any killing or, to a lesser extent, conflict in your game you’re going to get written off very fast. Farmville doesn’t really have any conflict (except against time for crops), Small Worlds doesn’t have any conflict except against the world as you jump your way through it. Asteroids has conflict against, well, asteroids and that that means you need to use a lot more skill as the difficulty ramps up. This is important as the need for skill obviously gives games a more of a long term life than they might have otherwise, but it’s not required. Is skill really what defines a game? I don’t think so because if it is then where do you set the level? If you can cut the first five minutes out of another game that ramps up its difficulty so you only have insanely easy bits then it’s still a game despite loosing the need for skill. A game of solitaire is still a game despite the flat difficulty curve and inability to lose.
Ultimately I think this trying to dismiss games because they’re too simple, short or cute is damaging. We’re all gamers and we’re far too prone to drawing up dividing lines between ourselves as it is. Darkfall players have been actively encouraged to hate World of Warcraft players, non-MMO players think MMO players are weird and waste their time, PC gamers think console gamers are dumbing down the industry, and console gamers think PC gamers are masochists. When it comes down to it whether we’re playing Farmville, Doodle Jump, Final Fantasy or Darkfall we’re all scratching the same itch because we love to play games. Criticising somebody for scratching that itch using Facebook, a DS, the Wii or a mobile phone is at best misguided and at worse elitist. Nobody has the right to tell anybody what they do or don’t enjoy, and for all we know somebody who discovers gaming through Facebook and Farmville may discover that they didn’t know that itch needed scratching and discover a whole new world of games in front of them. Who knows, they may even find that what they really want is some proper interaction and conflict between players and end up in Darkfall, just as I’m sure that some of those WoW tourists that people go on so much about would find if they were encouraged to try the game, just as I’m sure many Darkfall players also play WoW quietly on the side.
Just remember that no matter what you enjoy the important thing is that you enjoy it, and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.
6 comments
Akely says:
July 15, 2010 at 11:14 am (UTC 0 )
Good posts. I must confess I’ve been in the camp that says x-ville and similar programs are not games. Been. You and others have with arguments like those you put forth here made me change my mind. That and the fact that I had an online argument with a guy a while pack that stoically claimed that Falcon 4 was not a game. It was something "far more" and at worst it could be a "Simulator". Notice the capital S.
Anyway, good pints.
Gazruney says:
July 15, 2010 at 12:33 pm (UTC 0 )
It’s a little bit like the music scene with gaming at the moment. I could compare it to something like acid house in the late 80′s when it was an undergound movement everybody felt part of an excusive club,They were ravers and nobody could stop their tent in a field in the middle of nowhere raves!!!. Fast forward a few years and there are songs like "Sesam-e street" and the infamous Tetris remix in the top 40 and all the early adopters from back in the day are complaining about how it’s lost it’s vibe since going mainstream and that it was much more "Hardcore" back the day..
It’s what happens when a sub culture begins to mainstream, where it will all lead in the end for gaming and gamers new and old alike will be an interesting journey indeed.
Very thought provoking as always Jon
sunkzero says:
July 15, 2010 at 1:02 pm (UTC 0 )
Biggest objection I have to Facebook games is that they fill up my FB "stream" (I don’t know what you call it) with endless amounts of crap from my friends. In the past Facebook = good way to keep in touch with friends and what they were up to, especially now distant friends. Now Facebook = spam of game updates, because of those wanky games.
FarmVille is shit though…
Graham says:
July 16, 2010 at 6:12 am (UTC 0 )
Yes, Farmville and all those type of games are games. Just barely but they are games. Just like casinos, harmless fun for the majority and soul-sucking hypnotic money traps for those with addictive personalities. That last point is the reason I hate these games, because they damage people financially and emotionally.
Same reason I hate F2P as a business model.
techknowmama says:
July 16, 2010 at 10:07 am (UTC 0 )
I don’t argue that farmville and the like are indeed games, but when I hear someone who only plays those games as gamers, I have to fight the urge to groan. I know that makes me a snob
techknowmama says:
July 16, 2010 at 10:11 am (UTC 0 )
ok on my last post that should have been "but when I hear someone who only plays those games refer to themselves as gamers"
need more coffee