On Bad Games for 8-Year-Olds and the Theory of Causality
For Christmas, my friend got me a Pokemon Ranger game, mistakenly thinking it was a main-brand Pokemon game. The game seems to target a pretty young audience: the gameplay is simplistic and easy, the dialog shying away from words of any complexity, the main characters seemingly about 8-10 years old. And yet after a while I was attracted by the game by its differences from most other games I play.
It's focused on plot and doesn't care much about gameplay. I've never really played many video games where plot is the real focus above any gameplay. The RPGs I've played - at least the way I've experienced them - have all been gameplay first, story second. In King's Bounty, there were dialogue trees and such, but it was essentially ignorable. Might & Magic and Heroes games had cutscenes, but they were brief and rare. In Pokemon Ranger, however, the gameplay is pretty stupid and unrelated to the theme, for the most part. You draw circles around a wild Pokemon using the DS stylus to convey your feelings of friendship. Seriously. Their words, not mine. There are a couple variations here and there, but really the gameplay mainly exists to let cutscenes happen.
I know that's extremely common in games as a whole, but I've never been interested in those games before. I'm a gameplay kinda guy. My board game tastes reflect this as well. For the most part, the games I most enjoy are based on their mechanics and interpersonal atmosphere, rather than caring about a narrative. Betrayal at House on the Hill is the most notable counterexample to this for me, as the strategy tends to be either obvious or random, and yet I still enjoy seeing the different directions it goes and the created stories afterwards. And like the Betrayal stories aren't usually especially interesting, the Pokemon Ranger storyline was none too intriguing, save a single unexpected twist near the end (some minor characters seemingly on the good side turned out to be the big bad villains), and yet I stuck with it.
I didn't lose a single capture/battle the entire game. I came close in one boss battle, against - of all Pokemon - Ditto! But everything else was a walk in the park. Even the system that scores the quality of your capture turns out to be a bit of a sham; it seems like you're pretty good, as you get grades of A and B most of the time, but as it turns out you CAN'T get a grade below B!
So no challenge, poor gameplay, uninteresting story, and yet I kept playing (partially out of obligation, partially out of interest). I beat the game. And I even checked out what happened if I continued the game after the credits, and there are actually new quests and such still waiting for me should I decide to keep at it. And I am still thinking about it for no good reason, simply because in all its unimpressiveness it is making me think about its design decisions.
Why should a game continue after you've won? No board games I know operate this way, at least not technically. There are games where who will win is a foregone conclusion, but once the act of victory is achieved, the game ends. And you don't play anymore. That's it. In some games, like chess, you don't even GET to the act of victory, it's just inevitable that in the future you will have won, and so it's just said, hey, you win. Winning is the goal. You don't keep running after you've finished the marathon. Why is it different for video games?
Does it matter if theme and gameplay intersect? In Pokemon Ranger, they mostly don't. Abstract games obviously don't have that, and yet games from checkers to poker to Tetris to YINSH are all hailed as great games by many. In loosely themed games like Pac Man or Bejeweled or Through the Desert, it still doesn't really matter, the games are enjoyable. I think it's only when there's supposed to be a strong theme and it just conflicts with your actions that it's noticeably wrong. Having your mighty warriors stand off to the side and let everyone else duke it out in Heroes of Might and Magic 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6 was always strange. (Go Heroes 4!) In Settlers of Catan and many other modern European-style board games, you vie for a vague concept of "points," often "victory points" but occasionally dressed up as "prestige points" or "culture points" or whatever, which is still some arbitrary scoring mechanism that has no in-theme equivalent. When you have 2 VPs for a city in Settlers, what does that even mean? Yes, it means you're 1/5 of the way to victory, but as a... landowner, I guess... in Catan, how do you have 2 VPs? Eventually every game just gets down to "because I say so" when you drill far enough, it's just some games make you drill down more. 8 Stink Beans don't give you 4 thalers because that's how real bean farming is, it's because that's how Bohnanza works. Only one player each round can plow their field in Agricola not because of any real-world implications, it's purely for gameplay purposes. Even tabletop RPGs, with their generally loose rulesets and focus on making things make sense in some universe have to defer to the gamemaster or handbook or whatever authority figure is relevant just for some "because I said so" reasoning behind things. There never is a direct tie between theme and gameplay.
Which makes me think about real life now. You can ask a never-ending line of "why?" questions about pretty much anything, and you eventually just have to give into "because that's what God/science/the human brain/whatever says". We don't generally think of this as a disconnect, because we're immersed in it, but eventually explanations stop working. A hug can make you feel good because of emotional reasons or because of animal instinct or because of some situational rationale, but delving into any of those hits a wall at some point. There's a disconnect between the "in-game" action of a hug and the effect of comfort or happiness. Is cause-and-effect much stronger in real life than it is in a game where touching a flower lets you shoot fireballs or where rolling doubles three times sends you to jail? I think not.
Way to go, me, a fairly boring kids' Pokemon game has made me question the fabric of the universe. Good thing I don't play any actually good video games.
It's focused on plot and doesn't care much about gameplay. I've never really played many video games where plot is the real focus above any gameplay. The RPGs I've played - at least the way I've experienced them - have all been gameplay first, story second. In King's Bounty, there were dialogue trees and such, but it was essentially ignorable. Might & Magic and Heroes games had cutscenes, but they were brief and rare. In Pokemon Ranger, however, the gameplay is pretty stupid and unrelated to the theme, for the most part. You draw circles around a wild Pokemon using the DS stylus to convey your feelings of friendship. Seriously. Their words, not mine. There are a couple variations here and there, but really the gameplay mainly exists to let cutscenes happen.
I know that's extremely common in games as a whole, but I've never been interested in those games before. I'm a gameplay kinda guy. My board game tastes reflect this as well. For the most part, the games I most enjoy are based on their mechanics and interpersonal atmosphere, rather than caring about a narrative. Betrayal at House on the Hill is the most notable counterexample to this for me, as the strategy tends to be either obvious or random, and yet I still enjoy seeing the different directions it goes and the created stories afterwards. And like the Betrayal stories aren't usually especially interesting, the Pokemon Ranger storyline was none too intriguing, save a single unexpected twist near the end (some minor characters seemingly on the good side turned out to be the big bad villains), and yet I stuck with it.
I didn't lose a single capture/battle the entire game. I came close in one boss battle, against - of all Pokemon - Ditto! But everything else was a walk in the park. Even the system that scores the quality of your capture turns out to be a bit of a sham; it seems like you're pretty good, as you get grades of A and B most of the time, but as it turns out you CAN'T get a grade below B!
So no challenge, poor gameplay, uninteresting story, and yet I kept playing (partially out of obligation, partially out of interest). I beat the game. And I even checked out what happened if I continued the game after the credits, and there are actually new quests and such still waiting for me should I decide to keep at it. And I am still thinking about it for no good reason, simply because in all its unimpressiveness it is making me think about its design decisions.
Why should a game continue after you've won? No board games I know operate this way, at least not technically. There are games where who will win is a foregone conclusion, but once the act of victory is achieved, the game ends. And you don't play anymore. That's it. In some games, like chess, you don't even GET to the act of victory, it's just inevitable that in the future you will have won, and so it's just said, hey, you win. Winning is the goal. You don't keep running after you've finished the marathon. Why is it different for video games?
Does it matter if theme and gameplay intersect? In Pokemon Ranger, they mostly don't. Abstract games obviously don't have that, and yet games from checkers to poker to Tetris to YINSH are all hailed as great games by many. In loosely themed games like Pac Man or Bejeweled or Through the Desert, it still doesn't really matter, the games are enjoyable. I think it's only when there's supposed to be a strong theme and it just conflicts with your actions that it's noticeably wrong. Having your mighty warriors stand off to the side and let everyone else duke it out in Heroes of Might and Magic 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6 was always strange. (Go Heroes 4!) In Settlers of Catan and many other modern European-style board games, you vie for a vague concept of "points," often "victory points" but occasionally dressed up as "prestige points" or "culture points" or whatever, which is still some arbitrary scoring mechanism that has no in-theme equivalent. When you have 2 VPs for a city in Settlers, what does that even mean? Yes, it means you're 1/5 of the way to victory, but as a... landowner, I guess... in Catan, how do you have 2 VPs? Eventually every game just gets down to "because I say so" when you drill far enough, it's just some games make you drill down more. 8 Stink Beans don't give you 4 thalers because that's how real bean farming is, it's because that's how Bohnanza works. Only one player each round can plow their field in Agricola not because of any real-world implications, it's purely for gameplay purposes. Even tabletop RPGs, with their generally loose rulesets and focus on making things make sense in some universe have to defer to the gamemaster or handbook or whatever authority figure is relevant just for some "because I said so" reasoning behind things. There never is a direct tie between theme and gameplay.
Which makes me think about real life now. You can ask a never-ending line of "why?" questions about pretty much anything, and you eventually just have to give into "because that's what God/science/the human brain/whatever says". We don't generally think of this as a disconnect, because we're immersed in it, but eventually explanations stop working. A hug can make you feel good because of emotional reasons or because of animal instinct or because of some situational rationale, but delving into any of those hits a wall at some point. There's a disconnect between the "in-game" action of a hug and the effect of comfort or happiness. Is cause-and-effect much stronger in real life than it is in a game where touching a flower lets you shoot fireballs or where rolling doubles three times sends you to jail? I think not.
Way to go, me, a fairly boring kids' Pokemon game has made me question the fabric of the universe. Good thing I don't play any actually good video games.