Friday, January 14, 2011

Bad Gameplay

We often look forward to specific parts of games when we replay them. Parts of the game that were particularly well designed or implemented that are just a joy to play. World 4 in Super Mario Bros 3 was such a moment for me. The novelty of the giant goombas, pipes and blocks and the ability to switch between tiny and large enemies in one particular stage was too much fun to play with. There is something more satisfying about jumping on a Koopa's head when he's 5 times your size. For a more recent example, Old Haven in Borderlands is another such delightful area for me. Every time I replay that game, I look forward to battling through the streets of Old Haven. It's a well designed stage and the first time you encounter the sinister Lance soldiers. Covering yourself from fire seems to work better here, with plenty of buildings and rubble to hide behind, but the challenge is also greater since the Lance have shields and turets they can employ, forcing you to take full advantage of your contours.

 Sometimes these moments are in RPGs when a certain song is played, or a line is delivered just right (Celes trying to commit suicide in Final Fantasy 6 chokes me up every time, or when Crono sacrifices himself to defend his friends in Chrono Trigger). Playing through the game, these moments, stages and areas are in the back of our heads as we excitedly edge near them.

There are also moments in games that elicit the complete opposite response. The dreaded water temples, sewers, dark caves, areas with high encounter rates, or the place with the annoying bird enemy that is impossible to hit. They are a counterbalance to the excitement we have at the golden areas that excite us so. My question is, why are these areas here at all?

(The following paragraph has some very mild spoiler-y information about Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood. Read at your own risk!)

I can forgive older games since budgets weren't quite as high as they are now and mechanics and genres had not been standardized yet. Video games were still new and developers didn't have a full understanding of what exactly "fun" meant. But within newer games I am often baffled as I frustratingly struggle through an area that forces me to move more slowly than the rest of the game (underwater in Zelda games or Metroid games), or when the game forces me to walk slowly (slow walking bothers me, can you tell?) because I have to transport heavy or wiggling objects (Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood has one situation where Ezio has to carry a wriggling woman to a jail cell. It's an area that causes much a lot of grief, to say the least. The desire to slip her a taste of the hidden blade was tantalizing). Do developers and game testers not play their own games and encounter these frustrating areas of their games? I very much doubt that whoever is responsible for the hostage situation in AC:B played through that part all the while patting himself on the back for such a brilliantly built area and mechanic. Why not remove it? Or fine tune it to make it at least bearable, if not the best part of the game?

I sometimes write fiction in my free time and have encountered similar problems. Parts of the stories that I'm telling that are excruciating to read, either because of bad language or a boring situation that I've placed my characters in. When I read over a finished text and see these parts, I know that they must go. They have to die so that the rest of the text may live on and be something half-decent. But it's hard. You wrote it there for a reason and it either serves as a transitional part of your story or reveals something you believe to be terrifically important to the rest of the story.

       "Even if it's boring," I reason with myself, "it's crucial for readers to get through so that the rest of the story works as a whole." But no. No matter how convinced you are of the importance of this passage, it absolutely has to be deleted or drastically rewritten to be made interesting. Perhaps game developers experience something along these lines when they create a part of their game that is significantly worse than the whole. But, maybe it is also significantly more difficult to press the delete key on an entire section of a video game than it is for a sentence or two in a word processor. The work that went into that scene was not only the writing, but the design of the area, the voice acting, the graphics, the way objects interact with one another and so on. Because the work that went into this part of the game was several-fold more than the work it takes to write one sentence, maybe that justifying voice in their heads is similarly amplified.

    "No, we can't take this part out. It moves the story forward and we've already put a lot of money and man power into it. Players will just have to understand its importance and force their way through to reap the rewards at the end."

I want to make one distinction between frustrating gameplay elements and just plain bad ones. The water areas in Metroid games are very frustrating since you move slow, jump slow and are just a big glob of slow. But, once you get the gravity suit, suddenly all of these water areas are just lovely, since now you can leap about freely no longer hindered by the sludgey under-water game mechanic. This, to be contrasted with the end all of bad water areas, The Water Temple from Ocarina of Time. Even if they eventually give you the long shot to float about a little easier, it's still a supremely frustrating area that is confusing and hard to navigate. Sometimes an annoying area is presented for contrast to a better area to come soon, but sometimes it's just plain bad.

If there is one important lesson that I've been taught as a writer, it's that if you are bored while you are creating your piece, how can you expect your audience to be intrigued or suffer through that boredom? They owe you nothing. It is you who owes them for purchasing your future product, so the least you could do is take out the god forsaken Water Temple, couldn't you?