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Fun and Games

What makes games fun? With all the money being spent on game development and the obsession over framerates, HDR lighting, ridiculously expensive hardware requirements and all that other stuff, you’d expect that games these days are better and brighter that ever, wouldn’t you? Then how come they’re not? Look at Black and White 2 and Perfect Dark Zero’s single-player campaign. Years of development but would anyone call them legendary games? Hardly.

So what makes a good game? Is it story? Characters? Explosions? AI? Competition? Emotion? Graphics? Boobie physics? You’d think so with the amount of work that goes into them, wouldn’t you?

No, the answer is much simpler than that.

It is fun gameplay. Duh!

To be more specific, it comes down to low learning curve mechanics (see Why Don’t People Play Games – Interface), variation and a good challenge:reward ratio. Nothing more, nothing less. Look at the original Mario Bros – still a fun game after all these years. I wonder how many designers take those three variables into consideration – they’re the staples of gaming so you’d think they all would but let’s look at some examples:

Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball. It’s terrible. We all know it. And yet it has lovely graphics, some slick cinematography, interesting physics (a-hem) and plenty of competitiveness. But it has no game mechanics. I’m not even sure there’s volleyball in there amidst the pool-hopping, costume-buying and casino-gaming (that doesn’t count). As for challenge:reward balance… Sit around for long enough and they’ll find an excuse to jiggle their boobs at you. All right for some but they’ll probably find that porn is cheaper and more satisfying.

Okay, how about Dreamfall? Great storyline, beautiful graphics and lots of emotion. Barely any gameplay. See Andrew Vandervell’s review on Pro-G for a full description but the gameplay can be summarised thusly:

Fetch.
And carry.
*watch 2-minute cutscene*
*yawn*

While plot-fans will love the storyline, the heart of gaming is in, well, the gaming. Does anyone see it as a good thing when you solve a simple puzzle and your reward is to sit back and do nothing for 5 minutes straight while waiting for the dialogue to finish?

Perfect Dark Zero. Lovely graphics, lots of varying scenery, easy enough to control but good lord, the number of bullets that you need to knock a guy over. Ridiculous! It ceases to be fun when your bullets are hitting every time while you’re dodging three enemies and you have to keep it up for minutes just to take one person out. Even less so when all you have to look forward to is doing it again, over and over and over.

By constrast, the Burnout series has slightly dodgy graphics (barring the incredible-looking Xbox 360 version) and no story but many explosions. Yet despite the lack of story, every mission is a fantastic thrill-ride from start to finish. Anyone can pick it up and play within minutes and the World Tour mode means that you not only get adrenaline high of completing the race, you get more tracks! The ease of control and brevity of missions mean that you look forward to each new race. Tougher races get you more money, more cars and a greater sense of personal achievement. Would it be a better game if you got the same amount of money for winning a single-lap Indy 500 track circuit as for winning a 4 lap Monaco street race? Of course not. The challenge:reward ratio in action.

Oblivion has been lauded on almost every review site as being a great game despite the fact that the people are ugly, explosions are non-existent and characters are pretty wooden. The graphics are impressive but that’s not what makes it fun. I think anyone you ask who enjoys it will tell you that it’s the sheer breadth of the game that does it. The world just keeps going. There are always new things to discover and every new battle is a new challenge of your abilities.

Half-Life 2 – again the three staples are there. Easy to start playing, new enemies requiring different tactics are revealed over the course of the game and new challenges make you stop and think about what to do next instead of just charging in with guns blazing again and again, resulting in a greater sense of achievement when you win.

Let’s look farther afield – Xbox Live Arcade. In January the top-selling games were Geometry Wars, Gauntlet and Smash TV. All of these games and the new ones like Zuma, Jewel Thief and Outpost Kaloki X follow the same pattern – easy to pick up, hard to master and winning a level grants you a tougher challenge next time. What good is a game that sits at the same level of difficulty all the time? The law of diminishing marginal returns would say that the longer you play, the less interested you feel. It’s right – try playing just the demo of Zuma for a couple of days. Xbox Live Arcade games have no AI, no story, no cutting edge graphics and totally unrealistic physics but that doesn’t make them any less addictive.

Storylines, character development, explosions, AI and all that other stuff are just the optional window dressing that makes up a game’s genre. The heart of a game is in the playing.

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