Has the internet robbed games of any sense of mystery?

I recently played through Polytron’s Fez, a wonderfully absorbing little platform adventure game from the Xbox LIVE Arcade. The standout thing about Fez is its sense of mystery, the way it creates an ethereal feeling of wonder with a range of often obtuse, mostly logical, but at times seemingly impossible puzzles. It’s the first game I’ve played in years with a notepad next to my control pad, and this made me pleased.

Except the whole time I played, every time I scrawled down a potential solution to a stubborn question-mark labelled room, part of me knew I needn’t have bothered. I puzzled away for the joy of it, but I knew that at any point I could just turn to the internet and solve the whole game in minutes.

And eventually I did. I don’t have the patience or the mental ability to decipher entire languages and counting systems, and I always knew that eventually I’d turn to the net to get those last few pesky cubes. And as soon as I did, the game wasn’t fun anymore. That sense of wonder was lost, and the game boiled down to a mechanical process of visiting rooms and punching in codes until I’d hit 100%.

You could argue a lack of fortitude on my part, and certainly there will be a few stalwart individuals who will refuse to look online until they have solved every puzzle for themselves, but most people operate on a sliding scale of patience. If a solution eludes them to the point of true frustration, they’ll hit the net for an instant solution.

In our interconnected, always-online world, is there any way to counter this? And is it even something we should try to counter? After all, genuine, point-of-anger frustration is something that should generally be avoided in videogames. No one wants controller-shaped dents in their walls. But I’d argue that games like Fez, which place such an emphasis on puzzles and mystery to engender a sense of wonder in the player, are somewhat undermined by the easy access of instant solutions the internet offers. Continue reading →

Do Japanese games just suck?  To say so would be to ignore some fantastic output from Japanese studios in recent years – games like Bayonetta, Street Fighter IV, Dark Souls and Xenoblade Chronicles – but it seems that these few successes are in the minority.  The Japanese games industry is far from the critical powerhouse it was in the late 90′s, and there is a growing trend towards suck, spearheaded by previously untouchable studios like Capcom and Square.

Quantum Theory.  Lost Planet 2.  Knight’s Contract.  Bionic Commando.  I accept that taste is subjective, but come on; a lot of these games do suck.  There’s another trend in the Japanese industry at the moment, one that correlates quite neatly with what I’ll endearingly term the ‘trend to suck’; that’s the trend for Japanese developers to seek a wider audience by designing their games with a Western audience in mind.

I’ve written recently about the lack of audience understanding demonstrated by some game developers, and this rings doubly true for the big Japanese studios.  Their recent attempts, both to revitalise old franchises and to create new ones, seem to be the result of focus testing panels that are reaching to design games to appeal to everyone, and end up producing games that appeal to no one. Continue reading →

Know your audience.  For anyone who’s ever done any sort of creative education, this is the message that will have been drummed into you; if you want your work to be commercially successful, you have to know your audience.  Certainly, it’s one of the founding tenets of the entertainment industry.  It’s somewhat alarming, then, to realise that some of the biggest names in the gaming industry seem to have forgotten this basic principle.

It was sometime during my sixth consecutive match-the-numbers-on-a-clock face puzzle in Final Fantasy XIII-2 that I had to stop and ask myself ‘who is this for, exactly?’  Who are these dismal puzzle sections actually aimed at?  FFXIII-2 is a continuation of Square Enix’s attempt to revolutionise the RPG genre, a genre whose fans thrive on stat-juggling and accumulation, on percentage-beating and questing, exploration and dramatic storytelling.  Cutting away from all of this to a bizarrely disjointed and inflexible clock puzzle comes across as structurally baffling.

Trying to imagine the sort of person likely to purchase a game like FFXIII-2, I can’t think of any player who would consider these puzzle sections anything other than the worst aspect of an extremely hit-and-miss title.  I find it hard to imagine anyone playing this game who would be breathlessly awaiting the next opportunity to match coloured numbers in order.  There’s a market for this sort of puzzle, certainly, but it isn’t in the middle of a massive story-focused RPG.  They may as well stop you to solve Sudoku puzzles.

It’s a problem endemic of a Square Enix who seems to have little clue where to take the Final Fantasy franchise, who react to negative feedback with more knee-jerk attempts to expand the title’s reach.  It’s something we perhaps should have expected from FFXIII-2, a game whose very existence speaks of its publisher’s indecision over their future, but this indecision becomes more troubling when its symptoms are appearing in the wider industry.  Even industry grandfather Nintendo is far from immune. Continue reading →

In my bid to get Answer published and thus earn big sacks of money and cool-person points, I’m currently in the process of writing a synopsis.  The synopsis is important, as it’s likely the only thing a prospective agent or publisher will read before deciding whether or not to assign your manuscript to the recycling bin, and this pressure makes synopsis-writing even more painful than it would otherwise be.

Synopsising one’s own work is never easy or enjoyable.  For one, the longer I spend working on one huge ambitious idea, the harder it become for me to succinctly describe it in one elegant ~400 word package.  Picking which bits are important enough to include becomes so much harder, because to me, all the bits are important.

There’s also a kind of egotism involved that sets my teeth on edge.  Writing a synopsis is much more like a marketing exercise than it is a work of creative writing; in fact it’s entirely like a marketing exercise, as this is the one piece of work that will hopefully persuade someone in charge of money that this big ol’ pile of words I’ve written is a marketable product. Continue reading →

Piracy is a hot topic at the moment, with the Stop Online Piracy Act looming over American Congress and threatening to fundamentally alter the way we use the internet.  If you don’t know about SOPA or PIPA, it’s worth taking a few minutes to watch this.  For something more games-related, and for an idea of what the outcome of the bill could be, then I recommend watching this followed by this.

I don’t intend to weigh in on the SOPA issue as such, other than to say that it’s a morally reprehensible bill that could prove dangerous to free speech.  Instead, I’d like to comment on the issue of piracy itself, and look at why the companies that support the bill feel that such extreme measures are called for.

There’s no debating the moral issue of piracy – whatever the form, taking someone else’s work for free is wrong.  The entertainment industries’ attempts to equate it to theft, however, ring hollow.  By now everyone must be familiar with the lamentable You Wouldn’t Steal A Car ads that frontend most every DVD in existence.  What this clips fail to make clear is the real distinction between theft and piracy; the transference of property.  If I stole someone’s car, then they wouldn’t be able to drive to work the next day.  If I download a copy of Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked, the only transference that occurs is a few hundred megabytes of data copied from one server to another.  No one actually loses anything (although in this particular case it could be argued that I stand to lose 90 minutes of my life and a good deal of sanity.)

Continue reading →