Steve Gaynor bets no and thinks that while they’ll still be great games in 50 years their cultural impact will still be fairly marginal. N’Gai Croal’s response was good enough that I’ve added him to my Google Reader account as I should have a long time ago (part two of Croal’s response).
Anyhow, busy today, so I’m not going to throw up summaries. Instead I’ll just link to Todd’s response where he fairly effectively dismantles Gaynor’s points. Not doing Todd’s argument full justice, but basically Gaynor underestimates how much we invest in other medias and misses out on many classical and new ways that games are accessible.
That said, I disagree a bit with Todd on Gaynor’s point that "it’s still extremely common for games of high quality to be too difficult for a non-gamer to play effectively." Here’s the part of the retort I disagree with:
What he’s missing is that gamers do this even in games with set conditions of failure and success. Failure to meet a proscribed in game goal does not mean failure to meet a personal goal, and I would argue that personal goals of engagement are considerably more powerful in terms of what we get from the play experience than just "oh snap, I failed to save the princess." This isn’t to say they don’t intersect; they do, a lot. But how many of us who’ve played games -- especially inexperienced players -- have laughed when we hurtled off a cliff, blew ourselves up with a mortar, or rolled two gutter balls in a row in Wii Sports? How many of us get up on a DDR machine and think that if we don’t get a triple A on every song then we have wasted $0.75 and the experience was a complete failure? This is complete nonsense, and it somewhat saddens me that a game designer is thinking that way. I admit my biases are showing here; I’m a dyed-in-the-wool cultural studies guy, and I’m a hardcore personal agency-in-consumption person that gives the audience more power than, say, political economy. Still... I think the argument here against the idea of hardcode failure = experiential failure is pretty solid.
Sure it’s fun, for something like five minutes to an hour. But in games with set conditions of failure and success once you’ve done a neophyte’s exploration you’re likely to either fail less or start getting frustrated. Most everyone has some types of games they’re bad at for whatever reason (except maybe our mutual friend and treasured commenter Moti. I’m not sure if getting disoriented by FPSes counts as being bad at the game).
More after the break (sorry LJ readers, LJ-cuts don’t seem to work properly)
Now there’s ways to overcome if you get frustrated: read the manual, try the tutorials, change settings (like turning off booing in DDR), practice, get help from a friend, read the walkthrough, etc. Now a good designer can avoid a lot of user-failure frustration, but so can a bad sitcom director or a hack novelist. Full appreciation of any media requires some background knowledge, but failure can make it hard to get partial appreciation of a game once you’re done fooling around.
I’d say a television literate person of my generation could flip to a random channel and understand what was going on (if they knew the language) with five minutes. A game literate person could understand the basics of a random game within the same five minutes. However, that doesn’t mean that they’d be good enough to still enjoy it after being done with neophyte exploration.
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