Challenge Accepted: Fair’s fair
It might seem fair to gang up on someone until you get ganged up on yourself.
If you think about it, the whole idea of challenge being fair is kind of strange at face value. Games build unfairness into themselves by design. If your average Mega Man game was fair, the boss would be able to pause the game and use weapons on me to target my weakness. The bosses start out by being unfair by design, at that; they can jump higher, run faster, fire more complex attacks, and so forth. That’s not fair.
Of course, if the boss fights were fair, the game would be kind of boring. Imagine a game where every boss dropped as easily as the player character. It’d be fair, but it wouldn’t be fun.
Fairness is a nebulous concept, but it’s also a really important one when you’re talking about games. We talk about the importance of it over and over, about the difference between games that are really hard to beat but fair compared to those that are just plain cheap. But how relevant is that, really? Are we looking for fairness, or are we just interested in accountability?
Immersion isn’t a headset
It’s hard to believe that this is the device that will change gaming forever, due in no small part to the fact that it likely won’t.
What a time it was to be alive in 1995! The Cold War was over, the dot com cycle was not too far away but far enough that we didn’t need to think about it yet, and we were all still pretending that strapping a monitor to your face was the future of gaming. It’s been nearly two decades, and now people are once again holding up the notion of VR headsets as a game changer that will totally alter the way we play games because it’s like you’re actually in the game now, guys!
These people are also baffled as to why everyone else doesn’t recognize the brilliance of these devices, which kind of seems like a self-defeating cycle.
I’m not saying that the Oculus Rift is going to fail; I don’t have a crystal ball, I can’t predict that. I don’t imagine it’s going to make the impression on release that everyone backing it seems to assume it will, however, and I think the reasons are pretty obvious. Yes, it’s very interesting to sit down and play a game with it, but there’s a lot more going on than just “is it pretty and 3D.”
The fault of modern gaming is our own
Taking a bold step of bringing in stubble-covered white guys, but this time they’re wearing hoods.
We’re in the wake of another year’s E3 when this is being published. Maybe you’re reading it after. Maybe you’re reading it at an E3 long after it’s been written. Maybe you’re even reading it during another convention, or just on an otherwise idle day when you’re thinking about the state of video games, wondering how it all turned out like this. How did we get to a landscape with all these generic shooters, with games that run longer and longer with less and less to say, how did we get to all of this?
Simply speaking: we asked for it.
I don’t mean that in a snide fashion, I mean that we, as gamers, asked for exactly what we got as modern gaming developed. Each part came down to us asking for something en masse, then deciding after we had it that we didn’t want it much to our detriment. And rather than blaming developers for doing what we asked, if you’re not happy about the state of games, it might be time to look at what we asked for and admit that really, this is what we said we wanted.
Challenge Accepted: Easy keeps you going
First time, yes, full challenge. Subsequent times? Thanks, I’ll just faceroll it on easy.
There are some people who are just not going to have fun with a game if it’s not a challenge. That’s a given, and it’s not a bad thing. It’s part of how games work, and it’s an important element to keep in mind. Games cannot be designed to be all easy, all of the time, or the developers would be saying that they didn’t want the money of a sizable chunk of audience members. And that would just be silly. We need to have challenges in games, things that are difficult to overcome, stuff that can’t be cleared in one or two quick moments of play.
But in the long run, it’s going to be the easy stuff that’s more beneficial for any game.
This sounds contradictory. After all, the people playing a game for the long haul, whether it’s single-player or multiplayer, are going to be the people with more practice. These are the people best suited to facing challenges, and more to the point these are the people who most likely want more challenge. How can easy content be more useful to a game on a whole than difficult things?
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 