The tyranny of games-that-were
Get in there and get wet.
Last week’s tempest in a teacup was the announcement that Nintendo was finally hopping into the mobile games arena, a fact which the rest of the gaming industry responded to chiefly with a sigh and perhaps a muttered “welcome to here” or something similar. This is not revolutionary or stunning. Mobile gaming is as genuine a form of gaming as, well, anything that’s been coming out over the past decade.
What was surprising were the number of people clinging to the idea that this was some major change, as if Nintendo’s refusal to get into the space before now was indicative of a philosophical stance rather than a deeply calcified corporate structure incapable of forward motion.
Nintendo’s issues as a company are best addressed in another article (and probably will be), so I’m not going to go into that here. But it’s always surprised me, to this date, how many people think that the way games were released was indicative of anything more than how things were in terms of technology. The idea that the game arrangement we grew up with as children is in some way indicative of how things ought to be, from here to eternity.
Demo Driver 8: Secret of the Magic Crystals
Back in the 90s, I was in a very famous teevee show.
Huh.
One of the weird things about gaming is that there are these shadow genres which exist despite being almost totally ignored by the rest of the population. The Horse Game is one of those genres. There are tons of these games out there, and every single one of them smells like shovelware and, well, horse stables. It’s all about training your horses, breeding them, carefully brushing them, and so forth. And they are legion. These games come out, they keep coming out, and presumably they are in fact making money. How? I don’t know!
I didn’t actually know that Secret of the Magic Crystals would fall into this genre until I clicked the name, but it does indeed. It’s a game about raising not just normal boring horses, but special magical equine creatures like pegasi, unicorns, and if you get particularly lucky 90s sitcom stars. (Not so much, really.) And hey, maybe it was awesome! I knew nothing about this genre, right? Why not give it a shot?
Telling Stories: Why aren’t people getting into this?
The worst possible thing to feel when you’re lining up roleplaying is to have a big pitch all ready to go, plenty of planning on deck, and when the big day arrives… nobody cares.
It’s true online or in tabletop form. I’ve run tabletop campaigns wherein I had really cool ideas for a plot and characters custom-made by players to fit within those fields, but when push came to shove it turned out that no one was actually on board with the unfolding story. I’ve organized what seemed like really spiffy events to me that turned out just one or two people (which, in this case, was less than I wanted). I’ve been ready to go and gotten sort of left to one side.
So why aren’t people engaging? Why can you have an event or a story ready and then find no one willing to actually engage with what you’re doing? There are lots of reasons, some of which are more common than others, but there are a few questions that can help you at least fix the problem in the future, even if you can’t salvage what’s already gone south.
The Seven Deadly Sins of Game Design
I suppose it’s not really judgement day, but it’s similar.
Woe unto ye, designers, for ye have sinned.
The seven deadly sins in Catholicism are functionally the ur-sins. They aren’t the worst, they’re the roots from which all other sins spring. And I thought it would be edifying to remember that the same concept applies to game design and gameplay, starting from the design side. For there are sins in game design as surely as anything, and some of them are not what you would expect.
Since we’re stressing the idea of the seven deadlies, of course, they should line up to the big ones – greed, envy, sloth, lust, wrath, pride, and gluttony. And I could write for weeks about how those sins are very different from what people usually imagine when they hear those words, like how sloth is less about inaction and more about profound spiritual ambivalence, or how gluttony isn’t just a matter of eating stuff. But that’s really outside the wheelhouse of what is largely a game design blog, isn’t it? So let’s talk about the seven deadly sins of game design.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy V, part 2
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
Once you have access to the jobs, the complexity of Final Fantasy V kind of explodes. Not in a bad way, you’re not being smothered by stuff to do, but the overall change is pretty notable. You have a new swath of jobs to use, and suddenly you have to deal with an aspect of gameplay that has not been an issue in any previous installment of the franchise to date.
Previous installments of the franchise didn’t feature a lot of choice, or at least not much in the same sense of playing around with jobs. Even Final Fantasy III barely cared which job you had been leveling with before; it was all about what you were doing now, after all. Level as something that turned out to be useless and then change? You don’t miss out on much. But here, useless and useful jobs have an impact. Leveling now has an impact on what you’re doing while leveling later. Planning well means negating later grind.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 