In the comments for my last post, Brooke calls me on an overstatement. It's really silly of me to in any way imply that nobody has thought about varying levels of commitment in your playerbase before now. Certainly it's a question that's been considered in the ARG community before. Sorry!
I think perhaps the reason I felt that way, though, has a lot to do with the beast that is the modern video game industry, and the inherently quiet nature of less-than-hardcore players. Let's look at that second topic first.
As Brooke pointed out, in any game there is a certain distinct body of fairly casual participants. The problem is that these people are difficult to keep track of. If a player in an ARG never emails a character, never posts to a forum, never comes to a live event, it's easy to imagine the player doesn't exist at all, no matter what evidence you might have indicating otherwise. Website stats are, after all, notoriously imperfect metrics. So when a design team is moving ahead, it's easy to do so based solely on the inherently more vocal hardcore base, who are talking publicly about where they want to see a game heading. How can one design for a group about which you have no feedback?
The big problem here, of course, is that the hardcore audience is not necessarily your largest -- just your loudest. And to be quite frank, the changes they want may be diametrically opposed to what would make the game more fun or accessible to an ever-wider audience.
Taking this back to traditional video games -- this problem of catering to the hardcore audience over the more casual gamer is very much to the point right now. Let's think about the next-gen consoles for a moment (I bet you didn't see that one coming!). On the one hand, you have the Xbox 360, clocking in at $400 and more without games. It's the baddest, most polygonrific system out there, right? More realistic textures? Yeah, sure. But this is a machine designed by the hardcore, for the hardcore; and I feel this is a pretty big mistake from a business perspective. The quiet body of gamers who want to have a fun gaming experience but don't want to commit thirty hours a week to it probably don't want to commit $400 to their five-hour-a-week habit, no matter how beautifully the water ripples. After all, how much more fun are the actual games? (What's that, you say? It's the same games?)
Nintendo is going against what one might call the siren call of the hardcore player. If I may be trite for the rest of this sentence; Sony and Microsoft are at war for a bigger piece of the pie, but Nintendo is trying to make a bigger pie, by designing specifically for the soft-voiced masses of the non-hardcore gamers (or even, in some cases, non-gamers period). For a really terrific (and even inspiring) summary of their Revolution business strategy, read this painfully all-caps transcript of a talk by Reggie Fils-Aime. This, my friends, is why my money is on Nintendo.
So, in summary: Certainly a lot of sharp brains have turned their attention to making games that are accessible to players of varying time availability and levels of commitment. Conferences and newsletters on casual gaming and casual gamers are springing up like mushrooms, so clearly it's on the agenda. But I think not enough game designers have internalized these ideas; not yet.
Edited to add: Even if you're not in the habit of reading comments here, it's really worthwhile to take a look at the comment left by Greg Gibson, one of the developers of Majestic. It is nothing short of a critical and thoughtful post-mortem of Majestic, from an insider's point of view. Great stuff. :)
Thanks for posting about this topic. Again, it's great to see someone taking the silent gameplaying majority into account. That was very interesting info about Nintendo's strategy. (Braving the all-caps really was worth it!)
When it comes to satisfying both casual and hardcore gamers with different levels of play (in terms of both complexity and difficulty), many team sports games get it right. And they've gotten it right since the glory days of the Sega Genesis. With many of these titles, you can flip on the game, and there's usually an option in the main menu to start up a quick match. The only additional setup necessary, if any, is setting the difficulty. For someone like me, who only plays such games occasionally, this is perfect. From startup to completion, I can enjoy a satisfying experience in a matter of minutes.
Serious players, on the other hand, can spend real-time weeks or months simulating entire seasons, micromanaging almost every aspect of gameplay. They can switch team members, alter coaching strategies, design plays, and change game options between (or even during) games. In each season, the individual games are like episodes, which eventually lead up to the big finale, the championship.
Because experiences may vary greatly from player-to-player, team-to-team, game-to-game, and season-to-season, sports games can have storylines as complex and open-ended as any other genre. Or they can just provide a simple diversion for a few minutes in the middle of a busy day. It just depends how you prefer to use them. Designers for other game genres should look to sports games to see what can be applied across the spectrum.
This brings me to the biggest issue I have with the current state of videogame development: ownership. Game companies need to start letting customers own the games they buy.
By this, I mean players should not only have the right to play a game "correctly." They should be allowed to do whatever they want within the context of the game world. If they want to be invincible, have super speed, or even fight the final boss right away, why shouldn't they be allowed to do so? Players who enjoy only the battle system in an RPG are often allowed to skip the cutscenes, so why aren't the players who care only about the story allowed to skip the battles?
For a real world case, I submit The Warriors, the game based on the 1979 movie.
I wanted to play the game to experience the events in the movie. Problem is, that section is at the end of the game. I can enjoy the Rockstar GTA-type of game in small doses, but I rarely feel like playing them enough to make it all the way through. However, I would still have felt that I'd gotten my money's worth even if I could just play the sequences pulled from the movie.
I couldn't.
The opportunity to play the movie is the main sales hook of The Warriors. Yet, despite being willing to pay $50 for the game, I wasn't allowed to skip to that section. Without a cheat device or someone else's PS2 save card, I'll probably never see it. I've found I don't care much about the storyline that Rockstar wrote to lead up to the movie's events, so I haven't advanced very far.
When creating a series of games based on another movie franchise, The Lord of the Rings, Electronic Arts fell into the same trap as Rockstar. A good chunk of LotR completists--including non-gamers--were interested in EA's games for the movie interviews and other video features added onto the game discs. But access to the full collection of these videos was restricted to that minority of players who were good enough and dedicated enough to complete the games.
As a result, many fans of the movies paid money for something that is, in large part, worthless to them. Other fans avoided buying the games altogether, knowing they had neither the time nor the skills to see the content they really wanted. By making the special features accessible to all purchasers, EA could have expanded their audience for the game.
EA, Rockstar, and other companies often offer their most valuable content to reward good gameplay, when they should consider using this content to reward the customer's decision to spend money on their game. For most serious players, winning the game is the best reward for good gameplay. It can be good to offer these dedicated players some other rewards, too. But don't hide some of your best selling points and most entertaining gameplay options from a huge contingent of your potential audience--the ones who will likely never play every aspect of your game through to completion.
The current design practice of withholding ownership is illogical from a customer's standpoint, but the industry has yet to figure that out. It often takes little additional development time to give players the option to play or view whatever parts of they game they want. But game developers, consciously or not, tend to take the snobbish view of the hardcore gamer: You have to earn that right!
I already earned it. I paid for the game.
The industry's practices may have made sense 20 years ago, during the arcade game's heyday, when companies wanted players to keep pumping coins into machines to continue their progress. But when the company's already got my money, there's no excuse not to give me full control over the experience.
Imposing restrictions on the customer would be unacceptable in tabletop gaming, traditional media, or software design. If I start a game of Monopoly and want to begin with my piece on Boardwalk, it's possible. Anytime I want, I can break open the Trivial Pursuit box and read the cards. When I buy a DVD, I'm not forced to watch the movie before I can check out the special features. If I want to try making tables in Microsoft Word before even learning how to change font sizes, nobody will stop me. Most of the time, I'll use these things in the standard way. But if I don't want to, I have that option.
I'll always play most of the games I buy as they were designed to be played. But if I don't want to obey the rules when playing most genres of videogames--I know MMOs and ARGs can be trickier--I'll usually be the only one who stands to gain or lose anything.
If developers start to offer more game ownership to us customers, I promise I won't run to the GameFAQs forums and lie about winning games in record time. The hardcore gamers can still feel superior for having beaten the game properly. Others will just be glad they got to do and see what they wanted. And the game companies will have increased their chances of selling future games to both of types of players.
I hope the first development team to successfully execute this new design pattern in a major title makes a killing. And I hope that success helps establish a new paradigm in game design.
Now that I've used the word "paradigm" in a blog comment about The Warriors, I look forward to typing such future posts as "The Zeitgeist, as Reflected in the World of Mannequin" and "The Semiotics of Swimfan." Umberto Eco, look out.
Posted by: Greg Gibson | January 30, 2006 at 13:57