Is Gaming Becoming Too Easy?

By dkpatriarch;

© 2008 David Hilton

   My furious roar could be heard all the way to China. Well that’s what my wife sourly said, and as I looked at my slightly frightened children (who usually associate such anger with something they’ve done wrong …) I realised that this game was turning me into a monster. I couldn’t remember being this frustrated since the old days of gaming when missing a jump meant certain death (even if the camera angle was at fault), or miss-timing pressing a button meant going back an hour of the game to do it over again and again…..

Ironically the game I was playing, Ubisoft’s Beowulf, was about monsters; it was a typical movie-to-game conversion (in other words, utter rubbish). The part I was having trouble with, leading to my contorted red-faced outburst, was when I had to save virgins from trolls, while at the same time save my pathetically dumb Thanes from seductresses and cannibal-like natives….and not die yourself.

While saving virgins and fighting seductresses seems attractive, the problem was that this was made nearly impossible; if you didn’t do everything just right, you got nowhere fast. Virgins were tossed down holes screaming, your Thanes perished (later on they re-appear as miffed ghosts blaming YOU for their incompetence…), or you die a grisly death …. and start again.

When I did finally pass this part (due more to luck than anything else) was I triumphant? Did I crow how great I was to have beaten the sodding game? No, I felt relieved and pissed off for having to waste over an hour on a game device designed to artificially extend gameplay.

Yet I hear often from ‘real hardcore’ gamers how today’s games have been dumbed down and do not pose a challenge like they used to. I remember the early years of gaming where the challenge was in repetition and memorisation. Like the Beowulf example above, they turned mini-me into an overly explosive volcano. The idea was that as a gamer you proved yourself worthy by passing bosses and difficult sections; look at games like the original Castlevania. My eyes would go red and watery trying to finish areas and interruption of any sort would end me.

I remember playing games on the Commodore 64, where if you died you’d have to wait something like 10 minutes for the game to load again. Time enough to calm down, perhaps, but when I think about the time I wasted on small sections of games, I wonder how I enjoyed it. David Braben, one of the creaters of the early game Elite, which was like an early pre-sandbox freeroming game and different to the hoards of linear games of the time, says in OAXM (Issue 22): “One of the things I found with games (back in the ’80s), was that if you got stuck, you were stuck, you couldn’t get any further. In Elite, you didn’t get that”.

However, in Issue 31 of 360 magazine, the anonymous “The Mouth” laments the way games are going today. He states: “Why should we, the people who like games to have some level of depth, be paying such a high price for people who can’t be arsed to read an instruction manual or check a training mode? How about the concept that games are not for everybody? How about the idea that games do not need to be dumbed down. You want to appeal to the non-gamer? Make a Wii game.” Later he says about Assassin’s Creed: “It’s not a videogame so much as it’s video entertainment”.

While I understand what “The Mouth” is saying, I do not have such a problem with where video gaming is going. Yes video games are including more save points and are generally easier than they used to be, but this in my opinion is a good thing for several reasons, besides the obvious financial gain there is for game-makers if games appeal to more people.

First, the idea of difficulty creating longevity is turned on its head and game producers have to come up with more varied gameplay, story, and environments to extend the game. Like Braben, I do not think that gamers should get stuck. They should be challenged, sure, and difficulty levels help enable both casual and hardcore gamers play at different levels, but in the end games should be for entertainment and enjoyment and not overly frustrating.

A lot of gamers of the past resorted to codes and these days resort to GameFaq’s to get them past areas. Maybe they should have tried harder, or thought more, but in the end these gamers choose to ‘cheat’ and this is because it isn’t fun being stuck. I can understand how many gamers find giving up on a challenge, where passing the challenge provides the greatest satisfaction, abhorrent.

Like achieving something difficult in sport, they feel among the elite because they can do something many cannot. But really does that given them more respect? “Hi, I’m a fireman, I save people”, “Hi, I do overseas aid”, and then “Hi, I completed Halo 3 on Legendary without ever dying”. Oh wow.

Second, today’s gamers are increasingly casual gamers who are time poor and game rich. Unlike the past where only a few games were available at a time, we have a growing market where (espcially around Christmas) there are many games. If a gamer gets stuck, they will move on to another game and probably tell their friends that the game they got stuck on was too hard or sucked.

In the past a typical gamer tended to be young and have a lot of free time, but today’s gamer is older and has social, work, and family responsibilities as well as many other entertainment mediums competing for his/her attention. They simply do not have the time to stuff around with too much challenge.

They may be like me, often interrupted by other needs and cannot necessarily keep going until the next save point happens to appear or want to redo something they spent an hour on later when they get back to it. Also it seems boredom sets in a lot sooner these days and patience is not a virtue if you can spend your time doing something else that captures your interest more. How many gamers finish all their games? How many gamers would punish and push themselves against their better judgement to finish even the poorest of games (as I did with Beowulf I’m proud to say …. can I have some respect now?).

Third, I do not agree with “The Mouth”’s assertion that “games just are not for everbody”. Hardcore gamers cannot act like gaming is only their domain. Gaming is an entertainment medium like any other and now it is becoming more mainstream than ever before.

That is a good thing. No longer are we as gamers considered “geeks” as more and more types of people play games. The success of the Wii with the casual market shows that non-gamers will play games if they can without having to have a degree in game-playing or have a long history of game training from youth. Games like CSI: Hard Evidence may be poo-pooed by gamers, but if my wife, who loves the show, and others find that it is fun to play and spend time on, then gaming has won another convert.

If Stranglehold and Assassin’s Creed make previous button pressing function obsolete with more intuitive automatic game actions, then more people are going to be able to enjoy this simplicity. Lionhead’s Peter Molyneux has apparently said that in Fable 2 the 360’s X button is going to be for most actions like parry, block, and attack.

Complex controls aren’t what the game is about. He wants it to be accessibility combined with depth so that anyone can play. And this is where gaming is heading, much to the horror of traditionalist gamers. I don’t mind games becoming a mixture of traditional gaming and a more interactive video entertainment….as long as it is fun to play and keeps me playing. Gaming becoming mainstream may mean more simplification, but it also means more investment in games.

In the end it is about balance. Multiple difficulty levels allow gamers to play at their level and even perhaps improve. Having a lot of save points means not so much repetition if you die or are interrupted by real life demands.

Having different ways of doing a task or playing a game as with a game like Bioshock means that hardcore gamers can choose the challenging and rewarding route, while casual gamers can do something less taxing. And having more game choice means you can choose the game that best fits you, be you casual or hardcore, and enjoy yourself instead of becoming a monster.

© 2008 David Hilton