A colleague today sent me a story from today's
Wall Street Journal, reporting that Nintendo's president, Sataru Iwata, has announced games to appeal to a broader range of game fans, saying that the complexity of today's videogames is scaring off consumers.
"Mr. Iwata said many videogames lost their allure as they gradually became too difficult for average users to enjoy."
My colleague asked whether I agreed with this.
Yes and no.
All game styles run the risk of what I term "grognard capture."
"Grognard" was a slang term for members of Napoleon's Old Guard. Hardcore board wargamers adopted it as a term for themselves. By extention, grognard capture means capture of a game style by the hardest-core and most experienced players--to the ultimate exclusion of others.
The most extreme example I can think of is what happened to the Squad Leader series. Originally a relatively simple, accessible game of infantry combat in World War II, the publishers released supplement after supplement, each with new rules adding to the complexity of the game. Finally, they revamped it as "Advanced Squad Leader," publishing it in a loose-leaf binder so you could insert new rules as they were published, with systems as obscure and silly as the "Sewer Emergence Table" and the "Kindling Availability Table."
The original Squad Leader sold more than 200,000 copies, an astonishing figure for a board wargame at the time. Advanced Squad Leader sold a few tens of thousands of copies. Advanced Squad Leader is, I believe, still in print--Churt Schilling, a baseball player, bought the rights from Avalon Hill when they went out of business, and keeps it around. It has a fanatical following--tiny, but fanatical.
As another example, consider what has happened to the first-person shooter. Doom sold in the millions, and was accessible to anyone who could use the arrow keys and the space bar, since you could set the difficulty level quite low. With the move to Quake, FPSes gradually became more oriented toward deathmatch play, and less toward solitaire play; that alone began to exclude some players, because when you sign onto a server to play an FPS game, you're likely to encounter people far better than you, and having your head handed to you over and over is not normally a positive experience. The interface became more complex, as well; if you don't master mouse look, for example, you really have no chance of competing.
There are fanatical FPS players out there--and you can't really say that FPS games aren't popular. My guess is there are more people playing Counterstrike and Battlefield 1942 online at any given moment than in every MMG put together.
But the combination of player skills and increasingly complexity make FPS games less and less accessible to newbies.
You see the same process at work in a lot of other game styles; real-time strategy games layer more and more complexities onto the system over time. Fighting games have taken special moves to a ridiculous extreme, requiring you to memorize chords as complicated as anything a concert pianist uses. And so on.
Developers move in this direction because their market demands it; the hard core, who are also the opinion setters, want new features and games that reward their hard-won skills. And if that ultimately means cutting off a game genre from a wider audience, that's not their concern--though perhaps it should be of the developer's.
There are ways to ameliorate the problem--TSR used to publish both Dungeons & Dragons and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, for instance, the former serving as a gateway drug for the latter. Properly designed learning scenarios for RTS titles can ease people into the complexities. And so on.
Thus, in a sense, Mr. Iwata is right that games are "too complicated for the average user to enjoy." But in another sense, he is utterly wrong. If you look at "games" as a whole, not just as "$40+ titles published in the conventional PC/console game market," you'll find that there is a huge range in complexity. Games like Bejeweled have a large audience, and tens of millions of people play games like Hearts and Spades on sites like Pogo.com and the MSN Gaming Zone every month. Simple Flash and Shockwave games are often the largest driver of traffic for sites that offer them. And as I reported previously, Snood is the ninth most played game in America.
Simpler games are readily available and accessible to a wide audience, and do in fact achieve a wide audience. But when you talk about the PC/console game market, you're talking about games that cost more than $40. Few people are going to lay out that kind of money for a trivial game. For that much money, they want a deep, compelling experience--and for the hard core, who are the opinion makers, remember, that means games of a certain complexity.
My guess is that the remark is motivated primarily by Sony's announcement of the PSP, and is an attempt to position the PSP as the "hardcore device for geeky hardcore gamers", while the GBA remains the "game platform of choice for the rest of us." And that's fine as far as it goes--but in general, I think it's a mistake to try to sell games to non-gamers. What you really want to do is develop a game that the hardcore likes--well enough to recommend to casual gamers--and that does in fact remain accessible to casual gamers.
Which was part of the brilliance of The Sims, of course.
posted by Greg at 4:56 PM
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