Are Games Too Much Like Work????

I read an article on Gamasutra's site this morning talking about making video games more widely acceptable. Here are some quotes:

"When the player runs up against a challenge that is too hard, or that just doesn’t appeal, or the player’s having a slow day and just wants to watch, then the game should have an autopilot mode so that the player can watch the game overcome the challenge(s), and he then continues on to the next part. When he feels like playing he can turn off autopilot and continue."

"my observation of gamers who boast about “beating the game” is that they often appear not to have enjoyed the journey -- that is, even for them, sometimes the game is more like work than fun."

Click to expand...

Personally I find this ridiculous. If you want to watch a movie, go watch a movie. I have fun watching others play through a game, but it would be REALLY boring and pointless for me to watch the game play itself. And, I may get frustrated about not being able to get by a certain section in a game but I do call that fun. I may get aggravated by all the times I get killed. I may want to break stuff around me. But that makes the inevitable victory a little sweeter.

You can read the entire article here.

This is why side-quests exist.

Some games ARE like work.
Like almost any final fantasy games from 7 and upward are like a goddamn office job.
Most WoW players could have earned a masters degree with the time/effort/money they pissed away.


But it sounds like the author is talking about autopiloting difficult games, not tedious ones. Pretty pointless imo.


Sadly there aren't enough games that you can just kick back and "experience" when you're stressed out though. Like Otogi or something.

Yah, some grinding in RPGs can be like work. And taking Brucie and Cousin Ralphie or whatever his face was out on dates in GTA IV was was more like work than fun.

edit: Groo seems like a good noob so far, also. Excellent and rare, such a thing is.

Brucie was at least an entertaining character, though...

Deuce said:

Brucie was at least an entertaining character, though...

Click to expand...

Yeah, Brucie was pretty damn awesome. Best 'roid monster ever. I'd really like to see him get at least a cameo in The Ballad of Gay Tony.

For true games, this would be silly.

For the ineteractive movies of today... the concept should annoy me, but it doesn't. I just don't care about most types of games today in the first place.

Perhaps there are people that just want to play a game as one long quick-time event.

Just pass people through the system and reward them for no effort? Yeah, sounds like the work of a lot of people. That's how people are raised now.

jro said:

Yah, some grinding in RPGs can be like work. And taking Brucie and Cousin Ralphie or whatever his face was out on dates in GTA IV was was more like work than fun.

Click to expand...

I liked the dates.

(No homo.)

And I don't think games are like work at all. Hey, know what's like work? Fucking work, that's what.

Fucking lazy ass developers are to blame.

How about instead of letting us skip the shitty parts you just DON'T PUT THEM IN THE FUCKING GAME TO BEGIN WITH.

There isn't a single second of Metal Slug that I want to skip, even the control tutorial. Every single FUCKING MILLISECOND of that game is packed with fun.

I tried playing Folklore on the Triple last night and it took me almost a goddamn hour to get to the battle tutorial. Absolutely unacceptable.

I just really don't get it: if people hate certain sections of your game, take them the fuck out!

God what sorry-ass lamer crap.

KanYozakura said:

I tried playing Folklore on the Triple last night and it took me almost a goddamn hour to get to the battle tutorial. Absolutely unacceptable.

Click to expand...

I really get annoyed by forced tutorials. I dont mind if its within the the levels, learning new moves. However games where the first 20-45 mins are a practice level on how to play really piss me off.

LustForLard said:

I really get annoyed by forced tutorials. I dont mind if its within the the levels, learning new moves. However games where the first 20-45 mins are a practice level on how to play really piss me off.

Click to expand...

See I don't even mind that really, but fucking Folklore makes you sit through an hour of cutscenes and white knuckle walk-to-the-next-cutscene action.

It also fucks up the aspect ratio on my 4:3 TV...it's just unstreched widescreen. Really Sony, would it have been hard to let me have letterbox in my games?

I have to say the worst "tutorial" I ever played was the opening section of the Turning Point: Fall of Liberty demo...forty five seconds in told me what to expect for the rest of the game and I promptly deleted it.

god hand does tutorials right.

KanYozakura said:

Fucking lazy ass developers are to blame.

How about instead of letting us skip the shitty parts you just DON'T PUT THEM IN THE FUCKING GAME TO BEGIN WITH.

There isn't a single second of Metal Slug that I want to skip, even the control tutorial. Every single FUCKING MILLISECOND of that game is packed with fun.

I tried playing Folklore on the Triple last night and it took me almost a goddamn hour to get to the battle tutorial. Absolutely unacceptable.

I just really don't get it: if people hate certain sections of your game, take them the fuck out!

Click to expand...

What's up, Kan?

Here here.

Arcade games in general get it right. It's as if console developers are trying to pack an entire manual into a single tutorial - and not because the game play is so deep but because it's terribly convoluted and poorly designed.

Did anyone ever play the original Driver?

The tutorial is harder than any mission in the entire game.

I shit you not.

Lagduf said:

Did anyone ever play the original Driver?

The tutorial is harder than any mission in the entire game.

I shit you not.

Click to expand...

lol I remember that...took me ~1 hour inside of that stupid fucking garage.

Yesterday I just beat Contra on my NES for the first time without cheating. Yeah, the journey can be pretty hellish and frustrating, but the victory at the end is that much more satisfying. The trick is to make the journey fun, not tedious.

An autopilot mode for games would be retarded. As much love as I give Super Metroid, the only thing that really bugged me about it was the final battle that didn't really require you to anything.

I don't know what, or how to feel about any of this.

I am lazy, and I've been saying games require too much effort for years. That's why I prefer TV now. It asks nothing and gives so much. That's why I'm not online on the 360 that often, I'm just too lazy to turn it on.

Ha ha, I was reading the first post and thinking "reminds of the Driver tutorial, that shit was sweet".

I loved that. It was like an arcade game in itself. The only problem with it was they called it a tutorial. Also, it's such a sweet lift from the Driver movie it made sense of the whole game.

And actually the escorting the president final mission was definitely harder.

In Soviet Russia, game plays you!

Seriously though, the only time a game seems like a job to me is when you have to do a shit load of back tracking just to get one fucking item necessary to move on to the next point, or when you have to do a lot of repetitive or tedious shit to get an item, move to the next level, or get a trophy/achievement.

I agree though, an auto-pilot feature is fucking pointless. Why would you play a game if you don't want to "play" it. Yea, some levels and parts of some games are unbelievably frustrating. I died many times in Shadow Complex, but once I figured out what to do and moved on, and eventually beat the game, I found it very rewarding.

Mushiki said:

This is why side-quests exist.

Click to expand...

+1

Also, there aren't many games nowdays that are too hard, even for casual gamers. Off the top of my head the only one that was challenging is Ninja Gaiden Sigma. But even then, the bosses are simply pattern based for the most part.

OK, here we go. Who are all these people crying about how hard video games are???

[If you're no good at video games, should you be able to enjoy them anyhow? Gamasutra correspondent Lewis Denby looks at why difficult games might be "some elite party to which I'm not invited", and what to do about it.]

Click to expand...

Go friggin do something else!!! It's bad enough they're dumbing down the school system because tenured teachers are lazy-asses, now this guy is wanting them to take all challenging aspects of games out of there so he can just cruise through it?

As games become more and more about the experience, rather than about leaderboards and showing off to your friends, such horrendous difficulty spikes are becoming a real problem. They're making games annoying, frustrating and not at all fun to play.

Click to expand...

What?

So I play my games on easy mode, wherever possible. I'm the guy who loved the Vita Chambers in BioShock, the one who adored the streamlined gameplay of Deus Ex: Invisible War. I play through most titles without ever having to reach for the load button. Maybe I'll play through a whole game in a single sitting. Perhaps I'm not getting my money's worth out of that. Perhaps I'm just making sure that every second I spend in the game's company is enjoyable and worthwhile.

And maybe I'm simply not very good at games. I never got on with the Thief titles, much to everyone's absolute dismay. "It'll take you weeks to get good enough to start really enjoying them," someone once told me. Frankly, I don't have the time. I'll invest plenty of time into a game, but only if it's letting me actually have a bit of fun, or get something equally valuable out of the experience.

Click to expand...

So gay.

So you're pointing and clicking your way through a hot new adventure game, if such a thing still exists. You're stuck at a point where a mighty evildoer has rigged the entrance to the next area with all manner of preposterous boobie traps. What do you do?

Do you go to the local arms dealer and trade him some items so he'll explain how to disarm the explosives? Do you search around for a secret door that'll allow you to bypass the traps all together? Of course not. That'd be too easy. Too sensible.

No, what you have to do is take a rubber chicken to the local grave-robber, who'll give you a skeleton in exchange. Then you'll have to break off Mr. Boney's arms and legs, grind them down into a powder to give to a voodoo sorceress, who'll make you a potion as long as you bring her three sprigs of thyme in exchange. After that, you can feed the potion to a cat, who'll immediately vomit up a map of the island on which you reside, marked with an X.

Go to the X and dig - with a magical trowel, naturally, not the ordinary one you've had in your inventory for ages - to uncover a piece of paper with detailed instruction in how to sneak by the traps undetected. Oh - as long as you dress up as a woman.

Click to expand...

Please tell me the name of this game because it sounds awesome and demented.

Full article at Gamasutra.

Beyond Shadowgate already set the bar mighty high in the department of demented errands.

In the past if a gamer wanted to be coddled they chose easy mode or if it was a pc game they entered a god or unlimited ammo cheat. To simply hit a button and watch the game play itself is sort of defeating the purpose unless its one of those bullet hell shooters where the play on the video can give tips on how to get beyond certain sections of levels and the game still forces you to manually do it.

On the other hand, there have always been atrociously bad levels in otherwise great games that I think all of us have felt shouldn't be there. Escorting the NPC is always a terrible idea since the AI is usually horrid and that part of God of War where you had to climb the wall of spinning knives only to be dropped to the bottom if you guessed the sequence wrong was the epitomy of bullshit design. Also, with the advent of 3D came the terrible camera angle that can often turn an otherwise fun game into a frustration machine; I am looking at you Ninja Gaiden.

The only games that are too much like work, as the article claims, are level up based RPGs and MMOs. From a psychological standpoint there is a reason WoW obsessed individuals seem to put so much effort into the game. It tricks those willing to consider a long sought upgrade of a digital weapon into thinking there is a real accomplishment in attaining it and there is always something else to upgrade or another expansion full of better items coming up. I have heard it stated that WoW is the best gaming value for your dollar what with only a $15 a month price tag that makes you uninterested in so many other shorter lived $60 titles, however, time and effort are worth money and when you factor those elements in that game is fucking expensive as all hell. Most of the better guilds I know raid for 20 hours a week and frequently no-showing or raiding while pre-occupied and getting the group wiped will get you kicked from the group or the guild. Everquest was even worse.