"The great thing about a single-player game is that an entire virtual world can be made to revolve around you, the player. In a single-player game you can become the king or the galactic emperor or the metropolis's undisputed gang leader or whatever other supreme figure suits the setting because there are no other players for the designer to balance the game for."
I didn't like Bioshock. Why? Because it wasn't fun. And I was so disappointed because it has a 96% Metacritic score (lesson: don't trust Metacritic scores). Only two of my favorite critics (Yatzhee and Edge magazine) didn't like Bioshock. Eurogamer.net gave it a 10/10! I was so disappointed that I sold it to gamestop after beating it.
Someone at Irrational Games/2K Boston decided that making great gameplay wasn't important. Once I was acclimated to the underwater, dystopian, anti-objectivism, Unreal Engine 3, horror-house, "game" space, I found the story boring, the main characters uninteresting, the gameplay insipid (made worse by your XBOX 360 inability to die, making developing your skill unimportant), and the game suck. From this I remember a gamer's fear, when the "game" part of computer "games" is trumped by the other arts.
I saw this gameplay problem in GTA IV, too, but unfortunately for Bioshock, I liked GTA IV. I liked it because the radio and the city were awesome, especially the radio; even when GTA IV's NY City gets boring to future humans, the radio will still be awesome. Of the billion missions in GTA IV, I liked....lemme think....five missions (It takes a lot to get me to like an entertainment thingy; some of that $100,000,000 budget wasn't wasted).
So I am somewhat afraid. This summer, I'm going to play Fallout; so many are giving it Game of the Year. Perhaps my fear is misplaced because Fallout 3 is an RPG, and the most important gameplay of a stereotype RPG comes from we gamers trying to understand and use the RPG elements (knowledge, knowledge, using knowledge); this may be why many RPG purists hate Diablo-style RPGs. But I'm still afraid because the harshest reviews against the game came, once again, from Yatzhee (who sort of liked it) and Edge-online (who didn't). I'm afraid because I think, for many, the fantasy is what is making many people love Fallout 3. Please me be wrong!
I want this blog post to make this question: How important is a game's gameplay for the purpose of maximizing fun? As much as I want to say IT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN GAMES, I can't (minus the part where I did). Gamespot's Kevin VanOrd, in explaining why MGS 4: Of Patriots The Guns garners Gamespot's Game of the Year award, posits the counter argument. He says MGS4 is one "seamless entity" of two kinds of entertainment, computer games and cinema, done "absolutely incredible" and "fantastic," "to the point where you're not even sure what kind of entertainment you're participating in." I'm not sure I will agree with his adjectives or his assumption of our schizophrenia, but his good entertainment = good entertainment is good.
Maybe this is why Eurogamer.net gave Bioshock a 10. How many games do you see have an underwater, dystopian, anti-objectivism, Unreal Engine 3, horror house?
And did the references to Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged tickle? For me, no. Having interest in something and having fun are different. And OH SHIT (I mean YAY), now we can argue about what "fun" is. (I say, "fun" puts a sincere smile on your face, unlike "interesting," which makes you constipated).
This all is a call for games journalists to take time to watch the best of cinema and read the best of literature (the best, because we don't have much spare time; I recommend game journalists do the movie part with friends.). Since games are a transmedia art, we should be able to judge the other arts well, so when we tell gamers whether or not the non-game art in a computer game is making the game more or less fun, we can use fancy words like "romanticism" or "cubism" or "anti-establishmentenvironmentalorganicfoodism."
And that's the meat of the post.
(On a related note: I just played part of Metal Gear Solid; I died in the torture scene. I was amazed by how much I liked the terrible writing. Kojima's pertinacious iterating of the shittiness of war and the preclusions of healthy, sexual relations is entertaining, and the characters are interesting in a childish way I can't help but love. The scenarios offering varying kinds of challenging gameplay are fun.)
(On a random note: I'm planning to curse myself by getting the XBOX 360 version of Left 4 Dead, spring quarter. Ah Hell, Horror, Fuck.)
Posts
