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Game resolutions: Four resolutions for 2009

Happy New Year! Time to improve yourself! 

2009 has descended upon us, which means one thing: resolutions. Those promises we make to ourselves as the New Year starts to make us better people, which are usually promptly forgotten until the next New Year rolls around. Nonetheless, this is a golden opportunity for reflection on the past, especially the year 2008. As such, here are some gaming resolutions for 2009. 

This is a long-running complaint, but publishers seem to have a hard time understanding that people are willing to buy games in months other than September, October, November, and December. However, there’s absolutely no excuse for them to not understand that after this holiday season. Publishers should resolve to get smarter in two ways:

 

1: Launch big title games outside of the holiday season.

The past three months or so have been a tidal wave of big title games, but people can only buy so many games at a time. In the holiday season, everyone is bringing out the big guns, vying for the consumer’s money. However, during the rest of the year the competition isn’t so intense, making it easier to get the consumer’s attention and also their sale. An example of this is what Nintendo did, launching major games like Super Smash Bros Brawl and Mario Kart Wii during March and May, respectively. The result: incredibly strong sales, with both of those games already outselling their GameCube predecessors.

 

2: Don’t launch more inventive and creative games during the holiday season.

When people have a multitude of different games being offered to them at once, it should come as no surprise that many consumers will choose to put their $50-60 into something they know. This can be seen in action this year by comparing the sales of heavily promoted, new franchises, such as Little Big Planet or Dead Space, and heavily promoted major franchises, such as Gears of War 2 or Call of Duty: World at War. All those games were launched in the holiday season with lots of hype and promotion, but while the later games have gone on to tremendous sales, the former have sold well below expectations.

The solution is to launch games like that during the off months, when they won’t be crowded out by established, big name franchises. Gaming is expensive, and when there’s less competition people should be more willing to take risks. An example of this: No More Heroes, a very unique, niche game launched in January 2008 with no advertising beyond word-of-mouth, has sold about the same as either of the console versions of the heavily promoted Mirror’s Edge, which was launched in November 2008, right in the middle of the holiday season.

 

If publishers can be smarter about when their games come out, then both publishers and gamers would be better off.

This year has seen several shakeups in games reviews. The big moment was the ridiculous number of perfect reviews given for Grand Theft Auto 4, especially IGN’s exclusive early review which sounds like a seven page long love letter to the game. The fiasco surrounding this led to a year of self-questioning and evaluation by the more dominant figures in games journalism. Questions such as the ethics of games journalism and the value reviewers put on innovation were raised and bantered back and forth. I’m all for intellectual exploration of how games journalism should be, but the most in this case the most important thing of all is being forgotten: honesty.

 

Games journalism is about informing people, first and foremost. It isn’t about making money or landing lucrative exclusive agreements. Leave that to the marketers and keep it separate from the journalists. When you have the two co-mingle, you betray the readers, the very reason you got the advertising in the first place.

 

But the problem with games journalism goes beyond that. Video games are unique from other mediums which also receive such critical attention. Video games are in interactive medium, making it less about what is presented and more about the experience the player has. Games journalism should refocus itself on that: the experience. By being honest with the readers about the experience that the reviewer had, they fulfill their purpose.

 

This also means giving up the illusion of objectivity. Games are experienced, making them more about the experience of the player than anything else, and no two people are the same. So games journalism has set up a dichotomy of “objectivity,” pressuring the reviewer to filter their experience to something that is less about the experience and more about broad appeal. However, by running ones experience through that filter they end up diluting their experience into a checklist of items stated in a void.

 

Games journalism should return to what’s important and convey the feeling, the emotion, and the experience of playing a game, and have the individual games journalists take ownership of their opinions.

Each year gives birth to disappointing games, and 2008 was no exception. However, looking at the five most disappointing games of 2008, a common thread becomes apparent: these are games which forgot what they were trying to be. Mirror’s Edge is the best example of this. When the game focuses on what it’s supposed to be, a parkour game about moving across rooftops, the game is an absolute thrill. But the copious amounts of death from trial and error from unintuitive level design and poor combat kills the joy of the game. It’s like the developers just forgot what the most important part of the game is, the part that makes it enjoyable (in this case, a sense of momentum and progress), and added in unnecessary filler.

 

This is a problem that’s gotten more and more common in gaming as systems become more powerful and more opportunities are opened up. Games developers sometimes end up drunk on possibility and forget the key part of their game, as if everything and the kitchen sink needs to be thrown in to make a game great. However, this simply isn’t true. Simpler, more focused games, like Braid or Gradius V, can be just as enjoyable as more intricate and complex games. The reason is because what matters isn’t the features of the game, but how the player feels about it.

 

Developers need to take a step back and constantly consider the question “What is the most important part of this game that will make people want to play and keep playing this game?” Once they’ve got that, focus on that. Make sure the features of the game play to the strengths of that, instead of getting in the way of it. The result would surely be fewer disappointing games.

The Nintendo Wii launched in November 2006. The Nintendo DS launched in November 2004. But still today, anyone looking at gaming forums on the internet will find threads screaming about how the Wii and DS are destroying gaming by bringing in non-gamers and games that appeal to them. These ‘casuals’ will destroy gaming, leaving nothing left but minigame collections and wagglefests, or so they claim. However, they could not be more wrong. The so-called ‘casual’ revolution is one of the best things to happen to gaming, and closed minded gamers need to re-evaluate their biases.

 

The growth in casual gaming is great for gaming in general as it furthers the acceptance of video games into the mainstream. Demographics which previously shunned video games are now buying and playing video games. By spreading the joy playing video games, gaming is being understood more and more as something that is not a threat. It’s worth noting that over the past two years, which included such events as the launch of the Wii and games like Brain Age and WiiFit, has seen a dramatic decrease in the politicization of video games. Politicians used to have an easy target in video games, pummeling the evil games to raise support amongst older voters. However, that hasn’t been the case lately. For example, Hillary Clinton, a previous adversary of the gaming industry, has done an about-face and supported the industry and the ESRB ratings system. It’s no coincidence that this is happening at the same time that casual gaming is making games more mainstream.

 

This is also good for core gamers. Core gamers may look at games like Carnival Games or My Spanish Coach and wonder how they benefit from them, but they don’t consider the economics of games. Core gamer video games, like Gears of War 2, Metal Gear Solid 4, and so forth, are not cheap to make, especially so with the advent of the HD era. One game succeeding or failing can make-or-break the future of a developer or publisher. This is especially so in the current economic climate, as can be seen by the failure of Free Radical and Factor 5. Both of those developers made great games last generation, but put out one game this generation, had both fail, making very little money, and wound up out of business. This is where casual games come into play. Casual games are cheap to make, especially in comparison to a full-blown core game. This makes them an appealing economic proposition, with low risk should the game not sell, and high rewards due to the low number of games needed to be sold to make a profit. The reason this benefits core gamers is that those profits can then be turned around to make core games.

 

Finally, if core gamers shut off their hobby to others who aren’t as into it as them, they risk making gaming an insular niche activity, such as comic book collecting. After coming so far to shed the negative stigma of gaming, is that really the path to go down?

 

Core gamers need to open their minds and be more accepting to the ‘casual’ revolution.

For more info: Read some other resolutions, or look back on 2008 with the best and most disappointing games of that year.