Environment and experience
I’ve started reading Racing the Beam by Nick Monfort and Ian Bogost. The experience for me is akin to a reading about a JROTC officer reading about a Viking invasion — whatever problems you think you have are pretty inconsequential when you consider 2600 programmers had to manage what color a television’s electron gun was painting, right as it was tracing across the screen. But what has given me real food for thought is the introductory chapter, where the authors talk about how the environment in which game-playing takes place informs the design of these games.
Pong was designed to be played in a bar, for example. First of all, children are prohibited from those spaces — which is strange considering how video games are now stereotyped as fodder for children. Secondly, bars have specific social functions; obviously their main purpose is just to let people chillax, but there’s also the meeting-new-people factor, and in particular the find-a-new-mate (in the American sense, not the British one) factor. Pong can only be played two-player so it requires some level of socialization between its players, and the simplicity of its design means that it can easily be played by two strangers.
Compare how modern online game services allow you to fine-tune exactly how much social engagement you have with strangers, so that if you never want to talk to a stranger (or, more realistically, your parents don’t want you to), you don’t have to. This is by necessity, certainly. But I remember going to a carnival when I was in fifth grade and staring up at a ride that was intensely frightening to me. I have a fear of heights and back then, I had almost zero experience with amusement park rides apart from tame Ferris wheels. With this ride, you had to climb into an enclosed car that was just wide enough for two people — so as I stared up at that mechanical beast in terrifed awe, a man came up to me with his daughter and asked if I would ride with her, since you couldn’t ride alone. I said no but I wish I had gone for it. The experience would have been strange and probably scary as hell, but it would have also been worth it. Shared, scary experiences unite strangers.
Anyway, this also made me consider the environment that Flash games inhabit. While technically this is anyone, anywhere — the promise of the Web, right? — I’m thinking right now that they’re meant to be played while you’re supposed to be doing something else. An office worker whiling away a lunch break, or maybe sneaking in some fun on a slow day. A college student bored with a lecture. When you play games on Kongregate, there’s always a chat panel on the side, and at least in my experience people are very rarely talking about the games they’re playing. They’re chatting each other up, cracking jokes, making fun of each other — having a bar-like experience, could I venture to say?
This thesis of mine doesn’t have a lot of evidence beyond the anecdotal, so feel free to tell me I’ve got it wrong in the comments, but tell me why, too.
The implications of it make sense to me, though. People are looking for Flash game experiences that can be completed in short bursts — for the office worker, not long enoughto induce feelings of guilt; for the student, not long enough to get busted by a teacher. The games have to run at low resolution in a browser window that can be hidden away from observers at a moment’s notice. Sound is nice but can’t be required. And a Flash game has to capture a player’s interest very rapidly; Flash game portals compete with each other based on the number of games they have on offer and the ease of which a visitor can navigate through them. That is, the bigger and more popular a portal, the easier it is for a player to find a game that’s better, or perhaps more immediately arresting, than your own. Don’t get me wrong — that’s good for players. But it’s also vicious because it works against quieter, slower-to-reveal-themselves games.
In a lot of ways it seems to be a throwback to the arcades of yore, where games competed via attract modes and players milled freely between them. And I love old arcade games. For a while, I only played stuff on MAME because I was burned out on 12-hour PS2 games. But this is a depressing thought for me now, because none of the characteristics above match the kinds of games that I want to design. I want to make a game that encourages players to engage with it for a long time. I want to immerse players in it the way a good book or movie does.
I feel at an impasse, though, because I also find a certain amount of annoyance in downloadable games. Before I decide whether I actually want to play a game, I have to download it, unzip it (first checking to see if the author decided to put all the files into an enclosing folder or not), maybe even run a config application. Let’s not even talk about games that require an installer. I know exactly why Digital needed one but it still annoyed me, because I knew I’d have to go through the same hassle to uninstall it. Small annoyances indeed, but browser games have none of that friction.
It is actually really simple to package a Flash game as a downloadable one. Star Guard did it and very few people ever cared that it was made in Flash, so I think the technical obstacles are low. What I’m still mulling over is whether it’s worth the tradeoff.