Editorial: Craft Service
April 27, 2010
by Eric-Jon Rössel Tairne
Over the years, game design has calcified. If I were to pick a turning point, I might point at the SNES — a system of broadly appealing games that delivered exactly what people expected of a videogame, challenged few perceptions, and established the status quo for 2D console-style game design. Since then it’s been hard to get past the old standards — the prettied-up enhancements of Super Mario 3, The Legend of Zelda, and Metroid that added little new in terms of expression or design language, yet that refined the hell out of some proven favorites.
You could say that the SNES was the epitome of Miyamoto-styled design (even in games by other developers), and you’d have a reason for saying that. Namely, it was the Miyamoto Box: Nintendo’s reward to Miyamoto for the broad appeal of his NES catalog. Meanwhile Miyamoto’s opposing force, in Gunpei Yokoi, was rewarded for his invention of the Game Boy by having his studio removed from mainstream console development to support his brainchild. The message was clear: Miyamoto’s way was the successful one, so he would be in charge of everything important from here on.
The thing is, Miyamoto is just one voice. He had a few brilliant ideas in the mid-1980s, all born out of a particular context and in response to particular problems. And then by the turn of the ’90s he was pretty much dry. All that was left was to codify his ideas, turn them into a near law of proper design — regardless of context — and then sit back to admire his work, while new generations carefully followed his example as if manufacturing chairs or earthenware pots. A videogame was a videogame, much as a chair was a chair. It was a thing, an object, with particular qualities and laws.
Thing is, videogames aren’t things; they’re ideas. A game mechanism exists not in a vacuum, as a fact, but as a solution to a problem. Mario jumps so as to make use of the vertical space on the screen. He attacks by stomping on enemies or punching from below out of economy; his main defining trait is his ability to jump, so there’s a practical effect to both the upswing and the downswing. What makes Super Mario Bros. so effective, on a systemic level, is the tangibility of the player’s exploration. Compared with earlier games, it is revelatory to lump so much behavior onto physically touching the environment. The game is both visceral and curiously intimate.
That isn’t to suggest that jumping is the best use of vertical 2D space, or that leaping on or leaping into creatures or objects is an ideal way of interacting with an environment. This isn’t to suggest that the game’s level progression is ideal. Just because (given the right powers) you hit blocks in Super Mario Bros., and (given the right powers) you burn or bomb or lift blocks in Zelda, and (given the right powers) you shoot blocks in Metroid, that doesn’t mean that a chain of special powers and tiles, blocking the player’s path, is an ideal game structure.
You get the idea. One way or another, most mainstream games have evolved from the Miyamoto model. Not just on consoles, either; Carmack and Romero’s debt to Miyamoto is well-recorded, and fairly obvious in Keen, Wolf3D, and Doom. In a more sophisticated sense, Valve’s debt to Doom brings the theories to present on both shores. Granted, Valve tends to be more contemplative than most, with Half-Life 2 almost being a Super Mario Bros. style State of the Art address. Yet in its deconstructionist brilliance, it pretty well shows up the lack of ideas elsewhere. Even six years later, there’s not much been much advance on, or even equal to, the game’s grasp on player psychology.
There are some solid reasons for this lack of progress. For one, commercial videogames are expensive, limiting their potential audience to people who like “videogames.” For another, any established audience tends to drift toward the familiar. The most a fanbase ever wants is a slight twist on its object of attachment, or else it becomes unrecognizable. Remember how much people hated The Adventure of Link, for the NES — in some ways is one of the bravest and most sophisticated sequels ever made. The reason? It was too different from the original Zelda. So the third game was pretty much exactly like the first again, except prettier and a bit more polished, with a few new gimmicks. And to this day, gamers won’t shut up about it.
Another problem is of the cart-before-the-horse that is technology. Mainstream games keep getting more and more expensive and difficult to make, just to make use of all of the processing power of each new generation. Yet for all that processing power they’re not exploring many ideas that were impossible ten, fifteen years ago; they’re too concerned with just making back their investment — which means selling to as broad an audience as possible, where the audience has a very specific idea of what it wants.
In the wake of Nintendo and Sony, that audience has gotten large enough to command a certain voice, suggesting that there is an outlet for these expensive monstrosities, yet it’s too small and narrow to leave much room for alternative perspectives. Nintendo got around the problem by targeting non-gamers and people who haven’t played games in years. Which is brilliant in principle. And then, being Nintendo, they didn’t do much of anything with the idea. Oh well.
But now we have alternative channels. We have the Internet, we have cheap design tools, we have communities of individuals who grew up on videogames and who think in game design the way that New Wave auteurs thought in film. These aren’t people with a huge budget, or an audience to placate; all they have to please is themselves, and maybe a few peers. And videogames are a palette through which to explore their ideas. The atmosphere lends itself to asking questions — why do so many games revolve around killing and death? Why is Mega Man so hard? What’s the point of RPG statistics? What does all of this mean, anyway?
And so somehow, right now, and as of the last few years, it seems all the important questions, and most of the relevant answers in game design, are coming not from the institutions with the budget and the influence to command attention, but from a handful of hack programmers, putting in a few hours after their day jobs or between term papers — the way it used to be, twenty-five, thirty years ago. Videogames have gone through the maelstrom and come back to zero, a bit confused but also just a little more mature.
If videogames are an exchange of ideas, perhaps it’s best that exchange is between individuals.
![Red Moon Rising… The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile [Review]](./Editorial Craft Service DIYgamer_files/360-vampiresmile-110411-01.jpg)
![Jailbroken iOS App Cydia Store Hosts New Skirt Flipping Game (Is this Indie/Newsworthy?) [Opinion]](./Editorial Craft Service DIYgamer_files/upskirt04.png)
Glad you liked it. Would you like to share?
Add New Comment
Showing 5 comments