Playtime

• 20 April 2010
• excessive-electronics,
• life,
• programming

This going to be about video games. There will be lists, and references, and maybe some inside video game jokes. If you're not into that, that is fine, however, I'll stress that while video games remain the context of what I'm writing here, I'm trying to talk about something more.

I have been playing computer games all my life, or at least, as long as I can really remember. If you skim the history of computer and video games it makes sense: I belong to generation who never knew a world without Nintendo, who probably always had at least one television set in their home, and who have grown up witness to Moore's Law exponentially accelerating the progression of technology throughout our lives.

Let me give you an impression of the effect video games have on my life. Recently, I started collecting the latest play time indicators from games I've played in the past few years or so (at least for those that have the indicator), as well as the last time I played them.

I should probably qualify a few things about this list:

• For those that did not indicate how long I'd played, or those that I no longer had access to character information or saved games, I give rough estimates.
• I indicate whether I finished the game or not (by finished, I mean either played through the entire single-player story/campaign, or, in the case of the asterisk, felt like I'd suffered enough at the hands of the game developers).
• This is most definitely a subset of the number of games I've played or owned. In fact, when putting this list together, I ended up discarding a few games because I wanted to show the types of games I usually like to play. Yes, I play games like Halo. Yes, I play games where you're an alien trying to roll things into a progressively larger ball of detritus. But the ones above (those that have a heavy role-playing and story element to it), are the ones that I end up playing the most frequently and for the longest periods of time.
• This list (sadly) does not include some of the early adventure games I played (Lucasarts adventure games, Space Quests, Kings Quests) that I have no good feel for how long they take to complete (as I played most of them when I was pretty young). It also doesn't include strictly online games, or games that I played almost exclusively online or with friends (Warcraft, World of Warcraft, Starcraft, Counter-strike, Left 4 Dead), though I'll estimate the playtime dedicated to those to be in the hundreds of hours.

If you're curious, that adds up to at least 700 hours I've played in these games. Even if I add the online games, the adventure games, the games from genres I tend to shy away from, and even double that hourly value, it still doesn't seem like very much given the span of twelve years. For a period of 2008 and 2009, when it would seem I was playing the most games from this list, I had about 300 hours logged. Over two years, that's less an a half of an hour a day spent playing the games. It may be that my data collection methods are flawed (for example, playtime clocks show how long you play, but not necessarily how many times you may have retried a particular section of the game). Regardless, looking back, it doesn't seem like that much.

My final commentary on this list is that these are, for the most part, games that represent what I feel has gone right with video games in the past thirteen years. Either through exemplary storytelling, creative gameplay mechanics, or inspiring art (note that I say 'art', and not 'technological accomplishment', two things which are often called the same thing in video games, but really aren't the same at all), these games in my mind stand apart from the rest, and make the investment of time well worth the expense.

And to say that I think these went right implies also that I think others went horribly, horribly wrong. I won't make a list for this one. My complaints are legion. And I'll even say this: the games above are by no means excluded from the list of things that went wrong. In fact, the latest game I have played, Final Fantasy XIII, probably belongs on this terrible list just as much as Cabela's Big Game Hunters. The reason why is complicated, but, I think I can explain without having to go into too much detail about the game itself.

Here goes: I came across the term "roguelike" when I was poking around on the web. I thought it was interesting, and I couldn't figure out how to pronounce it. Looking it up, I found its intended meaning is to describe a type of game that resembles one of the original computer role-playing games from 1980, "Rogue." I have never played it myself, but have played later games that were either based on it or heavily inspired by it. Being that it came out five years before I was born and featured incredible intricacy (huge, randomly generated levels), difficulty (permanent death, no points at which to save your progress to return later), and a text terminal interface (your character is the '@' sign, your enemies other keyboard punctuation), I don't think it would have held my attention for very long. A combination of Mario and Commander Keen some years later was a much gentler introduction for a kindergartner.

Further, the term "roguelike," where I was reading about it, seemed to be applied to any game that either had the aforementioned gameplay, or was equally brutal in how it treated the player. You could describe something as "roguelike" if it didn't let you save your game's progress where you wanted, or, started you at the beginning of the level when you made a mistake or your character died. The point being, even though a game might have had only a vague resemblance to the original "Rogue," the term "roguelike" seemed to be nearly synonymous with "very hard."

And if you've played recent games, Rogue doesn't seem like a fun game at all. You get so far in the game, you die, and you have to start over back at zero. You can try to correct your mistake, but with random levels and enemies, you'll never be able to play the same game twice. The game was one of simply surviving longer than last time, and yet, it was incredibly addictive, enthralling, and kept drawing players back time and time again. Classic games like Donkey Kong, Galaga, Asteroids, Space Invaders, Centipede, etc., are based on essentially the same concept which is all but absent in modern games, or at least, very popular games.

Why is that?

I think it first had to do with the technology at the time. Computer memory was extremely expensive, and computer processors extremely limited (by today's standards). Computer programs were written by hand, low-level command by low-level command, not only to squeeze every ounce of performance out of the poor machines, but also because memory was incredibly constrained for the types of programs that were required to run. The game programmers barely had enough game memory to maintain the state of the game being played, no less keep multiple player's information save for maybe the last high score. Therefore, no saved games, no checkpoints, only a single number, your number of lives, keeping track of whether you can keep playing or not.

Resource constrained as they were, the classic games (Rogue included, as computer games were typically not much better off) were forced to play on human psychology in order to make them fun. They relied on the severest threat of having to completely restart as the risk to every action. As players invested more time into the game, they would become emotionally invested in the outcome of every action, start to care more about the fate of their small '@' drawn on the screen, and dread the moment when it all came crashing down. The point I'm making here is with a game with no "safety net" of being able to immediately retry, not only is the difficulty of the game greater, but also is the sense of accomplishment at finally toppling it.

I think of this in terms of one of my college roommates watching sports. He liked sports, and kept up on the "important" games and his favorite players. But he wouldn't go out of his way to watch a game. Unless, of course, he was betting on the game. When he would bet on the game, he would sit with rapt attention, never leave for food or drink, cheer and yell when his team got closer to their necessary spread, or writhe in agony as the clock ticked down. My point is, with both my roommate's sports betting and with classic games, there were consequences. There were stakes.

Compare this to modern trends in gameplay, where the opportunity to save your progress and return later are frequent (and in fact, griped about by players and game critics alike if not frequent enough). Where excessive penalization upon a player's mistake or death is viewed as "unfair" to the player. Where games of incredible production value, representing years worth of development, feature gameplay that is little more than "press X to not die," followed by questionably interactive cinematics.

Compare also the technical "limitations" faced by today's developers. For the first year or so after the Playstation 3 was released, game development companies complained because they couldn't figure out how to get all 7 of the machine's processors to work together efficiently (that is, 6 more processors running in parallel, each 1500% faster than what ran the original Pacman). Games now come on 8GB DVDs or 50GB Bluray disks. Modern systems have upwards of 1000x the amount of memory of those developed in the 80's. Game designers are by no means bound to the limitations of their medium. That isn't to say that game designers have no impetus to innovate, or to stress the boundaries of the devices they're programming for (see Odin Sphere), it's more to say that they are no longer absolutely forced to.

At the same time "roguelike" games were becoming popular on the PC, and arcade games based around the same psychological and technological underpinnings were becoming popular everywhere else, the "adventure" genre of games was becoming popular as well. Adventure games, or text adventures, or "interactive fiction," were the games that presented you with a command line interface to the game, into which you would enter English-like phrases in order to interact with the world being described in scrolling paragraphs above ("You are standing in an open field..."). Gameplay relied solely on your imagination, puzzle solving skills, and persistence. These adventure games were also the first types of games to introduce significant plot lines to a game in order to keep players interested.

These games were innovative because they were attempts to tell a story by playing a game, and a complicated story at that. The narrative for other games at the time were "Save the princess," or "Eat the yellow balls while ghosts chase you." Rather than having a few buttons and a directional joystick, you had at your disposal the dozens of verbs and nouns with which to interact with your character and your environment. The lack of a graphical display save for a screen 80 characters across and 24 lines down meant that the on screen dialogue had to be descriptive, succinct, engaging, and most importantly, tell an interesting story as a result of player activity. Most of these games had puzzles for the players to solve in order to progress to different story elements, most of which involved the players fully exploring their environment.

As I only played games derived from Rogue (Demon's Souls, the Diablo games, and Nethack once), I was also born enough years after the genre's inception to have only played games derived from their original forebears. The first games I played extensively were the Lucasarts adventure games (the Monkey Island series, Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango), termed "graphical adventures" for the fact that they no longer depended on a command line interface, instead on a limited set of verbs (Pick Up, Talk, Use, Give, etc.) one could use to interact with objects and characters on the screen and in your character's inventory.

Compared to their pure-text predecessors, one might think that the new graphical adventures were limited in their telling of a story as players could only do so many things in the game world (as opposed to anything you could think to type), but it wasn't the case: the limited vocabulary combined with the graphical interface instead removed the tedium of guessing what the programmers wanted from you ("Grab it." Dang. "Pick it up." Dang. "Pick up shovel." Ok, fine.) This made the story more quickly accessible, as well as invited players to explore more objects and locations in the world rather than fighting with the interface.

While these games remain close to my video game heart, recounting these games is a painful reminder of the fact that the genre of adventure gaming is all but dead. Lucasarts, as a company, moved away from its poorly-selling adventure game franchise and instead decided to focus on its Star Wars licenses. After 1997, adventure games produced have always been rated highly for artistic direction, storytelling, and game complexity, but have consistently sold poorly when compared to other game industry rock stars. Interactive fiction, now what text-based adventures style themselves, maintain some popularity among the hobbyist crowd, and even hold a yearly contest to judge new amateur submissions, but ultimately go unnoticed and unapproached by the game industry.

I recognize that I describe roguelikes and adventure games witih a sort of idyllic, "Golden Age," warmly glowing aura, when the reality is that the early 80's and 90's were just as fraught with bad games as I would say we are today. I hold the games in high regard though, even if I've never played them, for the influence that they brought to the games I love in recent years. I could spend hours writing about Planescape: Torment and how its brilliant balance of pseudo-turn-based role-playing and massive non-linear hyper-intelligent story line set the bar so high that everything I play today is cast over by its shadow. But I'll instead say that I recognize where it ultimately came from.

So, back 16 paragraphs, where I said I'd explain why I thought Final Fantasy XIII was one of the best and worst games I've played recently. I've recounted this whole seemingly irrelevant history to demonstrate how I feel about most of the games that come out these days, and it is that they seem to forget why we (or maybe just why I) play games. Newer games, with budgets nearing that of Hollywood films, with armies of programmers, multi-billion dollar companies developing technologies specifically for these games, and marketing schemes with more sophistication than the games themselves, seem to forget their history entirely.

For example, FFXIII, while it does a good job experimenting with and improving upon the basic gameplay elements of the previous 12 games (I know there are more than that), it has its players writhing uncontrollably on the floor in seizure and anguish any time a character opens their mouth to utter any line of dialogue. And from this dialogue the plot remains indiscernible, forcing players to read the encyclopedic diary logs that accumulate after events happen. Your only hope in getting through is either ignoring the story altogether and run your characters from checkpoint to checkpoint, or wade through the frequent cinematic cutscenes with confusion and wonderment with hopes that the poor technical writers who got paid to figure out the backstory can convey what happened after the fact rather than the beautifully rendered characters and environments. Something has gone wrong when you can safely say that the story would be conveyed better if the characters said nothing at all.

Other favorites of mine to pick on are Gears of War I and II. Intended to be an intense action game where players are pitted against terrifying heavily-muscled humanoids that emerge from tunnels beneath human settlements and even have the ability to sink entire cities. Well. You don't know that. You are instead taught how to hide behind cover (press A), aim (press A), time your weapon reloads just right (still, you press A), and how to split your enemies in twain with a chainsaw affixed to the end of your rifle (repeatedly tap A). Characters talk about how there's "10 shitloads" of "grubs" that are coming this way. You fly from place to place, doing what you're told, picking up incomplete clues as to your purpose in this whole mess, but you always end up coming short. You have to read the book, or the Wikipedia entry in order to understand why your character is there in the first place. Maybe it wouldn't bother me as much if the trailers for the games weren't tasteful, moody, artistic pieces of cinematic that seem to question the concept and validity of absolute war, and yet their games never seem to visit this.

Oh. Yes. And the Halo series, the four of them, with a number of sequels awaiting sweet release. The rock star of the console first-person shooter genre. You're a cybernetically enhanced super-soldier Marine, perhaps the last and best of your kind, pitted in merciless hand-to-hand-to-assault-rifle combat against a brutal alien race called "The Covenant." Who are attacking earth. And then suddenly you're on this "halo," thing, in space. It's pretty big, and important, and so you're going to have to blow it up at some point. And you're fighting all over it. And then you're one or many of their ships. And you get to drive a truck sometimes. And that truck has a gun turret on the back of it. And your character says things like "I'm going to finish this fight." And then the games end. I have a book on my bookshelf called "Halo: The Fall of Reach," which I'm told is supposed to give some context to the conflict in which you're so obviously embroiled. I refuse to read it out of principle. The series, I'll admit, saved face by introducing a character-based spin-off that focused on the adventures of a small number of "normal" soldiers trying to make their way through the aftermath of one of the battles depicted in Halo 3. But I might have only liked it because a number of the actors from Firefly did voice acting for it.

The last one I'll mention is the Metal Gear Solid 4. One of the most anticipated games to come out on the Playstation 3, with incredible technological accomplishments in graphics, gameplay, and depth. And it also had one of the most incomprehensible stories ever told. Yes, the life of an international future-spy being manipulated by governments and secret organizations can get a little crazy at times. But after you figure out you're the product of some military genetic experiment from your somehow older clone created at the behest of a small group of ultra-patriots who created an artificial intelligence system that controls the weapons used by cybernetically modified soldiers in proxy wars waged by... somebody? And that's just what I remember from watching some of the end sequences, where they're supposed to be telling you what *really* happened. The game was effectively 20+ hours of impressively rendered, incomprehensible cinematic cutscenes stitched together by too-short and innovative sequences where you had to sneak past armed soldiers.

I'll... go ahead and stop right there. These examples are the most egregious I've come across in recent memory. They're the games the gaming industry crowds around, and clamors for, and ultimately buys. FFXIII came out in March, and has so far sold 1.3 million copies in the U.S. (after selling 1.6 million on release day in Japan). The Gears of War games combined have sold around 17 million. The four Halo games have made upwards of 22 million sales. Metal Gear Solid 4 alone moved 4.75 million units.

In stark comparison, some of the games I like the most from my list seem to have sold the worst. Grim Fandango, the last of the great graphical adventure games, had only sold 93,000 copies five years after it came out. Valkyria Chronicles, an impressive combination of strategic combat, character development, amidst a thinly veiled fantasy version of the atrocities of WWII, sold 150,000 copies. Odin Sphere, a beautiful example of what can be done with 2D animation and good writing in a world obsessed with 3D and schlock, garnered only 100,000 sales despite being one of the highest reviewed games of 2007. I can't even find numbers for poor Planescape: Torment, a game I played more than a decade ago and still won't shut up about it.

These are just the worst performers. Other games I've played, from the list or elsewhere, have been among the most popular and best selling. Occasionally a game worth buying actually gets bought. My point in bringing up game sales for some of these games is that despite the incredible effort, art, and love that went into some of these games the economics of the industry, the decisions people make to buy certain games, and the types of games developers make in response to popular demand, rarely drive the games themselves in what I would consider the "right" direction. Instead, we repeatedly reward the game developers for creating games that are less about playing an actual, fun, engrossing, and challenging game, and more about watching silly "video game" stories that have to be either completely ignored or meticulously researched in order to feel any understanding of what the characters might be going through, or why they're doing what the game makes us have them do.

It is sort of no wonder why Roger Ebert says that video games don't constitute "art." The games that could be art don't sell, and the people who can make them can't afford to. The brief moments where a game breaks this vicious cycle are celebrated by geeks like me, only to be followed by soaring success of the sequels to the games that insult our intelligence. This is the reason why calling a book or a movie "like a video game" is a pejorative term rather than a congratulatory one.

I think the best games are the ones that are challenging and can remain challenging. I think the best games are the ones that tell important stories, stories that reflect human nature and and the hero's journey and self-discovery and identity and everything that normal stories are capable of. I think that the best games are the ones that take the best of the games that came before them and turn it into something entirely different and better. I think the best games have a story that's brave enough to have characters simply say nothing when nothing needs to be said, because we as interested observers can understand what is going on.

I feel that this is important to convey because games are becoming integral to our culture within the span of our generation, and will continue to serve as entertainment, and maybe even be considered a legitimate art form.

• (written around 24.7 years old)

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