I hate Pokémon. It’s stupid and I hate it.
I hate it because I don’t understand it. Four badges in and I haven’t used a berry, swapped out a TM or
Pokémon is about interrupting.
Five steps through the grass A WILD PIDGEY APPEARS! Two more ste-A WILD PIDGEY APPEARS! Son of-A WILD PIDGEY APPEARS!
Three steps past the edge of the long grass, a trainer wants to show me his Pokémon.
YOU HAVE A CALL FROM YOUR MOTHER.
“Hi dear, I just used your money to buy things for you you won’t use because you don’t understand them. You’re the best around!”
~Click~.
A WILD PIDGEY APPEARS!
When traversing the world, it seems I have an important choice to make. Do I walk fast and be under constant Pidgey harassment, or do I lump along like a crumb and only suffer moderate Pidgey?
Pokémon constantly distracts the player from their objective. To some, this might be exciting – the game throws something at you every ten seconds, another element to manage, fight, trade with, fight, find, grow, gamble, fight, fight. The game is playing me – it doesn’t feel like an adventure, it feels like interrupting errands.
I want to be inspired by a game to explore it. I scoured every inch of the Great Sea in Wind Waker. I climbed something just because it was there in Shadow of the Colossus. I like a game world to invite interest, not demand attention. Instead of inspiring me to discover Johto, I am loathe to go out in it for fear of Pidgey.
I hated Dragon Age: Origins. The people were lifeless and ugly, the story was dull, the combat was duller; it didn’t feel like a world but a maze of walls painted to look like scenery. I only played five hours but it was enough to know I didn’t want more.
One of the first games I got for my PS3 was a marked-down copy of Oblivion. I got out of the sewers and traded it in.
Variations on a theme – I don’t like RPGs, apparently. To me, the gameplay in traditional RPGs doesn’t take advantage of our modern input technology. I like pressing buttons - in some circles I’m considered good at it. I want to control the actions of the character on screen, not suggest and manage them through a series of earnest speeches and menu selections.
The only traditional RPG that ever held my interest was World of Warcraft. It’s debatable whether or not it counts. WoW is possibly the most RPG of all RPGs – a communal experience in character building, loot acquisition and destiny in a persistent world. But that’s the opinion of someone who appears to despise what many people hold dear about the traditional RPG.
If a game asks me to play a role, I want everything in the game to facilitate its believability. Turn-based battles do not. Even though WoW is secretly about rolling dice, doesn’t feel that way. You can never pause WoW, so what in other RPGs is managed in menus is translated into cooldowns and cast-times. You still need to strategize, but the process balances decision and action with an interface that feels active.
I’m a clicker, in World of Warcaft. I attribute it to never having played a computer game since Phantasmagoria, when I was probably far too young to be playing Phantasmagoria. In theory there was a far greater degree of control I could have in the game if I grew to think of my keyboard as a gaming input device. Which I never did, because it was hard, and because WoW allowed me to click my way to level 80 through quests, PVP, dungeons and raids without much trouble.
Another thing I like about WoW is that I can see every Pidgey coming, and walk around.
But I think there’s another reason why I don’t connect with traditional RPGs. It has to do with the inherent nature of games and what I expect of my role as the player.
All game play is performance.
***
The other day while searching for meaning on the Internet, I came across Jane McGonigal.
She is a game designer and a game researcher. I found her through avantgame.com when I did a search for “Games as performance.” In the manifesto for a speech she gave in 2005, McGonigal outlines the case for claiming “all digital games in the name of theatre”.
A game is a total art, capable of encompassing every other art. A lot of the ways we talk and write about games focus on the composite pieces. Graphics. Sound. Lasting Appeal. Story. And Gameplay, of course. Gameplay is key to what makes a game a game. The term can refer to several different things, from input to structure to subjective experience. It’s the one aspect of video games that they can claim as their own – the element that makes gaming a vastly different experience from other arts. It serves to describe the relationship a player has with a game as much as it describes an intangible ‘gameness’.
Examining the parts of a game to understand the whole is a job half done. Games cannot be compared to film because they do not offer a passive experience. Games cannot be compared to literature because the story of a game is more than just narrative and plot – it is the player’s interaction with the world and its rules. When we look at games in pieces we fail to talk about the medium in a meaningful way.
Frequently, the debate about whether or not games can be considered art boils down to gameplay versus story, as if ‘story’ is the thing games are trying to achieve. But the narrative of a game isn’t just the machinations of a plot to move a player through tasks in the game world – it is the performance of the player as the character in the context of the game. When we ask the question “Can a game tell a meaningful story?” we need to consider that gameplay and story are intimately linked and that the ways a game ‘tells’ are unique.
Demon’s Souls doesn’t have much of a story in the traditional sense. It has a circumstance; Boletaria has been invaded and corrupted by demons. The player is tasked with restoring balance to the kingdom. You meet an assortment of characters along the way, but they don’t move the plot along – they exist to facilitate your being in the world. The story in Demon’s Souls is not the events of the game. It is crawling through hostile environments with your shield up and taking every sound as an indication of inevitable death. The story is told not through dialogue and flavour text, but through my performance as this character in this context. I do not experience a narrative – the narrative is my experience of my performance.
This goes a long way to explain why I seem to hate traditional RPGs. I can’t fault the games – the problem is how I require a game to facilitate my performance in order to feel satisfied with the experience.
The idea of gameplay as performance doesn’t just apply to character-based games. McGonigal sketches out the relationships between digital game play and different types of performance:
“Digital game play is dramatic performance. Players act “as if,” that magic Stanislavski acting technique; they act as if they believe the rules are real limitations, as if the artificial goal is of real importance. Digital game play is spectacular performance. Digital game play, especially physical, pervasive and tournament game play, generates attention and audiences. Digital game play is demonstrative performance. Players demonstrate their mastery of the game system, showing off their understanding and skill in manipulating and reading the game system’s input, feedback and control mechanisms. Digital game play is expressive performance. Players reveal aspects of their personal identity through their choices in avatar and verbal exchange. And digital game play is, increasingly, about traditional kinds of performance: singing, rhythm, dance, movement, social engineering, and even in-game protest.”
In these relationships, we are given a way to think of games and gaming holistically. Instead of regarding games as the bastard step-child of film or the under-read cousin of literature, or the Frankenstein collusion of a dozen different arts, if we look at game play as performance it gives us a new way to think about what games are – and, importantly, what they can accomplish as an art form.
