As a game developer, I find the majority of my time is spent making games rather than playing them. It’s ironic, but I find time to be scarce. Portfolio building is a priority at this point in my career, but it doesn’t mean I’m not keeping my ear to the ground about recent games.
When I am not working on something that is word intensive, I am listening to video essays about games and films. Topics range from videos about went wrong in games, what went right, story videos, mechanic videos, aesthetic videos, music videos, nostalgic videos, comedic videos, and pretty much anything else in between. What I value about these videos is that they come from a lot of different people and keep me engaged with a plethora of video games subjects even when I am not playing them… or are they?
These videos are well informed and make fair points and analyses about games, but they are all calculated thought out pieces. By the nature of a review video, they are typically made long after the reviewer played them. As an academic, I get caught up in these pieces because of the craft and thought out arguments, but I have to remember that analysis is second to practice. The question I ask myself now with this knowledge is “Is the experience we engage in the moment more important than the one we remember?” More importantly, as a designer, which one should we design for?
Any answer I give will be an answer that appeals to the merits of both approaches. Obviously no one answer is more right than the other, but I do find certain types of games appeal more to one side over another. In general I find that action appeals to the memory while story appeals to the moment.
Action games appeal to the memory. If you ever asked yourself “What’s your favorite thing about playing Pacman?” I don’t think you would come up with a real example. The same can be said about Tetris, Super Mario Bros., or any arcade game for that matter. That’s because the game isn’t supposed to be memorable in the moment, it’s meant to be engaging. Because we can’t extract any real moment that made or broke Pac-man, we have to reconstruct our opinion of it using things we know about the game. Someone might probably answer “I like how you can take the power pellet and fight back against the ghosts.,” but this would be an opinion based on fact of the game, rather than any specific memory playing the game.
This isn’t to say that no action game can be memorable, but the action part of a game isn’t memorable itself because analysis of a game is hard to do in the moment. Unless you really practice at it, the analytic part of the brain shuts off when you’re having fun. So when you ask a game tester what was fun about what they played, they don’t know how to answer either.
This is the general trend of videos I watch on Youtube too. Even if the video is talking about game mechanics, they talk about how well a game could teach a player, or how fun the game could be given the set up and context, but almost none of them talk about how they themselves had fun at any of these specific points. For most game reviews, I find people talk more about a game’s story rather than it’s gameplay because it’s easier to plot story out on paper.
Story games appeal to the moment. A strong candidate for this are RPGs because action and story tend to be segregated in gameplay, making it easy to identify when a game’s story is going on and when the player has to pick up the controller again to play up to the next cutscene. An example I always come back to is Undertale because each moment in that game is filled to the brim with humor and style. No corner of the game is complete without an NPC having a memorable one liner or a plot point that makes the total arc a whole lot sweeter. You ask a person what their favorite part of playing the game and they could answer any number of moments, ranging from a guy who gets astonished when you remember their name to when a character literally picks you up by the head because they want you to come cook with them.
The human brain can categorize stories better, because the narrative puzzle appeals to our analytic side. Our brains like to put together the puzzle of a narrative and fill in the details as they arise. When games give you narrative beat to chew on, we eat them up, sometimes in spite of gameplay. When we talk about what we like in story games, we talk about the good moments that weave together a story “blanket.” This however comes with the caveat that story games also suffer the most from negative memories if the stories are bad or even just sub-par.
Story and mechanics aren’t mutually exclusive to making a game good or bad, but it can be seen that one will typically eclipse another. The best example of this dissonance for me was watching the Rise of Skywalker in theaters. Though not a game, the ideas of action and story still apply to non interactive mediums as well. As I was coming out of the theatre, I remember feeling good about the film. I remember that there were a few things here or there that felt weird about the film, but overall the film was a fun ride. When I got home and watched essays about it, it was to my surprise that every review I read tore into the plot like the film had no redeeming factor about it. Essay after essay confirmed that the movie had a lot of plotholes, contrivances, and production mistakes that would make any lower budget film blush. Slowly my own opinion about the film changed too. How could I have misremembered the film so much?
The short answer is I didn’t. One thing to learn about film, games, or any entertainment is that story and mechanics play to different strengths. I ended up watching the film again with my new knowledge and came out with the same opinion about it being vaguely good. I now know this because I enjoyed the ride of the film and didn’t harp too much on the story. As designers we can learn that mechanics play to the moment, but a solid story will stay in the memory for the long term.
This leads up to a bigger question of what makes a game good? I can’t provide that answer because it is subjective to every player. For me, Zelda II is a good action game, but I can tell you a lot of the moment to moment parts are frustrating. The triumph in overall challenge makes it worth it however. The narrative moments and satisfying mechanics weave together to make a fun experience that neither can do apart.
If someone ever asks you makes a game fun, remember the magic of the game is half in the moment and half in memory.
Game Design - Hard Questions 