Playability
May 15th, 2009Reading an article about Six Days in Fallujah, the recently canceled title which would have been the first game to be released concurrently with the conflict it featured, I came across this line from oft-cited Gamasutra columnist Ian Bogost:
“We use the word fun as a placeholder, when we don’t even really know what we mean when we look for some sort of enjoyment in a serious experience.”
This had been my problem with Six Days from the start: the gaming business, not to mention its respective media followers, has been so focused on marketing for virtually its entire existence that when titles come along which deserve a deeper perspective, they don’t know what to do with them. Konami, the company behind Six Days, is a big name, which means they’re looking to turn a big profit. And that means pumping the brand, throwing up as much information as possible to break through the nonstop press machine — and assuring gamers that they will enjoy playing the game. It should be simple to fashion a manner of PR that connects without offense, but they blew it by trying to connect “war” with “fun.” Which it apparently is, when it’s a recreated war that was fought by our parents or grandparents, lost on the youth market’s collective memory. But not when it’s happening right now, when we turn off the console and see the caskets coming out of the planes on the news. Then the connection brings fear and outrage from a variety of sources.
What’s the answer to this problem, then? Like it or not, a title won’t succeed without an informational campaign behind it and a concrete guarantee that it’s worth playing, and one of the ways this is done is by demonstrating that it’s playable. Now, I don’t entirely approve of that word; the sense of “play” has connotations which, in a certain light, are just as bad as “fun.” But the definition it places on the philosophy of the game’s design is an essential one: you will be able to control this game. It may not always work out, so you’ll lose lives and see the game over screen, possibly more than a few times. But it’ll be fair. There will be at least one path you can follow through to the ending.
It may seem pointless to mention it, since it’ll obviously be playable. Games which feature sloppy controls, disjointed graphics, or unforgiving challenges are given sixes on the review sites and rapidly forgotten, leaving mere stubs on wikipedia as their legacy. And yet, we can all think of games which are meant to be played not only for fun, but also because they introduce new concepts to us. From the experimental games at You Have To Burn The Rope, gaming provides us with plenty of examples of human emotion and reaction. Six Days may well have been a title that went one step further, meant to be played for its own sake in the absence of fun. Too bad they couldn’t express that in their release notes.
I still think that sooner or later, we’ll get an issue-charged title that succeeds in its goal. Gamers like intellectual challenges — note the popularity of Myst, for example — and it follows that gamers like to exercise their intelligence in general. It’s already happening in the swaths of election-based games (although they inexplicably dried up last November) and in reports of nationalist factions making their own mods for propaganda purposes. Eventually, somebody will step up and create something that engages the expanded gaming community in a bigger debate than which fictional characters would win in a grudge match. Who knows? By adding a healthy dose of reality, it could even lead the way for the Wii Fit set into the FPS realm, which would undoubtedly please the core gamers by making the genre more popular and fueling developer interest. Then it’s only a matter of time until we draw them into RPGs and such, and soon you’d be able to tell a crowded room that you play video games and get nods instead of stares. The key will be to ensure that any undertaking of marketing is handled respectfully and cautiously, to bring down the fears of a terrible experience without replacing them with fresh anger.