1109: Killachine

Another day, another article declaring the console will be “dead” before we know it. Lots of people — mostly analysts and business-savvy people who work in the mobile and social sectors — have been saying things like this recently, so it must be true, right?

Nah. ‘Tis bollocks, as usual. While it’s impossible to deny the huge impact that mobile devices have had on bringing the concept of playing games to the masses — the actually-not-all-that-good Temple Run 2 recently surpassed a whopping 50 million downloads — to say that they are going to “kill” consoles and/or dedicated gaming handhelds is, frankly, ridiculous.

Why? Because they cater to completely different markets and tastes. Mobile and social games are, for the most part, designed for players to while away a few minutes while something else is going on — perhaps a lengthy dump, a wait for a bus or a particularly boring meeting with a conveniently-placed table to hide what you’re up to — while computer and console games are, for the most part, designed for players to sit down in front of for a more protracted period of time and immerse themselves in the experience. There are exceptions in both cases, of course — hence the “for the most part” disclaimers — but, on the whole, that’s where we stand. And there’s nothing wrong with either aspect of gaming — they both exist, and they will both more than likely continue to exist.

The word “games” isn’t all that useful any more, in fact, because the medium it describes is now too diverse to be covered by a single word. I can say “I like playing games” and that will mean something completely different to what someone else means when they say it. When I say it, I mean that I like relaxing on my couch with a controller in my hand, staring at the TV and immersing myself in a game with depth, an interesting story, or both. When someone else says it, they might mean that they have three-starred all the levels on Angry Birds, or that they fire up FarmVille during quiet periods in the office, or that they have fifteen Words With Friends games on the go at any one time. These are obviously completely different experiences, though there can be a degree of crossover between the two extremes — there’s nothing to stop someone who, say, is big into competitive League of Legends play also enjoying playing Scramble With Friends against their less gaming-savvy friends and family.

Where we start to get problems is when developers and/or publishers from one group start to try and step across the invisible line into the other group. More often than not, this is seen in the form of mobile and social developers promising a mobile or social experience that will appeal to “core gamers” — in other words, the group that, like me, enjoys immersing themselves in an experience for hours at a time rather than as a throwaway diversion. It is, sadly, abundantly clear that a huge number of developers who try and take this route have absolutely no clue whatsoever how to design a game that will appeal to these players. The article I linked above is from the CEO of a company called Kabam, who specialise in developing a variety of almost-identical “strategy” (and I use the term loosely) games that supposedly appeal to “core” players. All of their games are the same (literally — I tested three side-by-side as an experiment once, and the quests the player was expected to follow were completely identical, right down to the wording) albeit with a slightly different visual aesthetic, and all of them are as dull as ditchwater.

The bewildering thing is that someone, somewhere, is playing these games — and, more to the point, spending money on them — enough to let them be considered a “success”. So more and more of them start appearing, each inevitably following the exact same template, making all the same mistakes and pissing off the same people while somehow convincing the same others that reaching for their credit card is a really, really good idea.

Note that I’m not saying here that mobile, social and/or free-to-play games are inherently bad in and of themselves; it’s that in many of these cases — particularly those that are supposed to be designed to appeal to “core” gamers — they are designed by people with an astonishingly strong sense of business savvy, and a complete lack of understanding in what makes a game actually fun or interesting to play. In other words, the fact that something is financially successful should not be the only criteria for it being considered “good” — you just have to look at Mobage/Cygames’ shockingly awful Rage of Bahamut, one of the top-grossing mobile games in the world, to see how this is the case.

No, the problem that we have is that everything new always has to “kill” something else. This flawed logic has been seen with numerous other technologies in the past; laptops would kill desktops, tablets would kill laptops, TV and video would kill the cinema… the list goes on. In very few cases is it actually true. Okay, DVD killed VHS, but that was a simple case of a superior format doing the same thing rather than two vaguely related — but not identical — things battling it out for supremacy. People still use desktops as well as laptops because big screens are nice and more practical in many circumstances. People still use laptops as well as tablets because typing on a touchscreen is still a horrid experience. People still go to the cinema as well as watching TV or DVD/videos because it’s nice to see something on a huge screen with room-shaking sound.

Why does everything have to be reduced to binaries? Why does something new always have to “kill” something else, even if it clearly isn’t performing the same function? Can’t these people just accept that certain parts of the populace are happy with one thing, and others are happy with another?

Ahh, if only.