Ticking the Boxes

By Lewis Denby

There’s a weird concensus among the gaming press and public. A glance across the media spectrum, at film, music and literature, displays plentiful disagreement and debate. And while this does happen within our little bubble as well, it’s certainly less pronounced.

You won’t hear too many dissenters of Halo or Gears of War. You’ll see people liking them less than others, sure. But generally, we tend to be in agreement that these are good, solid games.

But should ’solid’ be enough? And what defines a good game? We seem to be satisfied with a product that just works, that merely ticks all the appropriate genre-boxes. Don’t we deserve more?

//Time’s up
There’s a reasonable case for the videogame having existed since before television even became popular, but whether you consider the early cathode ray tube prototypes a part of this train or not, there’s certainly a healthy history behind us. We’re long past the days of gazing in wonder at the very notion of interacting with our computers and television screens. We should be, by any rate.

Yet we’re still intoxicated by the flashy new graphical updates, the increasingly brutal feedback loops of gunplay and the supposed complexity of modern interactive storytelling. We’re happy to sit, rooted to the groove we’ve forged in our armchairs, and attempt to absorb ourselves in the latest blockbuster promising destructible environments or multiple paths around levels. We’re a bunch of wide-eyed feature whores – and it’s damaging both games themselves and the potentially fascinating community surrounding them.

Certainly, these are all aspects that differentiate our medium from its more static peers, and we should be unequivocally proud of that. Games should absolutely celebrate being games, instead of urgently trying to mimic other forms of art and entertainment. But equally, these have their own exclusive inner workings. Music has the art of mixing and production; film has camerawork and editing. We don’t read a book, applaud the fact that its pages didn’t fall out half way through, and slap a big 85% on the end of our critique. Why is this acceptable form in games? Why aren’t we demanding better?

So we’re still mastering the technology. Tough. We’ve had decades to sort this out, and it’s about time playing a stable game – one that doesn’t crash your console or require a restart after you got stuck between two small stones on the ground – wasn’t something to rave about. It’s about time a good game wasn’t defined by how it technically works, by all the mechanical parts we unquestioningly accept as the fundamental building blocks of a high-quality experience. Graphics: check. Sound: check. Gameplay, whatever the hell that means: check. We’ve had our chance to perfect these isolated fragments, and it’s about time we expected them to be executed with damn prowess.

//Points of view
Are we really so shallow as to be taken in by this nonsense? Is this the reason there’s such vapid agreement across the board; that stereotypical, macho, empty science-fiction blast-a-thons are so fiercely idolised on forums around the globe? The reason a 91% on Metacritic pretty much means all outlets awarded it between 87 and 95? It’s surely telling that the few games that do split opinion are the ones that look beyond the realms of technological competence and into the possibilities of intelligence, nuance and cultural innovation.

Plenty of us love a good, mindless action game every once in a while. I do, and I know a great many others who’d agree. But that we all seem to agree is worrying. We’re too insular and solidified in our opinions, and we positively vilify anyone who dares to venture away from the accepted point of view. When Martin gave Resident Evil 5 a largely positive write-up, rounding it off with an 82% score, a user picked up on the piece at a popular aggregator site. “The game deserves nothing less than a 90,” he said. “That’s not personal opinion. It’s fact.”

That’s eight hundredths of a difference in opinion, yet it was still aggressively called out. And this reduction of games into a set of quantifiable nuts and bolts that objectively either work or don’t work is the root of the problem. Perhaps that’s a result of the largely closed gaming community; perhaps it’s the cause of it. Either way, collective agreement over what is necessarily a subjective experience always strikes me as suspicious and troublesome.

//A taste sensation
Games should work. They should hold together from start to finish, not fall apart after ten hours. They should, by now, be absolutely nailing the fundamentals of design, and looking ever forwards. And we shouldn’t assume that meeting these criteria automatically equates to greatness. It should denote acceptability, and nothing more.

From there, it’s all down to taste, and the day we come to accept that is the day games will be able to branch out, appeal to wider audiences and extend the breadth of their ambitions. We won’t all like everything that appears, but nor should we. Disagreement is something to be celebrated: it’s what makes us human. Difference is to be applauded: it’s what defines modern society. And lapping up the merely functional will not get us anywhere. Demand more. Dare to be different. Dare to love what others hate, and despise what others adore. Dare to take gaming into the brave world of tomorrow, where anything could – and should – be possible.