The Playtime War

You'll often hear the wistfully cynical brand of gamer calling up nostalgic--if misremembered--recollections of the early console games: they were more challenging, and the replay value was through the roof. You didn't burn through $60 in four hours and then leave the cartridge to collect dust for the rest of its life. Of course, they don't take into account they were knee-high to a circus dwarf when last they played Sonic & Knuckles, and certainly too clumsy and stupid (children are clumsy and stupid) to power through it in the time it took the pros to play.

The old guard will always see the grass as greener in the past, but in this case it's a problem for the current industry. Trying to compare the NES generation with that of today's games is like comparing silent film and the filmography of Michael Bay: they're each capable of being utter crap, but in entirely different ways. We forget that replay and game length existed in the retro titles because they were intentionally made too damn hard to beat quickly, if ever. Add to that the lack of a save function, and you find that games which were really pitifully short when played correctly seemed like bottomless chalices of awesome to our idiot pre-teen minds.

Today, expectations have switched tracks right along with the technology. The nature of the gameplay experience has become more comprehensive, and we have to take into account a dozen extra variables when trying to figure out if we got our money's worth. In turn, the developers have to cater to an audience that's increasingly concerned with graphically advanced eyegasms over the quality or depth of a storyline. So what do you get out of that? Right, right--movie-quality visuals, weak storylines punctuated with explosions, and campaigns so short you could beat them outright during an especially long trip to the bathroom. And the crowd grows restless.

The problem may be that we can't have our cake and eat it too. Or perhaps, we're just too demanding of developers. Kids who grew up spending eighty hours in a Square-Enix RPG are now expecting the same kind of playtime from their first-person shooters, though they fail to realize how many of those hours were spent leveling a team in Active Time Battles. Grinding, side missions, open world travel--all things we have yet to see much of in the average FPS. Developers are creating movies more than they're creating tales, and to ask them to put together a 20+ hour "film" in campaigns as visually detailed as something like Killzone 3's would be a death sentence for a design team's budget.

So where do we go now? There is an impasse to be overcome for both sides, with compromise and innovation the only options available. Players will have to understand what they're paying for, and buy games that suit their needs rather than complaining about the lack of content in a genre that currently can't support it. In the meantime, developers who cater will have to introduce innovation to their stagnant niches; there has to be a revival of interactivity to keep the line between games and movies clear. That or they're going to have to market their titles as multiplayer-centric, as any current FPS really should be doing. With the wealth of your title's replayability centered in your online experience, why on earth would you try to sell a storyline?

Know what you're buying when you take your $60 to GameStop, and know that your cash influences future industry offerings. As long as we keep demanding and buying "action films" for consoles, the developers won't know any better.

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Matt Newman is helplessly, criminally addicted to all things video games, and currently writes for http://www.diedagain.com.

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