Why Jeff Engel is Wrong

In today’s issue of Counting Rupees, Jeff Engel talked about why the sales figures for Braid are a bad sign for the casual game industry.

His arguement is essentially that when you do the math, Braid has sold 55k copies (according to public estimates) at 15 bucks each, which translates into $825,000.  You have to multiply this by 70% to get the developers cut, and then do a bunch of math to account for localization fees, certification, and development costs.

Jeff Engel makes the claim that in order for Braid to achieve its goal of completely financing the next game Blow wants to make, the magic number of sales Braid would have to achieve is something like 100k copies.  Jeff’s concern is that many games don’t sell those kinds of numbers.

My response to this would be that I have absolutely no doubt that Braid will hit and exceed 100k copies, that’s virtually a certainty.  Digitally distributed games certainly don’t have the market penetration that sales at brick and mortar stores do, but by the same token, the costs are significantly less.  XBLA arcade sales should follow a long tail distribution - meaning that after only two weeks of sales, the majority of the income from Braid is yet to be seen.

While it might be true that many games don’t reach 100k in sales, that’s true when you sell your shovelware game at Gamestop too, and at least there you’re not giving a cut to the retailer, another cut to bribe the retailer into showing your title promenantly for three days, another cut for manufacturing and distribution, and an even bigger cut to the publisher.

Jonny B. Good

I’ve not had the pleasure of meeting Jonathan Blow yet, but I get the impression that he’s the type of man who does what he does, not for the attention of the gaming media, but because he thinks that’s the way things should be.

And I’m going to have to agree.

I’ve spoken of Jonathan before, and if you haven’t heard any of his talks on design, you should, if that’s the kind of thing that interests you. Jonathan has made news recently based around many of his design philosophies. I had thought that these views were lofty and optimistic, it was difficult to point to any one of them and demonstrate a successful title that really embodied it. Then it came about that Jonathan was bringing a game to market, and I had intended to draw a bead upon it with a critical eye, looking forward to pointing out in his game where he was defying his own rules.

So much for that.

I realize that Braid is currently only available for Xbox Live Arcade, which I’m happy about from a business standpoint, but I almost wish it was more widely available in this case. I feel bad for friends of mine who would rather spend a few hundred dollars in coffee than own an Xbox, because they are missing out on an a profound experience. Braid is coming to PC later this year, but many of these friends own Macs (probably for the same reason they don’t own an Xbox 360). So let’s talk about Braid and Jonathan’s design beliefs.

Jon holds the stance that playing a video games should be a holistic experience - you shouldn’t need to be artificially prodded into doing one thing or another, rather the game play space should naturally draw you to areas and concept that should be interesting, and you should discover them for yourself. Braid contains no tutorials, and as the central game mechanic is about playing with the flow of time, describes a world in which things can happen which are not expected. Nevertheless, the game is built in such a way that you will naturally discover the quirks of this world, in a very organic fashion, and every time you do, you feel really good about it.

Jon is vehemently against scheduled rewards (a term I used, and I believe he coined). These are the little meaningless bonuses that at their best, try to get you to explore areas of the playspace you might not have, and at their worst, are a cheap mental trick designed to keep you in front of your box. Nearly all games contain these in some way, they’re so prevelant, it’s difficult to imagine a game without them. Braid is such a game. Taking them away gives the game a clean, minimalistic feel. It invokes the feeling that you’re free of distractions, and can be focused on the exploration at hand.

Jon is of the opinion that there is often a dichotomy between what the gameplay is trying to tell the player, and what the story is telling the player. The canonical example is Bioshock, in which the story tells you that the choice between saving or destroying the little sisters is critical, and the game play tells you it doesn’t matter (because the difference in rewards for doing one or the other are trivial). Braid’s story is tightly integrated with gameplay, and in fact it didn’t occur to me until the sixth world that the story being told was an allegory for what was happening in each level, and vice versa.

Finally, Jon believes that developers should think about what they’re teaching their players when they give them a game to play. On this point I think the world needs a balance, and in general we are lacking developers who live in Blow’s camp. Games have been used to teach people since time immemorial. As a tool for teaching, it is certainly important that what is being taught is a Good Thing. I think, however, that from a pragmatic standpoint, not everyone is interested in learning. There is a place in the world for people who want nothing but to be entertained, and someone will always be there to fill that desire.

So what is Braid? It is a world turning experience on both an intellectual and emotional level. Braid integrates complexity out of simplicity, it evokes a sense of wonder and delight. Free of distractions, you are brought into a masterfully crafted world where you are repeatly filled with a sense of delight as you learn. The feeling is much like the feeling of exploring in Portal, only more so. Jonathan values this feeling so much, that the official walkthrough simply urges you not to use a walkthrough - and he’s right. Using a walkthrough robs you of much of the experience you get out of this game, and you can never get it again.

Braid is a bittersweet, magical journey, and missing it would leave your hand off the touchstone of our generation. Jonathan Blow earns my respect in spades, and the world will never be the same again.

Carabiners for the Learning Curve

During the holidays I got involved in a little game called Rock Band with some of my buddies. I’m not usually one for rhythm games, but I thought I’d see what the fuss was about.

Six and a half hours later, I have blisters on my index finger from the drum sticks and my eyeballs are so bloodshot I can barely see straight. This process was repeated on nearly a nightly basis until it was time to return for one last round of schooling. My buddies are eagerly awaiting my schedule to lighten up a bit so that I can come home for a weekend and jam with them some more.

There’s something really energizing about playing a game that makes you feel like a rock star, and I would say that Rock Band is a genuinely excellent title. Part of what makes it an excellent title though, is that it’s HARD.

Unlike most difficult games, Rock Band evens out the playing field off the bat. It doesn’t matter how good a gamer you are, playing the drums or strumming on the guitar is a totally different experience than mashing on a controller. This means that my friends who might occasionally look at a video game once every couple of months are no worse off than I who live on my computer. If the game was easy, I suspect it would be a lot less fun. Part of what makes it entertaining is the challenge of rocking out a really difficult song.

So here’s the trick. If the game isn’t going to be fun without a really steep learning curve, how do you prevent people from just giving up? The curve is easy enough at first that someone who never plays video games can play the first few songs on easy without getting frustrated, but things get difficult quickly. I would suggest that Rock Band has implemented just such a system, I’m not even sure if they did it intentionally, but that system is one of scheduled rewards.

As previously discussed, scheduled rewards are any system of ‘fake’ or pointless gifts to the player that don’t actually improve the quality of their gaming experience, but act upon psychological hooks to keep the player captivated. Examples in Rock Band would be points, stars, money, fans, and unlockable clothing and instruments. Much of the multiplayer world tour experience involves playing songs well enough to earn ‘fans’. Earning enough fans will allow you to play for special items (such as a tour bus, roadies, a PR team, etc.). These special items serve no purpose other than opening new venues where you can play to earn more fans. The system is essentially purposeless, much like grinding an RPG, each incremental improvement simply allows you to do more of the same.

The difference in Rock Band is that the playing of instruments and singing is arguably a skill. The only way to improve at the skill is to continue playing progressively more difficult songs. By using a horde of scheduled rewards, Rock Band addicts players into sticking with it, ‘just to unlock the next venue’, or ‘just for one more set’. This addicting property offsets the disadvantages of having a steep learning curve - namely that players will become frustrated and give up.  While scheduled rewards do have the rather banal benefit of creating games that are often profitable, if not innovative, this would give them a genuine purpose in the design arsenal - as a counterweight for steep difficulty.

A Critique of Video Games

To say that there’s a debate on whether or not video games are art is rather disingenuous. There are those who feel that video games are not, but I think it’s been demonstrated that they don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. The very question of “Are video games art” doesn’t make sense. One doesn’t ask if drawings or film are art, these things are a medium through which art can be expressed. Anything can be a medium through which art is expressed, but that doesn’t mean that everything created using that medium is art. I doubt that Mr. Ebert would deny film being a viable medium for art, but he’s not exactly advocating the artistic merits of American Pie either.

And so we could discuss what the qualifications are for artwork, but I could make an entire blog devoted to that. The reality of the situation is that those types of decisions are made by consensus of the art critic community. We currently have a lot of game reviewers, who are paid money to play games and essentially tell the world if those games are worth paying for. This is only a valuable service only insofar as you can trust the integrity and opinions of those reviewers. Likewise, this service could be performed by a community, but is only useful insofar as you can trust the opinions of that community (and if the community is primarily composed of the idiots you find on XBL making various homophobic references, I don’t have a whole lot of faith in that). This is, however, not the same thing as evaluating the esprit of the game, as a work. And this is an area where things get a little fuzzy.

I’ve written before about the separation between an action which is highly addictive, and an action which is personally satisfying. These things are metabolically separate functions within humans. Unfortunately, they are often confused, and this is evidenced by a lack of clear distinction in this concept within the language (i.e. A game is simply “fun”). Case in point: N’Gai Croal chooses desktop tower defense in Slate’s Gaming Club game of the year.

Is obsession a valid selection criterion? I’d say so. It’s certainly one that I apply to other art forms. Whether I’m thinking about my favorite song, album, movie, TV show, novel, or play, I generally pick the one that I’ve responded to the strongest, the one that I can’t stop thinking about.

- N’Gai Croal

We don’t have accepted vocabulary that marks the difference between an experience that stays with you after you leave it because of the profound implications it has (For a film example, Memento) or because the experience was psychologically addictive (Spiderman 2). My point is, you can do both (The Matrix, the first one anyway).

Popularly, Jonathan Blow has seized upon this idea and seems to have emerged as the apologist for the concept. Unfortunately, I don’t feel many people seem to understand what he’s saying. In the same Slate Gaming Club article, Seth Schiesel talks about how Blow hates on Bioshock because it pretends to be an emergent Sandbox, when really it’s a constructed reality. I don’t really think that’s the point. While Blow does seem to prefer the Will Wright-esque emergent concepts that arise from atomic game rules, that’s only because of the satisfying experience it can provide. What he is essentially saying is that most games feed upon artificial scheduled rewards - the drug pathways, in my lingo - while very few provide a meaningful take-away.

What Blow is really asking is this: If we are going to make meaningful art, what is the mechanism that video games afford art that are not done through film, painting, poetry, or music? In his mind that mechanism is the structure of gameplay; the rules of the created world, and the exploration of those rules, should be the source of a certain profound satisfaction. I would call this a ludological art fundamentalist viewpoint. Certainly I can’t think of better contender for what the core of that experience would be, but I would take a more moderate viewpoint. Much as film is a unique medium from stage theatre, to say that the essence of the art in film is only in the cinematographer is disingenuous as well. Much of what makes a truly great film overlaps what makes a great play. So it is with video games.

Blow criticizes Bioshock for creating a non-authentic satisfaction. He argues that Bioshock’s marketing makes the claim that the game is about morality and choice, but this is not evidenced in the gameplay constructs (because your choice is irrelevant). I would say that Bioshock’s marketing as a game about choice is really quite brilliant. The game is not about choice, but rather the illusion of choice (Would you kindly agree with me). The fact that rescuing or saving the little sisters makes little difference in the stable state reinforces this concept, and it does it through gameplay.

Beyond that, I think the game is also a very powerful exploration of Objectivism, and one gets to literally explore the implications of that philosophy. Instead of through narrative and watching it occur, as one experiences in Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, Bioshock literally allows you to explore the aftermath of an environment which had adopted that philosophy, through the use of audio diaries and your experiences with the characters in the game. Those are not strictly ludological concepts, but are borrowed from film, which is perhaps why Blow doesn’t account for them. That Bioshock is able to do this, and at the same time make it relatively straightforward to bypass if you’re interested solely in entertainment shows that this game is a shining star of entertainment and art fused together. No, it’s not perfect, but art rarely is.

I don’t think that many people have explored the dynamic of using the gameplay, devoid of artificial rewards, as this satisfying experience, and that may be why it’s difficult to discuss it. I also think that adopting only the use of gameplay would make a game far more sterile than it could otherwise be. There are parallels between film and video games, and while it is ultimately to our detriment to make games that are trying to be films, ignoring the lessons learned in that medium serves no purpose either.

That said, I think Blow has gone somewhat overboard (which would make sense, considering this fundamentalist position). People who are interested in meaningful, authentically satisfying material will seek it out, and if it’s not available in the medium of video games, it is available in other fashions. Most people are not interested in being enlightened, and seek only entertainment. Having the entire industry produce nothing but games designed to be fine art will only result in the abandonment of the medium, for that exact reason. How many of the novels sold every year are truly profound? How many pieces of cinema leave concepts that dance in your mind as you drift off to sleep?

Daniel Radosh may be hungry for real food, but the rest of the world is clamoring for whatever cheap drugs they can find. This is not new, nor is it a sign of the times. This behavior is endemic of our species, and frankly I suspect it is a requirement for a stable society that most people not be interested in that which is profound. Ultimately most people will continue to make that which is entertaining, and occasionally a visionary will create a profoundly meaningful game. Those games will appeal to a much smaller set of people, and typically have much smaller budgets (would Citizen Kane have been even better if it had a $200 million dollar budget?). That doesn’t mean that AAA titles should not continue to push the boundaries of what is possible to make in video games, to explore the possibility space of what can be done with games, but I don’t think we need to get really whipped up about whether or not our games are art.