The art of tedium
January 14, 2009 at 2:01 am (Editorial) (360, canon, meta-gaming)
Repetition is known to have some enchanting effects on the mind, but all good things must come to an end right? I feel as if the older I get, the less susceptible I am to the soothing powers of repetition. In more than a few games recently, it’s proven to be an inhibitor to my overall enjoyment, a scathing red mark. Yet in my gaming history, I’m sure I could count more than a few games I thoroughly enjoyed that were also incredibly repetitious. So what gives, what’s the secret between making one game memorable and the other a waste of time?
Here’s the recent meals I’ve had: Crackdown, Dead Rising, Bioshock. All these games were relatively engaging at first, but the long-term romance hasn’t weathered quite as well compared to first impressions. I would say all are relatively repetitive and not the repetitive that drew me in. Yet I fired up Diablo 2 for an hour or two the other day, killing bad guy after bad guy, and it barely felt like any time had passed. Am I being hypocritical or is there a central problem here?
It’s hard to determine these kinds of things since what I find overly repetitive can be bliss for another person, it’s certainly a subjective issue. I imagine most designers could give a few pointers, so I’m going to try and think of this from a design perspective.
First issue I’d say is padding. Is the game full of repetitive activities to pad out the general length or is it there for a greater reason? If I look to Bioshock which is full of “random encounters,” where the player mostly does the same few things again and again, I’d have to call that padding. Padding to slow down the player from seeing the next big story aspect or next new level. The game also made the enemies more difficult by giving them more health, rather than new weapons or advanced AI. Essentially, the obstacles just became meatier, not more intricate. On the other hand, Resident Evil 4 (which was padded somewhat I’ll admit), played around with the enemies multiple times throughout the game and always placed the character in interesting level designs to force them to improvise more.
Next, does the repetition reveal the systems to be weak and shallow or reveal their depth and quality? With Crackdown, it seems there’s so much mindless shooting (and there’s no shooting for precision here, it’s all lock-on based) that despite the other central parts of the game-rooftop scaling and close quarters fighting-the shooting feels like it takes up so much more of your time. It’s certain that there’ll be situations where you need to take guys out from a distance, and unfortunately that can really only be done easily by shooting them. On the other hand, Devil May Cry has encounter after encounter, but this only helps the player to find different combos that work, or play around with the various systems (just rev and such), or find new weapons that they really like. It doesn’t feel like you’re doing the same thing when you’re doing it a different way.
Perhaps the biggest game-changer is reward though. When I was recently playing Gears of War, I’d kill countless Locust but it didn’t do much to change anything. There’s little more than a handful of weapons in the game, same with enemies. It didn’t seem like there was any light at the end of the tunnel. Look at something like Diablo 2 though, you’re always finding new loot, the enemies change every act, and there’s always another quest to look forward to. Plus you have inventory management and bumming around in the town to break up the central action. You go in to Diablo 2 and know that at some point, you’re bound to be doing something else eventually. Killing a Locust who is 12 barricades away instead of the previous 3 barricades isn’t really my idea of something else.
A good jRPG can be fun because it knows exactly how to strike the balance between good repetition and bad. It feels strange to say you’ve spent 40, 50, 80 hours (or more) battling and wandering around, but jRPGs are like the alchemy of the gaming world. Final Fantasy X is probably my favorite and a good part of it is because there was always a reason for the repetition (ie random battles), there was a whole sphere grid to navigate around and tons of skills to play around with. Plus the overall repetition made me see exactly how fast that game plays out (being turn-based, I’d say much quicker than most). By the way, I’ve played that game for more than 150 hours so you can be sure it’s taken me in.
For me, this issue of handling repetition, along with length and pacing, is one of the most pressing and interesting design issues that developers will be dealing with in upcoming generations. It was different back in older generations when running left to right or running and gunning was all gamers knew, now there are many more variables to think about. I’d imagine it’s difficult to go for a single vision of how to unify the gameplay without making it repetitive, and then falling back on a kitchen sink style (see later Tony Hawk games that introduced CARS). Yet some developers have done a remarkable job of handling these kinds of issues, Valve for instance varies things up with their method of scaling the action up and down to create mood. There’s also Bungie who uses a sandbox style of gameplay in their single player to give the player plenty of realistic options. Honestly, if I were working within the game industry, I’d love to be one of the guys responsible for tracking the pace of the game and keeping the player interested. It may not sound interesting, but it can separate the shmucks from the masters.
