Bad Games and Guilty Pleasures
“It’s like how you can laugh at a video of a guy getting kicked in the nuts, but actually getting kicked in the nuts is not fun.” - Travis Stout
So I was just pondering the question of “guilty pleasure” games - something I’d started chewing over in my brain earlier on today - when my coworker Travis just got a free copy of Godzilla Unleashed (courtesy of an Atari producer we’d worked with for NWN2’s expansion pack), and said “Yay, free game that got a 3.5 on GameSpot!” That led another coworker, Constant, to ask us if we ever enjoyed bad games, and Travis and he immediately started trying to delineate what separated truly “bad” games from one who were not great but still fun, and if something could be fun because it was bad instead of despite it being bad, and so on (look at quote for Travis’s most excellent response to that query). If there’s anything that could be a from-on-high-flick-on-the-back-of-the-ear to write a post, it was that.
So - bad games. What good are they? And at what point does a game become unforgivably bad, where no enjoyment can be wrung from it - or even when we as designers can’t learn from it? I think often we can learn more from bad (or, in all fairness, mediocre) games than from really exceptionally good ones, because our brains seem to better process stuff that is WRONG than stuff that isn’t - we’re natural critics. Our keenly-developed sense of Schadenfreude makes us, as designers, look at something craptastic in a game and go “whew, we’re not gonna do it that way” just as we see a dude get drenched by a car’s passing through gutter-water and consciously move further away from the curb. This doesn’t safeguard us from anything, mind - we often have woefully short memories when it comes to recalling why stuff works and why it doesn’t - but it’s there all the same.
So - bad games. Though I kvetch about my time spent working on the never-released Taxi Driver game, and whining about it a good deal (despite affirming at the same time how hard the team was working to make is as good as we could), I did learn a lot from it. There’s my joke “The number one thing I learned from working on Taxi Driver is NOT TO MAKE A GAME BASED ON TAXI DRIVER,” but that did honestly teach me part of how difficult it is to work with a license that people feel very strongly about (and then I moved on to Neverwinter Nights 2, and holy god, can the forums get fierce). I learned what parts of action combat are solid and which are flimsy, I learned why sandbox systems don’t always work (in the immediate post-GTA3 era this was a difficult point to argue with almost any publisher, methinks), and I learned that when people put in the phrase “I’m talking to you” - despite me editing it out a million times - makes me want to stab everyone in the eye… er. Which is to say: writers in the industry get very little love, most times. But yeah. We can learn stuff - and thankfully, we don’t have to make the bad games to learn from them.
So - at what point does a game stop being mediocre and really start being BAD? I have “guilty pleasures” in there, and had it in mind as bad games actually played for fun - but that’s the thing. Can bad games actually BE fun, or is that part of what makes them honestly bad? That they fail at the main function of a game - which is to be enjoyable? This profession of ours isn’t just about the incredible possibilities of an entirely new and interactive medium, it’s about making something that is entertainment (which I see as being no more “shameful” or “bad” as writing a book or making a film).
So I’m moved here to ask two questions:
ONE - what do you think makes a game honestly bad?
TWO - what games would you call your “guilty pleasures” - games that aren’t really arguably good, that you would rate at maybe a 6, 7 absolute tops in being generous, maybe even a 5 out of 10 - but you’re moved to play anyway?
For me, I’d say when it feels like you’re fighting against the whole system in order to succeed, it kills a game for me (part of why I mourned Breath of Fire V: Dragon Quarter so very deeply) . For a guilty pleasure… oh man. Hm. I did really enjoy Contact for a while… hm. I’ma think about this one. Back to you later. But in the meantime - discuss!
Tags: bad games, game design
December 15th, 2007 at 3:15 pm
1:
I think I have four main criteria for a bad game
a. It is unfun. (This can also mean that the frustration level exceeds the enjoyability of the game.)
b. It is uninteresting.
c. It is internally inconsistent (ie, after you figure out how the world works it ought to continue working that way. No puzzles where you have to just guess.)
and
d. it doesn’t work (either stability or interface issues.)
Now personally, sometimes one category is enough to get me to not play at all, and sometimes a strong showing in one of the first three will let me ignore the rest of them.
For example, many of the infocom text adventures I would rank high on fun, interesting, and functionality, but very low on internal consistency. (For example, in Enchanter the final encounter is solved through trial and error, and there are failure points where you are given no indication that you have made the game unwinnable until hours of play later. This is a repeating theme throughout the company’s products.) (I’d say that the best infocom games are good games with poor design elements)
Lunar 2 is interesting, fairly consistent, and it works, but the fun is lacking. I slugged through most of that game to acquire the little video rewards along the way that told the main story. (I did not finish the special ending stuff. I lost my memory card and the game wasn’t interesting enough for me to play twice. (Bad game, good story)
Temple of Elemental Evil is mostly fun, the story is reasonably interesting, and on my play through I saw no glaring inconsistencies, though it didn’t work all that well as software. (good game bad software)
Oni Reasonably fun, repetitive and frustrating in areas, issues with poor control, game worked the same through as much of it as I played before my computer decided that it didn’t want to run the game anymore. meh.
Tomb Raider 1 and 2. The first one was fun, interesting, consistent, and functional (though the controls weren’t awesome, they were adequate.) The second one? It had places that would kill you without warning. Sure, in TR1 I died because things surprised me, but never in such a manner that after the fact I felt that I couldn’t have seen it coming if I was paying attention to the right things. In the second game, there are traps that only announce their presence after it is too late to avoid them. Though from what I’ve heard, it is the third game where they fall deep into bad game territory.
Part 2:
If you are talking about them coming out today?
The SSI Silver and Gold box games.
Dungeons of the Necromancer’s Domain (I only play that when I find the graph pad I’m using to map it.)
Possibly Nethack.
Hum a lot of the other games I was going to list really are I think objectively good games even if they aren’t very pretty.
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:49 pm
Michael was pretty comprehensive in his reply, but I’ll give this a shot anyway.
What makes a game bad? When it isn’t fun to play. This can be because of a bunch of things, not all of which are the same for everyone, of course.
Install issues, clunky interfaces, regular crashes, display incompatibility, and a lack of quick, convenient help for basic issues are all things that have caused me to abandon a game relatively quickly. The game itself might have been pretty good, but I didn’t find that out, because IMHO it wasn’t worth my time to overcome basic problems at the start. People are like that. Make the initial bar just a bit higher and a significant number of players will just go back to whatever they were playing before.
Frustration is another player-killer. The section requiring Olympic-level reflexes for twenty-six separate gates, with no option to save part-way through, is a pain in the arse. I’m not a Ninja Warrior entrant, for goodness’ sake. If a player has to try the same part over and over, difficulty levels may be needed, or some other help-out. Players who don’t have highly developed thirteen-year-old quick-twitch muscles and a willingness to train on the game eleven hours a day will drop out. Other things can cause frustration, too. Like having to grind endlessly or to search vast and ultimately repetitive maps with few or no hints to find a crucial item. Or discovering that an innocuous choice made hours of playing time (and since saved over) has made impossible completing the game, or some critical part thereof. And, of course, having to tolerate the misbehaviour in multiplayer games of random decerebrates whose idea of fun is to spend time messing with naive newbies, or just stacking them up like cordwood.
As for my guilty pleasures: Syndicate, Warlords II, the Day of Defeat mod for Half-Life, early iterations of Civilization, some Flash revisits of old arcade favourites (like 1942 and Raiden). Well, these were excellent games in their time. So much so that there is something about them that keeps me coming back to them, setting aside recent releases in favour of established if antique quality.
January 5th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
Hiraethin-
Ooh you make a good point about MMOs. Any game with a moderation policy or actual mods who allow a toxic culture to develop on their servers definitely gets weighted toward “bad game” especially since the social aspect of gaming is a major selling point of MMOs.
Heh, I’d left off revisits of old arcade games, because they were frequently damned good games. (As is Civ1-3. Haven’t played 4) They had so little to work with, so many different games, and such fierce competition, that there is little room for bad games coming out of the 70s to the late 1980s arcades. I mean there were oodles of bad games, but the ones that still surface into your consciousness? A lot of them are either primal play types (Invaders, Asteroids, Missile Defense, Tank Wars (okay, that one needed polishing to be playable, but I played a great Tankwars clone in high school)), and Pac Man or excellent polished renditions of their play systems (Raiden, 1942, Contra, Super Off Road, Centipede, Galaga, etc.)
December 24th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
First off, Dragon Quarter is great fun if you can manage to beat it without dying/ starting over. My friend and I gave it a good go, but ultimately we died fighting the final boss(his fault). This was 10 hours from the previous save, so that was that. Still, the challenge was awesome and kept us at the edge of our seats for 30 hours. Losing at BoF5 was one of my fondest memories ever, lol!
Bad games?
Well, I figure Gameplay and Presentation are the two major categories to judge a game by. We really don’t need to discuss presentation, since audio, visuals, and storyline are things that obviously affect the quality of a game. I like to think of presentation as a value that multiplies the overall enjoyment found in the gameplay of a game.
Meaning, if you ain’t got gameplay, you ain’t got nothin’. Gameplay can be bad for a number of reasons as stated above, but I’ll try and break it down a bit differently. When playing a game, I have fun when I accomplish something and when I experience new things. Gaining levels in RPGs are fun because they combine the accomplishment of reaching a milestone with the experience of using new abilities. When completing a task in a game is too easy, the sense of accomplishment is less and the game is not as fun. When something is too challenging the player gets “stuck” and no longer has fresh experiences. This sounds simple but at the end of the day the quality of gameplay can be chalked up as Value of Accomplishment + Rate of Experiences. Thus bringing the entire equation to this:
Presentation(Au+Vi+St) * Gameplay(VoA+RoE) = Quality of Game
Try testing out this equation with various games. I find it pretty accurate. Things such as repetitive level design or tedious grinding would reduce RoE, while giving players real choices can increase VoA(without affecting difficulty!) When designing a game, try to find creative ways to positively impact the Gameplay end of the above equation.
One series I like that would be considered a “guilty pleasure” is Dynasty Warriors. I get to kill 1000s, while gaining levels and using some of my fav quasi-historic characters to boot! Ahhh, now that’s what I call nirvana!