Folderoltasticness

“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!