For the past 3 installments of this series, I've been pretty negative. I've pointed out that games are novelties, both on the console and the PC. I've also pointed out the slim hope that is held out by the MMORPG genre. Even so, very few novelties ever die completely.
This week I want to focus on a different hope. I want to focus on those video games that have actually stood the test of time. Yes, video games are a novelty, but so was Backgammon about 5,000 years ago. You could say the same about most sports as well. There are several novelties that are still with us today such as the Slinky, Etch-A-Sketch, and Magic Eightball. The real question here is: Will Video games be the Reversi and Chess games of the future, or just another Rubik's Cube clogging the toy aisle?
The only way to avoid trivialization, that I can see, is to make games that are timeless in the same manner as Risk and Monopoly. Obviously this is going to take a totally different design attitude than what is currently the norm in this industry. This is the reason that we look back, or more accurately at, games that people still play today despite the games being extremely long in the tooth. The hope here is to extract a set of guidelines for making games that will last across multiple platforms for generations. After all, we've had Monopoly since the American Great Depression and people still buy it.
So let's take a peek at some of the undead titles that are currently residing on emulators, cell phones, console anthologies, portable systems, and even in web pages. Some of these games represent whole genres that should have died years ago, but persist through the efforts of a strong online community.
Rogue-likes
These games have been around for freakin' ever!! Spawned in the early '80's, these ASCII tributes to ugliness and complex user interfaces are still being made and played to this very day. You can download a remake of the original or check out many of the newer rogue-likes at the Temple of the Roguelike. There have never been this many Rogue-likes in development before and the community just keeps getting bigger and bigger. Not bad for a whole genre that doesn't use any actual graphics.
For the uninitiated, Rogue-likes are RPGs that use ASCII characters rather than tiled bitmaps. Practically everything in these games is randomly generated. Scrolls, potions, weapon attributes, dungeon layouts, they all change from one game to another. These games also feature permadeath. While the game will autosave when you exit, it will erase your save and start you over if you die. While this all may seem pretty harsh, you never really feel that you died randomly in a well designed Rogue-like. Every time you bite the dust in Angband or NetHack, you know it was your own damn fault. While it is possible to finish the original Rogue in about eight hours, it'll take you at least 50 attempts before you get good enough to do so.
As a side note, there is a new generation of Roge-likes that are raising the bar in excellence while making the interfaces even more cryptic for beginners. These new games open up deeper interaction with the environment as well as greater depth in character development. Check out Dwarf Fortress and Incursion to get a taste of what the newest Rogue-likes are about.
Shmups
Short for SHoot eM UPS. These are the classic vertical and horizontal scrolling 2D shooters of days gone by. Guess what? They're still alive and better than ever! While there are scores of people that are playing Don Pachi and Giga Wing, the big buzz in Shmups is in the Asian doujin scene. Games like Warning Forever and Gunroar keep the genre kicking on both sides of the Pacific. Not all doujin Shmups are free like ones previously mentioned and can't technically be sold outside of their respective countries, so you need to be careful when downloading. Web sites like Shoot the Core also keep the community informed of the latest and greatest titles.
What's interesting here is that Shmups are actually older than Rogue-Likes. This whole genre dates all the way back to Spacewar! circa 1962. This genre envelopes everything from Space Invaders to Smash TV. Impressive not only for it's age, but also the fact that 2D games are supposed to be dead. Even 3D games that play like 2D games (Pandemonium, Klonoa, R-Type Final, etc.) are supposed to be dead. But be honest, if you see a Galaga machine at the local bowling alley, aren't you just a little bit tempted to slide quarter into it and play a round or two? I always give these games a whirl when I encounter them "in the wild" and I'm hopelessly addicted to just about anything made by Kenta Cho.
So what's the big deal here? Well, this is a genre that requires an almost Zen-like level of concentration. You have to be able to move thought into action without any transition in between. If you take the time to consciously make a decision, you'll probably bite it. These games are short and intense. Just making it through five minutes on one of these things makes you feel like you've accomplished a feat that is beyond most mortals. As soon as I pass 75 levels of Titanion I'll probably make a vid of it and post it on Youtube. Yeah, it's that gratifying. If you've never played one of these, it's like the accomplishment of eight hours of Zelda packed into three minutes. Hard, fast and casual are the words that best sum up this entire genre.
Tetris
They will probably be playing this long after our great, great, great grandchildren are all dead. I personally don't think that there's anyone on the planet that hasn't played this game. Seriously! If I'm in a plane that goes down in some remote jungle somewhere and I crawl from the wreckage and start playing tetris on my cell phone, I'm pretty sure that some native bushman will emerge over my shoulder and go "ah TETRIS!!" After sharing a laugh and brief moment of recognition, said bushman will probably kill me and take me back to the village to be served as the evenings long pig. But you get the basic idea....
While Tetris isn't the only popular puzzle game out there, it's certainly the most played and timeless. The modern manifestation of the puzzle game is the "Match-Three Colors" games like Bejeweled and Chuzzle. Although more traditional falling block games like Columns, Klax, and Meteos are also popular.
Ultimately, the formula remains largely the same. This is pattern matching in a form that can only be done within the context of video games. The same thing that drives people to do Crosswords, Sudoku, and Word search puzzles in newspapers is the same thing that drives people to play these games. This is why the most popular puzzle games on the market right now are Match-Three Color games without time limits. It's leisurely pattern matching that draws the casual crowd. Even the speedier games like Tetris and Columns start the player off at a fairly slow pace. In later levels however, Tetris can take on the properties of a Shmup as you have to almost intuitively place the pieces in order to keep everything going. The hook, as with Shmups and Rogue-likes, is to do better than you did the last time. There is literally no end to these games, so the challenge is to keep it going for as long as possible.
So the guidelines go as follows:
- Games should have enough pattern to be coherent, but enough randomness to keep the player on their toes.
- Games should completely engage the player for however long they choose to play.
- Difficulty should ramp up over time spent. Starting slow and picking up speed as the player progresses.
- Dead space should be minimized as much as possible. The player should always be doing something and a game should only last as long as is appropriate for the gamer.
Four not so simple rules. While I'm sure that a further study of these games would reveal several more universal guidelines to game design, this is really all I have time for today. Notice that each one of these rules can apply just as easily to FPS, RTS and MMORPG games as they do to the olde skool games of the past. Next time you play a game, ask yourself how many of these rules were really taken into consideration.
MMORPG.com writes:
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