Although we typically refer to media such as books and film as passive inasmuch as their audiences do not directly impact the work, it has long been recognized that reading a story or watching a movie is to some variable extent an active engagement.  Nonetheless, truly interactive media such as videogames clearly involve a more collaborative form of participation; one might describe a packaged title as an incomplete work of art waiting for a player to come along and dynamically cocreate its final release, not unlike a written play yet in need of an acting troupe.  Appropriate language for discussing videogames is experiential—because videogames happen.  We must speak of texture and flow and tactile feedback just as often as we elaborate upon mood or symbolism, for these constitute the very form of the performance.  Unlike in a play, the basic nature of performing in one videogame is different from that in any other because each has a unique set of bodies for the actors, ways in which those bodies can move, rules about how those movements interact with the environment, and so on; each literally takes place within its own world, however great or small.

But what is the experience of playing a videogame?  Well, in Mario games, we feel momentum and its effects upon our joyful leaps, contrasted with the tight, deadly circumstances of perilous floating platforms and a veritable zoo of odd creatures that all share the common ability to end our fun with the slightest touch.  Shadow of the Colossus is at bottom about lacking control as we rely upon the navigational intelligence of our stead and clumsily flail about landscapes or up giant beasts, tripping over our feet or desperately holding on as we are tossed about.  Bionic Commando is simply defined by the inability to jump.  And when we play a role-playing or real-time strategy game, we feel the physical push and pull of navigating the user interface and menu systems while developing an indirect aesthetic awareness of the crunch of a sword blow, the indistinct bubble of a water attack, or the way in which our units interact (or don’t) with the playing field.  These visceral experiences actually take on the qualities of what would in other media be called theme, as they are both pervasive and often mirrored or paralleled by the wider game structure or narrative.

At its most fundamental, gameplay (the play of a game in the most immediate sense) is determined by the restrictions built into the movement set and the response of the avatar—that is, the mechanics.  “Restrictions” is the most important word here.  If you close your eyes and imagine up an original videogame for yourself, the possibilities for your protagonist’s movement are totally limitless; it is your job to define them narrowly, or else your gameplay will fail to cultivate a relationship between player and level, self and other.  An avatar must have some form of weight, or else it will seem thoroughly detached from the spaces which it inhabits.  A game takes identity through these unique limitations of its mechanics, just as we mortal humans are most easily defined by what we are not.

Take the NES Castlevania games, for example.  Once the player has launched into a jump, directional movement cannot be changed.  This trademark hook combines with a slow walking speed and the fact that attacking causes the character to stop moving, creating a stiff feel of movement around which the levels have been designed.  Those bobbing medusa heads would pose little threat in many other platformers, but here they are a special nuisance due to the way in which the player character is knocked backwards if hit by one.  This is why Grant is such a useful acquisition in Dracula’s Curse; his freedom of movement greatly reduces the danger of falling into pits and even allows entire portions of stages to be circumvented.

What happens if the player character gradually gains a greater freedom of movement and environmental interaction?  You get Metroid, a sophisticated game in which the level design is based entirely upon the contrast between early and later avatar capabilities.  Despite the open environments, many obstacles are entirely insurmountable at first, which forces the player to explore elsewhere, sticking to the intended upgrade path to gain abilities until blockades encountered long before suddenly are easily traversed.  Dangerous enemies essentially serve the same function as these environmental obstacles inasmuch as they both confront the player with the intention of halting progress, but both players’ experience and developers’ thinking categorize them separately because typically one is passive while the other is aggressive; one stationary, the other roving; one unthinking, the other reacting with something meant to resemble intelligence; etc.

Part of Metroid’s brilliance is that it recognizes that the environment and its enemies are one and the same challenge by furthering its primary device, the slow development of exploratory freedom, to address enemies and difficulty by seamlessly integrating another means of controlling the player’s advancement: the progression of power, a device which had been developed in games like Zelda and Dragon Quest in order to prevent the player from wandering early into areas intended for later in the game by filling them with enemies whose strength was on a different order of magnitude.  Metroid players are rewarded for especially thorough exploration with optional powerups that have been carefully hidden within walls, tunnels, and secret rooms, making it easier to survive dangers; this increased survivability burgeons further exploration, generating a loop of positive reinforcement that illustrates the united impedimental purpose of the hazard and the impasse.

When seen in this way, it is no wonder that sequence-breaking is such an honored pastime: what greater satisfaction could there be than to forcibly escape the intended path of progression by cleverly defeating the level design directly?  In Metroid, a game about becoming stronger and more able, the principles of level design are extrapolated to become the shape of the entire game’s narrative structure; through sequence-breaking, players reject the career that has been planned for them, all the while overcoming dangers beyond their supposed league through sheer skill, without depending upon the powerups that would have chained them to the designer’s plot.  This requires a remarkable fluency in the game’s mechanics, its level design, and the relationship between the two so that structural cracks appear—cracks so fine that the designer was never aware of them. We witness here a form of performance art that eschews established guidelines, shrugs off imposed limitations, and declares, “I am clever and skilled beyond what you had expected, and I will find my own way without your help.”  Especially interesting is the implicit recognition within this act that the same quest-designing, dungeon-mastering god is simultaneously responsible for the placement of hindrances and help alike.¹

And this is a busy god indeed, as all of these elements have been designed around the established limits of player freedom.  Survival horror games, for instance, used to (and often still do) feature characters that controlled like tanks; because of their clumsy movement and lousy combat abilities, one or two zombies were enough to pose a threat to the protagonists of Resident Evil.  More recently, titles like Resident Evil 4 and Left 4 Dead have allowed player characters to move much more freely, and key to their success is that they maintain tension by pairing these freer, more dexterous capabilities with far more numerous and challenging enemies.  Just as the hero of a novel ought to be both challenged by and capable of besting its dramatic conflict, the limits of the player’s movement and strength in a game must always be met by appropriate obstacles and foes in order to provide tension.  Freedom and power must be equal to and equaled by the obstacles and dangers that meet them.  Player = antiplayer.  This is the basic equation of game design—one which must always be carefully balanced.

But notice here that challenge is presupposed to be essential in a successful game.  Should it be?  Well, games that are “too easy” are typically criticized as such, as though they are lacking something; a game without adversity is at bottom a story without a conflict.  Perhaps we might say that an unchallenging game is merely busy-work, much like a rote, insubstantial task given to a child by some unimaginative teacher.  We grow—be it through learning, honing, or creating—only when challenged to do so; by a question, by an obstacle, or by others.  With nothing between ourselves and our goals, we would never improve.  Sometimes we create our own challenges or challenge the challenge itself.  Sometimes we reject the equation.  Sometimes we sequence-break.

Serious gaming² is always either busy-work or self-improvement.³ In a time when more and more videogames are being developed to appeal to everyone from the “hardcore” to the “casual” (the one-size-fits-all approach), when the guidelines for progress are written into the software itself through pop-up tutorials, mandatory cutscenes, and unlockable difficulty modes rather than woven into the level design, we need to remember and in turn help to remind the industry why we do what we do.

Game design is a necessarily holistic enterprise that must emphasize at all levels a singular core idea or set of ideas, for it is through the central formal mechanics that the player will experience all of the game’s content.  Entire genres are born from well thought-out gameplay concepts.  Consider for a moment how long the RTS genre had been around before Relic so deftly embellished upon it with the cover system and destructible environments of Company of Heroes, and then consider how simply this new idea is integrated into and thoroughly transforms the mechanics of play as units are repositioned on the battlefield.  A good core mechanical idea like this can be transposed to different perspectives or sometimes even genres and still work just as well.  Imagine these ideas in a 2D sidescroller: the sprinting and knifing of Call of Duty 4; clamboring across rooftops with the contextual interactivity of Mirror’s Edge; charging and hiding behind cover as in Gears of War; rapidly dodging and fighting as in Godhand; and getting around by firing portals at distant walls while an AI overseer gradually reveals herself to be a murderous bitch.  These 3D gameplay concepts are all solid enough to remain successful in 2D; in fact, Flash examples of some already exist.

If a game has such a strong central mechanic, the rest is all level design; and as long as there is a satisfying interaction between the basic gameplay elements and the level design, everything else is just icing.  A truly exemplary game embellishes upon its core idea gradually, trusting players’ intrinsic curiosity to guide them as they encounter more complex dangers, puzzles, and rules.  Being an active participant in this kind of learning process is one of the most satisfying aspects of gaming.  We don’t need a string of tutorials or the ability to change difficulty settings on the fly in order to play Super Mario Bros.; the first stage teaches the player, one thing at a time, about enemies, jumping, stomping, running, etc.⁴ Not everyone finishes Mario; the game’s later challenges require quite a bit of skill and coordination.  But so what?  Unlike passive media, videogames are not about receiving a complete experience from start to finish.  They are about self-improvement, expression, performance, and participation; if a player does not engage all the way to the end of the game, that does not necessarily indicate a diminished experience.  One would think that accepting “Game Over” as an end to the narrative of play would be seen as perfectly valid, given the phrasing.

It must be conceded that this is a tough sell from a business perspective.  However, a game obsessed with apologizing for the parameters of its appeal in order to preemptively widen its market appears weak to all potential consumers.  There are too many others available for informed buyers to be interested in a title that lacks confidence in its own merits, and inevitably players will find that, for every design choice that they enjoy, another seems incongruous and made for a differently-minded crowd.  Even if such a release finds broad success, its customers are likely to come away feeling that the franchise or even the developer is wishy-washy.  If a title is honest about its identity, a player who gives up on a challenging game may well have purchased it with just such an expectation in the first place.  What’s so terrible about making a niche title, anyway?  Isn’t that the key to success—finding a niche and filling it well?  Is it naive to think that consumers will reward courage and integrity?

When developers become fixated upon players seeing everything that they have made, two terrible losses occur: they dismiss the inherently emergent characteristic of the videogame experience whereby the final product is the result of a partnership between designer and player; and they tack on devices external to the core mechanic and sometimes even outside the mode of gameplay itself for the sole purpose of artificially expanding the game’s accessibility, watering it down in the process.

When a work of art strives to be everything to all audiences, it ceases to be anything at all.

¹This fascinating observation is uniquely developed in the original Silent Hill, and I look forward to explicating that game at a later date.

²“Serious gaming” is meant here as goal-oriented activity, as opposed to “just playing around.”

³Whether that self-improvement is in itself busy-work—that is, whether or not good gaming has any value outside gaming itself—is a topic for another time.

⁴For a brilliant comparison of Super Mario Bros. and Half-Life 2’s teaching through level design and visual language, see this article.

Tags: accessibility, Bionic Commando, Call of Duty 4, Castlevania, Castlevania 3: Dracula's Curse, challenge, Company of Heroes, cutscenes, design, designer, difficulty modes, Dragon Quest, freedom, game design, gameplay, Gears of War, Godhand, Half-Life 2, language, Left 4 Dead, level design, limitations, Mario, marketing, mechanics, Metroid, Mirror's Edge, niche, one-size-fits-all, performance, player, Portal, powerups, Resident Evil, sequence-breaking, Shadow of the Colossus, Silent Hill, Super Mario Bros., tension, texture, theme, tutorials, Zelda