One of the most elusive qualities of pretty much any endeavor
in the arts is that of quality itself. What defines quality? What gives art
that meaning, that oomph? I can’t answer that question, because it’s pretty
damn subjective. One person’s art is another person’s waste of time. Clearly
not everyone likes the same music, and what makes a video game fun is different
from person to person. Oh, you can certainly try to quantify how great
something is by how many people rate it positively, for example, but that still
doesn’t get to the root of what makes it great.
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| Top 2% and Top 3% of Vocal Leaderboards. Breaking the Habit was a sight-read, no less. Not terribly difficult songs, mind you. |
A fantastic example of this in action in my personal life is
my vocal skills (or middling lack thereof). Rock Band says I’m awesome. Heck,
it even quantifies it for me and puts me up on a leaderboard. As seen in the
screenshots, I can hit the top 2% - 3% of the leaderboards for some songs (my
average is about top 10%). Besides being a great opportunity for a brag post on
my fancy blog, this doesn’t mean a whole lot, because of what Rock Band is
measuring. It’s measuring timing, and pitch, and nothing else. So I am technically
excellent, I have the basics rock solid, so what?
I love going to Karaoke. I can hold my own against most other vocalists, but I can always tell when someone who’s actually awesome and
potentially musically trained walks up and takes the limelight. They have a
fullness of voice, a timbre I don’t. They have power, but also control. They
can evoke an emotional response from the audience.
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| #1. Technical Excellence indeed. What this doesn't show is that approximately 10% of vocal players are all tied for #1 on this song... |
The point being is that just because something is technically excellent, be it polished,
well-executed, or by-the-book, but it doesn’t mean it’s awesome or fun. I find
the two to be pretty orthogonal concepts. You can have something that is fun,
but not polished, or it can be both (or none). I think when those of us in the
consumer space judge or critique games (or videos, or music, or any other art
medium) we sometimes conflate technical quality with awesomeness. Quite
possibly because technical excellence is far easier to objectively quantify.
For the record, I don’t really
hate my voice. Not anymore than most people do, anyhow.
Some of my friends have told me I have a lovely voice (thank you), and perhaps
I do. A lovely voice on its own isn’t enough to be awesome. I still have fun with it, though, so who really cares?
Bringing it to the video game space, when I look at a game
like Rift, it was quite excellent from a technical standard. The game was polished,
fulfilled the MMORPG checklist extremely well, had a story and extensive skill
trees, and I found it dull. It didn’t hit the fun button for me. Yet
clearly others enjoyed it. Diablo III and Final Fantasy XIII might be even better examples of
games that were extremely well-balanced, highly designed slogs.
On the other hand, you have a game like FTL, a critically acclaimed indie game which
is very simple, but pulls off that simple in a very concentrated form. The
graphics and sound are definitely indie-levels of quality (stylized 8-bit,
which I enjoy, but quickly get over), but the gameplay is straightforward and engaging,
with danger around every turn. Another good example is Magic: The Gathering
circa ten years ago. Awesome artwork but unbalanced as all get out--go look at
the lists of banned cards from some of the really old expansions--and yet MTG
had a massive following (myself included).
Sometimes I wonder if the search for quantifiable, technical
excellence is overwhelming a more pure form of fun. In the developer’s search
for the perfect game-balance, are they sacrificing everything that makes a game
unique? Some of the most fun games I’ve played were games that I could break.
Final Fantasy VI, VII, and VIII all could easily be completely broken with
careful power levelling and the right combinations of items. Diablo II was far
from balanced, but it’s still hailed as a masterpiece game.
On the other hand, all of these games that I could break
were also primarily single-player games. In a world where most games are either
partially or completely online and the amount of data available to show that a
class or mechanic is OP leads to player dissatisfaction. Anybody raiding in WoW
can attest to the large amount of complaining on forums about even 5% (or
smaller!) disparities in damage or healing output. Players demand balance,
demand technical excellence, perhaps even at the expense of their own fun.
If you're to look at something as a competitive match, like PvP, world-first races to finish content, racing or fighting games, for just a few examples, balance is extremely important and without that balance that aspect is no longer fun.
So what’s a developer to do? Us armchair designers may want
to design our way into a corner inadvertently, but can a large developer really
afford to ignore the vocal demanding balance and polish? Or perhaps true balance,
technical excellence, and fun may not have to be necessarily at odds. But even
if they aren’t at odds, are developers wasting effort on the technical when
they could be and should be working on the fun? Where do those boundaries even lie? And perhaps those boundaries are subjective, just like fun itself.
Or maybe I’m totally way off base and this entire concept is
crazy. I certainly don’t know, but it’s an interesting set of questions.
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