Now that that’s out of the way…

The answer is: no.  But, by golly, I’m getting ahead of myself again.

The question in question was posed in a post on Kotaku by John Davison of GamePro (formerly of What They Play and 1UP).  In this post, Davison says the crew at GamePro have been speaking with a number of game designers and the like with the goal of figuring out what goes on in those strange minds of theirs.  There are certainly some interesting things he points out, including the following:

There have been a surprising number of common threads that we’ve pulled from each of these conversations. Most pervasive is the notion that the games business is currently going through a once-in-a-lifetime period that should be relished as much as humanly possible. Unlike any other part of the entertainment business, gaming’s auteurs and its most influential (or at least most affluent) consumers are maturing at roughly the same pace. So as the vanguard of creatives in charge of our experiences adjust to their own life changes, they are able to channel their learnings back into their products (reasonably) safe in the knowledge that they’ll be well-received and broadly supported…This period is unique in that the industry will only be as naturally in tune with its audience as it is right now for a brief period, and its still adjusting its technology at roughly the same pace as its artistic vision.

This is a pretty interesting occurrence.  No other entertainment medium seems, as a whole, to be quite as in-touch with their audience as the gaming industry.  But, as Davison points out, this harmonious existence will not last, and I think we’ve already started to see things change.  The heart of his post, in fact, seems to point to this very thing:

The revelation that I’ve heard from more designers than anything else is this:

Games are too hard, they’re too long, and they provide way too much stuff.

If you’re anything like me (and, for your sake, I hope you’re not) you read that and said something to the effect of “Wrong.”  A less intrepid reader would likely have dismissed the rest of the post as the musings of a crazy person at this point.  Lucky for you, dear reader(s?), I decided to read on and see what sort of meat there was to this argument.

He begins by saying that data has been collected to support this, though not through surveys and the like, “because when it comes to our behavior we all have far too much pride, we’re all greedy, and we all lie.”  You’ll find no argument from me there; it’s just human nature.  Instead, Davison points to the fact that “an increasing number of games incorporate telemetry systems that track our every action. They measure the time we play, they watch where we get stuck, and they broadcast our behavior back to the people that make the games so they can tune the experience accordingly.”  He goes on to say:

Every studio I’ve spoken to that [collects this data], to a fault, says that many of the games they’ve released are far too big and far too hard for most players’ behavior. As a general rule, less than five percent of a game’s audience plays a title through to completion. I’ve had several studios tell me that their general observation is that “more than 90 percent” of a games audience will play it for “just four or five hours.”

This is where the argument loses me.  I’m not convinced that, simply because a majority of players will play a game for only a few hours, this means a game is too difficult, or too long.  To me, this points to — wait for it — a SHITTY GAME.  What’s more, Davison agrees with me:

The nature of the majority, as one developer told me recently, is that their preference is to “just dick around” rather than follow the structure. It’s not just an occasional thing – in terms of behavior its pretty much pervasive. There’s always a minority that plays things the way the studio intended, but as another developer told me, “sometimes, you just want to tell people that they’re playing it wrong.”

The thing is, we’re not playing it wrong. What’s happening is that studios are starting to look at the way they make games and concede that they’re making them wrong. The vast majority of releases, even the most spectacular and successful, adhere to structural conventions that date back 20 years. As an audience we’re getting bored of that, if we’re honest. Right? Younger gamers demand something more sophisticated, while older gamers don’t have the time or energy to play through something built around a punitive system for a bazillion hours.

To illustrate this point, I’ll forgo our usual standard of shittiness — Modern Warfare 2 — in favor of a game that I actually enjoy immensely: Bad Company 2.  (I’m going to assume that Davison’s interviewees were speaking about singleplayer experiences, since I highly doubt 90% of the people who bought MW2 or BC2 have only played a few hours’ worth of multiplayer)

I’ll come right out and say it: Bad Company 2 had quite possibly the most forgettable singleplayer campaign in recent memory — and I played CoD4!  Despite flummoxed Tweets by DICE developers to the contrary, the entire campaign was very very easily completed in four hours.  How do I know this?  Because that’s how long my frist play-through lasted.  And yes, I found the “hidden” M-COM stations and weapons.  At first, I was kind of pissed.  Then I said to myself, “Who am I kidding?  There’s no way I could’ve taken even two more hours of that, let alone the eight or ten more it would’ve needed to be of respectable length.”  It was repetitive, derivative and just plain boooooring.  Obviously the draw of Battlefield games has always been the multiplayer, but that’s not really the point.

A good example of something that could be easily considered, if not too hard, certainly too long and too full of stuff would be Borderlands.  I sunk over 100 hours into it, yet I never really found myself bored with the experience.  Why?  Because of all the stuff!  The lure of loot and leveling up was just too great.  Toss in a few good characters, and the lack of good storytelling (or story, for that matter) took a backseat.

So if developers are misinterpreting their own data to support the notion that we’re playing their games in the wrong way, where is our game experience headed?  Unfortunately it would seem like we’re in for more MW2 and BC2 — what essentially boils down to about three quarters of a traditional game.  But what about a more modular style of game delivery?  If Infinity Ward or DICE are only going to make their singlepalyer experience four to five hours long, why not give me the option of not even buying it?  The developer can choose to sell whatever experience is best representative of their vision for a game — in the case of BC2, the multiplayer –  as the base product, and offer the rest as DLC.  Valve has quietly done something similar to this with Half-Life 2 releases; if you look on the Steam store, not only can you purchase HL2‘s individual singleplayer episodes, but you can buy HL2: Deathmatch separately from everything else.  And Blizzard is selling StarCraft 2‘s singleplayer campaigns in three installments, ableit priced as full games.  Davison alludes to all this, and voices the thing we as gamers should be concerned with:

Hopefully the notion of “value” won’t be lost during all of this.

And that’s just it: the notion of “value” has already been lost.