Interesting article over on the BBC about how even in games, you have to work for money. It’s a good article, if only because it has the line:
“It just seems ironic that our key leisure activity is so fixated with toil and earning, albeit through killing and stealing.”
I never really thought about this before, really. Most games do have some sort of earn/spend activity going on and it’s often fairly essential to the gameplay. Now there’s two ways of thinking of this — both intriguing. Either the game designers were so entrenched in the real world that they couldn’t conceive of a different set of dynamics (even when doing things earns you new weapons, armour, etc, there’s still a earn/receive dynamic), or they used this familiar set of rules to make the gameplay more intuitive to those playing. After all we all earn and spend money to some extent, even the gamers who hardly ever see the light of day.
So what is it? Great use of intuitive design or blind conformance to the rules of the world we live in? Does it matter?
Comments (3) Permalink
June 29th, 2004 at 2:53 AM
if by “earn/recieve” you mean “challenge/reward”, then thats somewhat essential to a game and one of the prime balances to get right. If you were constantly handed rewards in a game for sitting around picking your nose, then the rewards lose value and the game becomes dull. If you’re forever overcoming challenge after challenge without even a higher score to reward you, the game becomes unfun.
If, however, you were more pointing to how a lot of games incorporate money in one form or another, I think the advantage of that is it gives the player a more analogue choice. Rather than overcoming a challenge and being given a fixed reward (like a new attack), you can give them a large wad of currency and let them choose their own reward. This allows players to feel more unique, more in control and to appreciate *their* reward more.
If you were referring to how games make you toil and sweat blood for that reward, then thats good or bad, depending on how you like it. I liked Diablo immensely… until I realised it was 4 in the morning and I’d just spent the last week obtaining a slightly higher statted imaginary sword. That sort of game uses something closer to currency following a simple equation: Time = Money * Skill, where Skill is a variable very very slightly greater than 1.
I like my skill as a gamer to count for something, so unless that illusion can be maintained I don’t want to play Diablo-esque games. Some people don’t care for that though, and the sheer speed at which success in these things is accrued for their efforts (when compared to real life) is reward enough. Also, the fact that while life is unfair with lucky gits like me and talented people like you in it, a Diablo-esque game levels the playing field for everyone. An escape from real life that follows the same rules.
July 2nd, 2004 at 6:28 AM
The challenge/reward paradigm is of course essential to the entertainment value of the game. What I was discussing was much more the area of actual currency and the ubiquity of this in games, when it is very much a real world concept.
I appreciate what you are saying about the analogue choice, but it does make me wonder if games are doing this just because it is the only thing they can think of or if it is very clever use of intuitive design.
Can you think of examples where there isn’t arbitrary earn currency to buy & progress?
July 2nd, 2004 at 2:57 PM
A lot of the first person shooter types (Half-Life, Doom, Quake, some of the Star-Wars games, etc etc) don’t have a currency as such. You have to get to the next stage in the game to get such and such a weapon upgrade or find the key to a particular door or whatever, but those are more plot elements than currency elements.
The same goes for a lot of puzzle style games (pretty much anything from the Kings Quest series or similar) where you collect the right objects in the right order as part of the plot but nothing more.
I think anyone who’s played most forms or role-playing game can join Tony in the ranks of people who played for hours solidly to upgrade a weapon or character so it does 2% more damage…. I know I have and I think that it’s part of what makes that style of game either highly addictive or totally unplayable.