Too Long. Too Deep. Too Expensive.

Seth Schiesel’s recent Ratchet and Clank: Quest for Booty review over at everyone’s favorite gaming rag becomes an occasion for one more critic to add his voice to the “too long, too deep, too expensive” chorus. Like a lot of us who are excited about indie gaming, LiveArcade, and the PlayStation Store, Schiesel wishes more titles were 15 bucks, 4 hours long, and as easy to get into as a pair of pajamas. Quest for Booty fits the bill.

It’s especially interesting to read Schiesel’s comments the same week that Spore is out, since Maxis is pursuing virtually the opposite strategy. Will Wright famously has asserted that the solution to the rising cost of content development is to give users tools and let them make it themselves (the fixin’s bar approach). Wright’s game is 50 bucks and has aspirations to suck up a lot more than 4 hours of your time. You are creating life after all. 

Good, cheap, fun.

Neither model is, in fact, the long-term core business model the industry is looking for. First of all, content – great content – is still best when served up by experts. Users can do amazing things with open tools, but their efforts always shine brightest when they are backed up by a well-developed franchise. Anyway, if Spore has demonstrated anything it’s that making good tools requires just as much time and money as making good content. Schiesel, for his part, all but admits that Quest for Booty is only as good as it is because of resources the Insomniac team developed for its triple-A release, Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction. You just don’t get 15 dollar titles with as much polish as Quest for Booty unless they have a more expensive big brother.

This will no doubt yield groans of disapproval from many quarters, but my own take is that better storytelling in serialized form is the best recipe for future success — one that will dovetail nicely with both the Maxis approach and also keep the Schiesels of the world happy — lifting all boats, so to speak. The fact is, the structural problem with most video games is that the novelty wears off too quickly to support multiple expansions without adding significantly new gameplay. Games are long and hard to play because developers are trying to get as much juice out of their mechanics as they can. Admitting that the mechanic they poured thousands of man-hours into only amounts to ten hours of fun for the average gamer is just too depressing. The advantage of developing characters and plots that players actually care about is that they will keep audiences coming back whether the gameplay and graphics are new or not — or at least keep them coming back longer. This is something that Nintendo, alone among game companies, has understood for years —  you always hear people whining that all Zelda games are the same . . . right before they plunk down 60 clams for their 4th and 5th helping of rupee-farming grind.

The only thing the story-driven approach really lacks is a way to test out gameplay/story concepts the way pilots and seasons allow audiences and network executives to test out television shows. The basic problem with games isn’t the cost of content as much as it is prototyping. A top-notch title more than pays for itself – it’s the expense and risk involved in identifying those titles and test-marketing them that looms so ominously over the industry’s financial and creative future. So far, the only “solution” to this problem has been scale — to get big enough to be able to take a few hits. But over time, unless more efficient prototyping and more loveable-despite-lacking-novel-gameplay franchises develop, even the EAs and Activisions of the world will suffer from high levels of instability.

Naruto and Context-Driven Control

A few years ago I remember reading a lot of complaints about the new wave of contextual button-pressing sequences that were making their way into games. Contextual control schemes arguably had been around (and resented) since at least Dragon’s Lair — but they were revived by the adventure game Shenmue in late 1999. Under Shenmue’s influence, platformers and beat-em-ups that had once featured purely “universal” controls (the punch button always punches, the jump button always jumps) were introducing  ”quick-time events“.

Naruto's Shadow Clone Jutsu

With quick-time events, players typically see a button flash on screen and then have to immediately press it in order to execute some contextual action or sequence of actions. By the mid-2000s, such sequences were no longer found exclusively in adventure games like Quantic Dream’s Indigo Prophecy — they were slowly but surely making their way into action series like God of War and Prince of Persia.

Today, in defiance of the complaints, context-driven control schemes are more and more common. Under the influence of rhythm games, with their abstract streams of cues, and fighters, with their complex combos and special moves, players and developers have both become more comfortable with them. In part it’s a response to the need to map ever greater numbers of actions to the same controllers with the same buttons. It’s hard to believe we’re beginning to outgrow 16-button controllers (not to mention gyroscopic input), but it’s true. Titles like Assassin’s Creed are even beginning to use one button like a “shift” key to change the ”case” of the rest of the controller, thereby virtually doubling the number of available buttons to map.

But this trend is about more than controller economy. Game mechanics enabled by contextual controls are becoming better integrated into game flow and more sophisticated. Case in point: I’ve recently been playing Naruto: Rise of Ninja, whose “justsu”-triggered button sequences add a genuinely heart-pumping wrinkle to fights. Naruto’s “jutsus” also innovate by taking the kind of special move button-sequences typically found only in the arena and bringing them into an open-world context. Naruto doesn’t just unleash heavy damage with his “jutsus”, but also climbs walls and wins over villagers, building on social gesture systems like those found in Fable and The Urbz.

Games like Naruto suggest that more complex contextual controls may well be a crucial piece of video gaming’s future. Their flexibility allows them to move between physical, social, and even emotional representation with fluidity and expressive power. We may, in fact, be moving from a “classical” period of “mimetic”, or strictly representational control schemes to a more self-consciously abstract and experimental phase.