On a phone interview today someone asked me what I think makes a game good. It was an easy question that I spoke at length on and thought I would share here.
A game is more than just a sum of its pieces to me. The major pieces of each game include graphics, sound, control, gameplay, fun and value. These are the major facets that I see in a game. Of course some of them are fluid and can change. For example a game might have crap single player action but the most awesome multiplayer. That’s sort of sad really because it shows not only that the developers didn’t take the time to balance but that perhaps they are a little out of touch with their customers, us, the gamers.
Some games have amazing graphics and then sounds akin to two rhinos humping in the jungle (I imagine it wouldn’t be pretty to listen to which is why I used it). Others have the greatest innovations in game experience and then the worst, finger bending, knuckle breaking controls. These are all common problems that make what could be amazing games simply mediocre games.
Another thing that appears to happen a lot is that developers don’t think about the platform they’re making the game for. Mobile phones have limited control capabilities and screen sizes, yet they try to pack these games in there where you need some complex control mechanism and a wide field of view. Duh! That just doesn’t work and you end up having a string of crap games getting made. It’s like they don’t actually ever look at the platform they are supposed to make a game for and go “nah, that just won’t work…why don’t we try something else.” Instead I think the meeting goes something like “square peg? round hole? Get a big mallet,” at which point the game just becomes inherently flawed.
No a great game is one that balances all of these things and does them all right. They don’t all have to be perfect, they don’t all have to be amazing. They just have to be right. When a game look and sounds good we’re happy. When it also plays well, it’s fun. When the controls are easy it’s addictive and when there’s good value for our money, we’re likely to buy more games from whoever made it.
I think the problem we’re seeing in games right now is that less and less care about hitting all of these points and more and more just care about cutting costs, recouping development and turning profit. Whatever happened to just wanting to make good games. I mean good games would in turn bring profit, agreed?
One of the greatest things game companies have ever done was to allow us to create our own content. It extends the gameplay, lets us cater the experience to our own desires and even challenge friends and strangers. It makes the value of the game exponentially larger because of almost unlimited fun to be had. Fun which could continue to expand without us having to pay more. This is perhaps one of the five golden grails of gaming to me. A game with continually expanding gameplay that makes me feel like ‘yeah, this was totally worth the price and I’m ready for them to bring me more…after my friends and I whip up another 100 hours of gameplay from this.”
That was helped make some games great at one point and I think it could again. Look at games like LBP where user content is king and see the epic numbers tally up.
Well this has gone on long enough. I think I’ll stop here, go make a pizza, pop open a beer and settle in for some good gaming. What am I playing tonight? I haven’t a clue, but I sure hope it’s great!