Sackboy, could he change the world?
Today is the first day of September and so the games rush is warming up. After a quiet month or two where few games have been released (So gamers filled our time with hype and rumour about those games about to be released), there is about to be a torrent of games unleashed for our collective gaming pleasure. Now while the old yearly updates will sell about as well as usual and Gears of War 2 will sell about the same as the original, the real big story of the year will be about just 2 games. Two games which could completely reinvent the industry by going completely against what conventional wisdom would tell you makes a blockbuster game in the 21st century. Those two games are Spore by EA for PC/Mac and Little Big Planet by Sony/Media Molecule for PS3.
One thing that is true of most gamers is that at some point there has been a review of a game that we have disagreed with and I predict that these two games will create more arguments than just about any games ever. The reasons for this go back right to the very beginnings of games journalism and will hopefully prove once and for all that the current status quo of games ratings cannot be sustained. The reasons are simple; universality or the lack of it.
The job of a reviewer has always been to play through a game to a sufficient degree to enable them to present a summing up of the merits and failures of the complete package to inform the reader/viewer, often assigning a arbitrary score to enable readers to compare scores of multiple games. Seems simple enough I know but this is the thing which will force reviews to change and continue to do so. I’ll start with Spore.
In case you have been living in a cage for the past 2 years or have a pathological hate for PC gaming news; Spore is a pretty unique game in that it allows players to chart the evolution of a species throughout time. The thing is, how can one review this? Spore has literally thousands of possible outcomes, no story and the promise of a completely unique experience for every single player. Reviewing this game therefore will be a challenge because how can any two reviewers review the same game? Yes the physics and graphics will be the same but the evolution will be entirely different with some finding a evolution which is long, humorous and full of complex social changes while others will find a dull game with few real jumps and a species which gets bogged down in an amoeba like state. The universality of the experience is therefore impossible to guarantee; something so unique and impossibly complex cannot therefore be simply given the same basic out of 10 scoring system which was devised during the Super Mario era where there were simple linear levels which players could complete in only one way.
Little Big Planet is much the same. While at face value it is a simple 2D platformer with a series of levels on the disk for players to complete, we all know that this is not why anyone is buying the game. The incredible looking level designer software and the promise of free sharing of user created arenas is truly a magnificent promise but its implementation waits to be established. That is the problem though, when IGN and EuroGamer et al get their copy to review, it will be 2 weeks or so before the united nation of PlayStation gamers get our grubby mits on it; as a result they will be completely missing out on the point of the game because that all important user created content will be nonexistent. How can a reviewer accurately present a picture of the game when one of its major features will be missing. In fact, can a truly comprehensive review be given the week before the games release, can LBP really be reviewed until 2 weeks, 2 months or even 2 years after release to get the best picture of the game. I am aware the same argument can be given in criticism of every MMO or even every game with an online mode and I agree but they do not so neatly fit into my argument as LBP and Spore do.
You may therefore be asking yourself what I think is the solution, where is this revolution coming from? Am I really advocating the abolition of reviews? Of course not, that would be utterly stupid; reviews have a place and a service to many gamers which should not be ignored, I just think that reviews need to change their approach. The answer comes in experience.
Presenting the single experience of a person is an increasingly used technique in academia, particularly in social sciences and humanities. The technique is called autoethnography and what it does is places the writer (and in this case reviewer) centrally in the piece; the thoughts, feelings, ideas and nuances of the reviewer to be central and form the basis of the piece. Reviews now try to present an unbiased and standoffish whole universe view of a game but in a autoethnographic technique a reviewer would give their own view of a game instead; even gamer reviews and blog opinions would then have the same credibility as the opinion of John Doe of GameSpot. Therefore the reviewer could be excused for missing out the largest features because they are only reviewing what they can while recognising the limitations of their work.
I know this sounds strange and all but think about it, doesn’t the idea of John Smith’s personal review of Spore or Lisa Jones personal musings upon Little Big Planet sound much more interesting and rewarding to read than the IGN one and only completely infallible review? Even if one of them comes forward and expresses dislike about a game that you truly love, doesn’t it seem much more palatable that it is the personal opinion of one individual than the judgement of a corporate juggernaut?
The fundamental truth however is that with online integration, post release patches, user created content and MMO elements becoming more popular in the game-sphere along with the increasingly sophisticated and expensive technology required to truly experience a game to its full potential; the experience presented by reviewers and the experience of gamers who are putting the money into the coffers of publishers is becoming increasingly a very different proposition so sooner or later the status quo will need to be destroyed to redress this balance; why not now?
The point is that the rating systems workes for all the games because they are all supposed to be fun. And that is in the end what you are rating on. Was it fun? And for what amount of time was it fun? Than it doesn’t matter if it was the graphics or creative stuff.
That holds true for both games. If they are boring to play they fail. No matter how many creatures or levels will spawn over time, if the core gameplay is dull or to easy or the controls are bad.