In the short term, developers relied on the novelties of real-time animation and 3D space. They built modest, often jury-rigged, playpens where the dodgy collision, imprecise movements, weird cameras, and minimal detail would be less likely to stand out. Either that or they went hard in the other direction and used 3D animation to glam up familiar 2D twitch-based design. Those games were, of course, struck with the same technical limitations as their free-roaming cousins.

The Dog and Pony Show

So a couple of new conventions appeared to make the most of this paper-thin, wobbly, and empty new space. One of them, I like to call completion-compulsive design. This trope has its basis in the tile-smashing of Breakout and the dot-munching of Pac-Man: to succeed, you do everything there is to do. Fair enough, in a self-contained example like Space Invaders: the entire premise is built around destroying the aliens before they reach Earth. But what about all those platformers that followed in the wake of Mario 64, that asked you to roam around and find five thousand otherwise-useless widgets?

You could call the collection aspect a reward for mastering the game’s controls and expressing a sense of curiosity. That’s a bit disingenuous, though; the widgets rarely do much more than increase a counter in the corner of the screen, or open the next area. There’s no tangible reward here, and any ineffable reward is connected only tenuously to the play mechanics. At best the widgets, if you found enough of them, would unlock a special item or ability or game feature. Either way, mainstream game design took a sudden dive for the inane.

If a designer chose to reject the Z-axis meandering of the main flock, what you would often see was a hardcore performance-compulsive design. Games like NiGHTS took the high score tables and social competition aspects of early arcade games and exaggerated them to a ridiculous degree by assigning (often bizarre) letter grades and often limiting progress until the player had shown sufficient technical mastery.

One major difference is that scores are a relative, rather than an absolute, measure of prowess. The other difference is that with traditional score tables the only way you’re being graded is against your peers. They’re also a descriptive record, that tends to more reflect than affect the way the game itself plays. By comparison, receiving a letter grade suggests that unless you’re playing perfectly, you’re not playing properly. This mentality whiffs of an uncomfortable sense of elitism and exclusion, much as how the completion compulsion makes you feel like you’re not really dedicated unless you waste your life fiddling with minutiae.

Dopamine, Sweet Dope of Mine

Both tropes originate in a desperation to find something interesting for players to do when developers have scant resources at their command and scant command over their resources. Each is a way to milk more “play value” out of limited material by telling players that unless they waste all of their time, they’re just wasting their time. Unless they’re scouring the material over and over again, pouring in vast amounts of personal resources for a very small reward, they’re not doing it right. They’re not getting everything there is to get out of the game — whereas maybe if they invest that last arbitrary bit of effort and unlock everything there is to unlock, they will discover a cool secret that justifies some small portion of the expenditure. Usually not.

This mentality is ancient, as videogames go. It harks back at least as far as the smoke-filled dens built to milk Space Invaders players of their last yen. Yet it also is a perversion of those mechanisms. Unlike the dots and tiles and score tables of the early ‘80s, these tropes are not an organic side effect of the give-and-take causal relationship that forms a videogame. They are a caricature of the least healthy aspects of traditional reward structure, taken to an affected extreme and detached from context. It’s like distilling crack from cocaine, with many of the same consequences.

No form of obsessive-compulsive behavior is healthy, and any encouragement is harmful. It’s around here that videogames become toys of cheap manipulation, and that their warped psychology starts to have questionable health effects both on players and on the medium as a whole. In their hard-line failure to meaningfully reflect the causal relationship between the player and the gameworld, these tropes both undermine the medium’s expressive potential and severely limit the appeal of the medium outside the hardcore and the deranged. Thus the slow onset of the phenomenon that Satoru Iwata dubs “gamer drift”.

Dropping Out

Although the mainstream industry is still recovering from this OCD fit, I have noticed that indie games often seem less affected by these attitudes. I guess it’s not too surprising. The tropes only arose in a significant way in response to endemic confusion and conservatism over a changing technical paradigm. Indie games aren’t exactly post-technology, but their budget and their scope tend to be low enough that any design problems are more a case of implementation and clarity of concept. If they have a price, the games are selling mostly on the basis of their ideas — which makes content for content’s sake a fairly low concern.

And frankly, indie designers are in no place to take their audience for granted. The indie game culture is more or less a meritocracy, so every player who a game bores is one less mouth to spread the word. The games that I have seen deal with an obsessive-compulsive premise, such as I Wanna Be the Guy or biggt’s Uin, generally do so with an ironic or deconstructionist understanding that glories in the inanity of these presumptions about the player’s time and interest.

Of course, it could be the boring stuff just all flies under my radar.

You could say that the SNES was the epitome of Miyamoto-styled design (even in games by other developers), and you’d have a reason for saying that. Namely, it was the Miyamoto Box: Nintendo’s reward to Miyamoto for the broad appeal of his NES catalog. Meanwhile Miyamoto’s opposing force, in Gunpei Yokoi, was rewarded for his invention of the Game Boy by having his studio removed from mainstream console development to support his brainchild. The message was clear: Miyamoto’s way was the successful one, so he would be in charge of everything important from here on.

The thing is, Miyamoto is just one voice. He had a few brilliant ideas in the mid-1980s, all born out of a particular context and in response to particular problems. And then by the turn of the ’90s he was pretty much dry. All that was left was to codify his ideas, turn them into a near law of proper design — regardless of context — and then sit back to admire his work, while new generations carefully followed his example as if manufacturing chairs or earthenware pots. A videogame was a videogame, much as a chair was a chair. It was a thing, an object, with particular qualities and laws.

Thing is, videogames aren’t things; they’re ideas. A game mechanism exists not in a vacuum, as a fact, but as a solution to a problem. Mario jumps so as to make use of the vertical space on the screen. He attacks by stomping on enemies or punching from below out of economy; his main defining trait is his ability to jump, so there’s a practical effect to both the upswing and the downswing. What makes Super Mario Bros. so effective, on a systemic level, is the tangibility of the player’s exploration. Compared with earlier games, it is revelatory to lump so much behavior onto physically touching the environment. The game is both visceral and curiously intimate.

That isn’t to suggest that jumping is the best use of vertical 2D space, or that leaping on or leaping into creatures or objects is an ideal way of interacting with an environment. This isn’t to suggest that the game’s level progression is ideal. Just because (given the right powers) you hit blocks in Super Mario Bros., and (given the right powers) you burn or bomb or lift blocks in Zelda, and (given the right powers) you shoot blocks in Metroid, that doesn’t mean that a chain of special powers and tiles, blocking the player’s path, is an ideal game structure.

You get the idea. One way or another, most mainstream games have evolved from the Miyamoto model. Not just on consoles, either; Carmack and Romero’s debt to Miyamoto is well-recorded, and fairly obvious in Keen, Wolf3D, and Doom. In a more sophisticated sense, Valve’s debt to Doom brings the theories to present on both shores. Granted, Valve tends to be more contemplative than most, with Half-Life 2 almost being a Super Mario Bros. style State of the Art address. Yet in its deconstructionist brilliance, it pretty well shows up the lack of ideas elsewhere. Even six years later, there’s not much been much advance on, or even equal to, the game’s grasp on player psychology.

There are some solid reasons for this lack of progress. For one, commercial videogames are expensive, limiting their potential audience to people who like “videogames.” For another, any established audience tends to drift toward the familiar. The most a fanbase ever wants is a slight twist on its object of attachment, or else it becomes unrecognizable. Remember how much people hated The Adventure of Link, for the NES — in some ways is one of the bravest and most sophisticated sequels ever made. The reason? It was too different from the original Zelda. So the third game was pretty much exactly like the first again, except prettier and a bit more polished, with a few new gimmicks. And to this day, gamers won’t shut up about it.

Another problem is of the cart-before-the-horse that is technology. Mainstream games keep getting more and more expensive and difficult to make, just to make use of all of the processing power of each new generation. Yet for all that processing power they’re not exploring many ideas that were impossible ten, fifteen years ago; they’re too concerned with just making back their investment — which means selling to as broad an audience as possible, where the audience has a very specific idea of what it wants.

In the wake of Nintendo and Sony, that audience has gotten large enough to command a certain voice, suggesting that there is an outlet for these expensive monstrosities, yet it’s too small and narrow to leave much room for alternative perspectives. Nintendo got around the problem by targeting non-gamers and people who haven’t played games in years. Which is brilliant in principle. And then, being Nintendo, they didn’t do much of anything with the idea. Oh well.

But now we have alternative channels. We have the Internet, we have cheap design tools, we have communities of individuals who grew up on videogames and who think in game design the way that New Wave auteurs thought in film. These aren’t people with a huge budget, or an audience to placate; all they have to please is themselves, and maybe a few peers. And videogames are a palette through which to explore their ideas. The atmosphere lends itself to asking questions — why do so many games revolve around killing and death? Why is Mega Man so hard? What’s the point of RPG statistics? What does all of this mean, anyway?

And so somehow, right now, and as of the last few years, it seems all the important questions, and most of the relevant answers in game design, are coming not from the institutions with the budget and the influence to command attention, but from a handful of hack programmers, putting in a few hours after their day jobs or between term papers — the way it used to be, twenty-five, thirty years ago. Videogames have gone through the maelstrom and come back to zero, a bit confused but also just a little more mature.

If videogames are an exchange of ideas, perhaps it’s best that exchange is between individuals.