Jonathan Blow Criticizes Game Design at Montreal Game Summit

[Andy Chalk]

Jonathan Blow Criticizes Game Design at Montreal Game Summit

In the second keynote at this year's McDonald's [http://www.sijm.ca/en] meal.

"Scheduled rewards" in games were a major part of this trend, he said, claiming that story progress, achievements, collectibles and other tokens of advancement were poor substitutes for "genuine enjoyment" in contemporary videogames. He used MMOGs as an example, saying their "constant fake rewards" keep players hooked and asking, "Would players still play our games if we removed these scheduled rewards?" He also added that "rewards can be like food, nutritionally beneficial, or like drugs, artificial," and said the videogame industry "pushes drugs" because it doesn't understand food.

He compared criticism leveled at McDonald's and tobacco companies to the way the videogame industry treats players, suggesting that with the current standards of design, "We don't intend to harm players but we might do so."

"In pursuing ever more players the games industry exploits them in an unethical way," he said. "We don't see it as unethical, though, because we refuse to stop and think about what we are doing. We don't have a sense to be ashamed."

Blow, who has previously written for Game Developer Magazine, is also the host of the Experimental Gameplay Workshop at the annual Independent Games Festival [http://www.gdconf.com/].


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[xbeaker]

To be more accurate ?scheduled rewards? is like gambling. Keep them pushing that button by giving the occasional jackpot.

Does he ever offer an alternative? Points are scheduled rewards. Power-ups are scheduled rewards. Cut scenes are scheduled rewards (unless they are live action, then they are scheduled punishment). I applaud the idea of branching out the idea of gaming, but to claim that someone doesn?t get genuine enjoyment because the reward is intangible seems a bit, I don?t know.. just wrong.

My high scores are an accomplishment. My XBL achievements are something I can taunt friends with. It is a GAME. Games are played to win, challenge, or accomplish something.

 

[stevesan]

Jon is preaching to the choir.

He should be blaming us, the gaming consumers, for our high tolerance of mediocrity. We are the ones that keep WoW running. We are the ones that keep buying Madden year after year. We are to blame (assuming this is actually a problem). The developers just tend to make what we buy. Every time we buy something, we're making a vote for what kind of games developers should make.

Don't blame McDonalds - they're a business. The only way to really fix these kinds of problems is to educate the consumer. Games can be detrimentally addictive, and we gamers need to be aware of this every time we log into WoW. I think Jon should make a documentary about the cheap tricks developers may use to make games addictive - like "Super Size Me." Maybe he should play WoW non-stop for a month and video tape it, pointing out how it affects his life and what not.

 

[Andy Chalk]

Every other entertainment medium out there produces brain-numbing shit for the slack-jawed masses. Why should videogames be any different?

 

[werepossum]

I've never played either WOW or Madden, but why are they mediocrity? Literally millions of people have found them satisfying, which to me is a better indication of quality than some disgruntled game critic hawking his "revolutionary" new platformer. Too many game designers squawking about how graphics don't matter in a game don't have the option of cutting-edge graphics; it's just the fox decrying the bitter grapes he can't reach. Games are one of my main forms of relaxation; I damn well don't want to be "educated" as to what I should like or what is good for me. If you like the artistic way his clouds drift across the screen, fine - but don't tell me that's BETTER than a brisk game of Counterstrike or a satisfying WOW quest (or whatever one does on WOW - my experience of it is a Southpark episode.) It's just a matter of preference. To paraphrase John Gibson of Fox News, a gaming company's job is to give me what I want, not tell me what I SHOULD want. And that goes double for critics who are would-be game designers. If your game is good enough to sell, more power to you. If it's not, I don't want to hear how the gaming public is "too addicted to crap" or "too ignorant" or "too unsophisticated" to appreciate it. Sometimes a poorly selling game is innovative and well-crafted but in a genre no one wants to play (witness Psyconauts), but most of the time it's just crap.

And the idea of fast food being addictive is idiocy. I love McDonald's quarterpounders, but if I happen to not have one for a month I don't get DTs. Try that with crack. Hell, try that with tobacco!

/soapbox

 

[Jonathan Blow]

Hi guys --

I actually address many of these questions in the lecture. It's a subtle subject and it's hard to convey what the lecture was really about, through short summaries and news postings like this.

If you are interested to hear the whole thing, I have put an mp3 and the PowerPoint slides up on the Web:

http://braid-game.com/news/?p=129

I am working on a movie version so that you don't have to have OpenOffice or PowerPoint installed to see the slides...

 

[Andy Chalk]

Damn, Jonathan - if you really are Jonathan, and not Jack Thompson in disguise - thanks for stopping by and letting us know about this. I look forward to listening to it and perhaps making a bit more noise about it after.

 

[Arbre]

Been listening to the mp3.

There's a point where I may disagree, not so sure, since Jonathan seemed to refine it a bit more later on, but, still, here's the meat:
It came during the touchy subject of pointless gaming and waste of time.
Jonathan said that any game would be less compelling if you removed those extra rewards (in reference to scheduled rewards).
Well, I think that was passed because a part of the audience that day may have started to show their teeth and felt hurt, but there are good exceptions to find there, notably in multiplayer games such as FPSes for example. But it also applies to many multiplayer sport simulations, beat'em ups, RTSes and other many Wii's shovelwares.

Take Quake III Arena. Huge community based game. Many players were actually removing all the "wizbang effects" to get to the very core of the gameplay, something franctic, furious, fast paced and requiring an incredible amount of reflexes and forethought, especially in duels, where you had to envison all paths you could take in a map to get the upperhand, just as much as you had to consider your oponent's options and escape routes.
It was pure skills, and very exhausting in fact, for a game where you just sit on your bum and push the mouse.
No grinding, no rewards. Even certain old mods like Rocket Arena went to the essence of the game, with no weapon to pick up (no reward in the sense that you grab it). It's all 100% combat.
These games are used over a wide range of social groups, from friends to pros.
The only downside is that they're classified, as the same old life-draining games made for no-life players, which in some respect does apply (there are serious cases of FPS gamers getting cut off from the daily realities of life to some severe extent).
But the fact is that with such games, your avatars, your game attributes, won't change if you play a hundred hours instead of just one or two in total.
The game hardly changes. The players shape it in a kind of way with their techniques and tricks.

The MMO addiction and massive waste of life is not something I experienced on my own, but I saw a close friend actually recess from such a dark period of his life. He's been through all the MMO stuff up to SW Galaxy, and it really ruined his years.
Now he has completely changed. He plays games which are more complete, more rewarding and a shorter scale (Quake Wars and Mass Effect for example). He's got a real life, really. Meets girls, has a job, does sport. The MMOs were giving him nothing good, and that's the trouble of games which are full of "fakery". They easily turn into traps, and one will increase his chances to repeat the same routine with no real achievement.

As for making MMOs more interesting, and then getting a smaller audience, that may be due to the fact that it would require the implementation of more complex and new systems which would require efforts to be understood and mastered, and that's probably why players feel more inclined to play on sort of less demanding games, which is illustrated by the large success of web community games.
Behind this idea is just another facet of casual versus hardcore.
But even hardcore people, sometimes, don't want to explore new stuff.

 

[GrowlersAtSea]

A "Super Size Me" like production about the gaming industry would be a fascinating watch or read.

Anyway, I listened to the mp3 and found it very interesting. I wish there were more examples presented of games that the speaker thought were done right either with morality, rewards, design, or whatever else.

I think it's really difficult to gauge how addictive video games can be because of how different they are from most mediums. I don't feel it's very fare to directly compare them to addictive substances because, although addiction can happen, it certainly isn't a physical addiction with physical withdraw and all of the rest. But you also can't claim it's similar to someone being addicted to watching movies or televisions, because of the interactivity involved, and frankly, the prevalence of it.

The companies are giving gamers what they want, whether it's good for them or not. If one company stops, it's competitors would be more than happy to pick up the slack. The industry itself won't just stop so long as there is demand, and there will probably always be demand for shallow repetitive rewards, because it appeals to something in our nature. I don't really see a solution.