A few weeks ago I was having a conversation with a highly esteemed colleague of mine, one who has worked in the games industry for a fair old while in a broad range of roles — for the sake of clarity later on, let’s call him Sagat. I told him about a recent review I did for an ace website you’ve probably heard of and he asked me if I play games any differently when it’s for work or pleasure. Apart from longer play sessions with a game I’m reviewing, to complete it more quickly than I might normally, I replied “No, I play games how I feel they should be played”.
Now who the hell am I to state how a game ‘should’ be played?1 I mean you bought the game, you decide how you want to play it and how you want to experience its content, much in the same way that if you bought a hamburger and preferred to eat it with a knife and fork, you’d more than likely raise an eyebrow if someone nudged you and pointed out that it was designed to be a handheld dining experience.
So allow me to explain my method. Whenever I start playing a new game, I have two rules: first, to always start out on ‘Normal’ difficulty and second, to never read the instruction manual prior to play.
I play on ‘Normal’ because the game’s makers have deemed it to be the ‘normal’ level of challenge; I want to see how (or if) they ease you into the world they have crafted; how they step up this default level of challenge to meet your increasing skills and to see what they think the average player should be capable of throughout their game. With that in mind, I’ll happily/begrudgingly change down to ‘Easy’ if I find myself struggling, as with Vanquish, or change up to ‘Hard’ if I find myself quickly getting the hang of things and want to increase the challenge, as with Castlevania: Lords of Shadow.
My refusal to read the manual before play is very similar: I want to see how the game teaches you how to play it, rather than its accompanying booklet.2 I want a sensation of discovery as I play a game, a series of ‘Aha!’ moments. I want to spot, recognise and embrace the audiovisual cues and feedback that positively or negatively reinforce the game’s teachings. I want to see how the game introduces new mechanics and how these are progressively expanded and combined to test a player and their newfound in-game abilities.
I play games in this way because, for me, it feels like the way a game is intended to be played.
Having explained my game-playing policies and my reasons for them to Sagat, I was genuinely surprised by his: he said that he will only ever play a game for six days, always with a walkthrough and will never return to a game after those six days, irrespective of whether he finished it or really enjoyed what he did play. At this, my jaw dropped and my gob was indeed smacked.
Returning to that hamburger metaphor, hearing about Sagat’s approach to his videogame consumption felt like he was telling me that he would rather order something that looked and sounded like a tasty proposition, only to ask someone to tell him exactly what to expect before each and every mouthful, rather than just taking a bite and finding out for himself.
Now like I said, Sagat bought the game and so its content is his to consume however he wishes; he can eat his metaphorical hamburger using chopsticks while sat upside-down and wearing boxing gloves if that’s what he wants to do! But I just couldn’t understand why, particularly as someone who creates games for a living, he would want to take the surprise out of a game, to remove the learning and understanding that come from exploring a game and its experiences through play.
When someone sits down to play a game I’ve helped create, I don’t want them to impose a time limit on themselves and I don’t want them to intentionally ruin any surprises. I want them to be compelled to play through to the end, to see everything my team and I have poured our hearts and souls into and to enjoy every moment we have created.
A game is an authored experience, just like a piece of music, a book or a film. As an authored experience it has been composed in such a way as to have an intended effect. While it is every player’s right to choose what, for them, is the ‘right’ way to play a game, it is equally their right (and something that only games can really offer) to deviate from the intended effect, to play with what they’re given and to break the rules.
But to deliberately and specifically avoid the experience you’ve paid for… well, while there may not be a ‘right’ way to play a game, that seems a wrong way to me.
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