#17 Generosity costs nothing
I gave up on a game for the first time in a long time last month. It’s not something I do lightly - I’m someone who finishes games and books from a bloody minded need to know how they end. But this game was too far, and after I wanted to hurl my controller out the window for the 4th time in 10 minutes, it was time to remove the stress from my life.
The game in question was Knack - a PS4 launch title from 2013 and a throwback to platformers of days gone by. And what had frustrated me about it was just how stingy it was - and how this stinginess didn’t feel necessary, it just felt unfair. Jump windows were tiny, health boosters were infrequent and checkpoints dragged you back far further than was necessary.
And it got me thinking about the role generosity plays in games. Because, however brutal the game, the truth is you can’t be stingy everywhere.Some generosity is essential for gamer to feel it's a fair contest. Even the Dark Souls titles, known for their unrelenting difficulty, are generous to the player in small ways - from the patterns the bosses attack with through to small improvements in your character. And, you’re expecting the game to be almost impossible, so your expectations of generosity are far lower.
Contrast this with Knack - an allegedly family friendly game, which seemed to delight in punishing you for small mistakes. It was an easy choice for me to give it up.
Knack was a throwback to days of old - when games were genuinely, nightmarishly hard. But, the best of them felt fair - and there’s no better case study for this than Mario.
Mario games always feel fair - historically they’ve been challenging, but not spitefully so. They’re hard, but when you make a mistake it’s entirely your own fault. But replaying the old 2D games from the 80s and contrasting them with the titles of today makes clear just how much more generous modern games are. Old Mario games gave you three lives and you had to earn more. And this ethos carried through to the games of the late 90s and early 00s - Mario 64 and Mario Sunshine are both tougher than I remember.
Mario Galaxy, the Wii’s 3d Mario effort and my new favourite way to unwind is completely different. It wants to make sure you never die - throwing lives at you as gifts and positioning 1 up Mushrooms ahead of any particularly challenging sections - ensuring you never see the dreaded game over screen.
Why have games got more generous?
In large part it’s because of the huge audience they now command - people who can’t afford to spend 30 hours learning exactly how not to die. It’s also a recognition that games are in competition for our entertainment time - and if gamers throw away the controller and opt for a movie instead, the whole industry loses. It’s something I increasingly care about as I get older - I want to see tangible progress every time I get an hour or two to sit down and play. And if a game won’t give me that in the future, then that’s not a game I’m going to crack on with.
That doesn’t mean modern games can’t be hard. The Last of Us 2 was a perfect example of this - combining challenging combat and limited resources with an underlying sense of fairness. In fact, sometimes the game was too generous - rewinding you to just before you died when what was really needed was to go a little further back and prepare for the upcoming battle more effectively.
As I’m writing this reviews have just dropped for Crash Bandicoot 4. And it shows how divisive difficulty in games can be. Kotaku praised the game for its difficulty and the way it rewards gradual improvement, while Polygon slammed that very same difficulty for feeling unfair - and more reliant on luck than player skill. It’s a debate which isn’t going away, but the mere fact two reviews can interpret a game so differently shows how important it is developers ensure gamers are if not generous to their audience, that at least they are fair to them.
My final plea to developers on the subject of generosity - please abandon old conventions around save points. Games in the 80s and 90s would dictate when you could save (if you could save at all) - but this was for reasons of hardware as much as a conscious choice by the designers. That hasn’t been the case for 20 years - and it’s time to let go of control over when the gamer gets to save their progress.
You don’t know when I’m going to have to stop playing (and sometimes neither do I) and being forced to find a specific location to save my progress only pisses me off. It led to me abandoning Persona 5 - a game which can take over 100 hours to finish, after barely 30 hours because I got fed up with the lack of save points.
The lesson from all of this - it’s ok to be generous. And a lack of generosity is something we should be willing to call out as critics - games should be an enjoyable experience, and if that enjoyment is hampered by stinginess or meanness on the developer’s part than it’s ok for an audience to say no and walk away from the game.
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