The Ludologist

I find myself scratching my head over the continued bursts of angry criticism against the Free to Play business model.

Here is Michael Thomsen writing in Kill Screen, “Will Work for Fun“:

The original Super Mario Bros. defined the console blockbuster with more than 40 million copies sold worldwide. After going free-to-play, Angry Birds has been downloaded over 700 million times (though some versions are still sold for 99 cents). The scope and stakes of videogame commerce have irrevocably changed, and, in a way, the value of the medium has degraded as a result. Designers are no longer selling games to people who want to buy them, they are selling their audiences to advertisers. Worse yet, they are using them as an interactive form of muzak, creating a lively backdrop against which the small percentage of people willing to spend money on new quests or in-game trinkets will feel more likely to spend.

The value of the medium has degraded? Really? On a basic level, I still feel that this type of criticism is eerily similar to the kinds of criticisms that people tend to direct at video games in general: commercial, exploitative, devoid of artistic merit etc…

There seems to  an underlying conservatism at play, where we intuitively believe that what we grew up with (games being sold in boxes at fixed price points) is a neutral good, and that everything else is ultimately a perversion. But all business models have a built-in skew: the boxed model skews towards  pretty graphics and a well-designed first-15-minute experience, after which the game quickly becomes boring and repetitive.

On the other hand, when I say this (that all business models and incentive structures have a built-in skew), I can hear myself mimicking my undergraduate university teachers:  “games are always already influenced by business models” (the “always already” part signals that you are part of the clique).

So that also feels like a cheap argument. I was entertaining the thought that it has to do with a basic conception of games (the magic circle if you will) as an egalitarian space where things like money are not supposed to make a difference, and the free to play and microtransactions seem offensive because they make the playing field skewed and unfair. (See the report linked below.)

Again, the default counter-argument would be that this is an illusion – because there never is any pure game space where money does not matter and so on. But this is again too easy: the fundamental fact  is that our conventions of game-playing (and sportspersonship) involve trying to create a type of pure egalitarian space, regardless of the fact that this can never be achieved a 100% (and regardless of what researchers think).

Michael Thomsen discusses free to play and capitalism at length, but ultimately I think we need to acknowledge that money is just one of many different resources (and not the only one worth talking about). I recently  heard an established game developer argue that microtransactions are fair because they level the playing field between him and the people with more time on their hands, and I have entertained the same thought myself. Microtransactions are really a type of “executive summary” for games.

And that is the bottom line for me: no business model is neutral, but it is also true that free to play can  collide with some of our fundamental assumptions about what games should be. And yet … for some games, the more expensive executive summary just is the better deal. (And the task of Free to Play game designers is to make it so, of course.)

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PS. Here is a study of player perceptions of free to play: “Cash Trade Within the Magic Circle”, by Holin Lin and Chuen-Tsai Sun.

Did you solve the black monolith puzzle in Fez? Ars Technica chronicles the collective quest to solve the most cryptic puzzle of the game. This one involves cryptography and random guesswork.

I must confess that I simply don’t have patience for this kind of thing anymore. Fez is beautiful and charming, but I am bored out of my skull by go-everywhere-click-everything-guess-backtrack-repeat puzzles.

Fez is surely supposed to be interestingly old-school & challenging, but I think this type of puzzle worked much better when you were 12 and only had a single game – and you were playing it with your friends on long afternoons.

At the same time, the feeling of impossibility is fundamental to the enjoyment of puzzles: a good puzzle has to appear to be impossible, however briefly. This is why I am conflicted about Portal 2, which I completed without ever feeling stuck for more than a minute or two. Never being stuck makes me feel good about myself, but I can’t help but also feel that Portal 2 just played it a little too safe and was too afraid of veering outside my comfort zone.

I think the problem with puzzles in a game like Fez is that the delay between having a new idea for a solution, and trying it out, is just too big because of the traveling and exploration involved, so you end up repeating the same increasingly uninteresting actions over and over in order to try out new ideas for solving a given puzzle (full disclosure: I am not far into Fez).

(From Ars Technica.)

My first computer was a Commodore 64 (for which I continue to have the fondest memories). Jack Tramiel, founder of Commodore, died this weekend at 83.