More evidence today that Nintendo is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the current paradigm shift happening in the gaming industry: Violent video games just aren’t very fun.
The article is from respected columnist Clive Thompson. On the lack of innovation, and how it breeds not new games, but old games with violent new paint (see also: Gears of War 2, God of War 3), he writes:
“When they look at a successful title from the past, they say ‘Let’s do that again, but turn it up,’†says Richard Ryan, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Rochester. So the endless cycle of games based on brooding, bullet-spraying antiheroes goes on and on.
On marketing:
The quickest way to get attention for a game is by touting its limb-specific kill points and “destructible environments,†particularly when the audience for action games is mostly young men. The violence is an attempt to pierce through the overcrowded videogame marketplace; it’s designed to get young men to simply notice the damn game in the first place, even though everyone involved — the designer, the gamer, the mildly stoned employee at the game store cash register — knows the title will sink or swim not based on the quality of its violence but on the quality of its play.
On the current shift in gaming:
Are action gamers tiring of this cycle of gore? Sometimes I think so. We’ve played too many games in which it’s obvious that the designers spent more time crafting elaborately fractal explosions and multiply-fanged insectoid enemies than making sure their games are actually, y’know, fun.
This is all why more people will remember Punch-Out!! in 20 years time than Fight Night. My opinion, of course.
Overall, it’s a good read, even if it’s something you probably read here on Infendo in 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009.
I don’t think there is a correlation between violence not equaling fun, but there is a correlation with voilence as a gimmick not equaling fun. Great gameplay, family friendly or otherwise, will always be fun. Punch-Out Wii is great fun. But so was God of War 2.
Well, it’s not so much violence as it is recycling old formulas. All the developers are doing is tacking more blood onto enemies and they think it’s “immersive gameplay.”
What Blake said.
Pretty much what Blake said.
If a game sucks, it sucks, whether it’s violent or not. Games that are just violent to be violent aren’t going to be very good. I personally dont’ find the Gears of War games or the God of War games to be in the “violent isn’t fun” category. I had plenty of fun playing them.
I too, must agree with Blake. Though I do feel that I disagree with the testing method used here. In the test, they used two versions of Half Life 2. In one version, enemies die normally (not extremely bloody or gory, but there is blood and ragdoll corpses). In another version, when shot, there is no blood, but enemies hover for a moment and then evaporate into thin air. Now I myself dislike excessive (see:Manhunt) violence in games, but I find that in the case of Half Life, the blood makes it more enjoyable to play. As for why this is, I would have to go back to Doom as one of the first examples. In Doom, you didn’t just shoot your emotionless enemies untill they silently fell over dead, enemies would cry out when shot and pain was actually used as a game mechanic. Where I guess I’m trying to go here is that you can get a certain satisfaction from knowing that you’re able to cause your enemies pain.
Allow me to go back to the Half Life example to explain this. Which is more enjoyable to watch?
A. You are carrying a barrel full of fuel. You launch it (via gravity gun) towards a combine soldier. It explodes at his feet after which he hovers for a few seconds then disspears.
or
B. You are carrying a barrel full of fuel. You launch it (via gravity gun) towards a combine soldier. It explodes at his feet after which he is blown backwards by the force of the blast, thus launching his corpse at a concrete wall.
In this scenario, the violence makes the game a bit more enjoyable. This would not work however, if the gameplay itself was poorly designed and the violence was used as an attempt to cover up that fact. In my mind, violence (as in blood and gore) in games is best kept in the same catagory as graphics. It can make the game more fun to look at, but if the underlying gameplay is shoddy, it only makes that fact more obvious.
+1 to Blake, ResidentialEvil
I find I play the House of the Dead games not for their violence levels, but comedy (at least in Overkill) and point-and-shoot gameplay but I see what this is talking about. Let’s just hope no one is insinuating MadWorld is a bad game.
@ gojiguy:
That wasn’t violence as the article put it. That was just awesome.
The article basically said that series of games that become progressively violent get old due to repitition. MadWorld, on the other hand, has millions of ways to kill people.
I actually agree with HyperPhazon, but having just MORE blood and guts in each new recycling of a shooter game gets old. Keep it at the norm and I’m fine.
I don’t base a games ” fun factor” on gore, violence or any such criteria.
I base a games fun factor on, you know, if its actually FUN.
A gory game can be fun, so can a simplistic, causal game.
No correlation here at all between gore and fun , or lack there of.
I always turn the gore off in games when given the option. I wish every game had the option. I find it distracting.
Another point that Blakes comment kind of ignores is that making a game with hyperrealistic gore is expensive. Games have budgets. If less money is spent on over the top gore, it leaves more money to be spent on actual game design and polish. I’ve heard of dev teams having an entire group responsible for gore and death animations. Imagine if that team was cut in half and the extra man hours were put into designing more interesting weapons, more varied enemies, or more elaborate environments. I’m not saying gore is necessarily bad, but hyper gore as an expense in game design seems like a misuse of dev time/money to me personally.
Just a random thought: how does a game that uses gratuitous amounts of violence as its selling point fit in here? (Okay, I’m really just thinking about Madworld)
Yep, what Blake said…
And I really liked Fallout 3, exploding heads and all, but nobody brings up that game when talking about violent content… for a reason.
I’m with Blake too.
I’m getting tired of saying the two are not mutually exclusive. It IS possible to have a violent video game that is fun. Christ just look at Goldeneye!