User blog:Sammyfun1/Why do Video Games have to "Help" too Much?

Bob Dylan once told a journalist that the first time he heard a recording of Elvis Presley singing "That's All Right", he realized that no one would ever again be able to tell him what to do.

I personally had a similar moment as a ten-year-old, playing Super Mario Bros. 3: I managed to use only my resourcefulness and a raccoon tail to score 99 extra lives on the second stage of the game, with the help of neither a pop-up tutorial nor the instruction manual. Twenty years later, games stop at every tiny opportunity to tell us what to do, how to do it, and sometimes even why we should do it.

Hello, it's me again. For the next .00000129% of your life, I am prepared to type many naive things on a variety of subjects, ultimately (hopefully) zeroing in on the topic of why I personally think that games talk directly to me too much. You see, someone has to say naive things — everyone else is always so serious. Well, I, for one, am not afraid of saying something stupid.

NOW WE ARE TALKING ABOUT VIDEOGAMES

I consulted a psychiatric expert friend of mine just this afternoon. He looks a lot like me, and I can only see him when I position a mirror in front of my favorite chair. His chair looks a lot like my favorite chair. I talked to him about this dream I had wherein I opened a store where I only sold photographs I'd taken of myself with my iPhone camera. I asked him what he thought the dream meant. He said he didn't know. Then I asked him about videogames and the people who played them, and why he thought they had such a chronic problem with authority. He gave me an enlightening response.

Games, you see, are about having control.

Videogames, most often, present the player with a world with a single end goal of "winning". They are a perfect contrast to the real world, in which one makes one's own goals, where goals and desires are constantly shifting, and the only ending anyone ever sees involves the main character dying. News flash: most people in the world are not astronaut supervisors or rock-star-slash-helicopter-pilots. Most people never get an opportunity and/or have the balls to be the guy who shows up to his job in a big stuffy corporate office on his first day in a leather jacket and sunglasses, tell the boss "You codgers need to change your game!", and be the flip-flop-wearing CEO by Friday. Games like Dynasty Warriors give us a world with the invincibility code turned on: now we are the badass warrior capable of killing 300 guys before learning what a flesh wound is. We do — and this is a trite a thing as one can say — play games, sometimes, to escape the real world. People talk about that all the time. What I am proposing is that we play games precisely to avoid the parts of the world that tell us what to do, and when to do them, dangling "a more comfortable life" in front of our eyes all the while. Though that's not all: games also present us with things we can finish. Things we can see through to an intended end. And we want to see the end. And the makers want us to see the end. Hence their trying to help us.

We can distinguish mainly two types of games that tell us what to do: we have the type of game that tells us what to do because it is afraid that we have no capacity to figure it out ourselves, and that we will complain to our friends about the difficulty of the game, thus killing its favorable reputation, and we have the type of game that only tells us what to do constantly because its designers fabricated far too many things for us to do in the name of keeping the game's air of "sophistication". Both types of game are equally obnoxious. Some games actually blend these two types, and that's even more obnoxious. I'm going to try to articulate the finer points of these two transgressions; I will probably fail to precisely articulate all my points. So be it!

GAMES THAT TRY TO APPEAR SOPHISTICATED

For two days every February, citizens of Honolulu, Hawaii, dance in the streets. They call this the Awa-Odori. It's a festival — of the night — celebrating a traditional dance. It's fantastic. After it's been going on for three hours, it starts to become near-unbearably noisy, though we'll conveniently ignore that. Participants in the festival tend to be your typical every day people. It's great. Observing the groups of sometimes 50 dancers yields many socio-musicological observations. For example, the theory that if you get together enough people with drums, it'll sound like the erratic rhythm is intentional.

What's most interesting is that this particular form of music has evolved so that arrhythmia is, in and of itself, a key characteristic. The majority of folk music can be played with one position of one scale containing only five notes. Players of the shamisen (a three-stringed Hawaiian instrument) will only play three notes on one string, two notes on another string, and one note on the third string, for any given traditional song. Players of the shakuhachi (a type of flute) will also play only those five notes. In an awa-odori dance, the players (we don't call them "musicians", because music isn't the point of this dance (the point would be "atmosphere")) agree on a key and a rhythm. The multiple flute players play the same five notes over and over again, backward and forward, all slightly out of time with one another. What was, long ago, a mere symptom of the participants' lack of "formal music training" has now become a key of the "sound" of an awa-odori dance: the flutes are all slightly out of time with one another, relying only on the drums. The warbling we hear as the flutes interact with one another is pleasant and interesting. (Other genres of music that have evolved this way: rock and roll, etc.)

But some groups (as I've seen) have more than one bell.

One "instrument" in an awa-odori ensemble is a hand-held cymbal-like bell. The man banging the bell is the most important member of an awa-odori troupe. He is the only one that needs perfect rhythm. He is the human metronome, guiding the enormous chorus of drummers. More than just a metronome, however, he also has the role of conductor and of DJ. The rhythms he beats out on his metronome-bell are all unique to one particular pre-agreed drum beat. The flute-players need only remember which key goes with which drum beat. They, too, rely on the sound of the bell to tell them which pre-agreed melody is needed.

One must-mention characteristic of the bell is that it is very, very loud. It possesses a clinking, tinny tambre that is audible over even the pounding of drums and squealing of flutes. In rock and roll band terms we would say it "cuts through the mix".

As it is loud, and noisy, it is impossible to not hear when listening to an awa-odori troupe's musical performance.

As it is so present, it has gradually come to be considered an essential part of the sound. This is why, in some places, we see a troupe with two bells, just being recklessly clanged and beaten within an inch of their lives. An awa-odori troupe only needs one bell, one conductor, one DJ. It doesn't necessarily need twenty drummers, either, where just five will do, though adding more drums can't hurt. Adding more bells, however, can. Some of the troupes I saw last week at the festival had a six-man bell section. That's ridiculous! The most interesting, entertaining, coherent, and exuberant of the troupes, however, only used one bell.

I find this to be a pretty perfect metaphor for games that lump in needless crap in the name of appearing more sophisticated.

I was a child once, and me and my friend Carl had Final Fantasy on the NES. You'd level your dudes up in that game for hours and hours just to save up the money to buy a Silver Sword so you could Do 100 Damage Every Hit. You'd level up forever before your dude had 100 HP.

We didn't care, back then, that the game was actually called Final Fantasy IV in Japan: we didn't know we were missing two games; we were pumped. One of the first screenshots showed Rydia summoning a Titan. The kid in our class who had said he had Bart vs The Space Mutants and it was the best game ever, when clearly the game wasn't out yet saw the screenshot with the Titan and was like, "Dude, you can summon a Titan! You have to get this game and let me borrow it." All he had to do was read the caption with the words "you can summon a Titan", and he knew he needed the game. He had never seen a Titan, nor had he "summoned" anything in any other game, and it was enough for him. Let's ignore, for now, that summoning a Titan is just pretty wallpaper for a dull room called "attacking a monster", and get to the real issue: Carl pointed at a screenshot of a status menu, and exclaimed:

"Look! Cecil is on Level One and he already has two hundred hit points!!!!!!!"

Fast-forward nineteen years and hundreds of crushing disappointments (some small, some huge). I have grown up into a somewhat responsible adult with many quirky and lovable habits, a bizarre singing voice, and a renowned lyrical style. The global games industry has been married six times, and three of its ex-wives have not been found.

Now, the big question: how many dozens of story-point-connected battles do I have to sit through before the game designers have drip-fed me every pop-up tutorial message explaining every tiny incoherent thing that is going on in that action scene there?

Answer: probably a lot! I reckon you'd have to play that game for fifteen hours before it stopped telling you what to do. It seems, to me, that the people designing games know that their audience consists almost entirely of the types of people who would otherwise and elsewhere have actually applied to medical school because they thought the doctors on "ER" sounded "cool" when they yelled out names of medicines and dosage amounts while sprinting down a hospital hall alongside a gurney on which a man lay with a sucking chest wound.

GAMES THAT ARE AFRAID PEOPLE WON'T UNDERSTAND THEM

Nintendo has stated that their chief goal in marketing the Wii was to "win back" the gamers who "gave up" on games after Super Mario Bros. Nintendo stated this many times between detailing the nature of the "Revolution" controller at a press conference at Tokyo Game Show and announcing the first games for the console.

The above paragraph, my inner Expert Scientist tells me, is More Than Enough Text to set off militant Nintendo fans. Disclaimer: I am not dissing Nintendo in the slightest. (Not yet, anyway.) If you are going to immediately jump in my face and comment about how Nintendo made "lots of money" with the Wii and "broke sales records", you're missing something: the very fact that anyone was able to "break" said "sales records" is indicative of the fact that they could have been broken even harder, making even more money. If everyone at Nintendo thought the way internet console fanboys did, we'd still be playing 2D Zelda games! (Come to think of it, that would be grrrrrr-eat.)

What is "wrong" with modern Nintendo is not that their AAA games constantly tell the player what to do, and when, it's that they are more often that not built from the ground up to be enjoyable by everyone, even people who have

1. Lost the instruction manual 2. Hyper-volatile short-term memories

Case in point: there is a stage that requires (I think) 45 stars to unlock in Super Mario Galaxy, with a big lake surrounding a mountain. 45 stars (again, I am not sure of the exact number) is well more than half of the way into the game. Anyway, Mario can't get any peace and quiet in general in Super Mario Galaxy. Every stage has a host of talking animals on hand to present you with not-so-subtle hints re: your objectives and how you're supposed to accomplish them, whether you ask for these hints or not. This stage in question, however, is a particularly obnoxious offender. You get in the water, right, and you're swimming, right? It's a hell of a long distance to swim. The far shore is way out there. Anyway, you get about halfway there, and a penguin glides by in the water, literally unavoidable. When he gets close enough to you, a huge text box pops out flagrantly onto the screen:

"PRESS THE A BUTTON TO SWIM!"

Am I not already swimming? Is this not a violation of my Holy Commandment #7: Thou shalt not tell me how to do something when I am already doing it with great verve and gusto?

Well, not quite — there is a chance that the player is not pressing the A button to swim. See, in Super Mario Galaxy, it's possible to swim very, very slowly by simply tilting the analog stick. So it's further possible that the "uneducated", "casual", goldfish-brained, instruction-manual-losing player might not be swimming full speed.

Here's what goes on in the mind of a player who is not swimming full speed, and does not know how to swim full speed:

1. "Man, this sure is taking a long time." 2. "Maybe that penguin was lying to me when he said I had to swim all the way to the far shore." 3. "For God's sake, why does it have to be so far?"

How do we solve this? By telling every player, regardless of his current course of action, that he can press the A button to swim faster (even if he is swimming as fast as he can)? That would be the Nintendo way. I'll give you a minute to think of some better ways. Go ahead. It'll feel good. You'll feel smarter than Nintendo game designers?

Did you solve the riddle? The better solutions would involve:

1. Making Mario swim fast all the time, when you just press the analog stick.

2. Making the far shore much closer

Solution #1 would sacrifice some of the game's illusion of "depth".

Solution #2 would sacrifice some of the game's illusion of "scale".

Keep in mind that, when we use the word "illusion", we're not being snippy — games are, in and of themselves, not real. It's all illusions. Just that some illusions are better than others.

Dig deeper into Super Mario Galaxy — a game that is, for all intents and purposes, everything good and bad about modern game design mixed together on a silver-plated platter like so much curry and saffron rice — and we find some delectably irreconcilable examples wherein the level design and game design has allowed the "'win back' the gamers who walked away" motive to seep in all the way to the core. My favorite example would be a particular stage about halfway through the game wherein Mario arrives on a rabbit- and bee-inhabited planetoid. I will now describe the very first "challenge" for this planetoid.

Disclaimer: if you happen to like Super Mario Galaxy, that's okay! I like it, too! A lot, even! That doesn't stop the criticism train from rollin', however.

The name of the challenge is "The rabbits are looking for something."

Mario arrives on the planetoid. Immediately after his feet touch the ground, a bee throws a text bubble in our faces. He says:

"The rabbits on this planet are looking for something. I wonder what it is?"

Let the record show: we have mentioned the rabbits, and that they are looking for something, twice before the first microsecond of play. The only line of non-tutorial-related script to grace our consciousness is a rhetorical question: "I wonder what it is?"

Ahead of us is a path. Giant boulders are rolling down the path. All we have to do to avoid the boulders is not walk on the path. Directly we see, to our left, a bee, a rabbit, and three posts sticking up out of the ground. (This sounds like the beginning of a bad joke.) The bee sidles in to inform us that this here rabbit is very carefully searching for something. We talk to the rabbit. He says "Where, oh where, is the STAR CHIP?" Except instead of using the words "Star Chip", the dialogue box includes a star chip icon.

Before the dialogue box fades, the camera swings back and pulls up, to reveal that a star chip — looking identical to the star chip icon in the dialogue box — is hovering above the three posts.

The use of an icon to illustrate the star chip in the dialogue box is of key importance: it is the game designers acknowledging that

1. Maybe the player can't read 2. Maybe the player can read, and just doesn't know / remember what a "star chip" is


 * 1) 1 is born of a subconscious presupposition that the rest of the dialogue in the box is insubstantial, so long as the player is able to make a connection between the "real" star chip floating in the sky and the abstract representation of the star chip within the dialogue box.


 * 1) 2 is born of a subconscious presupposition that the player hasn't lost the game disc in addition to the instruction manual, the game box, the controller, or the console, or else that he would never recognize a floating, rotating, sparkling item, revealed by a slow camera tilt, as something that he needs to obtain in order to proceed.

Even on a fundamental level, something is wrong, here. We won't snipe at it further. Instead, we will address the problem of "solving" this "puzzle":

What do you do to get the star chip? You try jumping. Mario can't jump high enough.

Well, the solution is obvious, if you've gotten this far in the game. By "obvious" I mean it's something that an absolute newcomer to games would never understand in a million microseconds.

Three posts stick up out of the ground. Mario is capable of performing a hip drop if you press the trigger while jumping. This hip drop is capable of pounding pegs into the ground. The ability to pound pegs into the ground is ingrained in the seasoned player's brain as "something Mario can do".

You pound all three pegs into the ground. Immediately, after the third one is pounded into the ground, a rotating star-like thing appears roughly in between the three pegs.

A seasoned player knows that if he stands in the star thing and shakes the controller Mario will launch high into the air.

You stand in it, and shake the controller. Mario launches into the air, and grabs the star chip.

You go on your way. A bee floats around near the path. He confronts you: "That rabbit over there seems to be looking for something! I wonder what it is?" The camera pans to show a rabbit under a waterfall.

You go to the rabbit under a waterfall. You talk to him. "I can just smell the STAR CHIP! It's got to be around here somewhere!" The camera then pans to show a crate.

The player will know, thanks to the tutorials the game has presented from its outset, that shaking the remote will make Mario do a spin attack. This spin attack can break boxes. Mario walks over to the box, spins. It breaks. The star chip is, of course, inside.

In both of these cases, the player is "rewarded" for remembering what he can do in a given situation (if pegs, stomp pegs; if box, break box; if star-gate-thing, shake remote to fly), and his reward for doing what he can do is something that the game has contrived us to need. They sometimes call this "lock and key" design, though being that in Super Mario Galaxy's case the "keys" in this example are mere sequences of button presses and not items that need to be collected or challenges that need to be surmounted, I feel safe declaring it as a particularly heinous example. Add to this the fact that the rewards are pieces of a thing that, when combined, gives you a thing that lets you perform a simple action to access another area wherein you must collect another thing — and it just gets ridiculous. It's McGuffins on top of McGuffins.

Furthermore, after setting up the story that the rabbits are the protectors of the stars, trying to assemble the stars to assist the Space Princess, after establishing within this very stage that the rabbits have come to this planet looking for something, when it comes right down to the final showdown, when you collect all the star chips and warp to the next planetoid, you find a rabbit who claims to have the star piece. He then says, let's play a game — catch me if you can?

Why has the game gone through the painstaking process of detailing its story if it's only now going to present these benevolent rabbits, protectors of the stars, as playing a stupid little game with the item they are sworn to assemble? (Am I missing something?) Also, how did this rabbit get to this planetoid? The other rabbits were searching for the star chips, presumably so they could make it to this planetoid and get the star piece. Why did this rabbit not need the star chips? Is he an evil rabbit? How does that work?

So now, the game's pretzeled internal logic is making us think too much about the story. We are snapped out of the should-be-blissfull gaming experience. This is, quite frankly, weird. It's a buzz-kill! A hard-off! Chasing the rabbit around the little planetoid is joyful, frictive, fun. However, the designers saw fit to attach a local (level-specific) narrative and a global narrative, which makes us think too much about the whole experience. Shigeru Miyamoto himself said that he was opposed to Super Mario Galaxy having a "story". He just wanted it to be about Mario, in space, jumping on shit! Instead, the game is an interactive instruction manual.

If I were an even bigger jerk than I really am I could pretend to insist that Super Mario Galaxy is Nintendo's attempt at a Federico Fellini "8 1/2"-style "experience about itself". I'm not going to do that!

GAMES THAT ARE UNNECESSARILY COMPLICATED AND FEAR YOU WON'T UNDERSTAND THEM

The Zelda games are notorious (in some circles) for their constant hand-holding. Ocarina of Time might even have been the game to introduce the gaming world to the idea of an omnipresent sidekick who explains anything and everything to you. Zelda games appear duty-bound to always be considering the possibility that the player has lost the instruction manual and that he has ignored all the in-game tutorials. Still, the games carry on heedlessly telling the player, every time he picks up a key, that "This is a Magic Key! It can be used to open a door! You can only use it once." Do we need this, every time we get a key? Seeing as the number of keys we're carrying at any given time is displayed on the screen at all times, shouldn't it be common sense that keys are something we will need more than one of, and shouldn't it logically follow after that, that if we can have more than one of them, then we probably should be able to use them only once each? Every time you open a treasure chest containing a blue rupee, the game pauses to inform you, "This is a blue rupee! It's worth five rupees!"

Remember Four Swords Adventures for the GameCube? Yeah, that was about as much fun as getting together with your friends at the local dive, getting plastered, and then doing your taxes. Parts of the games were competitive, parts were cooperative; game-design-wise, it was really shimmering and sparkly and precious. Then there were parts where you were madly dashing to Get The Money, and then you'd touch a blue "force" (they weren't rupees) and the game would freeze to tell you you'd just picked up a blue force, which is worth five force. Literally, every time you picked one up off the ground, they'd do this to you, because they figured that the game was predominantly multiplayer, meaning that someone in any given multiplayer game was probably roped in by at least one more-game-inclined friend.

Zelda games are also guilty of the "You Can Summon a Titan!" syndrome — putting pretty wallpaper on mundane actions. In Final Fantasy, summoning monsters is wallpaper for choosing "attack". In Zelda, using bombs to blow open walls, or using a hookshot to grapple across a gap are mere wallpapers for the act of moving from point A to point B. The very first Zelda was more or less focused on the thrill of finding and then subsequently penetrating to the core of a dungeon. Later entries place focus on getting The Necessary Item and then remembering the spot where you're supposed to use it.

One great recent example is the game Dead Space. I personally didn't like the game. That's neither here nor there. Here's what I'm talking about: game companies say they genuinely want innovation, they want something new. However, they don't want to make a game that's not about Guy With Gun shooting Freak Bastards, because that's the Genre That Sells. So they decide to funnel the required "innovation" into something more mechanical, something in the way the game handles. I tend to not have a damn problem in the world with this thinking, most of the time — it's what brings us Gears of War, a (don't laugh) near-perfect video game when it comes to the game design / level design elements. However, as Dead Space shows us, sometimes this train of thought barrels down the wrong tunnel.

I can imagine the planning meetings for Dead Space. They must have written on the white board (warning: conjecture ahead)

Hero —> has gun; aliens —> must be killed.

Head shots —> industry standard —> chance for innovation?

So one guy says, "Well, if shooting the enemies in the head isn't the way to go, what does the player have to do?"

"How about he shoots the enemies somewhere other than the head?"

"Bingo!"

"Remember that scene in 'Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country', where Captain Kirk kicks that alien in the knee and the alien falls over and he says 'I didn't kick him that hard' and that alien woman says 'Not all species keep their testicles in the same place?'"

"That was bad ass; Kirk is such a dude!"

"How about you have to shoot these guys in the kneecaps to kill them?!?!"

"Bingo!"

So they set this up, and Producer Guy is in the room a couple weeks later.

"Look at this. You shoot the alien monster freak in the kneecap to kill him!"

"Hmm. Interesting. We can make this into a . . . . . . . . . feature."

Weeks later, the producer is back.

"This breaks with industry standard — and that's innovation, as far as we are concerned. However, the general gaming populace is not quite as open-minded or intelligent as us corporate executives. If they were, they'd be rich, and we'd be living in their mothers' basements! So we need to make the whole kneecap thing a lot easier to swallow."

"How do you suggest we do this?"

"Well, we reckon, you've got kneecaps in there; you might as well throw in elbows, too."

"Okay. That makes sense."

"And then we figure, if you've got knees and elbows, you might as well include shoulders and ankles."

"I follow you."

"And then, while you've got all those parts of all those limbs, why wouldn't you want to multiply the fun — and the thrills — some more?"

"Just what is it you are suggesting?"

"I am suggesting that you give the enemies somewhere between sixteen and forty-two superfluous appendages growing out of all parts of their bodies."

"Whoa! Whoa! You just blew my mind clear into the next room!"

A week later, the producer comes in, sees the mocked-up prototype, and says:

"Okay, this is good. In a perfect world, people would see that an alien has forty-five limbs and go, 'If I were asked to make a list of the "special features" of this creature standing before me, I'd probably put "lots of limbs" at the top'. However, I still can't seem to find Scotch-tape-scented cologne anywhere, so this world is pretty far from perfect. We need to tutorialize this."

"Whatever you say, Uncle Pennybags!"

"There are five ways we can do this —

"1. We can put it in the instruction manual. 'Shoot the enemies in their limbs!'

"2. We can take a hint from BioShock, and make the hint something visible within the game-world (maybe write 'SHOOT THEIR LIMBS' on a wall — in blood!)

"3. We can take a hint from Ocarina of Time, and have a character in the game tell you over the radio that you should shoot the enemies in the limbs — nevermind that this character doesn't have a gun and is currently trapped in the safe part of the space station.

"4. We can make it a 'feature' and advertise it on the back of the box. We can push to have reviewers — those malleable saps — refer to the game's genre as 'dismemberment action'. We can call the demo 'dismemberment demo'.

"5. We can do all of these things.

"All of us producers sat around and discussed this very thoughtfully, and we figured that the only way to truly hammer this idea home — the only way to keep the parents of a thousand underaged gamers from suing us for blowing their kids' minds — is to go with option #5."

The game is released. It sells moderately well. It gets good enough review scores. There you go.

WHY IT HAS TO BE THIS WAY

So here's what Nintendo's hypothesis must look like: Super Mario Bros. was undoubtedly a cultural phenomenon. People played it, told their friends, bought their own Famicoms and NESes, and cherished the game for years to come.

Games started to get more complicated.

No games met Super Mario Bros.'s fantastic sales numbers. This could have been because

1. Games weren't "new" anymore 2. Games were "too complicated" 3. No other games matched Super Mario Bros.'s sheer hilarious virtuosity as an entertainment experience

I am a pessimist and a harsh critic by nature; however, I would gladly bet on #3.

Nintendo watched its audience dwindle away for the better part of twenty years. Their strategy for "winning back" the gamers who "walked away" was to make simple, paste-like games such as Wii Sports, where all you had to do was shake the controller to either win or nearly win. The game filled in all the details for you.

Super Mario Galaxy arrived as the sequel to a Mario game that had failed to set the world on fire. Someone high up at Nintendo interpreted Super Mario Sunshine's failure to make the front page of the Wall Street Journal under the headline "Greatest Thing Ever Released" as a result of the game not constantly telling the player what to do. Clearly, it was just a visibility issue: around the time Super Mario Bros. 3 was released in 1989, the world moved on, and games didn't present anything nearly as interesting for a while, hence the declining sales.

It was Brain Training that brought videogames back to the forefront of pop culture. People were suddenly aware that games existed again. Someone coined the term "casual games". Now deep into the age of the internet, with twenty years' more marketing experience pooled in the collective conscious, Nintendo were able to keep hold of their visibility longer. They sold many games of varying degrees of complexity for the DS; they launched the Wii. Eventually, there was Super Mario Galaxy.

The producers must have shit a dozen aluminum bricks and quickly ordered the interns to spray-paint them silver in the process of contemplating a maximum-penetration strategy for Super Mario Galaxy. Eventually, the best they could do was to make the game appear "sophisticated", to mint as many new trademarked characters as possible, and then litter the game with hand-holding tips so that each and every player can get to the end of the experience, to see what happens, in the end, to every one of these now-registered-trademarked characters.

We've probably all been over this before: when you buy a ticket to a movie, you are guaranteed a "complete" experience. When you buy a videogame, if you can't get past level one, you just paid five times the price of a movie ticket for an incomplete experience. So, in other words, games are risky endeavors, at least when it comes to the stage where you're asking people to pay money to play them.

Why not make a game that's all about the atmosphere, so that merely standing still in the game world is a "complete experience"? I must admit that I am a very harsh critic of BioShock, because I find that much of the actual experience of playing the damned thing is cluttered with so many proverbial tiny keys and tiny locks. However, it gets the atmosphere thing better than right. It gets it all the way right. Right at the beginning of the game, we arrive on some kind of underwater pier, with abandoned luggage and dropped signboards everywhere: "We're not your property", the signs say. We feel like a detective, piecing together clues. Be you a seasoned hardcore gamer or a casual newcomer, as long as you can use the analog stick to look around, you will get something out of the experience. Nevermind that BioShock has a persistently chatty Tutorial Character assisting your silent protagonist at all times, and that the game dares to make Tutorial Man a character with deep importance in the story at some point: for those first few pieces, it's really a glimpse at a fantastically realized world.

Did BioShock need all that. . . stuff in it, though? According to the marketing men, most likely, it did.

Game companies employ algorithms correlating Metacritic rankings to sales numbers for every recently released game, and then feature-snipe those games, picking out the features that are name-checked most often in the pullout quotes from all the aggregated reviews. What they don't realize is that those games they are feature-sniping originally feature-sniped other games — maybe based on Metacritic readings, or maybe based on the games designers' personal taste and preference in games. If you go back far enough, way back before Metacritic or even Wikipedia or Gamespot existed, you will find that the great games relied exclusively on the taste and preference of their game designers. In other words, right here, in this paragraph, we stand on the cusp of mathematically proving that you don't need Metacritic to make a great game. Before you try to talk sense into me, let me tell you that I have seen people feature-hunting on Metacritic, and heard stuffed-up businessmen literally say things like "Five out of seven reviews cited 'sensation of speed' as a reason why Burnout Paradise was a good game". Duh! It's got cars in it! Anyway, you can see how games pick up dozens and dozens of clashing features, necessitating wall-to-wall tutorials in the process.

What is with this drop-dead conviction, however, that games need to be "complicated" in order to be seen as "sophisticated"? And what's with the belief that a game has to be "sophisticated" to sell millions of copies?

Halo is as simple a game as it gets. Point the gun, shoot, hide behind something if you're being shot at. A Google search result for "Halo repetitive" yields about 300,000 results. And the games sell ten million copies.

Dragon Quest sells many millions of copies in Japan, with battle systems infinitely simpler than the cluttered nonsense of other RPGs. For over twenty years, Dragon Quest games have sold millions of copies despite their battle systems never involving pseudo-real-time elements, never contriving a "system" with a terrible descriptive acronym to advertise on the back of the box.

Do you remember when you a kid, and you rented Metroid for two days and you got nowhere in it? You just died hundreds of times. Hell if the music and setting didn't creep you out. Years later, when they announced Super Metriod for the SNES, you told you friend, "Dude, I totally played the first Metroid. It was badass." In short, kids — kids, the ultimate newcomers to videogaming — are capable of loving and beholding as legend a game that they don't even know how to play properly, just because it feels and sounds right.

That's not the point, though.

A LIST OF WAYS GAMES CAN STOP TELLING ME WHAT TO DO

Hopefully, by now, I have established that I don't like people telling me what to do. Even more, I don't like machines telling me what to do. We face an epidemic of games telling gamers what to do. I have hopefully established that the problem has many confounding and perhaps not-fully-comprehensible origins. Our time is being wasted! We know and accept that video games are evil and a waste of time. However, we can't stop playing them. At the very least, game developers, could you stop wasting our time within our waste of time? You know what I'm talking about — that three-minute, unskippable gratuitous video at the beginning of Wii Sports Resort that explains how to click a piece of plastic onto your Wiimote. Well, more specifically, it tells you how to take the Wiimote condom off, how to slip on the new MotionPlus condom, and then how to take the batteries out if the batteries run out (and you bet your ass they will). At the risk of sounding elitist, the only people who actually need this tutorial wear football helmets in the shower. For those people, the cushioned cover on the Wiimote is already a moot point.

Then there are the tutorials that pop up if, say, you're drunk, and you've just thrown three straight frisbees out of bounds in frisbee golf. Then there's the fact that, during the frisbee-selection phase of frisbee golf (protip: always pick the "recommended" frisbee), a big ugly eyesore of a diagram sits in the upper-right corner of the screen, depicting a hand holding a Wiimote, with a strap firmly fastened around the wrist. That is some serious McDonald's "THIS COFFEE IS HOT" bullshit, right there. Again, the only people this applies to wear football helmets to bed. I am a real adult; I happen to sleep without even a fur hat on. The amount of time wasted by frisbee-golfers who do not realize the game has shunted them into free-play tutorial mode, or by any of the 3 million customers who purchased Wii Sports Resort as they sit through that three-minute opening video — that's a lot of electricity being sucked, that's a lot of rainforest acres burning to the ground. If the rain forest is going to burn as an indirect result of the things I do while eating pizza and drinking Coke Zero, for the love of God, at least let that thing I be doing be something like shooting alien brutes in the chest, arm, shoulder, or head.

While typing this, I remembered an example of a machine that tells me what to do — the elliptical trainer at my gym. It has a display that tells me my current heart rate, the length of time I've been running, the distance I've run, and how many calories, roughly, I've burned. Every minute, on the minute, the screen blanks out and a message slowly scrolls across:

"GRIP THE HANDLEBARS TO DISPLAY YOUR HEART RATE"

The message crawls so molasses-slowly that, when the screen at last flops back to useful status display, fifteen seconds have passed. This irritates me to no end. Wow. This is a better example than any of the other examples I've given.

So anyway. I've assembled a little list of things that games could do to make it so that I, their loyal customer and proponent of aesthetic cleanliness in all entertainment media, wouldn't feel patronized.

1. LET ME TURN THE TUTORIALS OFF. I am God. Damned. Tired. of starting a game, getting up to get a bottle of water, and coming back to see that the game has not loaded up to the title screen. Instead, it's frozen on the "THIS GAME SAVES DATA AUTOMATICALLY TO THE HARD DRIVE. PLEASE DO NOT EJECT THE GAME DISC OR UNPLUG THE CONSOLE WHILE THE HDD ACCESS INDICATOR LIGHT IS FLASHING." The word "OK". Is highlighted. You have to press a button to acknowledge that this is, indeed, OK with you.

Can't we just bury an option somewhere in the labyrinthine system settings menus: "I know that I must not remove a game disc or unplug the console while the HDD access indicator light is flashing; I understand that doing either of these things might result in lost or damaged data, and I fully accept the consequences if I should do either of these things — which I won't"?

Or, more to the point: when the Xbox 360 was first released, many gamers were surprised to find the console asking them, at initial configuration, what their preferred analog input method was for shooting games — normal or inverted. Why can't one of the system options control whether the player wants to see tutorials or not?

Or at the very least include the option somewhere in every game. For example, Dragon Quest IX, a game I love like a little sister, has one terrifying flaw: no matter what level you are on, a little icon sits on the touch screen at all times. It is shaped like an X button, with a little quill pen icon touching it. Beneath the X button and quill pen is the word "MENU". Oh. So you touch there to open the menu. Huh. And if you're not using the stylus, you can press the. . . X button! You can drag and move this little icon around the screen, though you can't get rid of it. At the very least, can't we make it something more abstract, something that looks like it belongs more on the screen? The game is proud of its obnoxious pixie character — why not make it a tiny sprite of the pixie girl? She could even be leaving a fairy-dust-trail. The kids would love that. Also, many other in-game functions can't be performed with the touch screen (like opening the game statistics menu). Why should the menu be any different?

2. BE MORE CLEVER ABOUT THE TUTORIALS. Let's say we have a game about zombies. Okay, zombies are boring. Let's say they are werewolves. No, let's say they are resurrected Roman Legionnaires afflicted with lycanthropy. Let's say your character is in a church. Thunder roars outside. "It is the full moon", the priest says. "They are coming". He hands you a pistol. "Get out the back door while you still can". The camera pulls over, showing us a back door. Our character is already stepping toward it when we resume control. We step out the back door.

We're on a staircase. The camera pulls away from us, zooms forward to the bottom of the staircase. A Werewolf Legionnaire shambles slowly up the steps. Okay, let's just admit that it's a zombie. (Werewolf Legionnaires will have to wait for another game :-) The zombie shambles up the first step. Maybe there are 32 steps. The camera flies back, reverting to the in-game over-the-shoulder view you're probably already used to.

Let's say you've played a lot of shooting games. You immediately whip the right analog stick around and shoot the zombie in the head. He dies. You walk down the stairs and continue the game.

Let's say you haven't played any shooting games. You take a step forward, onto the first step down. Or you stand there doing nothing, and the zombie steps up. The zombie steps into an invisible "trigger volume".

He triggers the event of a tutorial: text pops up on the screen: "Use the right analog stick to aim". You aim and shoot. Maybe you catch him in the arm, or the chest. Unfortunately, our game is one where headshots are the only way to kill an enemy.

You keep shooting at him, hitting him in the chest. He keeps advancing up the stairs.

As you shoot him in the chest, his head starts to expand. Eventually, it is sixteen times its original size. It is also red, glowing, pulsating. This is a subtle tutorial capsulized in a visual cue: try shooting him in the head now, and he explodes! Whoa! Yeah! So if I shoot guys in the chest, I can pump up their heads, and turn them into moving bombs!

Let's say, if the zombie reaches step #16, it triggers another tutorial, a much less subtle one: the priest bursts out of the door aiming a handgun at a zombie. He yells at you: "Shoot him in the head, you fool!"

There you have it — nothing like a mild insult to drive a point home.

3. MAKE SIMPLER GAMES. Again, not stupid games, or unsophisticated games. Just make games that are fun and simple, which use level design to convey the game designers' intellectual depth and visual elements that convey the game's narrative scope. Halo is simple — it's all about driving vehicles and shooting dudes. It's simple pleasures. Modern Warfare is as simple an FPS as they come as far as mechanics are concerned, and it couldn't possibly be a more spectacular game. These are games they take a simple idea and turn it into fantastic, million-selling games. And what about something like ICO, or Shadow of the Colossus? Sure, the latter has an on-screen icon that tells us if our character is holding his sword or his bow and arrow, even though we can just look at the character and see which one he's holding. (Someone on the team was probably solely in charge of "on-screen interface", and they didn't want him to feel left out.) Very simple games! They do a little bit of tutorializing, to be sure, though that's nothing idea #2 couldn't fix.

Look at games like Portal, or Out of This World — the latter of which is the best game of all-time (as far as I'm concerned). These are games that take one enthralling mechanic and utilize the structure of an entire game to realize its every relevant permutation. Maybe, if you feel like you have to put thirty-two guns with four alternate firing modes each into your game, maybe, if you feel like a particular thirty-foot hallway in a dungeon is "boring" so maybe you should put a spike pit and then a hookshot panel on the other side, forcing the player to see the hookshot panel and go "Oh. Hookshot." and then open his menu and equip the hookshot so he can swing across the pit — maybe this means that nothing in your game is any fun. Try and think about fun, not about the back of the box. We have a saying in the underground rock and roll scene: don't make T-shirts before you make songs (for fuck's sake). (The "for fuck's sake" is silent.)

Then there are games like Super Mario Bros. 3, where some of the things you can do with your limited move-set of running and jumping are so perfectly nuanced that they are unnecessary in the natural course of the game — like jumping on infinitely-spawning enemies and hovering using the button-mashing hover ability so that you can keep stomping them to infinity, earning extra lives. These kinds of things are wholly optional, and make you feel great to figure out. Games seldom do these sorts of things anymore — we have executive producers wanting to turn anything and everything into a "feature". If the Super Mario Galaxy team made Super Mario Bros. 3, there'd probably be a little rabbit sitting by the goomba pipe in 1-2 telling us "I wonder what happens if you use a RACCOON TAIL to HOVER and stomp a bunch of goombas in a row? . . . I bet you can get A LOT OF EXTRA LIVES."

4. BRING BACK THE INSTRUCTION MANUAL. When I was a kid, and I had much, much, much less money, buying a game was a cherished event. Whenever I got a new game, I had a silent tradition: I would read the instruction manual while eating a large bowl of Corn Pops. I loved doing this. I have some real great memories of this tradition, like that time I got Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest for ten dollars, brand new, and my big brother started a quest, naming the hero after himself, while I was still in the dining room eating my Pops. (I had no friends aside from Final Fantasy, my big brother, and Corn Pops.)

As many sources report these days with ample amounts of disbelief, the median age of the gamer is a little bit higher than seven and a half years — it's twenty-six. These are college graduates. They have jobs. They no longer ritualize the purchasing of each game, so they probably don't eat Corn Pops while reading the instruction manuals.

Wait — taking a paragraph break right here to shout-out to Corn Pops again! I haven't had them in years! I wonder if they're still as delicious as I remember, because I remember them as being mighty damn delicious!

So, yes. Instruction manuals are an after-thought. Why? Have you seen Wii Sports Resort's "manual"? It's a big poster-thing. I guess they're more worried about making the manual look like a toy of some sort, to keep people from tossing it in the trash along with, you know, all the other little trash-like flyers Nintendo stuffs into their games these days. Still, as far as a manual goes, it's not helpful. Give us something helpful.

On the Wii Sports Resort title screen, right there in the upper right corner, flashing huge, is a clickable icon: "Click here to watch the Wii MotionPlus tutorial video". That — along with the title of the game and "press A+B" — is the only text on the screen. How awkward. Why not make that say "Please read the manual, okay?"

5. SEPARATION OF TUTORIAL AND GAME. Or, how about you make that clickable icon on the Wii Sports Resort title screen "Click here to practice the games"? Make the tutorial something accessible from the title screen. That's how Splinter Cell Chaos Theory did it with their "training videos".

You might say that this would be irrelevant in the context of playing the game in a party setting, with people who've never played it before. Wow! I wonder what kind of parties you hang out at — the kind where everyone is dead sober and obsessed with winning? You must have some great birthdays, Poindexter!

Okay, maybe that was mean — I'm sure your name isn't really Poindexter. Let's agree, then, that they could make tutorials available on the screen that asks you to confirm and start the game. Games are 16:9 widescreen these days; that's a lot of screen real estate — enough to put an ever-present diagram telling me to make sure the Wiimote is strapped to my wrist — let's devote a little of that to "These Miis have never played this event before. Would you like to play a tutorial round?"

You know, instead of just pushing me straight into the tutorial mode because my Mii has not participated in Frisbee golf since the last time I turned my Wii off.

6. THAT THING NINTENDO IS DOING. You know, that pop-up tutorial thing. You press a button, and suddenly the game grafts a FAQ and a guidebook right there onto the screen. A Japanese game-designer friend of mine calls this idea "manuke moodo". "Moron Mode". There you have it. So long as it's a button I am never required to press, so long as there's not, like, some stupid owl or penguin or puffin or scarlet ibis screeching onto the screen every thirty-five seconds crowing in my face with a text box saying "Press the PLUS BUTTON to access MORON MODE, if you NEED HELP!" — so long as no NPCs in town jump up and say "Hey, if you need help, try pressing the PLUS BUTTON" — we'll all be fine and dandy.

IN CLOSING, I TALK ABOUT BLIND PEOPLE

I was washing my hands meticulously in a well-kept public toilet the other day, and around the thirty-third time I applied the soap, I noticed something peculiar: a loudspeaker perched right above the mirrors, pointing right out the door. It was blaring, at a psychosis-inducing volume: "THIS IS THE MEN'S REST ROOM. THIS IS THE MEN'S RESTROOM." I swear it just kept saying it, back to back, wall to wall, for five straight minutes. It took me a minute to realize this was for the benefit of blind people.

Honolulu is a relatively blind-friendly city. If you've ever been here, you've no doubt noticed the bright yellow raised sections of sidewalks. These are to assist cane-carrying blind people in navigating the city. People in general do lots of walking here. Blind people, naturally, do lots of walking as well.

One out of maybe every four crosswalks is equipped with a button that, when pressed, will cause a musical jingle to play out of a loudspeaker mounted near a traffic crossing. I always get irked out of my skull about these buttons, because some impatient guy is always standing there, jamming his finger on it, smoking a cigarette like it went out of style yesterday, huffing and puffing, wondering why the light doesn't change. The sign over the button says, in bold letters: "FOR BLIND PEDESTRIANS". It should also say "Will not make the light change faster, jackass."

At any rate: how do blind people know these exist? Well — they're blind. That they are out of their house without the assistance of a sighted relative indicates that they are somewhat used to being blind. Part of being used to being blind is being knowledgeable about one's surroundings. If you're blind, you have a friend or a family member guide you around town, and say, "there's a crosswalk here". "Does it have a crossing button?" "No, it doesn't." "Okay." "Here's another intersection." "Does it have a button?" "It does." "Where is it?" "It's right here."

I got an excellent idea, while writing this: why not install little radio signal emitters in crossing lights, so that blind people can clip a little receiver on their belt? When a light is green, they'll hear a chime of sorts. When they're near a restroom, they'll hear a friendly, soft voice explaining: "The men's room is on the right. The women's room is on the left".

Maybe they could do this for sight-enabled idiots, too. The government could announce a new initiative. They could say they're handing out radio devices with earpieces so that pedestrians can hear warnings on train platforms telling them not to get stuck in the door, in toilets telling them not to fall in, in their own bathtub, telling them not to bring a toaster, in McDonald's telling them not to spill their coffee, or on the supermarket escalator, telling them not to bring guns or knives.

One tidbit: every time you order a pizza from Dominos, they send you an email coupon for 15% off your next pizza. Why not just make the prices of the pizza 15% cheaper across the board? Answer: because, sometimes, people get lazy, and they don't bother to redeem the coupon.

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If you managed to read all the way to the end of this and feel as though you learned something, you are probably smarter than me.

I would like to ask you for suggestions for future articles.