Blog

Anyone who has had cause to contact a ‘Customer Service Representative’ from any company will be well aware that this is one experience to be dreaded. It’s akin to battling a hideous troll, only your weapons are your words, and their armour is their lack of understanding.

Although Microsoft are the newcomers of the ‘big three’ console manufacturers, they have been in the business of computing for over 20 years, in which time they have dealt with more than their fair share of consumer issues.

In light of this, you might think that Microsoft would have the experience and technical knowhow to provide an excellent standard of products and service to their valued customers. You might think that they would be well aware that providing an excellent product or service is only one factor of success, and that a company needs to provide support for the people who pay their bills when the inevitable happens.

Hardware reliability issues aside, the Xbox 360 is great product and Xbox Live is a great service. Now that Microsoft have taken the decision to ‘bite the bullet’ on Red Ring of Death issues and spend £500 million on extended warranties, they have bandaged their deepest wound and essentially removed the greatest source of negative criticism that has been directed towards the 360. Both the media and gamers in general have one less thing to moan about.

As someone who is on their third Xbox 360, I have had no choice but to call Microsoft on a few occasions. Although the lack of Xbox 360 consoles for a short time was a minor annoyance, I do own other games consoles which can satisfy my interactive entertainment needs. Coupling this with the fact that my faulty 360 was replaced relatively swiftly, painlessly and at no cost to myself, my opinion of Microsoft did not suffer because of this. Microsoft have a clear focus on rectifying their most prominent failing, but it’s a shame they don’t seem to share the same concern for other issues that their customers may face.

My first indication that Microsoft staff may not have been given sufficient training came when contacting them about a Digital Rights Management (DRM) issue. Microsoft’s problems with DRM have become much more well-known as of late, and they have finally done something to resolve people’s complaints on this matter once and for all, but a year-and-a-half ago the two Microsoft employees I spoke to about being unable to access Xbox Live Arcade games that were purchased on a different profile had no idea what I was talking about. In frustration, I gave up trying to get a solution from the people who should have been best poised to help me, and found the answer I needed on a random internet forum.

More recently, my wife’s Xbox Live subscription was due to be renewed and on my recommendation she bought a pre-paid Xbox Live Gold card from an online retailer, as this is cheaper than buying it directly from Microsoft by credit card. Nevertheless, Microsoft continued to try and take the money from an expired credit card (even after being advised of the situation), and when they were unable to take payment they cancelled her Xbox Live subscription that she had paid for herself through someone other than Microsoft.

The fact that they should be able to cancel a service that was not even purchased from them is absurd. The fact that it took several calls and broken promises ( “a manager will call you back in 48 hours”) for Microsoft to admit they’d made a mistake and that she was entitled to another 12 months of Xbox Live is ludicrous. At this point we tumbled down the rabbit hole and truly entered the fictional Wonderland…

Microsoft said they would give her a code, which she could use on the Xbox Marketplace to redeem 12 months of Xbox Live Gold membership. The only problem was that they had run out of codes… Lets think about that for a moment. Microsoft, the company who provides the Xbox Live service and generates the Xbox Live codes (which can be found in thousands of shops and websites) had Run. Out. Of. Codes.

Microsoft sorely need to realise that incidents like this can destroy faith in a company. It’s a well known fact that bad press spreads faster and farther than good press, so if Microsoft truly want to succeed in this generation they can’t try to dilute the nasty stuff with sweet stuff. Maybe rather than making some new gaming announcements at next week’s E3, Microsoft should pull a renewed commitment to customer satisfaction out of their collectives arses…

In the good old days, it was easy to tell who the casual gamers were. They didn’t really know much about games, and generally only had one or two titles in their collection. FIFA of some sort, and a racing game. Casual gamers weren’t good enough at games to ever threaten you but had just enough know-how to make you feel good after you beat them supremely.

But that was then. Nowadays, casual gamers are a group who’s boundaries are becoming increasingly blurred. What makes a casual gamer? Literally, it’s just someone who plays video games occasionally, not enough to warrant the term ‘gamer’. With the power of the Wii and DS bringing in more and more of these so-called ‘casual gamers’, I think it’s necessary for us to find out what we mean.

Most people who are buying the Wii purely for its universal playability are being labelled casual gamers, but I say that they just don’t cut it. A casual gamer is still a gamer. They’ll have a bit of background knowledge on a range of games, and the consoles to play them on. Chances are your grandmother probably won’t. A casual gamer could pick up a PS2 pad and instinctively know what to do. Your three year old sister would probably cover it in orange juice and sticky finger marks before moving on. So why are we calling them all casual gamers? Why do people insist on saying that things like the Wii are aimed at the ‘casual-gamer market’ when clearly the people they’re thinking of aren’t casual gamers at all.

A new term is needed to describe these people, be it ‘hardly-gamers’ or ‘barely-gamers’. Maybe even ‘rarely-gamers’, it doesn’t matter much. What does matter is we reinstate the divides between the different groups of gamers, so we know who we are talking about when we use the terms.

That isn’t to say the walls between should be rigid, unmovable things. People are free to interrupt World of Warcraft sessions with a quick round of Golf on Wii Sports. But knowing the differences between a casual, hardcore and rarely-gamer helps us to understand the reasons behind individual games, and their effectiveness. Unless we know who a certain game is aimed at, we may never discover it’s true value.

Picture a cave. It’s dark outside, but the smooth rock surrounding you provides comfort from the elements. A fire crackles before you, and the flickering, warm glow illuminates shadowy figures seated in a circle around it. Someone clears their throat, the storyteller begins to weave a tale, and as the threads of the story grip your imagination, reality fades away. Thus it has been since the dawn of time…

All terribly epic isn’t it? But the fact is that mankind has told stories for thousands of years. Gaming is just the latest evolution of the narrative method, but is it more Spot the Dog and Jackass: The Movie than War & Peace and Schindler’s List?

Gaming narratives will inevitably be compared to books and films, as they are the other significant storytelling mediums, and game-makers over the years have clearly taken inspiration from both of them when trying to tell a story. Can gaming ever live up to the tale-telling heights of other media? Should it be trying to?

I would argue that games should not necessarily try to be more ‘cinematic’, as this implies that the best games should aspire to be just like a film. Although as a primarily visual medium, gaming has more in common with movies than books. The interactivity of gaming is what defines it and what separates it from other artistic forms, and it’s also what gives it the potential to be so much better at creating a story that involves the player.

To look at how gaming stories are distinct from those of films or books, we need to first explore the many different types of gaming story. There are games where the gameplay dictates progression in the game; most First-Person Shooters would fall into this category. In these titles the story is usually nothing more than a backdrop to give the player motivation. The player still can make base-level choices, such as which weapons to use, or how to beat that boss, but they can have no real effect on the story or the way in which the game is played. Platformers such as Mario titles, and even Point-and-Click adventure games would also fall into this category, and in many ways this is the simplest gaming experience. All that exists is the goal, the way to achieve that goal, and the challenge of getting there.

The next type of game is one where the story is in control. These games have a clearly defined narrative structure, and the gameplay fits itself around the story. In these games you are often less able to make any tactical decisions yourself, as everything that you do usually has a meaning within the story. Examples of this are Zelda games or titles like Beyond Good and Evil. This may force the player to use certain weapons or items at certain times as the story dictates it.

Then there are games where the player is the primary controlling factor. Games like Mass Effect or Oblivion allow you to shape your character, choose how the game is played (i.e. using stealth, magic, diplomacy), choose the order or type of goals and often choose the motivations of the character. That isn’t to say that the story will not force the player’s hand from time to time, but the player is the basis of the games experience.

What do all these types of games have in common? It’s that the story is external to the gameplay. The gameplay itself does not create the story; rather the plot is expounded through text, dialogue or cut-scenes. This is not to say that the gameplay can have no effect on the plot, as many titles will now provide the player with branching plots. Ultimately, though the game may have multiple paths or endings there are only a limited number of possibilities.

Although the player may be allowed to make decisions that seem significant, in reality these are hardly more sophisticated than a ‘Choose-your-own-adventure’ book. Therein lies the problem with games trying to be better storytellers than books or films on their own terms. The defining feature of gaming is interactivity; interactivity means control, but if this control is limited to the number of branching storylines that a developer can create then gaming will never reach its full narrative potential.

There are many reasons why developers can only create a very finite number of narrative possibilities; these include limited budgets, limited resources, limited timescales, hardware limitations and of course, limited imaginations. So with all these insurmountable limitations, how could gaming ever hope to provide stories that live up to the medium’s limitless potential?

Emergent narrative is the answer. This is when the player creates their own story through the use of the gameplay mechanics that the title provides them with. Open-world or sandbox games provide the best examples of this, as do games that are essentially simulations.
“I followed the hooker down the alley and set her on fire with a Molotov cocktail. But a witness tried to call the police, so I stabbed him.” – Grand Theft Auto.
“I pick-pocketed the old man, but felt guilty because he only had 2 Gold, so I gave it away to a beggar” – Oblivion
“I was too busy cooking breakfast for my wife to make up for our argument last night, so I was late for work again and lost my job” – The Sims

These stories are not pre-scripted and the player is not forced to make any ‘Option A or Option B” choices. Although the player has almost complete freedom of choice in these situations, there are still limiting factors; these being the game mechanics and the Artificial Intelligence of non-player characters. Although AI in games is becoming increasingly more complex, currently AI characters still have a much more limited range of reactions than a human player.

This is where online gaming comes in. The added variable of the unpredictability of other human beings vastly increases the number of possible situations. Each of these situations is another story. The choices that the player can make (and the tales that can unfold) are now limited only by the mechanics of each particular game.

Clearly there are Massively Multiplayer Online games out there that are making progress in this direction already and virtual worlds such as Second Life are approaching reality in terms of the opportunities that they offer to the player, but there is still much work to be done.

Of course I am not suggesting doing away with more traditional and single-player game-types. Another of gaming’s strengths as an artistic medium is its diversity, and it’s sometimes nice not to have to make choices and to simply watch a story unfold before you.

Cinematic and immersive games like the Half-Life’s and Metal Gear Solid’s of the gaming world can still provide fantastic experiences for the player, but for gaming to really reach its full potential to give every player a unique, personalised and truly interactive experience, we need to see more online titles whose game mechanics give players true freedom.

Picture that cave again. Only this time we’re in a game. You can choose to listen to the story being told, you can run outside, you can fall asleep, you can murder everyone around you, or you can begin to tell your own tale… The possibilities are endless…

Gaming is huge. Gaming is massive. Gaming is ginormous.

In the UK the videogame industry generates more revenue than either movies or music, and it’s fast catching up with DVD sales. Not bad for a revolutionary new form of media that has been available commercially for less than forty years.

Gaming does offer exceptional value for money, typically providing over an hour of entertainment for each pound they cost. This may be one of the reasons that the gaming industry is booming even whilst consumers tighten their spending on other ‘luxuries’ in the wake of the worldwide financial crunch.

That said, with games retailing for up to £50 they hardly fall into the category of an impulse buy. Some casual gamers might pay out for a game based on the box art and the words on the back of the case, but most gamers are a bit more discerning with their purchases.

This is where game reviews come in. As well as (hopefully) providing a critical analysis of the game being reviewed, they should also help you determine whether that title you have your eye on is really worth parting with cold, hard cash for. Game reviews are BIG business…

To provide another comparison to other forms of media – book, film and music reviews often do not end with a final score, and if they do then it’ll usually be nothing more than a cursory ‘out of 5 stars’ analysis. In contrast, the score has become the focal point of game reviews, with many commenters and forum-goers of gaming sites admitting they simply skip reading the text and just look at the score.

THIS MUST STOP!

The text should be the most important part of the review as it contains the reviewers’ actual observances and opinions. The text should justify the score, but ideally the reader should be able to formulate their own opinion of the game after reading the review anyway. Scores are useless for judging games that may polarise opinions, or otherwise brilliant titles that suffer from one fatal flaw.

Score aggregator sites such as Gamerankings and Metacritic are fine to get a rough idea of the general feeling about a game, but you can’t really know whether a game may float your boat without actually reading a review. Review scores have been given a level of undue importance by the games industry, both by publishers handing out discretionary bonuses to developers based on how well their title scores, and more recently by Microsoft making Metacritic score one of the deciding factors on which XBLA games will be axed.

This overemphasis on the little number at the end of a reviewer’s critique is in danger of invalidating the very objective of reviewing. With many reviewers at major magazines and websites being offered various ‘sweeteners’ by publishers such as free flights, free merchandise, exclusive ‘first-looks’/previews and of course the right to review the finished product before anyone else, many review scores are being artificially inflated. This has resulted in some outlets’ average score now being 7/10 (*cough* IGN *cough*).

You could argue that with increased production values and more experienced developers that the average game is now better than ever before. But shouldn’t our definition of what makes an ‘average’ game evolve too? Should a game be rated in comparison to other games available in that genre, in comparison to all games, or just on a scale of how much the reviewer enjoyed playing it? These are difficult questions with no easy answers, which is maybe why we need a definitive method of gaming criticism.

The score is not the only problem that games reviews have, as many reviews focus too much on the ‘what’ and not enough on the ‘why’. They will state that ‘this feature is really fun’, but they’ll forget to add the all-important word ‘because…’. With constructive criticism like this reviews can ideally serve the additional purpose of being feedback for games developers.

So are there any solutions to the mess that game critics find themselves in? The few publications such as EDGE who have toyed with removing review scores altogether have received public outcry, so this doesn’t appear to be an option. Making the scores visually smaller can help, but putting the score on a completely separate page could result in even more people skipping past the text.

At the end of the day reviewers just have to do their best to present an objective, critical view of a game and let the public make their own mind up. A heartfelt plea to actually READ what we write couldn’t go amiss though…

So it’s June and we’re starting to see some advance reviews of the PS3’s flagship title Metal Gear Solid 4 trickle in now. Unsurprisingly it’s garnered some pretty high review scores, and this got me thinking about objectivity.

The difficulty with reviewing a game such as MGS4 is that it’s such a heavily plot-centric title that previous experience is necessary, but this in turn means that if the reviewer has played and enjoyed previous titles in a series then it will be difficult for them to provide an unbiased opinion.

Take as an example the IGN UK review of MGS4 that resulted in the horribly pretentious score of 9.9. While I can’t argue with the score, I do question how useful this review would be to an MGS virgin. Talk of tying up loose ends, reprisals of previous characters and locations, being evocative of previous titles, reiterating themes, fan service and Hideo Kojima moments are all meaningless to someone who is pickup up an MGS game for the first time.

Clearly at the end of the day a review is just one person’s opinion, but it also serves the purpose of helping a consumer decide whether a game is worth buying. MGS4 is not really being reviewed as a standalone game in this instance; it’s simply being viewed as a part of the whole series.

But what is the solution to this conundrum?

I would suggest that reviews for games such as this should include a ‘second opinion’ review and score from someone who has never played a title in the series before, although I understand there would be difficulties associated with this approach.

So does that mean I think the review scores of all sequels are skewed by the reviewer’s experience of the franchise? No. But MGS is pretty much the vision of one man and the finale of a series with more twists than a pigs tail.

To give a few comparisons - GTA4 requires no prior knowledge, in Halo 3 the plot is very much secondary to the gameplay and can be largely ignored and Mario Galaxy is pick-up-and-play. The enjoyment of these games is largely unaffected by whether you’ve played previous titles.

Would MGS4 get a 9.9 score from an MGS virgin? I can’t say for sure but I’d imagine it’s about as likely as a Kaz Hirai & Shane Kim love-in.

P.S. There are many more important issues regarding review scores in the gaming industry that I may touch upon in future blogs, but reading IGN’s unobjective MGS4 review really kicked off this train of thought.