What is the content of a videogame? If you want to find out, don’t ask Sean Malstrom, who is persistently inconsistent in his definition of “content”. In a recent post he claimed Mario’s content is about rescuing the princess, then turned around and said it’s about jumping and throwing turtle shells. (Is it the cutscene at the end or the playing beforehand?) He began his post stating that gameplay and graphics are somehow functionally identical, and therefore are not content, but finished it by bizarrely declaring FPS and RTS gameplay to be content! You can’t make this stuff up, folks. Let’s review a quick synopsis of this trainwreck:
…there is no fresh content in the Core Market. All the games are the same. Each new generation is the same exact content with new coats of paint. Gamers are no longer surprised.
Gameplay and “Graphics” are performing the same job
When games were being born, gaming was exploring all sorts of different content experiences. How about a video game about you being a railroad tycoon and you can make tracks and buy new trains? Sounds like fun!
Pretend the year was 1989, and you asked a child, “Why do you play Super Mario Brothers?” the child would enthusiastically respond, “To save the princess!”
But lo, a modern game developer would appear and say, “Child, that is not why you play Super Mario Brothers. You play the game because of a Pavlovian reward system that has been systematically metered out throughout the game.”
And right here he changes his definition of “Content”.
The content of the program grows depending on how much the player can interact with the program and the program reacting to the player.
A big reason why 2d Mario is way more successful than 3d Mario is because when Mario went to 3d the range of choices available to the player shrank. The player has to get the star a certain way. The player must go this direction or that direction. The player has to kill that monster. In 2d Mario, the player is free to choose his or her own way and his or her own style of play.
If Sid Meir is correct, then the choices in games need to be interesting. Deciding which bug to collect is not interesting. Deciding which weapon I am going to kill that monster with IS interesting.
So the content of a game is not just choices. It is INTERESTING choices.
Again, I insist that gameplay and graphics are one of the same. They are both parts of the stage. The gamer is the player. The interesting choices the player engages in (which exist in the player’s mind, not the developer’s mind) is the content of the game.
FPS games are rich with interesting choices. Do you attack with this weapon or that weapon? Do you use this angle or that angle? Do you stay on the high ground or sneak around on the low ground? Do you jump around like a bunny or do you snipe from the tower?
Let’s see if we can’t clean up this incredible confusion of ideas. What he calls interesting choices is actually the gameplay, which is the set of actions available to the player and the effect it has on the game environment. (When will he stop using words he doesn’t understand?) The other is subject matter, which is what the game is about. Two games can have the same gameplay, yet entirely different subject matter, or vice versa. (Picture a version of SMB that replaces Mario with a cowboy, and the goombas with cattle rustlers.) This confusion is why his readers keep asking him what this magical thing he calls “content” actually is. Sometimes it is subject matter, other times it becomes gameplay. Sean doesn’t seem to see the distinction!
When he says “… there is no fresh content in the Core Market.” he means they all have the same subject matter: You are a mercenary, you get betrayed, you get revenge. He may also mean that the interesting choices, or gameplay, does not vary that much either. Hardcore games do a lot of copycat stealing of each other’s gameplay mechanics.
And would somebody please stop Malstrom from abusing that poor hypothetical child by yelling game design at him? A game designer’s objective is to make their gameplay invisible, so the player will believe they are playing the game to rescue the princess, even though the neural feedback loop of learning new things about the game’s ruleset is objectively what they are enjoying. Game designers should be magicians. Who would shatter a child’s fantasy by pointing out the strings, or showing them the mirror under the table? That’s just cruel.
Not going to lie, David Copperfield is still pretty awesome.
Earlier 2D games did have more variety in subject matter. Heck, so did earlier 3D games. 3D Games from Starfox to Deus Ex have had interesting and different ideas to convey. Even hardcore gamers have complained about revisiting WWII too often, or inevitably being betrayed halfway through a game. War is an overused subject matter. Switching sides has been done to death. What Sean doesn’t want to admit is that to improve the subject matter of games, they’ll have to work on writing a better story. I don’t think he’s quite ready to swallow that bitter pill just yet!
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