Klobb's Posterous

Ricky Haggett  //  I make videogames and run a small indie developer in North London called Honeyslug.

 
Feb 4 / 4:48pm

Dumbing Down is Ruining Videogames

Late last night, tired, grumpy and bored, I decided to check out Capcom's game 'Ghost Trick' on iPad, having heard a bunch of people raving about it on Twitter. About half an hour later, I tweeted the following:

Damnit Ghost Trick, yet another game that can't shut up & let me play for even 5 seconds. Destroying all surprise and wonder with shit text.

and:

This dumbing down of modern videogames; treating players like they must be very, very stupid is basically ruining them for me.

 

If you've not played Ghost Trick before, and you have an iOS device, you could follow along! Go grab the game (it's free to download) and play through the first bit. I'm not going to spoil what happens in Ghost Trick, because the game does a perfectly good job of doing that itself. In summary, it  has a central mechanic which is neat and clever, the surprise of which is entirely ruined for the player by the game explaining it all with text boxes in exhaustive and repetitive detail.
Ghost_trick_bmp_jpgcopy-620x

I'm not sure how we got to this point, but over the past ten years or so, I've heard the opinion expressed by a number of folks in the games industry  that, 'people are stupid', so I guess that has something to do with it. I don't think people are stupid. I think the interfaces to games are sometimes stupid, and need a load of text to explain how they work, but actually, that isn't the case with Ghost Trick..

Hey, if you were playing a game on a touchscreen device, and you saw a glowing thing on screen with the word 'YOU' underneath, and another glowing thing nearby, what would you do? How long would it take you to try dragging from one glowing thing to another, to see what would happen? Well the people who made Ghost Trick didn't think their players would be up to this, so they have a load of text explaining it. This has two main effects:

  1. it makes the opening section of the game REALLY slow and boring.
  2. it destroys any impact of surprise and wonder implicit in the game mechanics and level design.
If only this phenomenen was limited to Ghost Trick! I was ostensibly moaning about that game, but thinking also of another game I tried to play recently - Skyward Sword, which is perhaps even more guilty of ruining its fun for players. I'm not going to elaborate on that, because Tim Rogers has done a great job of that for me, here in points 3 and 4:  (recommended reading). 
Ghost_trick_by_sii_sen
(nice fanart from here)

Here two practical suggestions for game developers worried that if they don't explain everything to their players, they will get stuck:
  1. Have an option at the start of the game, to the effect of 'have you played a videogame before / do you want lots of help / are you a moron who needs to be told everything three times? YES / NO'.
  2. Trust the player enough to at least give them a chance to figure out how to do a thing before you tell them how to do it. Then if they haven't done it after a certain amount of time, you could ask 'Hey, it looks like you're stuck - would you like some help?'
Postscript
So some people replied to my tweets, to the effect of 'yes but it's an adventure game and the writing is good'. To which I'd say.. hmm, wow...  I guess I'd say a few things:
  1. I know I said the text was shit but I wasn't really making a comparative judgement call on the quality of the text.
  2. .. but since we're talking about it, what exactly are we comparing it with? I've been reading Charles Dickens' Great Expectations recently, and the text in that is really, really good - if I were in the market for reading, I would just finish that! When are we going to stop being apologists for objectively average writing in a game just because it happens to be better than in the majority of videogames?
  3. I'm pretty good at reading. Actually very good - I've been doing it most of my life. I can read fast and accurately, even the big words. So I really resent someone else deciding how quickly I can read. If you can't give me the words as fast as I can read them, I don't care how well they are written, I just don't want to bother.
  4. I wasn't actually complaining about the writing directly. In Ghost Trick the writing is really just the medium by which the surprises in the game are ruined. It could just have easily been ruined with text-free diagrams.
I did say I was tired and grumpy.

 

2 comments

Feb 05, 2012
phanboy_iv said...
It's my take that if you have to explain to people how to play your game like this, the front end of your game is badly designed.

Period.

Feb 05, 2012
Ricky Haggett said...
If you have to, then yes that's true. But here's the crazy thing: I'm pretty sure that the front-end of Ghost Trick works fine, and that the visual cues and structure of the opening level would work fine for educating the player, without all the text they throw at you..

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