Why Zelda is not an RPG (And why Halo is not, either)

If you like to talk about video games or even just listen to other people talk about video games, chances are you've heard someone argue about what makes an RPG an RPG. And you will hear a lot of varying answers and may conclude that there's just no real definition.

Genres. Who needs 'em, anyway?

Recently, on a game dev forum, there was a discussion about what favorite aspects of roguelikes. Shortly into the thread, we realized we were all talking about a different genre. Well, you can't talk about what you like about roguelikes if you can't even define what a "roguelike" is.

And before you claim "Sure you can! Everyone can just use their own definition!" Well, that's a bit pointless. If we wanted to talk about our favorite qualities of foxes, because someone wanted to create their own fantasy fox breed, and I said "I like how they live in the water, have gills, and eat smaller foxes to survive. It's cool when their fins come out of the water, too." How is that helpful? I could just say "Well, my definition of shark and fox is the same thing. So it's only fair that I use my own definition of fox and not one that we all agree upon."

As you can see, there are times when you really do need to define things.

So, users on the forum started trying to define "roguelike," and some people claimed that the definition should be kept vague. It ended up bursting into a string of people saying "By that definition, Halo is a roguelike." Then everyone would just compare ever definition of "roguelike" used in the thread to Halo and see if it worked. People got mad.

However, this is the correct way of going about things.

The purpose of genre is to distinguish different things. The purpose of categorizing anything is to distinguish. So if you can't distinguish between things using your definitions, you need to define your categories better.

It's like taxonomy. What makes Periplaneta burnnea (the brown cockroach) different than Periplaneta americana (the American cockroach)? Most people would say, "Hell, I don't care. They're both roaches and pretty much the same." And most of the time, that would be fine. But there are certain times in which you must say one is a different species than another -- that's the entire reason we have taxonomy. Without it, we couldn't study biology properly.

If you're talking about why you like RPG's, you're talking about why you like them compared to other games. If there's nothing to define it and separate RPG's from other games, what are you even talking about? You're just talking about what you like about games in general.

And we can't just have a vague description. If we just said "Well, if they have legs and crawl around, it's a cockroach." Then, well, your pet dog is a cockroach and an elephant is a cockroach, too. And obviously, that doesn't work for most people, and would make a conversation about cockroaches quite difficult, if anything that fits that definition could be a cockroach.

So if we want to talk about RPG's, we have to define what an RPG is, or else we're all just talking about elephants and sharks when we're trying to talk about roaches. And we have to define it very specifically.

With that out of the way, let's talk about what actually makes something an RPG.

Just what is an RPG?

Firstly, people will look at the name "Role Playing Game." One of the most unproductive things I hear in these kinds of discussions is the "obvious" fact that RPG's must be a game in which you "play a role."

Of course, that not only is so vague it barely makes sense, but it's very rare that you don't play a role in a game. You play the role of Sonic in Sonic the Hedgehog. You play the role of a soldier in Call of Duty. You could even say you play the role of a doctor in Dr. Mario. Does that mean those games are RPG's? If you don't think so, your definition of what makes an RPG is flawed and needs some work. Remember, we need to find a definition that separates the games we call "RPG" from other games.

Then there are some arguments that seem to make some more sense. People will think about RPG's and try to find things they all have in common. Well, you level up, you collect weapons, you take turns, etc. This puts you on the right track. But of course, you need to think about how disputable these things are.

You take turns in Checkers. Is Checkers an RPG? You level up in Halo's multiplayer. Is Halo multiplayer mode an RPG mode? You collect weapons in Grand Theft Auto. Is Grant Theft Auto an RPG? Also, are these things true in all RPG's? You don't collect weapons in Pokémon. You don't take turns in Secret of Mana. You don't level up in Romancing SaGa. But those are all considered RPG's by a vast majority of people.

At this point, there are lazy people who give up and say "RPG doesn't really mean anything, then, I guess!" But then, why would we even have such a term in the first place? And are all these people who consider themselves RPG fans just playing whatever games come their way and pretending they have an interest in a certain genre?

Of course not! A big problem is that the term is used incorrectly or loosely in casual exchange -- but this doesn't mean we can't define it! It just means we're going to have a lot of frustrating opposition (like with the examples above, and whatever else people may want to throw our way).

Let's look at the early history of the genre. Role-Playing Games actually start out as just that -- games that revolved around creating a fantasy in your head and acting it out. Now, as children, we just call this "playing make-believe" or "playing house" or something like that. But when older people do it with a set of rules and turn it into a sort of strategy-based game, we called it "role-playing games." It was still a group of friends getting together and making up a story together, pretending to be in that story, but now it was a bit different.

Made famous by games like Dungeons and Dragons, it's no surprise that fans of these games who came to love the numbers and statistic crunching involved in those structured make-believe sessions to see the computer world as a great opportunity to expand on this. With a computer, you could have even more complex rules and formulas without having to worry about calculating them yourself and distracting from the fantasy world you were creating.

But the computer opened up another opportunity -- you could create a single-player campaign! It would have to be a little more structured, but just create your world and a story, and allow the player to experience it in the same way as they did while playing a pen-and-paper game like Dungeons and Dragons by building their character, interacting with things in the way they wanted, and rolling virtual dice (which don't even need to be displayed anymore) to determine their success... Now you could share your creative worlds, or experience a friend's, without having to get a group of dedicated followers together twice a week. It was a gaming miracle!

Of course, the popularity of this kind of software quickly spread, and people started to create all kinds of games using these systems. People enjoyed the actual numbers gameplay and character building so much that a lot of the storytelling aspect was lost in favor of things like exploring massive dungeons that you had to map out with a pencil and graph paper in order to win.

Of course, as computers became more powerful, we didn't have to describe the environments with text anymore. We could display a graphical world for the user to explore. And as technology advanced to what it is today, we were able to even tell a cinematic story along with the gameplay. So, that aspect of creating your own make-believe characters and adventures in your head has been somewhat lost in certain types of computer RPG's today, while parts of it retain in free-roaming RPG games like the famous Elder Scrolls series, where the game is like a very, very illustrative Dungeon Master. We still, however, lose the spontaneous creative quality of playing with humans.

So through all of this, what factor brought over from those tabletop imagination games has stuck around? What has never gone away or changed, that we could say "makes" an RPG what it is? What quality do these games have that other games, both then and now, didn't have?

Numbers. The beautiful numbers!

Well, if you go to you're friend's Vampire: The Masquerade night and take away all the humans, what are you left with? No, not vampires. Well, you have a bunch of rules, a bunch of numbers, and some dice.

All games have rules, of course, but what make the rules of an RPG different from that of another game? I mean, basketball has rules, too. So does golf. But of course, those aren't the same type of game! What makes them different? Well, the rules and equipment you use. What makes RPG's different from other games is like that, too!

Open any RPG book at your local bookstore or hobby gaming store, and read the rules. They will completely cover how to make and build characters within the rules, and how to determine success of actions. They'll also tell you how to tell good stories and work together, but again, we're using the computer to replace that human interaction part now.

And those things are what all those numbers and the dice are for. Still, all video games have numbers and formulas (Pac-Man uses numbers to track your score and number of credits, and even the speed of the game), and almost all video games have some kind of random number generation (Damn you, Clyde!!)

So those rules that tell us how to use those things--that must be what sets an RPG apart from other games. And indeed, in all my time working to find a good definition of what makes a video game an RPG, this has proven to be the best answer.

In an RPG, the numbers are not already determined for you. In an RPG, an important part of the game is being able to influence those numbers on your own. When you played the pen-and-paper games, all your friends' characters leveled up together -- but when Frank's mage leveled up and Susan's warrior leveled up, they didn't grow stronger in the same way. Why? Frank and Susan got to choose how those numbers affected their characters. The numbers were user-influenced. Mario is going to have the same running speed no matter how fast you want him to run. Mega Man can only shoot three bullets at a time no matter how much you want him to shoot more.

Now, we're still going to run into problems with using this as our definition of RPG's. If just having user-influenced variables made a game an RPG, then a ton of games could be an RPG again. In Dance Dance Revolution, I can influence the difficulty of the song by choosing a difficulty level (which is represented by a number), as well as alter my score by stepping on arrows at the proper time. Hey, I'm influencing values, right? Well, of course, that's not an RPG.

So let's think again about those rules. What makes the user-influenced numbers so different in an RPG? Let's think back to those rulebooks and what we're doing with the numbers.

There's a core difference that we haven't mentioned -- remember those dice? That's right, the entire point of these numbers is to use them with those dice. In an RPG, our "stats" determine whether our actions succeed or fail, and to what extent they do. When we want to do something difficult, we roll a check. When we attack a monster, we roll a check. And when we hit? We roll for damage.

That makes our numbers a bit different. We now have user-influenced variables that are used for the purpose of combining with random numbers to determine our success and level of success. And when you think about the actual gameplay elements of an RPG, the stuff we're using the computer for, that's pretty much the entirety of it.

An important part of this definition is that these random numbers combined with our influenced variables determine our success. What determines if we succeed at an action and how well we succeed is not anything else. In Karaoke Revolution, what determines if we pass the song is how much our voice stayed in pitch. In DOOM, what determines if we hit our enemy is our aim, not our accuracy value plus a dice roll.

In a non-RPG, you will have pretty much the same success rate defeating a boss or attacking it no matter how your random numbers or user-influenced turn out. Even if in a first-person shooter, there is a random amount of damage done to an enemy when shot, and you can level up your shot power, killing that enemy may take you between 5 and 10 shots. No matter what. 5 if you're lucky or powered yourself up a lot, 10 if you're unlucky or haven't powered yourself up a lot.

But in an RPG, it's not like that. My character, who I purposely didn't level, so they're only level 2, and I put my few points into magic, may take 24,593 attacks to defeat a boss with my normal attack. But my friend, who is level 100 and poured all their points into strength, could defeat it in one hit! That's a very different experience even though we're playing the same game -- and the entire reason it is different is because the core system of the game is about these user-influenced variables mixed with random numbers determining our success.

Any game can have some numbers and random influence, but when it's the core system and those numbers significantly determine the success rate and severity of success instead of your ability to press buttons in timing or something, and what takes you from the beginning to end of the game is your personal manipulation of those numbers and choice on how to use them -- that's an RPG.

Now, there is a sub-genre of RPG in which action can play a major factor in certain pass/fail situations. Mostly this has to do with replacing dodging/accuracy with the players actual timing. For example, in Kingdom Hearts, if you run out of the way of an enemy's attack, you will not get hit. So you could argue that your timing abilities are a key element here, which they are. But the fact remains that a player who created a magic-focused Sora and is level 55 is going to have a very different experience fighting a boss than a defense-focused Sora at level 7 fighting the same boss. When the experience changes greatly depending on the way these user-influenced variables and random numbers are put together, the game can be categorized as an RPG. Even if there's action involved, that core of user-influenced values changing the game greatly is what creates that action-RPG subgenre.

But Link has a sword, guys!!

But wait! You don't like my definition, because you love The Legend of Zelda, and that's totally an RPG! But my definition doesn't fit Zelda, so it must be wrong. There must be something missing from my definition, because this really cool RPG that everyone loves can't even be qualified in that way! It's not fair to say it's not an RPG just because Link doesn't level up! He still gets swords and new weapons that change how much damage he does!

Oh, I've heard it all. First, if you're going to stretch the definition of your categories, you have to make sure that all games that fall into this new stretch you are willing to accept as an RPG.

Link gets new weapons that make him better. Yes, and I get new parts for my car in Gran Turismo that make it better.

Link does different amounts of damage depending on what weapons he has. Spencer does more damage in Bionic Commando depending on what weapons he has.

Link can explore a big world with dungeons and stuff in it while collecting items that help him on his quest. Olimar and Louie explore a big world with dungeons and stuff in it while collecting items that help them on their quest in Pikmin 2.

In the game, you play the role of the character Link. In Kirby's Epic Yarn, you play the role of the character Kirby (and hey, it even says "Epic" which describes RPG's, right??) ...

The aspects that people claim make Zelda an RPG usually apply to almost any gave ever.

Let's look at the history of games like The Legend of Zelda. I consider the game to be an action-adventure game. This is another term that gets used loosely, and I don't want to go into it as much as I've gone into defining RPG here.

Do you remember the classic adventure games? A lot of people called them "point-and-click adventures," and that's still the true definition of an adventure game. You don't even have to go on an adventure, really. An adventure game is test of the player's wit. There is a puzzle that is solved by clicking on various things and seeing how they interact with your click. Sometimes you solve mini-puzzles. There is a specific solution, and every time you play the game, you must use that solution to win. Remember MYST? That's a perfect example. Even though you can kind of explore the world and everything, you don't progress until you solve the puzzle in order. These games always have a "solution" that is defined and rigid.

You can even experience these pretty easily by playing something like the classic Crimson Room online.

Now what if you took that type of game, and instead of clicking, you threw a user-controlled moving character on there? And now instead of clicking on a box, you moved your character over to the box and pressed an interaction button? Yeah, you just created an action-adventure game. And sure, you can have some combat in there, but there were point-and-click adventures with combat (you'd click on an enemy many times to defeat it, or in a game like Clock Tower, click on things in the environment to attempt to use those to attack, or if you have things in your inventory, they'd automatically be used at certain points...)

The action aspect of action-adventure games makes for all kinds of new and interesting ways to solve the puzzle, but you're still just solving a giant long puzzle, and that's the key gameplay system. Zelda is a lot closer to MYST or Dreamfall than it is Final Fantasy or Persona. In fact, Zelda is closer to Super Mario 64 than it is to an RPG...

In conclusion, if you're going to categorize games into genres, these genres must be unique in that only games you want to put into that group can fit. If other games that you don't consider a part of your genre fit all the requirements you have for your genre (In Halo, you play the role of a character, explore a world, collect items, fight, and power yourself up! It must be an RPG, right?) then your genre definition is flawed and you need to reconsider. There is no point or use for a vague or undefined genre or category.

In the same way, you can't create definitions that don't apply to all games in your genre. You can't say "An RPG must have this!" when there are RPG's that don't have that quality.

So in order to create a proper genre definition, you must create a list in which all games of that genre (ever last one!) contain every quality you define, and in which no games outside of that genre (none at all!) contain any of those qualities you define.

Of course, you can have sub-genres within genres and stuff. Like Illusion of Gaia, Final Fantasy Tactics, Dragon Quest, Secret of Mana, Eternal Eyes, and Lost Odyssey are all RPG's by my definition. But there are things that set them apart from one another... So we can say when there are certain elements, games like Illusion of Gaia and Secret of Mana can be Action-RPG, Dragon Quest and Lost Odyssey can be turn-based RPG... and even further, a sub-sub-genre of turn-based RPG can fit Tactics and Eternal Eyes and we can call that Strategy RPG or whatever.

It's a lot like biological taxonomy, if you recall. A tree, mushroom, and frog are all certainly living things, but they're in completely different kingdoms. But not all plants are trees, either. And not all animals are frogs. And then even among amphibians there are things other than frogs. And then there are different kinds of individual frogs... there are tons of sub-sub-sub-sub-groups.

Because of that, I've found that the best definition for an RPG in video gaming is a game in which the core system revolves around the fact that there are user-influenced variables, and the success of a player's choices is solely based upon calculating and comparing these variables in combination with random number generation. When the player's experience can change greatly and the success rate of actions is changed significantly depending on these user-influenced values, the game is an RPG.

By this definition, I cannot think of games that don't hold this definition that I would still want to call RPG, and I cannot think of games that hold this definition that I would not want to call RPG. So I feel that I have settled on a currently-working definition of the RPG genre in video games. And I would be more than happy to change or tweak it if I find games that break my definition in either aspect (RPG's that don't fit it, or non-RPG's that do).

This is how classification and categorization work. There's no other way to do it, or else you're missing the whole point of classifying things. And there are times when things need to be classified. So make sure when you do classify things, you categorize responsibly!

Polish makes a bad game good

I have been wanting to write an article about polish being the most important part of game design, but after Capcom's release of Street Fighter x Mega Man yesterday, I feel like I really need to write it now. (By the way, the game is completely free, so go download it on Capcom-Unity's Mega Man website!)

Polish is a word that gets thrown around a lot in the games industry, but it's not often I hear people really trying to define it. Sometimes people try and don't end up saying much of anything. When I try to define it myself, I find it's pretty hard to describe exactly what makes a game polished, even though I feel like I could easily identify when one is and one isn't.

Polish is what makes a game "feel right." Think about how annoying it is when you're playing a platformer game, and you press the jump button, but there's a slight delay before your character actually jumps. This lag is frustrating, because even though the action was performed, there was something about it that didn't feel right. You didn't feel like you had proper control of the game.

But there are other things beside the controls that won't "feel right" unless they are implemented properly. There are a lot of issues I like to call "big polish" that developers and gamers talk about--things like making sure the controls work, the game doesn't lag a lot... essentially, making the game as free of error as possible. But there's also the "little things." Things that don't change the game whatsoever, that people don't notice until its gone.

Where did this come from?!

Let's look at a game like Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), a game that a lot of people complain about. When you walk into the loading zone for a new stage or select a mission from a character dialogue or whatever, a loading screen suddenly appears. There is no transition whatsoever. You're just walking along, exploring the city, looking for secLOADING SCREEN!! It's really disorienting and strange. Even if you know you're about to go into a new area, it feels so sudden.

But let's look at Super Mario Bros. 3 for the NES. Nintendo games are known for their polish, and they've been doing it forever. When you move your character around the map, he makes little noises and moves smoothly from location to location. He doesn't just pop up. And when you are over a level you would like to enter, you can press a button to start that level. You will hear a confirmation sound, and there is a screen transition effect. You feel like you're moving from the map screen as you hear that sound and watch the screen get wiped away, ready to be replaced by the stage you wanted to play.

I can hear the sounds just looking at the screencaps...

That's polish. Even though they could have just suddenly dropped you in the level with no transition whatsoever, and the game would still work exactly the same, and the actual "fun" part of the game (running around levels, avoid obstacles, reaching the goal) would not be changed at all, the game experience would be lessened by these jarring transitions.

And what if the game was full of uncomfortable transitions and things that looked and felt odd? Even if the core game was the same, the levels were laid out exactly the same, the game controlled just as well... imagine if you just appeared in the next level with no introduction at all, no music played until halfway through the stage, and Mario didn't animate when he ran (he just kind of scooted around in a standing position!) and stuff like that. The part of the game that is supposed to be "fun," the actual challenge and gameplay, would still be 100% in-tact. But the game would be a lot less fun. It would constantly feel awkward and frustrating, even though we're doing the exact same thing.

A lack of polish can make a great game into a bad game. I plan to write a series of articles about unpolished games that I think are excellent, such as Mega Man X7(which had, in my opinion, better stage and weapon designs and gameplay concepts than all the other second-half Mega Man X games, but is largely regarded as the worst) or UNLIMITED:Saga (A genius, beautiful role-playing game that's very rough around the edges, scoring miserable reviews around the map). But today I want to talk about another topic.

I believe that you can have a bad or mediocre game, and throw enough polish onto it that it becomes a "good" game.

Just like hearing a noise and watching a screen transition "feels right" in Super Mario Bros. 3, like I mentioned, polish overall just feels good. We like the sound of entering a level. When we use a potion in Final Fantasy, we hear a joyful chime and watch those pretty green numbers pop up, as our hit points rise up quickly to their new total like a slot machine. All of these things combined--the sound effects, the color effects, the spinning numbers, the fact that we "recovered," watching a number change to a higher number--they all release endorphins into our brain and make us happy. It just feels good. It doesn't even have to be something that we accomplished in the game--the polish makes us happy.

Flying numbers and letters everywhere! Feels great!!

When a game is full of these kinds of things, we're going to be happy all the time while we're playing it. And even if there's nothing spectacular about the game's design--even if it's bad--you're going to feel happy and enjoy playing it.

Now let's look at Street Fighter X Mega Man, the latest entry in the Mega Man series which follows our blue hero as he goes through stages beating up the Street Fighter characters much like in his old adventures against the baddie robots. A lot of people are complaining about the game right off the bat. Of course, people always complain about the most recent stuff, but this time, I think there are a lot of legitimate complaints floating around. This game has a lot of unpolished edges.

One of Mega Man's most iconic enemy character designs is the Mettaur, often called Met for short. It's a little hard had lying on the ground. It can lift the corner of its hat up, revealing eyeballs underneath, and shoot some bullets out. The added feet to them shortly so they could walk a little after shooting. Over time, they've made tons of styles, but we always have our basic Met.

Now, if you've played a Mega Man game, you know that Mets have a certain pattern to the way they work. They'll stay under their little helmet until you approach them. Once you get within a certain (exact, by the way) distance, they will pop up and shoot at you. If you shoot at them when the helmet is down, your bullet bounces off of them with a little "clink!" sound, the helmet rattles a little, and they will stay hiding.

Now, when you're playing the game, other than the basic pattern, you don't think too much about this. But all of those little things make you happy because they make a lot of sense. If a bullet hits it, it would clink, and the helmet would shake. And the little guy would probably keep hiding. All of those things just feel right.


See? It's cute.

But in Street Fighter x Mega Man, the Mets don't work exactly this way. When the bullets hit them, they still clink, but the helmet doesn't rattle. They also don't have their old A.I. They just kinda pop open and closed on an interval. We've been playing Mega Man for 25 years, and suddenly they change this? In Mega Man 10, you had to get closer to a Met than normal before it would pop open. But it was only the distance that changed--the mechanics still functioned like they were supposed to. Why would they take a step backward and make the most basic enemy less interesting? This lack of polish, not even bothering to relate the experience to the previous 10 major games. It's almost like putting a big stamp on the front of the game that reads "We didn't even try this time!"

But the Mets are a more minor example. There are plenty of series mainstays and things that were just left out. When you select a stage, instead of seeing the boss enemy make a pose, they just stand there and repeat a default standing animation. When you press start at the beginning of the game, you're not prompted to choose a new game, password entry, difficulty setting, whatever. The options menu is reduced to a marquee that blinks the different options at the bottom of the screen on the pause menu (Press F4 for display options!) If you want to know what each option is, you have to sit and wait and stare at it, hoping the option you want appears.

Polish works because we expect it. We've been trained to. When we click on menu options, we expect sound effects. When we land on the ground, we expect to hear a thud. When we use a potion, we expect sparkles. Stuff like that.

Mega Man is am even more critical case because the series has been building for 25 years. We've come to expect a lot from the series, especially with the most recent installments. We expect things to work a certain way, and when they do, that contributes to those endorphins that help us enjoy the game.

When the game doesn't do those things we're expecting, we suddenly feel off. We're distracted from the experience that we're supposed to be having. We're not thinking about how fun it is to jump and shoot and clear stages and fight bosses. We're thinking about why the Met opened before we expected, why half the enemies in this stage are a fire demon, why Rush controls so awkwardly (and only in a forced-scrolling segment), why pressing escape just kills the game and there's no other way to exit, and why the shutter felt weird when we opened it.


Exactly how many fire guys will they cram in this stage?

And it's not just things that are missing from previous games--enemies in general seem "stupid." When they move, you can almost see the route that was drawn for them. They don't feel like a bad robot trying to attack us, they feel like a sprite on a path that was programmed to be in the way so we could play the game. You can feel the way the game was built, and that's a product of a lack of polish.

When things like this distract us from the game experience, we miss out on those endorphins, and we're no longer enjoying the game. Even if the stage design, difficulty, or whatever is more clever than previous titles, even if the actual challenge is technically more fun, we can't help but feel disappointed when we're not getting that polished experience.

Of course, I'm not trying to say Street Fighter X Mega Man is better than previous titles. But I don't think it's any worse than half of the NES titles that are all well-loved by fans. But playing it, it feels a lot worse to play, because it's missing so many things we expect from the experience, and there are a lot of distracting elements in the game.

But what if it had all of those things? What if the game was polished up, released as Mega Man 11, with nothing changed but the way it made us "feel good," and sold for ten bucks on XBLA? People would be all over it, praising it to no end. Even if the game had mediocre stage/enemy/whatever design like it does now. Plenty of games do nothing special or unique, but people love them because they have a high level of polish. Super Mario 3D Land did nothing better than the games previous. In fact, it cut a lot of corners in the core gameplay and level design. But the game felt good to play--the 3D effects were nice, and all of the expected Nintendo polish was there. If it had been an unpolished game without the Super Mario brand on it? It would have been destroyed by reviewers and mostly disliked. But because it was polished up, it had an overall favorable reception. Branding plays into this, too, but plenty of times a popular brand "goes bad" with an unpolished game. Harvest Moon DS and Mega Man X7 are perfect examples of this.

And I'm not saying the fans are ignorant or unappreciative. It's the responsibility of the developer to polish their games so that we enjoy them. Polish is a big part of the gaming experience, and without it, the game is simply a lot less fun. It takes a lot more work to get past the rough edges of an unpolished game, and players don't want to work to enjoy their games. They want to enjoy them from the start. Leaving out important polish in a game is a serious flaw, and the developer is completely at fault.

I do think that some games deserve more attention even though they were not polished, and I'll write more about that in the future. But for now, I just want to leave with the point that you can build an amazing game and it will be received more poorly without polish, and you can build a crappy game and it will be received more favorably with a lot of polish. There are plenty of other issues that factor into the reception of the game, but polish is a big one. In the end, I think polish really makes the game.

Gaming: the dangerous, harmful hobby?

It has "Lollipop" in the name. It must be for kids!

I often find myself defending games from the negative attention they can receive. Games tastelessly promote and glorify violence, teaching kids how to use real-life weapons, all while making you stupid and anti-social. While I believe that games can exercise your brain, and like any media, should be taken with parental guidance, it's always hard to convince others of that.

Recently, however, as I get older and older, I've been noticing some things about myself I'd like to improve upon. And when I try to think of the source of these bad habits, my mind first turns to games.

Now, I know it's been said before, but games give us a sense of accomplishment and productivity. It's easy to play them to make up for not feeling productive or accomplished in "real life." Of course, I think that if games make you happy, and they are a serious hobby, it's completely fine to feel accomplished for clearing a difficult part of a game or to feel productive for working toward a goal in a game. You just have to realize that it's not a substitute for progress outside of the gaming world, too.

But simply escaping from life's failures is not the only bad habit that this sense of productivity can entice.

I've realized that I have developed a problem with committing to long-term goals, something that I didn't feel like I had a problem with before. As an artist, I'm used to the stages of beginning and accomplishing a big project. I plan out the process, set smaller goals, plan out each stage before starting, and generally have a pretty good work ethic. I apply this to all the part-time jobs I take around town as well (I'd consider myself something of a freeter).

But now, as soon as I get to a step in my progress that seems a little difficult to overcome, my initial reaction is to just give up and start some new project. Instead of putting forth a little bit of extra effort, I'd rather just start over from the beginning of something else, where the feeling of progress comes rapidly and the new goal is fresh and exciting. Over time, I feel like this has gotten even worse. If I don't feel like going to work one day, I feel like I should just quit and hope I find another job soon enough. Luckily, I haven't gotten to the point where I actually have started quitting jobs, but I certainly consider it, and it seems like a good idea more and more often.


Screw this. I bet I can get all the trophies for Hannah Montana!

And when I think about it, this is how I play games. If I get to a stage I can't clear or a boss I can't defeat, instead of practicing or trying to find a new strategy, I just quit the game and start another game. And when I start a new game from the beginning, I get all kinds of accomplishment rewards. I'm clearing stages easily, achievements and trophies are popping left and right, and everything is exciting and new. It even makes me want to go out and buy new games constantly, because that feeling of easy reward is so addictive.

I also have noticed that I have a problem with procrastinating by using "junk projects." I may need to get a blog written, or an art project finished, and instead, I'll just write drabbles or draw doodles. Somehow, even though this isn't working toward anything and it's so effortless that it's barely able to be called practice, I feel like I'm making progress and doing something useful with my time.

Win or lose, playing Hexic HD 100 times is an "achievement!"

And this, too, I realize, is how I play games. Sometimes instead of starting a new game, I'll just mess around in the game I'm playing, working toward some achievement like "Use your special attack 10,000 times over the course of the game!" or something else that requires absolutely no effort at all. But because you're rewarded for just repetitive, non-productive actions in games these days, even just sitting and mashing a button to spam an attack against a wall seems like progress.

It really makes me wonder--has my lifelong hobby of gaming started to chip away at my productivity outside of the hobby itself? Has gaming turned me into a lazy person who only wants easy rewards? It's scary to think that one of the things I love most is turning me into a slacker with no work effort.

So I started playing games a lot less. I'd play some quick bouts of DoDonPachi Maximum or Collapse on my Windows Phone 7 when I was waiting in line for something or sitting in the car (as a passenger, of course! Don't game and drive, kids!) or something like that. But other than that, I was trying to avoid playing "big games" or even turning on any of my home consoles. I'd limit them to certain days -- like I'd only play my Wii, and only on "off days" when I wasn't working on anything anyway, once or twice a week.

But the problem didn't seem solved. I was still procrastinating and giving up on projects and work. I still felt like working toward things was wasting my time. In fact, it started to get even worse. With all of my extra free time, I felt more wasteful than ever. I was more paranoid about doing the wrong thing that I didn't want to finish anything. I stopped all of my art projects, seriously considered quitting my job, leaving my band, and more. I kept starting new projects. I went through a dozen ideas for new projects, and made even less progress than I normally would.

After even more introspection, though, I've started to reconsider. I think this is a classic case of assuming that correlation implies causation. In other words, people assume that if two attributes increase at the same time, one is causing the other. The more fatty foods you eat, the fatter you get. The more lazy games you play, the lazier you get. Stuff like that.

The problem with this is that it only is realistic a small fraction of the time. Often, there's another factor that is the cause of the correlating events. For example, if I don't bathe, my hair will get greasy and my skin will get oily. I could say, the nastier my hair gets, the nastier my skin gets. But that doesn't mean that one is causing the other. If I shave my head, my skin will still be gross.


The default example. People love to kill when they eat ice cream...!

Plus there's no reason to say that the causation is one way over the other. I could also say that I became lazy with real-life work first, and that translated over into games. That real life was ruining my commitment to games. There's no way to determine which causes the other.

When I really think about it, though, the problem has nothing to do with games or work. As I get older, I get more and more paranoid about fitting into the roles expected of me. I'm supposed to have a committed "career" and work toward getting lots of money and whatever. But I'm not on that path, nor do I want to be. But every time I start some project, I feel like I need to give it up because it's not "the one thing I want to do with my life." And there is a lot of pressure to find that "one thing." It's affected my mindset about everything. I only want to put effort into something if I feel like I can get some kind of long-term gain out of it, no matter how happy it would make me or how much I enjoy it.

The more I learn to get over that pressure of needing to focus on one thing or else I'm "doing it wrong," the more I'm able to commit to and finish projects, and the more I'm motivated to do the work needed to get past obstacles. Even though this realization doesn't have a lot to do with games, I've also been finishing games more. It had been a long time since I even cleared an entire game before I finally got around to finishing Catherine last month. I cleared Sonic Generations, too, and even picked up my Skyrim game again after giving it up because progress gets slower the higher your level gets.

I was able to work toward overcoming my problem when I stopped blaming games and started trying to think about what was really behind it all. When I started to understand more about what I was unhappy about, my happiness increased both in and outside of gaming. I haven't completely solved the problem yet, but at least I'm not ignoring it by putting the blame somewhere it doesn't belong.

I think it's important to keep re-evaluating every situation. Just because we think we've come to a solid conclusion on what's causing a problem in our life doesn't mean it's the correct solution. It's even worse when we make these decisions for others. It's easy to say "My kids are doing badly in school because of video games." when it's possible they're doing poorly in school because they are bullied, and online games are a way to escape their feelings of loneliness. The two things are correlated--the lonelier they feel, the more they want to play games. But the loneliness and gaming are both going up because of another factor--the bullying.

And of course, it's not just kids. As social beings, we like to help others solve problems. We give advice to our friends, our family, our coworkers. And when we think we have a real solution, we become more adamant about trying to implement it.


If I play this, not only can I stop smoking, but I'll be FREE!

Games are easy to blame. But games can also be a perfectly healthy and even helpful hobby. For me, as an artist, games are a big source of inspiration. My passion for gaming inspired me to get into art. My passion for gaming helped me find the motivation to try hard in school so I could work in games one day. It was that passion that helped me get a 4.0 GPA. Games have been known to help improve critical thinking skills, help control anger management problems, boost decision-making abilities, and improve overall quality of life, among many other things.
And I'm not saying that games are always a good thing, either, of course. I've known people who have developed serious problems with games. I know a victim of video game addiction who quit her job and left her boyfriend, and even fell into theft to pursue her World of Warcraft vice. And I believe that unguided regular exposure to violent themes can help desensitize children to violence. (However, this is true for any media--books and movies included, even educational documentaries. The worst perpetrator is television news, where violence and tragedy bring in the most viewers and get ratings up, so they milk everyone's sadness as much as they can. But that's another article for another blog on another day... Games just tend to be the easy target, again, for parents who don't monitor their children's entertainment.)

But that doesn't mean we should just blame video games for every problem a gamer has. Like, I'm pretty sure games don't teach kids how to use guns. I play tons of games with realistic gunplay, and I still would have no idea how to operate a real gun. Other than pulling the trigger, I have no idea. And I'm pretty sure you don't do it by pressing Y to equip it and holding the right shoulder button to fire.

I think we like to blame things that are easy to blame. In a way, it's another form of escapism. If we can just say our problems are due to games, we don't have to take responsibility for the problems. We don't have to try any harder to solve them. We can feel like it's not our fault, and it makes us feel better about ourselves for doing "all we can."

It's important to keep looking at our problems and do what we can to fix them. Don't settle on a solution just because it's easy or seems to be a "good enough" answer to your problems. It's important to never give up and strive to always better our lives. It's important to discover what means the most to us and pursue it, even if that means playing games. Games don't have to be a vice. We have the power to control our fates and the world around us, and we should utilize that power as much as we can.