Standing Out

Wired's Clive Thompson has an interesting post up over at the Game | Life blog, about a recent study which purports to show that most gamers care far more about play mechanics than violence. Discussion of the study segues into discussion of why, if violence isn't being demanded by the market, games continue to be so violent. I think Thompson hits the nail on the head when he says that the ever-escalating levels of head-exploding gore in action games is largely a product of studios who are convinced that their games won't sell if they aren't drenched in blood. They see other studios dishing out the entrails, and think the only way to compete is to back up a bigger dumptruck full of organs. Of course with the exception of the early Mortal Kombat games, when blood-fountains were a novelty in games, buckets of gore have never compensated for shoddy gameplay. Nevertheless, the gore (and, usually, the testosterone) keep getting ramped up, whether they make any difference or not.

I can offer some anecdotal evidence to corroborate Thompson's point. I worked for a few years as an in-house ad designer at a newspaper. Most of the local car lots would run big, expensive full-page ads every week, and during the time I worked there, these ads became a kind of arms race. The biggest lot in town would run an ad with 50 pictures, so the next week their competitors would want 75. The big lot would react by wanting 100 pictures, so the smaller lots would want 125, and so on. Lest anyone accuse me of committing a false cause fallacy, the salesperson who dealt with these lots would regularly come back to the office exasperated, with stories of how each lot owner would demand to know how many pictures would be in his competitors' ads that week so he could one-up them. The end result was ads crammed full of hundreds of tiny pictures of cars accompanied by seven-point type (which is barely legible when printed on newsprint) descriptions of each. Of course nobody could tell what was going on in these ads, but the lots were all happy to throw their money away on unreadable advertising, so long as they weren't being "bested" by another lot with more pictures.

There was another offshoot of this, though: every ad looked exactly the same. If you weren't paying attention, you could look through the paper's automotive section, and get the impression that a single car lot had bought all the advertising space. So desperate were they to win by beating the others at their own game, that by the end the lots even had their logos all looking similar. Of course we designers tried from time to time to get the salespeople to persuade the lot managers to try something different--like not try to advertise every car on the lot in every ad. With every ad in the section looking almost identical, the first person to buck the trend would be instantly noticeable. One of the designers made a mock-up of an ad with far fewer cars but far better design fundamentals, and the salesperson presented it to one of the managers. His response was that if he changed his ad, he would be admitting defeat, and we went right back to the tiny, blurry pictures and seven point type. The moral of the story: this was five or six years ago, and now only a couple of those car lots are still in business. While I'm sure the money they wasted on full page, full color ads that nobody could read was only a minor factor in their going under, one at least has to wonder if things would have been different had they been willing to do something to break away from the pack, rather than engaging in a never-ending dogfight.

Obviously, something similar is going on in action games, not just in the ever-rising tides of blood, but in characters (including character designs) and scenarios. We may not call FPS's "Doom clones" anymore, but most of them are still basically following the formula set down by the genre's pioneers. Sure, the worlds are more open, the graphics are better and the play mechanics are far more refined, but the basic premise--grizzled one-man army blows a bunch of monsters to hell in a spray of blood--hasn't changed. If your reaction to this is "Well, of course--that's what the genre is!" I invite you to play Half-Life 2 or Bioshock. Yes, these games are still about shooting a lot of stuff from a first-person perspective, but they build their own, instantly recognizable worlds. Their designers had the courage (or foresight) to stand out from the pack, and as a result both are considered milestones in the genre. And the rise of the term "Gears clone" shows that we're seeing something similar in the third-person shooter arena, as developers there have become convinced that no such game can succeed without a Gears-style cover mechanic.

It's not hard to see why more people don't branch out, though. Titles like Okami, Shadow of the Colossus and Beyond Good and Evil (just to name a few) which buck popular gaming trends tend to sell poorly. On the other hand, look at the ongoing success of PopCap games. Peggle and Plants Vs. Zombies have done huge business while eschewing every member of gaming's holy trinity of gore, space marines and cover mechanics. So what's the difference? That's not an easy question to answer, and maybe the comparison is not even fair. PopCap has incredible distribution, gets loads of word of mouth advertising even outside of the games press, and makes games that are essentially reskinned and refined versions of other instantly recognizable games. The niche titles mentioned above, on the other hand, are artsy, high-concept games that reqeuire significant investment to understand, and are only spoken of by a tiny percentage of the gaming press. So while PopCap's games buck the trends of graphic violence and mature themes (read: lots of swearing and misogyny) so prevalent in popular action games, they really aren't bucking gaming trends writ large.

So will truly original titles ever be able to sell enough in the U.S. to be viable? Hopefully, the continuing expansion of gaming's audience will go some way in solving the problem. Right now, games have a bigger audience than ever, but it still largely overlaps with the same audience that consumes mainstream entertainment. If the industry can somehow draw in more of the independent media crowd, then niche titles can, if not stop being "niche" altogether, at least be guaranteed enough of an audience to make them worth publishers' investment dollars. Eventually, it would be great to see games that stand out from all gaming trends get the attention they often richly deserve.