Pardon me for going off topic – yes, I have no way of justifying this post and claiming its relevance to anime – but as I shift in and out of the mood to pursue Japanese cartoons with unparalleled amounts of zeal and energy, irrelevant ideas occasionally cross my mind. Having recently mentioned gaming in a post that was intended to have far more to do with anime than it did, I found myself taking a little break from this medium that we know and love, and indulging in a few solid hours of adventure and conquest.
Now, as for how this is relevant to the topic at hand: in taking a good look at the medium of video games from a perspective that has widened dramatically in the last several months, I’ve come to realize a few things that I never noticed before. In short, I think the enjoyment that players derive from games can be divided into three broad categories – entertainment, competition, and art – and that the mystery behind why some games appear to be “good” while others are “bad” is far less of a mystery than it appears.
Let’s start with the obvious category: entertainment. As we all know, media exists to entertain. People derive fun from stories, interactive or otherwise, and so we are willing to spend money on them- supply and demand, the birth of an industry. Ignoring the inconvenient loophole of piracy, the fact that media is produced proves that it is used for entertainment, also known as “fun,” and gaming is no exception to this.
I like to classify entertainment as the simple feeling of fun that one derives from any particular activity. For instance, playing Mario Party might be “fun.” So might owning n00bs in Halo 3. However, both of those games are very different. Hence, the experience that one gains from playing a game might not fall into one specific category - in fact, it will probably fall under all three.
But that isn’t the important part of the categorization. While fans of party games would claim Mario Party to be entertaining, and FPS fans would surely do the same for Halo, there is a tremendous difference in the intention of the developers. While all games are “fun” on some level, far more people would see Halo as competitive than the amount that would see Mario Party the same way. The enjoyment that one feels from playing both games might be “entertainment,” but in the grand scheme of things, a game like Halo falls far closer to competition than a party games does.
Mario is always great for entertainment, especially when he’s 2D.
And now we enter our second category: competition. Competitive gaming has grown in leaps and bounds, not just in Korea, and many gamers play games the way athletes play sports. It’s fun for them, in a sense, but it’s also a job, and the real enjoyment comes not from running around and shooting stuff, but instead from engaging in a battle of wits and reflexes against a living, breathing opponent. Once more, a game that is competitive can also be entertaining, but some games are simply built to be competitive.
The obvious example in this case would be the fighting genre. The mere fact that many fighters are first released in arcades is evidence enough that they are meant to be competitive, but it doesn’t help that some console ports lack innovation as well. Often times, the console version of a fighting game will be identical to its arcade counterpart, with an art gallery or unlockable skins/costumes to make the purchase slightly more enticing. In other words, people don’t buy the latest Guilty Gear or Street Fighter for achievements or single-player glory: they play it to learn it, and to compete with their newfound skills.
Nothing says competitive gaming like a good round of Starcraft.
Due to the fact that fighting games are so focused on gameplay, there is little…for lack of a better word, let’s call it the x factor. The kind of magic that enraptures Zelda fans, the skillfully-woven layers terror and fear that survival-horror fans devour; the unnameable, elusive elements of games that are both intangible yet integral. That’s the kind of beauty that causes legions of fans to rally behind epic Final Fantasy adventures and engrossing wars like Fire Emblem, and without having any precise way of describing it, I’ll call that factor art.
I don’t mean to encroach on the is-anime-art debate and simply replace anime with gaming, but it seems unfair to claim that video games cannot be artistic. Take a closer look at games like Okami and the Metroid series. They can both be challenging, yes – they are both held together by solid gameplay – but isn’t there something more to them? Many developers have imitated the action/adventure genre and implemented their own unique stories and mechanics, but by that logic, every game with decent combat, a plethora of sidequests, and a large world can equate to Okami. But by that logic, the latest Barbie platformer is Mario’s female equivalent.
La Pucelle Tactics is analogous to Final Fantasy Tactics in that they both involve heroes fighting against villains using SRPG gameplay, with a semi-religious setting and conflicts that are both small and large in scale. But what do the games have in common, save for being SRPGs? This isn’t to say that one is superior to the other – opinion plays no role in this kind of categorization – but certainly, the games share very few characteristics. Nippon Ichi games tend not to take themselves seriously, while FFT is more serious business than a gattai between Cruel Angel Theses and Bateszi Anime Blog; LPT treats the player to comical and entertaining gameplay that can be both relaxing and challenging while Final Fantasy’s SRG endeavour is straightforward and to the point.
Forgetting about one’s personal opinion of these two games, what is the main difference between them? Simply put, it’s the intent of the creators. La Pucelle Tactics is about fun and gameplay and fun gameplay, with a bit of a serious plot tacked on to it, while Final Fantasy Tactics is about telling a melodramatic tale of war and magic, and it does so through well-refined conventional gameplay mechanics. FFT focuses on the artistic aspect of gaming, using the interaction to tell a story.
Fable has good gameplay, but one look at it is enough to tell that it’s more than just action.
In the end, I urge you to remember that none of these categories are concrete and that many breach into one another’s territory. As I said in the beginning, Halo can be both fun and competitive – and depending on how you view the engrossing single-player campaign, it can also be art. Most games fall into this category, where elements of each category converge to create an appealing whole.
However, any gamer would know that certain games were developed to accomplish certain goals. Perhaps this is why the debate between “casual” and “hardcore” games will never end – because both sides try to force these games into being something they’re not. This might also be why fans of fighters and FPSs will never get along, or why there will always be animosity between Zelda and Final Fantasy – each set of fans believes their franchise/genre to be the best of its kind, and they refuse to acknowledge the worth of another similar category of game.
This might also be the root of the trouble people have with games like Super Smash Bros Brawl and Hoshigami, where the former is accused of not supporting competitive gameplay while the latter is inaccessible to many gamers and nearly unplayable by new SRPG fans. After all, SSBB was meant to be a fun multiplayer game that anyone can enjoy, and Hoshigami was meant to be a rigorous SRPG for those who love challenge – when it comes down to it, there’s really nothing to criticize. I believe that this is where the “casual vs hardcore” issue comes from, where players expect games to please both audiences at once, but that’s a different scalding hot kettle of fish (ready to explode at the mention of Wii or MLG).
Writing a post without at least one picture of an anime girl just isn’t my thing.
In conclusion, I believe that video games are a highly versatile medium that can accomplish a variety of different goals. Whether the developers are after philosophical sci-fi epics or old-school finger-murdering action, games can deliver – it all depends on the goal that each game sets out to accomplish. Some games succeed in blending genres, such as the interactive adventure of Fable – the gameplay aids the story and vice versa, detailing the legend of a hero that is none other than you. Other games like Gears of War are all about the gameplay and the chainsaw bayonets until you look closely at the campaign and realize that it could make an excellent futuristic war film if anyone cared to do so.
Ultimately, games are tools for developers to express their thoughts and ambitions; sometimes these ambitions are to create a competitive RTS game that will last a decade, and other times they might consist of a humble dream to entertain a 6-year-old that can barely hold a controller. It’s good to have an opinion, but the important thing is not to classify one category of gaming as superior or inferior – it’s to understand the difference between games, the fact that expecting all games to be similar is akin to expecting all anime to possess the mythos of Type-Moon and the entertainment of K-ON, and to learn to determine why a game is the way it is. Everyone understands what games are and how they’re made, but in understanding the why, we can learn to enjoy what we might have flamed, and save the flames for the products that truly are mediocre.
~ ETERNAL
つづく
