Short Games, Mini-Games – Who's To Blame?

[Rolex]

Corey,

Pokey-thinky at it's most succinct...first article for a while, life as a writer must afford some time off (of course you have probably been super busy but if my imagination is correct then how was your yacht in the South of France with the nude butler?!) Time is apparently money...LOL

We want to get to the point and fast. We ask people -regardless of whether they're friends or strangers- to tell us why a piece of entertainment is worth our time and money, because both concepts are so valuable to us, and then when we get it, all we want to do is progress to the end as quickly as possible… or at least have someone let us know it's worth it.

I've highlighted this certain phrase because this is the most poignant in todays society as a whole and as you comment, not just games.

Is our time so precious that we can't stop and smell the roses when we need to; are we always on the go..do this do that..or are we just wasteful due to laziness or worse, inefficiency!? Is the world we live in really so jam packed and efficient that to look out over the horizon takes too long?

My answer to this...No!
We as a culture on the whole waste more time doing seemingly insignificant repetitive tasks that when something comes along which decrees we get enjoyment / vfm by spending time with it as such, we miss the point of it all - we are convinced that this would be a waste of time or even there is something better elsewhere. It's a paradoxical state of mind to think that advertisers, friend, families, governments, employers and even ourselves are spot-on and we are "always" missing out on something else and propagate this illusion that time is short and we should "always" be doing something else....What we need to do is to stop and smell said hypothetical roses and stop worrying about whether 2 hours or 10 hours out of our life will bring armageddon if we relax but still be productive in a way which is enjoyable.

I have always thought that taking the time to; for example; read a book, be it fact or fiction or play a game; is a productive period comparable to washing up or working overtime to pay bills - in fact I set time aside for it in the main, especially when things are really busy. It doesn't make my life any more stressful and it makes me realise that time isn't as valuable per se as "others" would have us believe. Sure, we can all be busy busy at times but this can't be the case ALL the time, can it..?

I do hope not...

I think that the current games culture - to go back to your original article on the whole - is big enough for us to still enjoy the mini and epic genre of titles - as you have intimated, Nintendo has gone all out to capture the non-player market and entice them into the marketplace with short sharp enjoyable chunks of e-tainment.

Can the games world sustain this? Sure, why not?!

Will epic titles stop being created in lieu of WarioWare 1000. Never, the designers will always strive to create worlds in which people lose themselves - exactly the same as print...they may go out of fashion but dissolve completely...NEVER! [off a bit strong there tiger ]

Epic games, for me, aren't always what gaming is about but neither are minigames! I want ingenuity and interest with a story in my console but also want to switch on piss about for an hour and switch off...! the current crop of ports and shovelware for the Wii aren't great but we will get there, no doubt in my mind.

With the Wii/DS - we ARE getting that imaginative streak reemerging and although the wheel isn't being invented here, fun is! Something seemingly missing from the GC but also from the harder-core machines from my experience.

Although one very clever bandwagon, that Nintendo specifically seems to have built and then driven with teams of wild horses - is the "educational" game [BrainTraining for example] - man, this is sooo clever it hurts..take a games system, which plays games, make a game which pretends to educate whilst having fun - shovel it out to the world, makes pots of loot and sit back smugly...

You are playing a game! Not reading a thesis on molecular symbiosis, curing cancer or helping the needy BUT you will "play it" because it's helping you to become smarter to carry out these everyday tasks which are so important because you time is so valuable....omg I could go on but respect to Kawashima and Nintendo- we're convinced this isn't an apparent waste of our valuable time...

Now where is my DS......

[Ads]

[Rolex]

Good article. One important thing missing are the ports. Everyone is still raving over RE:4 which at best is equal in graphic quality as the GC version with nothing new over the PS2 version both of which are two years old.

BTW I disagree.

RE4 - ciper, don't get me started dude. WTF happened to the animation / cutscenes - dear me it's like the acting / editing on a bad soap opera - and the the camera angles [I cried a little]!!!

I know this isn't the place to rant about it but scheese... It makes the Wii version look like Ed Wood's plan 9 from Outer Space...

[dan1123]

And right now, the demand across all territories is for the games we hardcore so often frown upon. We're a vocal minority, but when it comes down to it, no matter how loud we shout, that 'minority' part speaks far louder. The silent majority lets the chart sales speak for them.

I don't think you get it. The point is not that mini-game compilations are bad. The point is that all games should have a long gameplay time rather than a long game time. You can replay tetris or snood hundreds of times and still pick it up and enjoy it just as well a couple days later. You can also jump into a well balanced deathmatch in a 10 year old game and enjoy it very much. Now I have played the crappy super monkey ball minigames and understand that a minigame can be just bad, but a long, expensive to produce game can be just as bad.

The "silent majority" really only has two requirements: make the controls simple and let me start playing now. That's it. Think about your hardcore games with every button in use and different modes of play that changes control configurations around. Could the game be reworked to not have such a complex control scheme? Probably. Game complexity simply has an upper limit for most people. Going to a 3-level menu system to search for the proper counter attack is not the kind of thing that the non-hardcore enjoy. Neither is a 20 minute intro sequence or a novel's worth of text to read on-screen.

In my opinion game developers should move away from the difficult control systems and long non-interactive sequences. A game can still have depth and lots of content, the players have just moved away from being impressed with in-game cutscenes and working around control deficiencies.

[cbrotherson]

Pokey-thinky at it's most succinct...first article for a while, life as a writer must afford some time off (of course you have probably been super busy but if my imagination is correct then how was your yacht in the South of France with the nude butler?!) Time is apparently money...LOL

Ha, the yacht in the South of France with the nude butler looks a lot like my house… my imagination seems broken There's lots of features on the way, just a slight hiccup in the roll out. Writers don’t get time off, sadly, we only get 'guilt laden breaks'.

We as a culture on the whole waste more time doing seemingly insignificant repetitive tasks that when something comes along which decrees we get enjoyment / vfm by spending time with it as such, we miss the point of it all - we are convinced that this would be a waste of time or even there is something better elsewhere. It's a paradoxical state of mind to think that advertisers, friend, families, governments, employers and even ourselves are spot-on and we are "always" missing out on something else and propagate this illusion that time is short and we should "always" be doing something else....What we need to do is to stop and smell said hypothetical roses and stop worrying about whether 2 hours or 10 hours out of our life will bring armageddon if we relax but still be productive in a way which is enjoyable.

Absolutely. One thing that I've noticed growing up is that advertising is such a dominant force on society's 'group-think' ideology, it's scary. And it ranges from ham-fisted to really subtle stuff. We're told to fill our lives with stuff that ultimately fosters to an culture created in a room where numerous people try to work out how to get us to spend our money. And humanity is speed obsessed, so anything which plays to that is often on to a winner. Cultivation theory has anyone who doesn’t subscribe to a makeshift lifestyle ostracised for their individuality. So we're all pushing and pulling for essentially the same thing, trying to fill a hole that may not even exist outside of adverts. And with so many vying for our attention, its no wonder the rate of consumption has increased dramatically.

Will epic titles stop being created in lieu of WarioWare 1000. Never, the designers will always strive to create worlds in which people lose themselves - exactly the same as print...they may go out of fashion but dissolve completely...NEVER! [off a bit strong there tiger ]

Yeah, the 'one or the other' style of thinking always confuses me – surely there's room for happy mediums? Surely we can like both epics AND mini games? And as you say, the epics will always exist because of the fundamental human desire to thrive on story (the crux of any epic game). We need story in any shape or form, and have done so since the birth of humanity; people need the tales of others, and as long as gaming continues to exist, there will be the thirst for games which span over a period of time to quench that, because if there's one thing people love more than a story, it's being PART of a story. Gaming is that desire given thousands of years of evolution. Or at least, that's what I think.

I don't think you get it. The point is not that mini-game compilations are bad. The point is that all games should have a long gameplay time rather than a long game time. You can replay tetris or snood hundreds of times and still pick it up and enjoy it just as well a couple days later. You can also jump into a well balanced deathmatch in a 10 year old game and enjoy it very much.

"Woah woah woah, nice shootin' Tex". In accusing me of 'not getting it' you appear to have missed the other part of my article which states:

"However, just because a game is short by typical standards, doesn’t mean it has no longevity. The ability to create titles that allow us to dabble without long term commitment but have a distant goal, is a valuable one, marking a more careful transition from lengthy gameplay to something more transitory."

Here is the point I make where I say what you've just pointed out, longevity being the key to many things, including bridging a gap between two different audiences and scratching the same itch. The rest of the paragraph goes on to reinforce that, just I used more contemporary examples. As stated in another feature, I don’t really feel the need to be explicit with some bits, you guys are smart enough to work out what I'm getting at.

The "silent majority" really only has two requirements: make the controls simple and let me start playing now. That's it. Think about your hardcore games with every button in use and different modes of play that changes control configurations around. Could the game be reworked to not have such a complex control scheme? Probably. Game complexity simply has an upper limit for most people. Going to a 3-level menu system to search for the proper counter attack is not the kind of thing that the non-hardcore enjoy. Neither is a 20 minute intro sequence or a novel's worth of text to read on-screen.

In my opinion game developers should move away from the difficult control systems and long non-interactive sequences. A game can still have depth and lots of content, the players have just moved away from being impressed with in-game cutscenes and working around control deficiencies.

Which appears to be part of the ethos Nintendo is going for. I presume this is an aside from the above as it doesn’t really have much to do with the topic at hand per se (although there's plenty of other columns I've done which address this). I wouldn’t say gamers have "moved away from being impressed with in-game cutscenes"; many hardcore gamers still love them (take a trip to Neo GAF sometime when a FF game is released). Better yet, companies have worked to make them more interactive with Quick Time Events which force you to stay alert during story exposition, which I personally feel is the way forward for larger games. More effort, but it's an interactive medium, after all.

But devs will never totally move away from difficult/complex control systems, even when motion control becomes standard – it's the bare nature to complicate a control method once the supposed simplicity has been suitably exhausted. We just often go in cycles with the whole process. Yet a deep control method doesn’t necessarily mean it becomes unplayable to a person who doesn’t wish to learn every nuance – beat em ups are prime examples of that. The amount of times I've seen a decent player terminated by some button mashing crazy (who's enjoying the whole ride regardless – isn’t to say a very skilled gamer will lose to same said 'crazy', but the enjoyment can be held on multiple levels, rather than just a simple plane). Something like God of War has numerous moves, yet you can pretty much get through a bulk of the game without having to learn more than a couple intermediate attacks, while everything you need to know is signposted anyway. Titles that are complex yet have rudimentary simplicity can be done, it just takes a hell of a lot of well-thought out design to pull it off, something many companies don’t have the time, money or inclination to do, but now have to consider it a lot more compared to the days where I had my CPC 464 and spent an hour reading the instruction booklet to learn the controls. Ah, memories.

[captainff]

Yeah, the 'one or the other' style of thinking always confuses me – surely there's room for happy mediums?

Just want to pick up on that one line of thought.

It seems thouroughly strange to me that while science is making strides forward in the fields of the quantam, politics and advertising are forcing themselves back to ancient Greece and the time of Aristotle. The best, most famous, relatively recent example of Aristotlean logic came from none other than G.W.Bush prior to the 'war on terror' beginning. He said "You're either with us, or you're with the terrorists."

This kind of thinking is permeating through society - A or B, True or False, This or That - while at the same time those studying quantam physics are dealing in terms of percentage chance and probability.


If we are ever to move away from the idea of EITHER mini-game OR epic then we need to change our thought patterns away from those promoted over 2000 years ago and move into the 21st century.

[ssbb_lover]

Ever wonder if Rolex and Corey were the same person so that he can agree with himself?...

[cbrotherson]

Just want to pick up on that one line of thought.

It seems thouroughly strange to me that while science is making strides forward in the fields of the quantam, politics and advertising are forcing themselves back to ancient Greece and the time of Aristotle. The best, most famous, relatively recent example of Aristotlean logic came from none other than G.W.Bush prior to the 'war on terror' beginning. He said "You're either with us, or you're with the terrorists."

This kind of thinking is permeating through society - A or B, True or False, This or That - while at the same time those studying quantam physics are dealing in terms of percentage chance and probability.


If we are ever to move away from the idea of EITHER mini-game OR epic then we need to change our thought patterns away from those promoted over 2000 years ago and move into the 21st century.

Scary but true... it's a loyalty designed tactic, always essential in conflict which I guess is part of all societies. Tends to seep into pretty much anything.

Ever wonder if Rolex and Corey were the same person so that he can agree with himself?...

That would be pretty useful... although I'm afraid the other voices in my head would only get jealous

[Almo]

nice article! its great to read something that long and know at the end it was 'worth it'

[spawnminion]

Well so far with the wii im not that inpressed but when SSBB comes out I will be content who wounldn't want to get that game...lol but so fare there really wasn't any that exxciting of games. I hope that won't malke just mini game type genres moore.. they should make osme this new somwthing that will make the wii industry

[daviduk200]

Personally i get really annoyed at short games as i dont think i get what i payed for.

For instance red steel i completed in 7 hours 20 mins. i got annoyed at how short that was.

and wario ware i completed in 2 hours and never played since as i hate it soo much for its too short minigames.

now games like Zelda i liked as that was a decent 32 hours for me.

But then we get back to REsident evil four i thought that game was slightly on the short side at 15 hours complete time but they shoved in loads of extras to increase its replayability and longevaty.


so overall shorter games annoy especially as we are also seeing rise in game prices