The magic of opening a new game

Of all the topics covered in class, there was one that called my attention above all other, it was when we talked about how new games have achievements and new ways of calling players attention and attracting them into buying your game. All of this was normal but is this really necessary? And why was this not necessary 15 years ago on the time when we just went to our local game store and just pick a game depending on the name and the box.

Let’s begin by thinking how the gaming industry advertisement worked 15 years ago; at that moment I was a kid so let’s think how the industry tried to approach a kid during that time. The first part of a game advertisement was television, as expected (today is more common) like nowadays this way of advertisement was the way to get the public to get to know what products are currently on the market.
The next step of game advertisement was the box art, which was meant for people to go into the store and according to the name of the game and the box art (which included the front of the box and the game images on the back) they decided if the game was worth buying it. An example of this I can recall buying the game “Spider-Man –X-Men: Arcades revenge”.

If we do a simple analysis of the game cover above, it is very appealing for a player at a young age, first of all it has a great quantity of characters that means that you are going to play with them or at least fight with them. Also this characters are really famous (thanks to comics and cartoon shows of the time period) which make it really exciting to play with your favorite heroes. But most important, what this box shows, is the battle between the characters which tells us that it is going to be an action packed game which we will enjoy a lot for a great amount of time.

Thanks to all of these messages that the box communicated I bought this game and was deeply satisfied by how fun it was, and the same goes for old games like “Rock’n Roll racing” where just the name of racing with awesome music was enough to buy a game, and just the excitement to not knowing what type of game until you opened it, made it a magical moment when you opened the box and played it for the first time, and that is what I call “The magic of opening a new game”.

Now if we jump to today, what are the aspects we think about, when looking to buy a game, if we compare it to the last statement, television commercials are still presenting us with games, but, nowadays we have a new aspect that a lot of people keep in mind when buying a game and that is Game Reviews.
The main purpose of game reviews is to show the public the quality of games, and suggest them if the game is worth buying, according to other people, or other “experts”; opinion, but is this really good for the industry? Nowadays game development if we compare it to 15 years ago, fewer games are coming out but more important, games are less risky. The reason for this last part is that taking risk for a new game idea may result in a terrible review which will result in terrible sales. If we think about the first years of gaming taking a game where you would play like a porcupine or as elf might sound like fun, and thanks to that legends like Sonic and Zelda were born, but if we think about it, if we just come out with an idea nowadays of playing a game as a first person view and it focuses on running and not killing we might think is a lot of fun, but when we take Mirrors Edge (which has that main concept) and evaluate it in its Presentation, Graphics, Sound, Gameplay and Lasting Appeal (IGN reviews) of course we will find that it has some glitches, but if we go deeply in the game, it is the unique idea makes it a great game that is worth playing.

Thanks to this review standards that exist nowadays for games, companies have started to look for other options for calling players attention, like Downloadable Content and Achievements, where we come to create the terms of “achievement whores” who are players that play terrible games just to get the easy achievements. This new ways to get players, may not be wrong, but it is not the right way to go, because it shows that the industry is just giving up on quality and worrying more on random sales which is why now we have so many games that qualify as “shovelware” which are games that are just developed as fast as possible without worrying about its content.

In conclusion the industry has changed a lot, personally I miss the days where we could just go to the store pick up a game just by looking at the picture and live the “magic” of opening this new game, now when we buy a game we already know what graphics to expect, what time is it going to take me to beat it and we know a number which means how much I will enjoy it. Personally this is wrong and it has taken the fun out of a lot of games, that if we were able to play it almost blindly like when we were young they would be tons of fun.

So what can we do to recover “The magic of opening a new game”? Actually I don’t know, but if we as game developers stop worrying about the dumb aspects of game reviews, press comments and more about what can I make that will make gamers go “Wow!, this is awesome” maybe that could be the next generation of gaming.