There is an old maxim that holds that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. The complexity involved in crafting a game, especially modern video games, is too much for one person to handle.

Does that necessarily mean that games will never reach the same heights or plumb the same depths as a work of text by a single author? 

As much as I love film, no film has yet to surpass literature in the realm of crafting experience. The reason for that is the utter lack of interiority of films. A great actor can communicate their internal dialog and emotions through external means, but a book bypasses that entirely and puts us into someone's head. 

Games on the other hand, have a shot at achieving that level of interiority. How can works developed by groups of people develop the same consistency of depth of a work developed by a single mind, rewritten or edited until it reflects, however poorly, the intent of the author? Where every single word is there to mold the experience and draw the reader deeper in to the story. 

Okay, that doesn't happen for every book, but it does for the great ones. Where are the games that can do that? Braid is the best and closest example that I'm aware of when it comes to games as literature. It is a triumph and that cake is real. The entire game was developed to, dare I say, author's Jonathan Blow's vision. I have no doubt that the rest of the development team contributed significantly to the end result, but Blow's determination and focus is what drove the project. 

Braid is a step in the right direction. Not that every game needs to be the singular vision of an author, but that every game needs to strive to be a singular vision. Each piece of the story needs to be embraced, whether by an individual on the team or the totality of the studio. Game designers, indie ones particularly, need to see themselves as storytellers*, as authors*, and as explorers into conveying what lies behind another's eyes. 

* Yes, not every game needs to be a story. Gun, Monster, Point, Click... yeah, I get it. Not every book or movie is War and Peace either. In the immortal-ish words of Teddy "Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those timid spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat."**

Everybody loves free things.

Television broadcast over the air is still the most watched, people listen to the radio, be it FM or Pandora, and people play free games with advertising. The cultural theorist Dallas Smythe argues that nothing is free. Instead audiences are packaged up by media providers and sold to advertisers. Given that he was theorizing about television in the early 1980s it is astonishing to see just how accurate he is about the workings of modern advertising. 

Some game developers have decided to eschew advertisements. Instead they make use of microtransactions. These can make the game easier, allow you to purchase bigger weapons, funny hats, or clicks of a cow. This can be great for gamers, they aren't subjected to interstitial advertisements or banner ads that suck real estate from the game. League of Legends, a popular MMO strategy game supports itself through just such a method with astonishing success. 

And then there are games like EA's re-release of Dungeon Keeper. The game itself is a wonderful update of the 1997 hit, the graphics are smoother and feel like they belong in this century. However, the game is a prime example of what not to do with microtransactions. It is technically playable without paying a cent, but it takes a full twenty four hours to accomplish what you could in the original game in roughly five minutes.

Microtransactions in games usually take the advantage of the interest curve. After putting the player in a position where they have to struggle almost to the point of walking away, microtransactions make the game easier for a time, bringing the player back into the center channel of interest and spurring them on. 

Dungeon Keeper, on the other claw, is essentially broken as a game without spending money. The most disheartening thing of all is the legion of fans of the original series calling for a full game, sans microtransactions, for $9.99. I know that I could be tempted to purchase the full game for such a price. 

Instead EA is betting on microtransactions as the way of the future. Who wouldn't want continuous revenue from a game instead of a develop, sell, develop cycle? I don't object to the idea, I object to the current goldrush mentality behind shifting to microtransactions as a way to make money from a game. It can truly ruin the experience and that's what it's all about. 

I will be using this blog for the Game Design course that I am taking this Spring.