Linearity Hypocrisy?
December 4th, 2007GameLife raises an interesting point that occurred to me while I was playing Super Mario Galaxy: the game is far more linear than its Nintendo 64 predecessor. But people don’t seem to care (especially considering the success of NSMB for the DS). Is it indicative of hypocrisy when people laud non-linear games for their inventive story-telling and the player’s control over the narrative?
My suspicion is that the answer is “sort of.” I suspect that people overestimate the importance of narrative in the first place and that what really matters is just whether the game is fun. Naturally, that’s a subjective assessment that can be helped or hurt by the story-telling choices that the designer makes - but it’s not necessarily a one-fits-all requirement. I wish people would remember that more.
(By the way, is it just me or is it odd that Chris Kohler is confused by the relative outperformance of NSMB vs. Galaxy? Sure, the latter has sold only 10% as much as the former. But the DS has 53M consoles sold, while the Wii is still under 15M, and some of those sales are necessarily to casual gamers. It’s a question of basic math.)
Posted in DS, Geoff, Nintendo, Wii |
December 4th, 2007 at 5:14 pm
I thought about this a bit as well, but came to the realization that Mario Galaxy is only slightly more linear than Mario 64. The only change is that (for the most part), you’re limited to going for the star listed at the beginning of the level each time. However, the order in which you go for your stars is largely up to the player. If you hate water levels, you can basically avoid them (at least for awhile). If you don’t like the ray racing, you can just quit out of it and go somewhere else. The major strength of the game is how much sheer variety there is, so if you don’t like one thing you can basically go and try something else.
I’ll add in that there’s still a slight bit of “non-linearity” even within the levels, since there are hidden stars and hungry lumas within some levels. We just lose the ability to get some of the “main” stars out of order, like you could (most of the time, there were some exceptions) in Mario 64. What Galaxy lets the developers do, though, is explore completely different aspects of the same level without confusing the player or making the player have to retread a lot of ground. I think it’s a fair trade-off.
December 4th, 2007 at 6:32 pm
Hey guys, I just got this from ars article, and it is a January 2005 post by the blog DUbious Quality [im sure you've heard of them], and it contains a letter from Trip Hawkins to Gamepro way back in Sept 2001 and….yea, it’s pretty shocking stuff:
http://dubiousquality.blogspot.com/2005/01/shame-of-trip-hawkins.html
I apologize if you already knew this, but I never heard of this.
December 4th, 2007 at 8:40 pm
Yikes. Glad to know that someone out there is dumb enough to put this stuff in writing.
I’ve been procrastinating linking to Dubious Quality, but it’s in my Favorites list. Good stuff.
December 4th, 2007 at 11:13 pm
@laesp,
I’ll wager there are letters just like this written every year. Maybe not as dramatic, and likely with fewer threats and more innuendo, but with the same intent.
December 5th, 2007 at 12:18 am
Yeah, I’ve seen Hawkins’ letter before. Made a big splash when it came out. I don’t doubt that there is plenty of pressure, but the Hawkins memo is really beyond the pale. It’s just so explicit.
December 5th, 2007 at 5:10 am
While that letter is kind of ridiculous, I will say this…
The game publisher certainly has the right to pull advertising if they like. If some site continually trashes them, it’s probably safe to say that it may not necessarily be the best place to advertise. The problem is when the advertisers try and use their money to pressure the publication into publishing something that the editors don’t agree with.
Trip certainly tries to do that in the letter, so that’s unacceptable. But he also clearly felt his advertising dollars weren’t doing much good on a site that was trashing his game, so he’s clearly in his right to pull his money out. Hopefully the site has enough other sources that they can happily accept ads from.
December 5th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
Jeff,
The problem is that those two scenarios are functionally equivalent: an advertiser with an implicit policy of not advertising on sites that review its products poorly is going to have the same impact as one who explicitly ties his advertising dollars to favorable reviews. In both situations, the clear incentive for game reviewers who value that advertising is to “enhance” their reviews to make them more favorable than they otherwise would be. (In other words, not writing poor reviews and actively writing good ones are logically equivalent - they’re either one or the other, from the advertisers’ perspective.)
I think you’ve pinpointed the major issue here, though, which is that the main responsibility for ensuring reviewers’ credibility is the editorial staff of the review sites themselves. Although we can lambaste the Trip Hawkins of the world - and justifiably so - when they act in a clearly unprofessional manner, it’s the journalists who need to put their feet down and tell advertisers that they will not influence policy… whether requested implicitly or explictly.
December 5th, 2007 at 5:50 pm
I hope you all don’t mind me commenting on the original post, but:
“Is it indicative of hypocrisy when people laud non-linear games for their inventive story-telling and the player’s control over the narrative?”
Why does it have to be hypocritical? Can’t you laud non-linear games for those reasons and praise linear titles for different reasons? I think both approaches can work well, depending on how the game is structured. Praising one doesn’t have to damn the other, though I suppose some reviewers have indicated that they’d rather have one over the other.
December 5th, 2007 at 9:06 pm
Ludwig - I think that’s basically the point of my post. I’ve seen a lot of people complain that a game is “too linear” and laud non-linear games; yet what games like Galaxy and NSMB prove is that a game can be effective regardless of which path it chooses, and linearity may be a desirable characteristic in many circumstances.
December 5th, 2007 at 10:14 pm
“I hope you all don’t mind me commenting on the original post, but:”
Touche!
Yeah, we probably get off topic too much.
I certainly think that linearity has its place. As does open ended design. And they certainly arent mutually exclusive, not even within the same game. Some games leave you awash in the open-endedness and I find that problematic depending on my gaming mood. Sometimes I really feel like wandering around a world just to see whats there. Other times I can’t stand the idea, I just want a bad guy placed in front of me to defeat, then another and another until I’m at a boss. Its times like this that a game like Morrowind will make me want to shoot myself in the face, and a game like Viewtiful Joe is just what the doctor ordered. But other times I will lose myself in a world like that of Metroid literally for hours as I explore. I actually disliked NSMB for its NON-linearity. When I play a game like that I don’t want to think about which stage to take next. I want to take them “in order”. And in some places that was nearly impossible and frustrating.