So Much Goddamn Waiting: How Games Waste your Time

A dude who wrote a bunch of stuff once said, “Brevity is the soul of wit.” People are totally into that dude’s writing, so maybe he knew what he was talking about. Who knows. The point of Shakespeare’s quote is simple: Don’t waste my time. When you avoid padding, you create a more enjoyable experience for your viewer, reader, or player. There was a big push towards longer and longer games as of the last years and while it’s thankfully petering out a bit, games still love to waste your time.

But what are the most common ways that games waste a player’s time?

I dunno if I trust a  dude with that haircut, though the stache is pretty awesome. I guess I can take his writing advice.

Clutter is one of the newer padding methods game designers are employing and the one I hate the most. Clutter is when a game furnishes you with items with the express purpose of taking up space in your inventory and selling them for gold later. Maybe developers don’t think that people will remember how much time they spent dicking around in their inventory screens. You may as well just give the player money, instead of wasting their time. Fallout 3 was filled with real-world clutter like coffee cups, burned books, and cigarettes but none of these items did anything gameplay wise.

This whole place i junk. I will collect this junk, then sell it until the merchants are out of money. Then I shall cart it to my next destination. Onwards forever.

If you picked up too many of them, you needed to spend time emptying out your inventory or selling them for a few meager caps. Dragon Age Inquisition is the worst offender here, however. Your inventory has a whole tab just called “Valuables” which you can sell to any merchant with the press of button. Why even have the middle step? Just give me the gold, dammit.

Why was this dragon carrying 5 sheets of parchment? Why can't I use said parchment? Maybe I should quit the Inquisition. I'm sure regular people don't deal with this nonsense.

Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt took a much more sensible approach to clutter by allowing you to sell the items to a merchant for gold, or break them down into crafting components which you can use for craft new items. By giving the items a non-monetary use you make them an addition to gameplay rather than a distraction from it.

Backtracking is another oft-complained about padding tool that some developers use. Like the name says, it involves making a player retrace their steps through a previously explored area. This might make a player feel like they’re making progress because they’ve spend more time playing the game, but when nothing changes gameplay wise, there’s no point. Tomb Raider (2013) just loved backtracking.

When every map look like this, you know you're in for a long ride. A long unnecessary ride. 

Every area was filled with secrets and collectibles that had no gameplay impact besides extra EXP which you got from completing missions and defeating enemies anyway. While there is some precedent for in-depth exploration from earlier Tomb Raider games, that was the entire point of those games, rather than just something to pad out of the 100% completion game length. There are games that find new use for old tropes, like Super Metroid.

You will have this map memorized by the time you're done with this game, but the last area will still be new.

By gating player access to areas, Super Metroid makes backtracking more like exploration. You may have come across smaller passages earlier that you couldn’t fit into, but with the new upgrade you found you can turn your suit into a ball and roll through! The whole map becomes new again

Grinding is the most common method of elongating a game. Usually found in MMORPGs or JRPGs, grinding consists of forcing players to level up (or grind) to defeat more powerful enemies or gather currency.  In MMOs or RPGs, enemies have specific levels and strengths associated with that level. Given that most of these games are turn based (or close to in the case of most MMOs), player skill doesn’t really come into play. You can’t manually dodge an attack in Final Fantasy X, or slip around the back of an enemy to deal more damage in Persona 3: FES, so you have to rely on your numbers to be better than the enemy’s numbers.

My numbers are better than your numbers, which are better than my friend's numbers. Perhaps one day I will have the best numbers in the land.

I was racking my brain trying to think of a game that did grinding well, but I can’t find one. I’m pretty sure grind should just be banished from the gaming sphere entirely. When gaming becomes an excel spreadsheet with pretty colors, the point has been lost.

If brevity really is the soul of with, then most games are not very witty. I don’t necessarily think this is true, but I do think that the focus on game length has resulted in a quantity of quality situation. Better crafted experiences will stand the test of time while bloated, empty games will end up by the wayside. Long story short: Don’t pad, add!

If you don’t share this with everybody you know, every game will be nothing but grinding forever. Quick, save us all!

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Anything it takes: Survival In Video Games

Some of the most harrowing tales in human history are based around survival. Robinson Crusoe, Cast Away, and The Life of Pi are some standout examples. To game designers, survival is a fun mechanic to add into a game, or in the case of games like DayZ and The Long Dark it’s the entire point. These days survival mechanics move a game more towards reality, i.e. the need to eat, drink, etc while settling you in a hostile environment. Developers can sometimes shoehorn in mechanics where they don’t quite fit. After all, to someone with a hammer everything looks suspiciously like a nail.

So what makes for good survival mechanics in games? Why is survival fun in the first place?

Fallout: New Vegas is a game with surprisingly deep survival mechanics. It’s made with the same Bethesda engine as Fallout 3, but the game’s staff are all ex Interplay Entertainment (developers of the original 2 Fallout games) members. The game returned you to the west coast with a twisting tale of betrayal, greed, and complex faction interplay.

Fallout: New Vegas is hailed as a return to better parts of the Fallout series. I prefer Fallout 2, but F:NV sure beats the hell out of Fallout 4.

While you could eat and drink in Fallout 3, it offered little benefits beside a small bit of health and a hefty dose of radiation. In F:NV’s Hardcore Mode, eating and drinking are a must. As you skip meals and pass up water bottles, your stats slowly decrease. Go without for long enough and you die of starvation and/or dehydration. Stimpacks no longer heal a chunk of health instantly, but instead restore it over time. To heal crippled limbs, you must find a doctor, a doctor’s bag, or a few other options. Ammunition now has weight, instead of being magically weightless. These are not gigantic changes, but they fundamentally change how you play the game.

F:NV is one of the only games I've played that actually makes buying food a worthwhile option.

You now have to think about food/water weight when you’re moving across the Mojave. You can’t just pick up every weapon you find, but you have to think about what kind of ammo you’re carrying and if you can afford to spend more weight points on a new type. Moreover, the scarcity of resources plays into the game in a very thematic way, drawing you more into the world. You can gather resources to cook or create health items and you have to make choices about how to use everything to the best of your ability.

The S.T.A.L.K.E.R series is another series that features a few survival elements, though only in two out of three games. The survival elements are lighter in S.T.A.L.K.E.R than in FNV, but there are a few other mechanics that balance the whole package out, for the most part.

Nothing spells bleak quite like swamps and radiation. I'm still a little confused as to why anybody would go into the Zone, frankly.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R has no thirst mechanic and the hunger mechanic takes several in-game days to take effect. After a few days, your health lowers constantly and your stamina is severely reduced. S.T.A.L.K.E.R stumbles when it doesn’t make hunger a bigger threat. S.T.A.L.K.E.R could lower your carrying capacity, or affect your weapon handling when don’t eat. Maybe you’re so weak from hunger that you can’t hold your gun steady, or perhaps kickback is increased because you can’t brace the weapon properly?  S.T.A.L.K.E.R introduces new combat and survival mechanics that shine, however. When you take damage in S.T.A.L.K.E.R you bleed and your health drops over time, with speed depending on the severity of the wound. If you don’t use a bandage on yourself, you can bleed out in the middle of a fight. In S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Clear Sky and S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call of Pripyat radiation storms can occur and random, forcing you to seek shelter. If you’re caught outdoors, your health drops rapidly, and you’re assailed by disorienting effects.

Sprinting to find cover as the sky darkens around you is one of more harrowing parts of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R series. These emissions are also a great example of gameworld and narrative working with gameplay.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R games put you in one of the most inhospitable environments ever designed in games, but the survival aspect that comes with that setting is never really addressed, with respect to your character’s limitations. It might have been better to remove the food aspect of this game entirely, as it doesn’t add any depth to the game.

Why does any of this even matter? Isn’t survival kind of a terrible burden to have to face in real life? Well, survival mechanics offer a degree of realism that you usually don’t see in games. This is not to say that it makes games “realistic” or anything like that, but it does take some of our real world expectations and give them tangible gameplay implications. We get hungry, so does our character. We need to drink, and if we don’t in game, our character will suffer. It’s a fine line to tread between oppressing a player with annoying mechanics that stop the action every ten seconds and half-assign the mechanics so that they’re just in the way of gameplay, but when developers manage to get it right, it adds a lot to the game. I think you could also make a good case for the general direction towards more “realistic” mechanics in games. Swinging a sword in The Legend of Zelda is very different from swinging it in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, for instance. More complex mechanics feel like a natural progression and they challenge players a more.

Survival mechanics are a cool tool when used well. They can add a lot of depth to a game and make the player feel more involved in the world. Next time you’re playing a game with survival elements, think about how the game uses these elements to draw you in (or push you out if they’re bad) of the game world. How do the mechanics change how you play? What would make the mechanics better?