Koobazaur's Domain

Voltaire once said – “I disapprove of what you play, but I will defend to the death your right to play it.” Are all games worthy of being made?

I recently had an interesting argument with a fellow gamer and fan of Postmortem, explaining his dislike of truck-simulators as being repetitive content-padders that dilute the gaming market. After all, they boil down to driving for 2 hours on an identical stretch of a road – isn’t that just lazy design?

Firstly, I’ve actually had many similar feeling in the past. With early indie and Flash games, seeing literally hundreds of copy-pasted physics puzzlers made me rage – so lazy and unimaginative! Worse yet, it flooded the market making it harder for original games to get recognized.

However, I now realize there is a big difference between unrefined physics puzzle done over a weekend with a pirated version of Flash, and a full-featured and realistic truck sim that took a team of 20 people three years to design, prototype, develop, model for, test, refine, market, publish etc.

Going through the whole process myself developing Postmortem: one must die made me appreciate game developers of any game that much more – despite its brevity, Postmortem already took a year, with many 10-12hr+ days. And I am still working on it with tech support / publishing / marketing today.

Yes, I dislike illogical puzzles, fillers, and padding, and there is definitely way too much of it in any form of art and media these days. But at the same time, with truck simulators and such… I think some of the seeming padding might just be the nature of what the game is about – you can’t make a truck sim without long stretches of identical roads. And I personally know several people who absolutely love spending 2 hours driving the same stretch of a road, even if I can’t understand in the god’s name why?

In a way, how is driving identical road for 2 hours making repetitive turns any different from walking down identical corridor for 2 hours killing repetitive enemies? I guess everyone has their way of relaxing, be it watching a popcorn flick, or sitting on a porch with a hot tea enjoying a breezy morning.

And who am I to tell people what they find enjoyable? Existence of games I dislike does not take from my ability to play those I do like.

Another great example is Angry Birds – while derivative, with many free Flash precursors, it put an original coat of paint on the concept, perfected the controls and UI, reached out to new platforms/demograpihcs, and went through the grueling process of publishing, marketing and legalese. Sure, the core idea might not be unique – but all the effort put in its implementation is.

My point – there definitely are some lazy, copy-pasted, cash-grab games, and those which may appear so, but took genuine effort. And the line between is very fine. As long as there are people who genuinely enjoy a game, even if it’s a game I personally despise (*cough*FarmVille*cough*) – isn’t it enough to warrant its existence and validity in the gaming market?

You don’t need to enjoy or play a game, but at the very least, you can appreciate the effort of the devs and stop mocking those who play it – you’ve got weird hobbies too.