What should be the goal of a good game? To sell as many copies as possible? To get top grades by the press? Both of these objectives are short-sighted. If the game isn’t good enough, even if it is advertised well, nothing will come out of this. A game which is applauded by the press can also be a complete buster. So? What is the most important attribute of a good game?
The faculty to grab attention. To conquer a piece of the mind of the player. To establish a long-term, active relationship with them.
What is so good about attention? For a start, caring about gamers’ attention will mean that players will finish games. Prior to this realisation, games were long and difficult and most players gave up before seeing the end credits. In terms of production, this means that a development team works hard to create content that will never be seen by many: this is very irrational.
Making sure that most players stay onboard until the fat lady sings is one thing - not demanding too much of a player’s attention. And it’s no small achievement. But touching them personally, which is the next step, is a much more extraordinary feat. This is done using a variety of devices, such as tension.
Such players actively relate to the game. They will talk about it with friends and relative, pass the game around, they may promote in online, perhaps operate a fan website or write a walkthrough for the game, furthering its presence. The press will discuss it willingly, use it as a benchmark and compare it with other titles. All of this tremendously enhance the reach of the game and broadens its potential audience way beyond the number of units sold.
This has two immediate, positive consequences:
one is commercial. A game that has the capacity to reach player’s attention can be turned into a lucrative franchise, that is, it can beget a series of games both cheaper to develop and with a strong potential audience to begin with.
The other consequence is even more interesting for developers. The relationship that such games induce with the player is mutually beneficial: these games foster their imagination, enrich their universe, and provide them with entertainment in its purest, finest form.
A bit of theory
Gamers are consumers of media and other entertainment products or services. As such, they have the choice of spending their time the way they see fit, just as a consumer has the ability to spend their money to get what they desire most. As Thomas Davenport puts it, in postindustrial societies, attention has become a more valuable currency than the kind you store in bank accounts. What this means it that we all have a fixed amount of attention that we can dedicate to, well, just about anything. In the ancient times, when the offer of videogames was relatively scarce, game developers assumed that if a player just started playing a game, they would do so until the end, despite humiliating difficulty levels or tedious and uninnovative game mechanics. And indeed it worked, the opportunity to start a completely new gaming journey was so rare that when early gamers were presented with a fresh new game, they would give it considerable attention. This is much less true today, for many reasons:
the gamers attention is increasingly more solicited than it used to,
at the same time, it is much easier to switch to something else than gaming: modern games are more structured around short sessions, it’s more convenient to save, and stopping playing doesn’t involve any hardware manipulation like rebooting the PC or plugging the antenna cable back into the TV,
finally and most importantly, with the advent of the internet, it’s easy to get help on any game. While players had to find the answer to every puzzle by themselves fifteen years ago, they now can have the solution at their fingertip, effectively fast-forwarding their gaming experience.
Measuring attention
Objective measures (sales figures, press ratings) can be obtained easily, but tell little about a game quality and potential. Inversely, whether a game can manage to exist in an attention-scarce world is quite significant, but very difficult to assess.
- Defender of the Crown, Amiga, 1986
- Gaming conventions for invading castles have certainly evolved over the last 20 years
Cinemaware was one of the major studios of the pre-3D era. They sold quite a few, er, floppy disks, although volumes had nothing to do with what they are today. It’s also fair to say that their games were also widely distributed through non-commercial channels, piracy at first, then abandonware. Then, the studio disappeared in the mid-90s. In 2000, investors tried to resurrect Cinemaware and the first thing they did was to make available for free on their website a PC version of the 1986 classic "Defender of the Crown". Within a month, the game had been downloaded no less than 6 million times.
For 6 million people, Defender of the Crown meant something, either fond memories of having actually played the game, or a concept interesting enough to give it a try 15 years after. At any rate, that 6 million figure was much more that Defender of the Crown ever sold by a considerable amount.
This doesn’t mean that 6 million people bought the 2003 remake. But when the production of that game begun, it had a tremendous potential. Some sequels of truly old, yet memorable games have achieved tremendous results (Prince of Persia, GTA3, or, to a lesser extent, Frogger).
Alternative measures of attention such as number of hits on the internet, number of known fan sites, or readers’ reviews of games provide a good indication of the importance the game could have taken.
Crossing the line
By taking into consideration the player’s attention, by not considering them as the receiving end, but as a partner in an truly interactive relationship, it is then possible to create games that will be noticed, loved, but, more importantly, good games. The ones that leave fond memories, the ones that are remembered as classics.
But similar mechanisms can lead to addiction. Unlike attention, addiction is not a positive outcome of game design and should be avoided at all costs. In marketing lingo, or in the self-representation of gamers, being addicted is generally very highly regarded. Indeed, it’s a recurring theme of advertisement campaigns, and in forums or opinion polls, gamers, especially the younger ones, tend to depict themselves as more "hardcore" that they actually are: they own all next-gen systems, they play 10 hours+ a day, they started playing 20 years ago, etc.
Addiction is not cool, it’s pathetic. And it’s not good for your game. When you grab a player’s attention, you make them use the game in a more active way. Addicted players however play more automatically, more passively. So, from a game designer point of view, this is not very rewarding.
Of course, there are also ethical considerations involved. This subject has been so much debated that they may seem stereotypical, but they cannot be underestimated, as an addiction to one game can have such devastating effects, and give such a terrible image of the game industry in general.
Finally, there is a very direct and very unhappy financial consequence, as a player which is addicted to one game is not likely to play another one, which means less revenue per hour played. Many MMOs, which come naturally to mind when dealing with addiction, have a monthly fee business model to address this issue, effectively making some of these games extremely profitable. But eventually, the addicted player will generate less revenue for the industry as a whole than an enthusiastic, active, interested attentive player.
Games in the pop-culture
Compared to other forms of modern media, games are still dwarves in terms of the attention they can get from society as a whole. 6 million people may have downloaded Defender of the Crown (many of which never played it or even installed it), but the trailer of Peter Jackson’s King Kong was downloaded more than 100 million times (and was viewed every time!). The game industry does not have the muscle to fight with TV, movies, music, sports and so on. This is a paradox, because the game in itself requires more involvement from the player than a movie from a viewer, and has the potential to touch its user in a much deeper, much more personal fashion. If a game won this attention battle, it could be the next big thing - an event with a global, yet a personal reach, like Pac Man in its time or, more recently, Pokmon.