Feed the Dog, Take Out the Trash, Collect Trinkets?

While playing a game, gamers are asked to do many things. Some of those things are fun, others are not. Juuso Hietalahti, at Game Producer Resource, posted a quick article suggesting seven simple elements that can be added to your game can make it more fun. I agree with six of them.

As a kid, I collected all kinds of crap: baseball cards, Star Wars figures, soccer pins, comic books. Eventually I grew out of it (except for a resurgence of Star Wars figures around 1999) except I still have what I consider collections, like my video games, books or DVDs. I always had fun while I was doing it but I never really got too crazy.

However, I hate when a video game asks the player to collect things. In my opinion, it is not fun. It's busy work, a chore. It distracts from the game at hand. It has become one of the worst video game clichés and a crutch to synthetically lengthen game play.

While playing through Gears of War, I could never suspend my disbelief that Marcus would stop and look for COG tags while the Locust are bearing down on him or while he's in a hurry to save humanity. The same goes for Master Chief and the golden skulls. It seems that every platforming game to has the player collecting hundreds, if not thousands, of random, shiny object all in the name of meeting some goal of 100% complete. It has also become quite fashionable to create achievements around collecting. I hate collecting achievements. Which is saying something because, in general, I love achievements.

At least in the original Mario games, collecting 100 coins would earn the player an extra life. In Grand Theft Auto, collecting secret packages makes items spawn at your safe house (although, I usually stopped actively searching for them once the body armor was unlocked). These days, collecting things nets you a few gamer points and some concept art. If I'm going to be collecting something, it better be necessary to advance the story line and provide my character with new abilities. When a game play mechanic is no more important or as enticing as chores around the house, I'm not really have any fun any more.

Wii: Bright or Bleak Future?

A little over a week ago, I came across a great new website: Game Producer Resource. The latest post describes Juuso's (the author) opinion on the upcoming success for the Wii.

Since I work day in and day out with the Wii, I thought I'd throw out my two cents:

I’m not as confident as you. Sales have been very strong and probably will be in the near future. But sustained growth is going to be tough.

The Xbox 360, my personal pick in the long run, and the PS3 will be better at meeting the hardcore gamer market with exceptional titles, XBLA/PSN capabilities and online gaming. The Nintendo Wii is said to try to be winning hardcore fans but attracting casual gamers as well. The casual games market is thriving, but mostly on hardware that casual gamers already own: like a computer or a cell phone. It will be a hard sell to get people to continue to purchase a $250 piece of equipment to play casual style games and that’s it. (For a far better success story, one can look to the DS.)

This leads me to another problem I see with the Wii: game line-up. Working at a third party publisher who fully intends to support the Wii, we still see it as a second tier platform. Triple A titles are going to the 360/PS3 while the Wii will get ports with tacked on Wii Remote functionality. Lackluster but strong support from third parties is going to be detrimental in the long run. Nintendo is the only company who seems to fully see the potential in their own hardware. And with a release schedule of only three or four high profile titles a year, the road ahead looks far less bright.