Gaming Imperfect

"But please, you know you're just like me

Next time, I promise we'll be - perfect"

 

Smashing Pumpkins - Perfect

 

 

If you've ever played an MMO (or even some single-player open world games) you've run across the mindless beachcombing vulgarly touted as exploration achievements. In theory "exploration" should mean taking stock of your surroundings, finding paths, shortcuts and secretive nooks and crannies or alternately scenic or significant landmarks.

 

Worse: it's past another marker, so you probably stopped searching the area.

 

In game designer jargon though, "exploration" means tagging indistinguishable patches of dirt with the idea that exactly 3.91km outside of town on the highway counts as exploring that road - but not 3.90 or 3.92! City of Heroes ranked the worst offender for its coin-sized markers you literally had to step on, because finding lost pennies on a sidewalk is the equivalent of discovering Vinland. Compounding the problem, you must usually find absolutely every last marker to complete the achievement. Obviously Marco Polo didn't truly visit China because he never hit madam Wang's noodle steamery on 35th street. Without that, the whole trip's void.

 

We could comb every step of every map just fine when Doom consisted of twenty pharmacy-sized levels of featureless corridors with predetermined demon spawns for your shotgunning pleasure. But in the era of hundred-square-kilometer virtual worlds, asking players to find the exact ten spots where your dog shit last week might as well come with HUD markers, because nobody bothers doing that without cheating off a wiki. The only way to keep such challenges playable without rendering locations too obvious is to stop demanding full completion, which would also address another issue of the absolute faceless lack of player identity in modern games. It might be quaint to compare notes with someone else and find the 10/13 spots I found to complete an achievement aren't the same 10/13 he did, that he likes beaches while I prefer hills, and neither of us thought to crawl up a troll's ass to find the exploration marker it swallowed.

 

But this is just a small manifestation of a larger, older issue. Mammalian play is supposed to be explorative, and as a heavily neotenized species we enjoy that feeling of rifling through grandma's kitchen cabinets for the sheer hell of it. For anyone with more brains than a hamster, it stops being fun when grandma just orders you to take out exactly five forks from the second drawer on the right. Playing games should be an inherently creative endeavor, an intersection of your personal style with novel challenges, not fucking cookie-cutter builds, "meta" team comps, enforced min-maxed optimization and completionism!

 

I've probably logged hundreds of hours in RimWorld without ever bothering to pursue the supposed win condition of escaping the planet. I'd rather see how cyborg cannibals fare against giant ants. My current gimmick is technophilic primitive nudists in the taiga. One colony some time ago started with Labrador retriever pets. Properly trained they made passable if unimpressive combatants, but the economic angle proved more interesting.

 

Their larger litters give them twice the population growth of mightier beasts like cougars, but their nutritional requirements soon had me considering sterilizing them all to stem the voraciously adorable beige tide. Turns out they sell well though. Lacking any other tradable commodities (sculptures, couture, beer) during the early, dirt-farming years of my colony's development, my colonists' lives began revolving around Labrador breeding to such an extent even when they did get around to sculpting, it was all about the damn mutts. I organized their schedules around properly timing trade caravans to rid myself of each new sackfull of puppies before they eat me out of house and home. Thus planet <whatsitsname> acquired its first dedicated puppy mill.

Am I winning at RimWorld?

Maybe not officially, but anything with that many puppies sure feels like a win.

The stars can wait. Why would I ever abandon puppy-farming?

 

Albeit hardly games' biggest problem at the moment (that would be microtransactions) the fixed idea of "winning" by completing the game is holding back more promising genres, and it's rooted in the industry's beginnings. The early success stories like Space Invaders or Frogger were by necessity limited in their interactivity. Getting the high score was a worthy endeavor in a context which never stretched beyond strafe/shoot/strafe/shoot anyway - but we have more options now.

Take a Stellaris playthrough in which I outlawed robots. Normally, the machine uprising event (if you research sentient AI but don't give them their rights) is a mid-game challenge, with individual fleet strengths on the order of tens of thousands. Mid-game came and went, late game saw me polishing off some of my more threatening or profitable neighbours... one of which had AI-driven ships... which tech I inadvertently acquired from battlefield salvage. I was nonplussed when the unprompted machine uprising warning signs began to pop up here and there, decided it must just be little glitch... and another one... and OH, SHIIIIIIT !

Turns out the event scales.

When the robot mafia spawned from my galactic frontrunner, late-game empire, it spawned with individual fleets of 1.5 million and more in strength, for a total of ~15mil, when my combined fleet strength, matching the whole rest of the galaxy put together, could barely take on one at a time. And I did take on one at a time, traded for alloys, retreated and regrouped at citadels, and eventually managed to recover thanks to the skirmish/attrition-obsessed AI never massing against me, wasting its superfluous strength on undefended systems.

That should count as a win right there.

A single one of those fleets would trounce the entire Contingency which spawns as the official end-game artificial intelligence crisis faction. Anything after the terminator swarm stretching across whole systems can't but come across as a firecracker echoing a nuke. After surviving the Robot Mafia, telling me I won by outscoring the Lokken Mechanists in energy credits or whatever comes across as an insult... butchoo gotta beat the game, right?

To their credit, Paradox have started experimenting with more nonstandard endgame scenarios like blowing up the galaxy for the win. Such alternate victory conditions (the classic example being Civilization's spaceship launch) are currently lacking in the recent TBS which started this whole train of thought, Old World.

In one recent playthrough, I found myself putting quite a bit of effort into breeding Labrador retrievers... errr, I mean, inter-breeding with the Vandals, securing an alliance and wedding new heirs into the tribe. But, given Old World's emphasis on dynasties as principal selling point over Civilization and its copycats, I'm a bit disappointed at the absence of some kind of victory condition relating to inheritance. Y'know what? Scrap the "victory" part. Winning by completing achievements is decent, but give me more ways to deliberately finish the game without just outscoring everyone, maybe legitimize the Vandals by my imperial authority and parentage, install my mostly-Vandal grandson Abdosir (isn't he cute?) as their god-king, turn them into a divinely sanctioned rampaging horde and set them loose upon an unsuspecting Fertile Crescent, ending civilization as we know it. Cue credits. You don't win. You don't lose. But you played it your way to the bitter end.

This is MY sandstorm.

I criticized plenty about Shadowrun: Dragonfall after my playthrough, but applauded its setting, characters and especially its stellar reinterpretation of a "bad" ending as simply your character's choices taken to their logical conclusions, without beating you over the head with a bunch of shallow moralistic posturing about how you should've played the hero. And, just as city simulators have a lot to teach other genres about decentralizing the action, we should remember grand strategy is just a way of saying roleplaying on a civilization scale. Not every campaign should be measured against an arbitrary perfect win, ticking all checkboxes on the achievement list, chasing down every last monster in every last zone for 100% completion, marrying the prince for a golden ending. Instead of advancing toward ruling the world, merge the ideas of strategy tech/culture/military victories with RPGs' "where are they now" end-game slideshows. A little good. A little bad. So it goes.

On the flip-side, cRPGs themselves almost invariably get easier as you advance, sometimes to the point you can one-shot the final boss. Justified, to a large extent, because a late-game unwinnable state would cheat the player of a lot more invested time than getting eaten by the first giant spider in the prologue. This can be addressed by implementing more "bad" endings without treating them as losses, without propping up a single "golden ending" as the goal of the entire campaign. Yes, building the Civilization spaceship means you'll never rule the Earth. So what? Screw you guys, I'm going home... to Alpha Centauri. Start legitimizing pyrrhic victories, desperate last stands and glorious resistance movements instead of merely ranks on a podium and "second place is another word for loser."

Sure, games have rules and goals, otherwise they disintegrate. If you want complete creative freedom, buy some art supplies and paint your way to victory, compose some music, scribble disjointed short stories and post them to your blog, whatever. You don't need fifty space marines and a gluon gun for that. But there must be a middle ground between everything and nothing allowing for interactivity in an interactive medium instead of just practicing Mario's jumps. Whether it's imposing a victory condition on a sandbox, 100% achievement completion, golden endings, nominal victories dwarfed by preceding gameplay, anticlimactic but mandatory final boss fights, we have got to distance ourselves more from the idea of perfect scores, first place or complete domination as the only goals worth pursuing.

And if you don't see any social commentary in that yet, I'll just leave you to it.