Unlockable Features In Games

It’s not often that Slashdot comes up with something genuinely interesting that I haven’t seen from somewhere else before, but they managed it today. Puritan Work-Ethic, How I Loathe Thee really struck a chord with me:

Nearly every video game since “tank pong” has buried its best content behind layers of work. Unlike any other retail product I can think of, when you buy a video game, the chances that you will actually get what you paid for are infinitesimal. I can’t think of a single game I’ve played where I am confident that I’ve seen every single level; unveiled every coveted secret; unlocked every whatsit and pretty and soundtrack left like kipple by the designers in the dark corners of the code.

I bought it. I want my game.

The last couple of weekends, my darling fiancè has rented a couple of playstation games for us to try out. Last weekends games were The Italian Job and one of the many Bond games. Both are a lot of fun in and of themselves, but both lock off 99% of the content until you’ve achieved certain milestones. This is more than just a few special bonuses being locked off to give you something to aim for, this is almost the entire game being locked off – even complete modes were locked off, like the multi-player arena in Bond wasn’t available until you reached some undetermined point in the multi-player cooperative mode. The Italian Job was similarly bad, a huge range of cars included in the game and none of them available. What’s worse, completing stages wasn’t enough to unlock things, you had to get a seriously high score while doing it – and the game was really quite challenging just to get through. In fact after a weekend of playing, we’ve only managed to see two of the stunt courses because it’s so hard to unlock the next one.

It’s a real shame that the game industry has decided that games are only fun if there’s some semi-tangible reward for doing well. What they don’t realize is that just getting through the level is the reward, it is genuinely satisfying just to be able to get to the end of the level. There’s no need to lock of particular features or even future levels to provide a reward, just getting through is reward enough.

Similarly, games that have specific and rare save points are doomed to be discarded in frustration. There’s just no reason for it, if I want to make the game harder by not saving regularly, I can do that – I’m in control. If however I want to make the game easier and less frustrating by saving regularly, let me do that. I do know what I want, I do know when I’m having fun and when I’m ruining it for myself.

The reality is, I don’t play games because I want to have a really hard challenge. I play games because I want to win. I hate losing at games it annoys me – why would I waste my time voluntarily doing something that clearly I suck at? I want to get up and over the suck threshold quickly and make progress and win – sure I want to be challenged, no it shouldn’t be too easy, but I should be able to win, even if it means saving every two seconds so I can practice little bit by little bit to get it just right. In the end, the only reason I’ll enjoy the game is because I can win at it – so give me a break, unlock the content, let me pick what I want to do when I want to and that way I’ll make sure I win just often enough to maximize my enjoyment.