Games Aren't Numbers

I try to give them a chance but I just hate professional reviews. Actually nearly all reviews are bad, but at least amateur and indie reviews are sometimes entertaining reads. Professional ones (IGN, 1up, etc.) are consistently just lousy. I could go on about how bad reviews are, but one thing that always stuck out to me is the fact that it seems like these reviews judge games against an unwritten formula. Like they believe there is some sort of Platonic ideal embodying the perfect video game and all others are to be judged against it. I have always wondered what exactly this latent ideal is, since no one seems to be able to say exactly.

I think I may have discovered the answer while reading this article on sensory reactions to shooter games. To provide a summary of the article, a study was done measuring the emotional response to events in 3D shooter games such as Gears of War, Halo 2, Half-Life 2, and so on. As it turns out, cut scenes are boring, dangerous situations are exciting, close combat is thrilling, novel weapons are fun, and after the excitement there need to be periods of relaxation. None of these are revolutionary discoveries, but now there is hard science measuring them. (Even with charts and graphs!) The idea is that developers who are aware of this data can use it to maximize the time in their games where emotional response is highest. This is trickier than it sounds since the study only provides rough guidelines, and the most emotional elements still need to be deployed strategically to make an impact.

One of the elements which incites the most emotion is close combat. There is one line on page three that makes an interesting observation:

It was no surprise to us that the three games in this study widely considered "game of the year" (Gears of War, Halo 2, and Half-Life 2) all designed and executed exceptional melee weapons to encourage or force close combat.

If you read the whole article you'll see that "game of the year" winners frequently score very high in all of these tests, not simply close combat.

Needless to say, this study only covers a single genre and there are many more popular games that are not 3D shooters. But given that genre, this seems to be the core of what really drives a game forward in scores. Reviewers will give specific praise to the graphics, controls, and so forth, but in the light of this "emotional" aspect my suspicion is growing that these various qualities are really only secondary. I have to wonder though, that if this is truly the most prevalent force in a game, why it is so rarely addressed directly. I suppose it could be because the emotional elements are more latent, and journalists express them indirectly with colorful language, but I do not want to go to far with this mere hypothesis.

But is this it? Is this the "formula?" Do reviewers simply want to feel a constant emotional high throughout their games? This seems rather shallow. Do not get me wrong, I love being thrilled and excited and games that do these are great fun. But is that it? Is that all they boil down to? My answer is of course not. Reviews are just superficial.

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