Pefecting Games

MTV's Multiplayer takes an interesting look this week at the swelling ranks of perfectly reviewed games. The seemingly endless stream of critical paeans to GTA IV is just the latest in a trend that has seen four of the 12 highest aggregate review scores ever on Gamerankings.com go to games released in the last 10 months. Bioshock, Halo 3, Super Mario Galaxy, The Orange Box (featuring Portal) and what seems a golden age of independent games prompt Stephen Totilo to speculate:

I’ve been considering that a new plateau in game design expertise been achieved by a broad array of developers. It’s possible that the fundamental things that genre fans have been asking for have been achieved. The controls of “GTA” have been iterated on to the point that few people are cursing them anymore. The “Mario” universe has been rendered and re-rendered in all the dimensions in ways that seem to hit the spot perfectly for fans of that sort of thing. The war first-person-shooter has been nailed — repeatedly. Many known frontiers appear to have been conquered, goals have been met.

Surely gaming will get better. Games are an iterative medium. By and large, the new stuff is better-made than the old stuff. And, by and large, each year brings instant classics and instant lemons.

But I do wonder if something different is happening now, if a new status quo is being widely achieved.

It's an intriguing idea, and one I think is largely correct. The fundamental tools of game design as we've known it seem to have been mastered. Genre mechanics, character design, animation, music, the overall kinesthetic flow of games have reached a point of, if not perfection, then core excellence. The ragged seams that for so long prevented games from giving us complete and truly unified experiences are disappearing. The sense that we are playing some version of what game makers actually envisioned, rather than some adulterated sketch, has increased exponentially.

It's an exciting time to be sure. The medium is enjoying a perfect storm of financial, technical and cultural success. The quality and perfection of production techniques is no small factor in this success. The Wii has made the often parochial world of big-budget console gaming accessible to absolutely everyone. The explosion of downloadable console games has brought high production-value and the wonder of the classics to the masses in easily digestible chunks. The PS3 and Xbox 360 are routinely enabling designers to deliver fully realized and polished experiences that increasingly can stand against any other form of entertainment. Videogames have well and truly arrived.

But this is far from saying that game design has been perfected. The stage has been set, the wealth of the possibility space has been exposed to all and sundry, but in the midst of this moment, glorious for some, a new challenge has emerged. Soul. If games are to exceed their status as beautiful playthings, designers must now take the control they've achieved over the complex systems that constitute games and use it to more powerfully express the passions, fears and dreams of their creators. The proof of concept has been delivered with Bioshock, GTA, Super Mario Galaxy and the like. Now the challenge for games is to do more than simply succeed on their own terms. We need them to become ever more impassioned personal expressions with a finesse of viewpoint, character and purpose. It's not that games should aim beyond fun, but rather, that the fun they generate should be driven by intent. Games need to become fun for a reason.

Without that, all this perfection will soon become boring. And where's the fun in that?