The Men in the Green Visors

At the beginning of any medium’s lifespan is a period of rampant, unstructured experimentation. Creators work by trial and error, and in the absence of strategies that reliably work, they follow their own whims and interests. Over time, ideas about what does and does not work build up and are taught to future generations as rules or guidelines. For each medium, this process plays out differently, but in each case it is motivated by the need for some relatively reliable system to predict the profitability of a given venture. Once some novel venture starts making enough money, the accountants are going to start taking over.

The hope is that whatever system gets produced will be flexible enough to allow for innovation. American comic books provide a good example of how badly this can all go; in the beginning there were crime comics, horror comics, detective comics, romance comics, adventure comics, etc., all of which eventually gave way to the domination of superhero comics above all else. Innovation in mainstream comics has been an incestuous mess of deconstructing, reconstructing, recontextualizing, and rethinking superheroes, then repeating the process on whatever new ideas about superheroes came out of the previous cycle. This makes for an output which appeals to a fairly narrow segment of the audience, and has left the entire medium in the undignified state of mainly providing characters and ideas for other media in order to eke out a living at all.

On the other side of the spectrum are Hollywood movies. In 1927, just as filmmakers were starting to figure things out, sound came along and forced a violent shift in many practices over the course of only a few years. Many stars became unusable, shooting and blocking procedures had to be reconfigured to keep actors in the range of the microphone, and someone had to figure out what kind of dialogue and music people wanted in movies. The findings of the twenty-year process of figuring out what people wanted were suddenly near-useless, and quickly coming up with a new system was a matter of survival.

According to film historian Rick Altman¹, the reaction of the movie studios was to put out as many talkies as possible, observe which ones were successful, and put out even more talkies with similar thematic and structural elements in an attempt to isolate the variables that made that movie popular. The end result of this process was a remarkably well-defined system of genres. By repeating a successful movie’s elements in various configurations, the studios could analyze which of those elements were essential and which were incidental to a movie’s appeal, and to build up a series of fairly modular definitions of types of movies. This is perhaps the ideal of a reliable yet flexible system for commodifying an artistic medium; later critics would look back on Hollywood’s genre filmmakers as harboring much of the innovation and artistic success of the studio period.

Videogames have faced no such major paradigm shift in their history, but nonetheless are approaching the point at which the accountants are going to want some guarantee of results. Unfortunately, it looks like they’ve hit upon usability engineering as a good template to work from. Videogames are software, so why not evaluate game design like other types of software are evaluated?

The problem is that traditional usability engineering isn’t even working that well for other types of software anymore. The field was originally built up on the assumption that users have goals and tasks, so the best way to design software is to minimize obstacles between the user and those goals. This is fine when you’re talking about simple business software where the tasks are obvious. But more and more situations where this doesn’t apply are showing up – exploratory data mining and visualization applications where the goal is unknown, online stores that want to support idle browsing, collaborative software where multiple users may have conflicting goals or intersecting tasks, and so forth. We’re using computers for a lot more complicated and unstructured things these days. As a result, research in human factors and usability is moving away from the older task-centric point of view².

Nonetheless, the videogame designers who are showing an interest in applying usability to increase the reliability of their output seem to be absorbing the older task-centric style, if the Halo 3 team is any indication:

“Here’s the problem,” Pagulayan mutters, motioning to a computer monitor that shows us the game from the player’s perspective. He points to a bunch of grenades lying on the ground. She ought to be picking those up and using them, he says, but the grenades aren’t visible enough. “There’s a million of them, but she just missed them, dammit. She charged right in.” He shakes his head. “That’s not acceptable.”

The player has failed in the subtask of getting the grenades, which she will need to accomplish the task of finishing the level, etc. This focus on tasks isn’t surprising; after all, the new movements in human-computer interaction aren’t fully developed yet, and if you want something time-tested, task-based usability evaluation is all there really is, even if it makes an awkward fit with games.

Of course, this is only one game, and not necessarily an indicator of larger trends by any means. However, it is liable to be an enormous success, and a very high profile one at that, given the extent of its marketing. Which means that anything it does is probably going to get copied by a lot of people. If those people are looking for a good systematic way to make reliably successful games, the usability-style evaluation used by Bungie may seem pretty attractive.

And this would be a terrible idea. What usability researchers are finding now is that the task-based evaluation paradigm only works for a surprisingly narrow set of programs; likewise, task-based evaluation would produce a narrow set of games. The only obvious task in games is to finish the game. But of course, many simulation games have no end, and even in games with endings, the fun isn’t only, or even primarily, in finishing – the fun is in the process. Streamlining the process so that the gamer finishes it more smoothly is not necessarily what every gamer wants, or what any gamer wants all of the time.

The strength of Hollywood’s genre system is in its flexibility to aim at different audiences and to allow innovation. As Chris Bateman might put it, it’s tactical rather than logistical. It acknowledges the difficulty of creating a gold standard of “entertainment” that will appeal to the entire audience, and instead creates numerous kinds of entertainment that appeal to many smaller segments of the audience. And because of its modularity and its ability to get at the essence of what makes a movie enjoyable, a good genre system is also more capable of reacting when the tastes of the audience change. Musicals, for example, were hugely popular from the coming of sound to the mid-’60s. As more cynical ’70s audiences went for movies with the veneer of realism, Hollywood slowed its production of musicals, and by the ’80s and ’90s was focusing anew on big-budget screwball romantic comedies – basically musicals with the songs taken out. Now that a new generation has grown up with ubiquitous music videos, Hollywood is trying out musicals again, often aimed at teenagers and incorporating traditional elements of high school movies. Meanwhile, trendspotting critics identify brand new genres like torture porn and mumblecore, and studios obligingly release a bunch of movies under the new labels to see what makes them tick. Reaction times are pretty fast and changes are easily incorporated.

The idea of a “science of play” based on usability, though, suggests a much less flexible system. The Halo 3 article describes a process designed to create a smooth, homogenous user experience, exactly the kind of please-everyone ambition that gets you in trouble as your audience changes. It’s the equivalent of those crackpots who swear they’ve found a formula for predicting the success of a movie. Just plug in the script and go! The idea is ridiculous on the face of it, knowing just how many factors go into the box office performance of any given movie. The same applies to games, and attempts to homogenize the player experience would obscure a lot of those more subtle factors while developers should be learning from them.

It’s been nice living through the period of gaming when even the most mainstream games are filled with weird experiments and innovations, but there’s no way for that to last much longer than it already has. Already a lot of that experimentation is moving to the fringes, to indie games and small developers, which is normal. But it would be unfortunate if mainstream games were to end up like mainstream comic books, atrophied and weakened by their adherence to a single standard of entertainment. The industry needs to develop its tactics, not just one-size-fits-all standards of gameplay.

1. ”Cinema and Genre,” The Oxford History of World Cinema 
2.  A 2003 CHI panel discussed some of the new paradigms in HCI.  Additionally, experience-focused HCI seems to hold some potential for thinking about games.