*edit* I typed up a few thoughts on Super Meat Boy and hard games in general for this amateur blog post - I didn't realize this would be a forum post but cool, this way more people get to see it. Read and post away.
The AAA industry had a huge hand in helping the indie scene get where it is, but not intentionally and not directly. It started when publishers, dollar signs twinkling in their eyes, dropped the platformer like a hot potato to go chase after the FPS. After the launch of the Xbox and PS3, platforming (2d or 3d) didn't get much attention in the big budget arena, but, soon enough, Braid and World of Goo had taken off, indie developers blinked, and it hit them that they didn't need the publishing middleman between them and their consumers. All they needed was XBLA, PSN, and Steam. So they adopted the platformer as their genre of choice. And plenty of indie platformers have popped up since then hoping to be the next Braid - some are more Mario, some are more Megaman, some borrow a little from both with something new to spice it up. The best of the best of all indie platformers, though, would turn out to be the one developed from the most unpretentious and personal vision. Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes of Team Meat made Super Meat Boy just because they thought it would be fun, and they wanted to make something they would have stayed up all night playing when they were kids. As it turned out, developers who played platformers as kids know them better than anyone else. And gamers were jonesing for exactly what they were making.
What Team Meat and plenty of gamers were craving was a stiff and rewarding challenge. This is hardly news - SMB discussions usually involve someone saying they could have enjoyed it if it wasn't so difficult, and maybe another person saying, it's hard, but that's why it's so good. Everyone is in quiet awe of someone who's gotten Golden God. Yes, difficulty means something is hard to do, but SMB went further than just giving a stiff challenge. It gave a carefully calculated challenge, with a painstakingly designed difficulty curve all AAA devs could take notes from. Take a typical first time playthrough of Super Meat Boy: when you start, Super Meat Boy is just a cute cube of Meat running and jumping to catchy chiptunes, and you breeze through the first few levels learning his moves. This is because a smart and effective difficulty curve is patient; it sneaks up on you, seduces you by not giving you too much trouble at first, just slowly building the foundation for your skills. But sure enough, those skills hit a ceiling, you need to jump a certain way and you don't quite know how. You've come this far, you won't let those sawblades stop you from getting to your lovely bandaged lady. You go through your bag of tricks, try a few things, you run the level through several times, and with a sigh of satisfaction you finally figure it out and clear it. And then you do it faster a few more times just to squeeze out that A+.
Without you knowing it, Super Meat Boy has tapped into your desire to improve, your drive to see it through to the end, your need to prove yourself and what you've learned, all those little brain muscles you have to flex to master any real life skill. The brain muscles that current gen big budget games won't touch with a 10-foot pole. So, if you ask me the difference between Super Meat Boy and, say, Uncharted 2, I would answer you with another question: is a piano player more rewarded by the first concert performance he perfected for several months and performed flawlessly, or by the mini series he finished last night? You wouldn't think twice because which mini series he watched and for how long isn't really the issue. Without fail, any experience that demands you to hone and master your skill over time will stick with you longer than any cinematic experience. Whether it's got shooty bits in between the jaw-dropping cutscenes or not, Uncharted still does nothing new mechanically, and aims to wow you rather than to train you, so it falls squarely in the category of impressive entertainment worth having fun with. I will always enjoy big budget games like this between the more demanding ones, and I'll always forget them the day after I'm done with them and move on.
However, please note the difference between Super Meat Boy and Random Frustrating Indie, the game that is difficult just to be difficult. Clearly, a lot of thought has to go into a difficulty curve for it to work as intended, as every level has to be considered in context of the player's skill at that point. The gameplay has to somehow walk the tightrope of being rewarding but not too frustrating or punishing, and just how every game does this is very unique to its design, but, in this day and age of game design, eliminating frustration is crucial to keep the player from quitting. Super Meat Boy eliminates frustration with a killer soundtrack, a funny presentation, and just one second of delay between deaths. Random Frustrating Indie wants to do what Super Meat Boy does, but its mechanics, design, and gameplay are not inspired or rewarding enough to make a good difficulty curve - it's just needlessly difficult, the player gives up, and it's quickly forgotten. Considering how easy it is for a game trying to be difficult to just alienate the player, it's that much more impressive when games like Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, and Super Meat Boy so well balance difficulty and challenge with reward for a job well done. A constant tug of war between effort and reward.
Without Team Meat and From Software (the company behind Demon's Souls and Dark Souls), I never would have cared about video games enough to even give this matter a thought, let alone write anything about it. Credit these two companies with showing this generation's core gamer audience what a smart difficulty curve is, and, if you haven't played any of these 3 games, I'd suggest you look them up and try them out. You might be proud enough of the godly platforming skills you suffered to learn in SMB to be driven to put more effort into those real life skills you always wanted to try (everyone has them!). Because putting effort into a challenging skill and getting gradually better at it is pretty much the same regardless of what the skill is, and it's always rewarding, whether you finally find the words for what you want to say in a new language you've been studying, or whether after grumbling obscenities for hours at Dark Souls you finally get out of Blighttown. Yes, I'm idealistic, no, we don't even know if games will even continue with this design philosophy, and no, not everyone will take this much away from games like this. But it is a more valuable and concrete lesson than can be learned from any other entertainment medium, and it's an encouraging thought for the future of game design.
Log in to comment