Progression and Efficiency vs. Fun
By CJduke 6 Comments
I began writing this blog as a post to Austin's most recent Off the Clock. In his article, Austin wrote "But in Fallout 4, spending a resource often means a decrease in efficiency. I lose screws and steel and copper so that I can have a row of lights welcome me home when I return from the wastelands. The lights don’t do anything except trigger a small bolt of electricity in my brain that makes me recognize them as familiar, as something that I placed there. The “most efficient” way to play Fallout 4 would be to ignore these mechanics entirely. In the same way, the “most efficient” way to live in a real house is to spend money only on the most necessary of material improvements. Bare walls and empty shelves. What separates a house from a home is a collection of inefficient, emotional investments, and Fallout 4’s settlement system allows you to make these by the dozen". I love this point about playing games "efficiently". I feel like games often get criticized or our enjoyment of them is based on, like Jeff says, "seeing the numbers go up". I feel like a lot of people, myself included, have put way too much stock in these sorts of things. We complain about all the loot systems being similar, the numerous open world games with completion percentage bars and a list of collectibles in the hundreds, climbing towers to unlock things on a map that let us unlock more things, but sometimes it feels like we also deem a game as "not good" or "pointless" if it doesn't have these arbitrary progression systems.
As an example from what Austin wrote about, the Fallout 4 settlement and building system isn't great. The controls are janky and feel half baked. The idea that you can bring any item in the world you find back to your settlement, allowing you to design your home in anyway you want is cool, but then you realize you cant place the items easily in the way you want them. I can't get my toy rocketship to sit on a shelf facing me. I can't get jangles the moon monkey to sit on a counter. It's annoying and disappointing. Lastly, the entire gameplay system is largely "useless". You build up your settlement(s) to recruit more people, have food to gather, a place to store items, and a place for your companions to hang out. I don't really need any of these things. Food is easy to come by, as well as stimpacks. I'm playing on PC so I have 5,000 carry weight because fuck carry weight stats in games, so I don't need storage space. You can have settlers run your stores, but it is an expensive investment, especially for the higher ranking stores, and there are plenty of stores in other places to trade items. Jeff stated (and I'm paraphrasing) how it seemed that the building was a bit boring because he couldn't figure out the point to it, that it wasn't unlocking him things and getting him new stuff, so it's not efficient to play the game doing it. It's a waste of time. I feel like Jeff, and a lot of other people, myself included, take this approach to gameplay too often. If mode or scenario X isn't unlocking/filing a meter or making numbers get bigger, then it's pointless. But why?
What happened to games just being fun? I think the building/town creation in Fallout 4 is fun. I don't spend hours upon hours doing it, I certainly don't get crazy creative with it, but I take part in it and I enjoy that they put it in the game. I built a house and I dump shit in it I find in the world that I think is cool. I built rooms with furniture, I have lights and turret defenses. I have a collection of power armor models. As I get more settlers I add more water, more food, and in turn more defense. I put goofy pictures of dogs and cats on the walls. I try to place items I find, like pillows and cups, where they would fit in a real house. I put a typewriter on a desk. I have a bobblehead collection stand and magazine racks to hold my comic collection. Doing a lot of this has given me experience points, so I've probably gotten about two levels from building stuff, but beyond that there is no point to it. It didn't unlock me special perks, it didn't give me new weapons or armor. It doesn't give new missions, at least none that I have seen. It's just fun, even though it doesn't have a point. It's certainly added an extra 5 hours onto my Fallout play time that did nothing to progress my character or the story, but it was fun.
Not everything needs to have a "point." Not everything needs to be "efficient." Why play single player games for efficiency? I find myself in Fallout saying "well this gun is boring but it has waaaaay more damage than the gun that shoots an ice beam. It's certainly more fun to shoot people with an ice beam, but this generic pipe rifle kills people faster, getting me experience faster, getting me perks faster, helping me beat the game faster so I can...so I can what? Be done with the game? Why don't I just use the damn Cryolater!? It's WAY more fun! I had a similar feeling reading the Star Wars Battlefront review and watching the quick look. Dan kept talking about the progression, how lacking it all was and how that seriously impacted the review score. He kept saying "this is all there is, that's it." How about just tell us if the game is fun! If you actually enjoy playing a game, then why do you NEED any progression? Why do we need such efficiency to the things we do in games? And yes I know he did say it was mediocre, which is fine, I did not purchase the game because the gameplay did look tiresome. But I mean, would someone give Counter-Strike a lower score because you never unlock new guns or level up? Would someone say Mario is a bad game because you don't have a skill tree and earn experience points every time you jump on a goomba? No they wouldn't, because those games are just fun to play, period.
If something is fun it is fun, even if it doesn't fill some arbitrary progression meter, or is an inefficient way to play the game. Hell if you are worried about playing games efficiently, especially single player games, then I would wonder why you are playing games in the first place. They make life pretty inefficient! And sure you can just say, well the Fallout 4 building mechanics just suck and the Battlefront gameplay is basic and has no lasting value and I wouldn't disagree. The building mechanics in Fallout 4 are really lacking. Battlefront's gameplay does seem very lacking in variety. But I think it is fair, and certainly makes more sense, to judge things based on if they are fun or not, not if they have X amount of "progression." Games used to have zero progression and people loved them! Now everything needs rpg mechanics or it has "slim replay value", or 10 levels of prestige or the review score gets lowered. And yes, I didn't give the best examples with Fallout 4 and Battlefront because I agree both those games could be fairly qualified as "not fun" based on playing them alone, but they are two recent big budget games that I think highlight some issues many people have when playing games today. I even noticed on the Giantbomb forums that some people were having a blast playing Battlefront because they love Star Wars and the gameplay is so simple. Who am I to say it is inherently bad then, because the progression is thin? Efficiency and value are a weird thing. We want to feel like the progression in games, the side missions, the unlockables are all overflowing so we get our money's worth out of every game. I understand, games are expensive. But sometimes it seems like we lose sight of the most important thing in games; is it fun to play even if you don't unlock a single thing? At a certain point the progression will end. You will reach max level. You will unlock every gun. Do you stop playing then? Or do you keep playing because, level 100 character or not, the game is just damn fun to play.
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