COLUMN: 'Chewing Pixels': Downgrade Complete
['Chewing Pixels' is a semi-regular GameSetWatch-exclusive column written by British games journalist and Flash game producer, Simon Parkin. Today, a look at a satirical game that reveals much about the state of game design.]
The evidence that videogames may yet emerge from their period of extended adolescence comes not from the dizzying realism of the next Forza, nor from the unrivaled spectacle of the forthcoming God of War, nor even the news that Lara’s improbable cleavage is scheduled for a sober reduction in the next Tomb Raider.
Rather, it's in the emergence of a new breed of satirical web-game, one most famously exemplified by last year's Achievement Unlocked, which poked fun at gamers' obsessional pursuit of Xbox Achievement points and PlayStation trophies.
These snappy experiences parody not the grim clichés of gaming’s stories, settings or visuals but rather the more subtle underlying systems that drive them or, in the case of Achievement Unlocked, surround them. They compel us to play via the very same hooks that big budget titles employ, but their exaggerated presentation and irreverent context encourage us to evaluate the worth of these mechanics and, in doing so, question the very reasons why we find them so irresistible.
Upgrade Complete is the latest such satirical game in this vein. It begins by presenting players with the bare bones of a shoot ‘em up; a blocky, silent retro game whose music, graphics, menus and even developer logos must be bought and upgraded one by one with in-game currency.
At first glance Upgrade Complete appears to be making fun of downloadable content, those upgrades - new costumes, weapons, characters and levels - released by a developer for a modest fee after their game’s initial release. After all, until you purchase a humble loading bar you can't even start this game (the developer 'lends' you $1000 to make this initial purchase).
But as you play on, the game’s target is revealed to be a more substantial and pervasive one: that of the in-game upgrades that furnish our characters with better weapons and abilities, a feature found in almost all contemporary videogames from Fallout 3 to Call of Duty 4.
In Upgrade Complete, your slow-moving ship starts out with a single front-mounted gun. But as you shoot down enemy ships and collect the coins they drop, you can pay to upgrade and 'customise' its manoeuvrability, weapons and effectiveness, revealing, piece by piece, the final, ideal iteration of the ship originally designed by the game’s creator.
This mechanic originated in traditional RPGs, where defeating monsters earns experience points and coins used to improve your character’s abilities and purchase new spells, armour and weapons. The system is compelling because it offers a clear way in which your time spent with a game results in demonstrable progress, while also strengthening the idea of your character undergoing a journey through which they're growing and developing. But it’s also a fiercely linear sort of progression: the more you play, the more your character realises its predestined potential, one that has little to do with your own choices or successes.
In recent years more diverse games have begun to adopt this unlock trajectory, using it as a way to hook their player in and to artificially pace the game’s progression. Recent open-world titles inFamous and Prototype both feature characters who start off as pale reflections of the avatars they eventually become, the pacing of each game set by the character abilities that unlock in a steady trickle.
So it is with Upgrade Complete, a game that only begins to resemble its final, finished state as you play and invest in it. It’s compelling because the economy of cause and effect is immediate, overt and frequent. But it is also cheap trick that highlights a fundamental change in the way designers are constructing their games.
In the beginning, non-RPGs rarely employed this kind of system. In Pacman, for example, players enjoy the full range of their avatar’s abilities right from the off. The focus isn’t on playing the game for a long time to develop (or, more accurately, complete) their character, but on perfecting one’s technique with a defined, immovable skill set. The better you are at Pacman, the further into the game you are able to progress, its rewards structured around perfecting skill rather than merely investing time.
Likewise, the full breadth of Street Fighter IV’s content is unlocked very quickly. And yet tens of thousands of players are still heavily invested in the game, not because there is more content to ‘purchase’, or better moves with which to upgrade Ryu and Chun-Li, but rather because they are on a quest to play the game more effectively and beautifully, to perfect their technique and to better manipulate its systems.
There is no in-game reward structure in Street Fighter IV for a player who invests more time than another player, other than the probability that they will grow to become better at the game. As such the pay-off for the player is in learning and improving a skill, not in purchasing and accruing in-game items or upgrades, a crucial distinction that bucks against current consumer-based gaming systems.
In part the use of sequential character upgrades in games is a by-product of the pursuit of linear narratives. If a game is telling the story of a character's journey, then one of the easiest ways to communicate a sense of that journey through the game system is by adding to the character's abilities. But this approach, while effective, encourages sloppy design. Imagine if Super Mario's jump distance extended as you worked through Super Mario World (as it does in Prototype). The need to craft thoughtful levels and puzzles and construct a balanced difficulty curve through them would diminish as the pacing of the game is instead dictated by withholding abilities, not finding ever more inventive ways of challenging a player to apply what they've always had.
Good games encourage players to literally better themselves, rather than simply toiling away to unlock game features or character upgrades that should have been present from the start. And yet, this most simple of reward schemes can prove irresistible, locking us in to patterns of play that distract without enriching.
We should be glad of satirical games such as Upgrade Complete which challenge us to identify what it is we find attractive about a particular game, and, as with choosing a partner, discern whether that attraction will be good for us in the long run. Therein lies maturity.
Click here to read the previous Chewing Pixels columns.
Comments
Upgrades and changing abilities can be used for good level design and can give not only a sense of progression, but also a more varied breadth of challenges. Think of Super Mario World, which has blocks you need to go off and activate. This means that a single level can be played multiple times and present different challenges and obstacles despite having the same objective.
Also, you can use upgrades to help ease a new player into their abilities. Portal is generally upheld as a paragon of teaching-based level design, and it intentionally withholds the ability to place portals until a few levels in.
Also, there are games where a large portion of the pleasure of playing the game is from constructing and customizing your character. Think of the Armored Core series. It's not a gimmick or a trick to keep you hooked or invested; building and tweaking your mechs is genuinely enjoyable in its own right.
Don't get me wrong, I completely agree with your main premise: these games are good for us, in addition to being funny. Getting us to think about the things we take for granted is always a good thing. Hopefully they can lead us to identify the cases where they enhance the game, and where they are used merely to artificially extend the game or invest the player in something uninteresting.
Posted by: Julian | July 7, 2009 10:44 AM
Metroid is one of my favorite game franchises and it commits this alleged crime. The result? Some of the best designed, explorable environments I've ever played.
However, I am not sure I buy the core assumption that doling out abilities is somehow lazy. It strikes me as more of a tool to move the game along. It can work or not, but the existence of this progression-tool is not the problem.
This is an interesting article - and very entertaining. I can't wait to play Upgrade Complete some more. My few minutes with it are very fun - in that meta-sorta-way we snobby gamers like so much. :)
Posted by: Matt (DocBadwrench) | July 7, 2009 12:56 PM
Simon, I think this is both the core of your argument and the part I disagree with:
"Good games encourage players to literally better themselves, rather than simply toiling away to unlock game features or character upgrades that should have been present from the start."
I'm thinking I have 3 points. They all center around a different opinion of what "good" means when judging games. I am prepared to "agree to disagree."
1) I don't believe that challenging players to better themselves and having unlockable abilities are mutually exclusive. "The need to craft thoughtful levels and puzzles and construct a balanced difficulty curve through them would diminish" doesn't seem to mandate that a game with unlockable abilities would be necessarily a "bad" game. Metroid has already been brought up as a game that both consistently challenges players but requires unlocked abilities in order to proceed to new objectives. Action RPGs going all the way back to Zelda have challenged players both technically and intellectually while also providing a sense of progress both for the player and the protagonist.
2) I don't believe that good games necessarily challenge players to better themselves. A "good" game could, for example, convince players to stop and take stock of their lives and world view. Upgrade Complete seems to have done that for you, and that seems perfectly commendable as a goal for a game.
3) I don't believe that players becoming better at managing the interface of a game necessarily counts as "bettering themselves." A "Serious Game" can teach the player to conserve and recycle, and can point out the benefits of conscious lifestyles and the dangers of irresponsibility. An RPG can make a player question immature or improperly nuanced ethical precepts, which strikes me as impressively challenging the player to become a better person -- not just a gamer. Street Fighter IV may challenge players to become better human beings, and perhaps "to play the game more effectively and beautifully" is in that sense worthwhile in a grander scheme, but I'm not sure I see inherent value in training "to perfect their technique and to better manipulate its systems."
Again, I think this comes from having different views on value. If anything, I take issue with the unspoken value proposal that you have assumed to be true, and that you've assumed your audience would accept.
Posted by: Erik Hanson | July 7, 2009 2:38 PM
Half of the Street Fighter IV roster is hidden behind unlock conditions. Two specifically require no continues be used, and have other performance requirements. A fairly large number of non-gameplay items are also locked, such as most of the colors and personal actions. Plus there are alternate outfits that can only be obtained by paying for DLC.
Honestly, at least in regards to multiplayer games, I'd actually prefer if things could be unlocked just by spending enough time in the game, regardless of skill. Some games manage to hide stuff behind annoying conditions, and sometimes it is just annoying to burn the time in solo modes when you primarily want to play multiplayer.
Posted by: Billy Bissette | July 7, 2009 4:43 PM
@Upgrade Complete
wow. loved it.
Posted by: Raoul Duke | July 7, 2009 5:07 PM
Billy:
I think the distinction is that almost all of the Street Fighter IV's unlocks are tokens of skill (new costumes, new icons etc) used to show off to other players. Non-skilled players will never get some of those unlocks no matter how long they grind the game.
By contrast, inFamous or Prototype's unlocks are inevitable, skill only relevant in the sense of how quickly those unlocks are arrived at, rather than whether they will be or not.
Also, not one of SFIV's unlocks in any way changes the basic game. None augment any character's abilities or in any way change the finely-tuned base of play.
Posted by: Simon Parkin | July 8, 2009 2:20 AM