Evergreen Games @ The Brainy Gamer

The Brainy Gamer Michael Abbott asks an interesting question - without necessarily knowing the answer - why do some games age better than others? Michael had his students play Ultima IV and Super Mario Brothers 3 and got very different reactions:

Playing older games can be a joyful experience. Revisiting an old favorite evokes a certain nostalgia that feels less like re-reading a book and more like driving your first car through your old neighborhood. Some things appear just as you remember them; other things seem oddly small or ordinary. Sometimes the car doesn't handle like you remember it.
I've been thinking about why certain games age better than others. Playing Ultima IV with my students recently, the neighborhood felt like home, but the car was stiff and hard to drive and, after awhile, not much fun anymore. I confess I found it mildly heartbreaking. Revisiting Super Mario Bros. 3, on the other hand, makes me wonder why I bought the car I'm driving now.

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Interesting question, that, and one that's hard to answer definitively.

Speaking only for myself, I know it's not the graphics. I've been badly hooked on Dwarf Fortress and Nethack, which have ASCII graphics, and while va-voom graphics do make a favorable first impression, I can see through utilitarian, bad, or nonexistent graphics fairly quickly.

That leaves about three other broad areas: gameplay, content, and structure.

With these, I think the key is in gameplay. If a game is badly imagined and poorly structured, there's really no reason to revisit anyway, unless the gameplay is really exceptionally good. Conversely, a game with exceptional content and structure can still feel like a drag to play if the gameplay is poor.

For example, I've repeatedly restarted Planescape: Torment, only to give up fairly soon due to the crappy gameplay -- the first time I played it, the content and structure were powerful enough to sweep me along and soldier through the crappy gameplay, but now that I've played it through and remember what happened, more or less, I can't muster up the patience to slog through those endlessly tedious rat fights and endless trudges back and forth across big maps.

The same goes for Fallout 2. Not so much Fallout 1, though -- while the mechanics are the same, it's so much better balanced and has so many fewer slogs through mobs that it's much less tedious to play, which makes its strengths shine that much brighter.

Conversely, Deus Ex has aged really well -- it's marvelously imagined, reasonably well written, and masterfully structured -- and the gameplay is varied, fluid, and exciting enough to make it fun. It's a thoroughly modern game in every way except in the visuals, and that's more than enough to carry it through.

What is good gameplay, then? Put a bit metaphorically, a game with good gameplay balances on a knife-edge between boredom and frustration. If it's too easy -- with easy, boring fights, lots of slogs back and forth, lots of repetitive, unchallenging quests -- it's tedious and boring and sucks. If it's too hard -- with fights that you can only win by saving and loading and saving and loading ad nauseam, or fight after fight after fight after fight with no change of pace -- it's equally tedious, only it'll have you screaming in frustration rather than yawning in boredom. Games that hit a good balance between the two are enjoyable to play, and they stay that way even as the tech ages: Deus Ex, Half-Life, Fallout... even Baldur's Gate 2, once you've gone through the excruciating process of figuring out which quests you should do first.

Interesting question.

I think it's key not to focus on the games exclusively - but also ourselves, and the evolution we all go through as human beings.

My theory in relation to this, is that some games - just like movies - are made in a sort of "timeless" fashion. I can't pinpoint exactly what constitutes "timelessness" - but I think it has to do with a peak in terms of gameplay evolution. Also, it's about when those games have been released, and whether it was during a period of a graphical revolution or not.

Let's take a perfect movie example - Alien.

This movie is considered timeless - because it's not dealing with any contemporary social issues, but rather the universal human condition. Fear is timeless - and the setting is still "far future", and because it doesn't make heavy use of CGI - it doesn't really seem aged. It doesn't really get into ANYTHING except the horror of being trapped alone "in the dark" with a monster. That will likely never seem irrelevant or old-fashioned.

Computer games - by their very nature - probably can't really escape the aging of technology, but they CAN become relatively timeless by having non-tech related strengths as their focus. In the case of games like Deus Ex - that game still represents the "peak" of gameplay evolution, because games haven't really evolved much in that particular genre.

My own favorite, System Shock, has similar strengths in terms of gameplay - but it's so old by now, that the technology can't help but get in the way. Also, the control scheme is clearly not up to modern standards, and it suffers as well, in that way.

But games like Doom will probably not hold up in terms of gameplay, because pure shooters HAVE evolved, but in my mind only in a limited fashion.

Ultima 4, yet again, will seem extremely aged these days, both because of technology AND the evolution of CRPGs - which in my opinion started to stagnate only a handful of years ago in terms of gameplay, but we're seeing constant technological progress - what with Oblivion and stuff like that.

Anyway, a complex question - but those are some of my thoughts on the matter.