by I’m a math guy – let’s start with some numbers:
597 days (292 days after Chezni).
978 games in total.
229 in Tier One (23.4%).
216 in Tier Two (22.1%).
Now it’s done. I have…far too many Steam games. What’s more, I now know that even with unlimited time, more than half of them are not worth playing. You might think that depressing (I’ve specifically avoided calculating exactly how much money I wasted), but it’s a remarkable feeling to look at all the Tier One games I have and know that I enjoy each one of them. I can pick any game in my library and have a good time. That was the point. I no longer feel an obligation to play video games. I can have, you know, fun.
Shortcuts
I’ll be honest – I did take a couple shortcuts. The number of games I have was so large that I couldn’t see myself ever finishing this project – so eventually I just dropped every game with a “Mixed” review on Steam or lower into Tier Three, sight unseen. I don’t regret having done this in the slightest. I reviewed several games before that point that had Mixed reviews and lower, and I realized that though there might be a hidden gem somewhere in there, it just wasn’t worth the time I was spending to find them. Perhaps I would have reviewed them if I had unlimited time, but with limited time comes opportunity cost. We are lucky enough to live in an era where there is a staggering amount of free and cheap entertainment. There’s so much, in fact, that it’s just not worth the time trying to enjoy something you don’t.
My second shortcut only started a couple weeks ago – if a game couldn’t at least show me something I enjoyed in 10-15 minutes, I didn’t give it the full hour and tossed it into Tier Three. Even if I kept it, I was only writing first impressions for the games that I had something to say about. This decision coincided with another project I’ve been working on: sorting through my anime backlog. There’s a video by a YouTube anime personality that talks about recognizing terrible anime in just one episode. After applying that to anime, it clicked that many of the same techniques I’d developed to find good anime could also be used to find good games. It might be arrogant to say I’ve developed taste, but I’ve at least figured out what I like in entertainment.
Taste
I’ve found that I’m much less likely to enjoy games that start out with long, drawn-out cutscenes with minimally-interactive gameplay. Though it can’t be the only criteria for evaluating a new experience, it is a good first indicator. This makes sense – if you don’t trust your gameplay to tell your story or hook your player, it’s likely that the rest of your game isn’t going to integrate narrative and mechanics. The mechanics are the “show, don’t tell” of video games. As an example, one of the last games I categorized was Remember Me. It squandered its first impression with unskippable cutscenes about things I didn’t care about, interspersed with occasional keyboard input for a few seconds. Even during moments of control, you were shoved towards the right direction, the camera never quite pointed the right way, and the controls were unbearably floaty. Horribly, this was on purpose, since your character was supposed to be stumbling and disoriented. I can appreciate a narrative-driven game like Dragon Age: Origins because the gameplay was bearable and the dialogue choices mattered most of the time. I can tolerate control being taken from the player at a crucial moment. But starting a game with practically no player input and poor controls is a good indication that perhaps you should have made a movie instead.
I don’t think it’s impossible to make a narrative game with strictly linear action sequences enjoyable, but it is very close to it. The question I have to ask every time is: “Why can’t this be a movie?” If there isn’t a good answer to that question, it’s unlikely I will enjoy it. If failure just means restarting at the last checkpoint and the narrative takes no significant deviations, why am I pressing buttons at all? To answer this, I’m going to look at two linear but enjoyable games: Half-Life 2 and Halo. A few similarities jump out (besides interesting and engaging stories). One, control is taken away from the player as little as possible. Half-Life 2 keeps you in control the entire time (even during “cutscenes”), and Halo just has a quick opening cutscene for each level. Two, you are in the game almost immediately. Halo has you wake up and immediately control Master Chief. In Half-Life 2, the G-Man wakes you up on a train and you’re immediately in control. Finally, both have incredible multiplayer components (Half-Life’s is just called Counter-Strike), indicating that the engine supports complex gameplay. Even if you completely skipped the story, these games would be almost as long as before and you could still have fun with the mechanics.
Making a good game is a lot like (actually, almost exactly like) being a Game Master for an RPG: you have to be ready for the players to do anything, or you have to have a good reason that they can’t do something. Generally, the more things players can do, the better – but if you can’t make a massive sandbox consistently interesting, don’t even try. It’s okay to have a linear game if that’s what your players are expecting, but don’t try to hide the rails if you’re going to railroad them anyway. The players don’t want to hear you narrating your fan fiction about your world – they want to play the game. Some people might be okay with a grimdark game, but for the most part people are going to make Monty Python jokes anyway. Your plot twists will be guessed, your simplest puzzles will stump them, and the BBEG will get cheesed. In other words, making a good game is ridiculously hard and I’m frankly surprised that almost a quarter of the games I own were Tier One.
What’s Next
Truly, I could ramble on about what makes a game good forever. For now, though, I’m just happy that I’ve got these games sorted. There were definitely times that it felt as if I just didn’t enjoy video games any more. Every game was just another zombie crafting/survival game, pixel art roguelike, or QTE hell. But then, every so often, I’d start up a game that would remind me why I was doing this in the first place. And now, I have enough enjoyable backlog that I haven’t felt the urge to buy anything on my wishlist for months. It’s fantastic.
There are definitely things I’m forgetting to say here (clearly, since I didn’t even reference Dark Souls). But this isn’t the end. Never has there been more quality entertainment out there. There’s still New Game+. All the Tier One games I can go and give proper reviews to now. All the future games I’ll buy on sale because I have terrible impulse control. All the board games Chezni and I play at our FLGS. And anyway, what sort of gamer would I be if I stopped at 100%?
