Depth in mainstream genres

The first person shooter is a genre that demands a lot of the player in terms of understanding the game's complexity. Yet the first person shooter is among the most popular genres today. It's very strange to me that something that difficult can become so popular. But I guess it's like a sport. No one's going to just kick around a soccer ball for the first time and really play soccer. A lot of people are just going to quit because playing soccer when you don't play soccer isn't fun. But say you're young and you've got time and patience. You'll find fun in uncoordinated wanderings of multiplayer Goldeneye maps. And once you fight the inaccessibility you find yourself having grokked a deep and complicated system. And there's just something incredibly fun about grokking something like that.

Game makers know this phenomenon -- at least intuitively. They react to player grokking by supplying to the market deeper games of the same genre. Once a player gets platform jumping he's going to want more. And he's going to want to shoot bullets at the same time. And he'll want harder jumps to plan. And he'll want enemies that he can predict the patterns of enough to dodge them in a platforming world. So he'll have to be challenged while not being frustrated and not being bored. He wants a state of flow. That demand drives game makers to deliver harder, deeper games of the genre.

That's how you end up with Megaman 9. A 10 buck XBLA game marketed toward the people who find the platforming in New Super Mario Bros. boring and easy. I actually like Megaman 9 quite a bit. It goes against a lot of my ideas about indie games and what games should be and how the medium needs to evolve but I don't want to talk about that tonight. Saying that you want games like first person shooters to stop being produced because it's stagnating the medium is hard to say because it's this thirst for a deeper instance of a familiar genre that gives us incredibly deep games like Call of Duty 4. Calling CoD4 deep sounds weird but a lot sounds weird with the present vocabulary of the medium.

There's a place for the mainstream genre and mainstream game. We shouldn't keep people from practicing what they have grokked so well over years. It's fun. I'll worry about games as an artistic medium after getting through this new Wily Castle.