Games are Games

Games are games.

We can all agree on that, right?

When you buy a game about shooting zombies in space, the first thing you'd expect after pressing play is that you’d be in space and that you’d be shooting zombies.

This, I think, is a fair assumption.

So why is it that so many games begin with overwrought cut scenes or extended prologues or mind-numbing tutorials?

Obviously every game needs to establish its setting, its rules, its controls, and so on. But there’s a difference between establishing the basics and boring the player to death before they even get to do anything.

The most egregious examples of this issue are Skyrim’s famous wagon ride, as well as the plot-heavy beginnings of both Fallout 3 and 4. To be fair, all three are wonderful games. I enjoy their stories greatly, and their intros are well designed to immerse players in these fun, new worlds.

Besides, when else can I live the dream of being raised underground by Liam Neeson?

Still, it feels frustrating that games that thrive on exploration and player choice must subject their players to such slow and linear paths before the world can truly open up. It can sometimes act as a barrier to truly engaging with the game itself.

It was certainly an issue for me when I was first writing the campaign for The Corruption of Ganon. The first draft was, to put it kindly, slow.

Chapter one involved players meeting each other at the Adventurer’s Guild and forming a team. Chapter two involved small missions in a farming town, filled with death-defying challenges like rescuing cats from trees and finding a missing horse. All to teach the players the mechanics of the system and how to use their strengths, avoid their weaknesses, and so on and so on and so on.

It took until chapter three to even hint at the central conflict for the rest of the campaign, and the grand heroic adventure didn’t even start until halfway through chapter four!

I realized my mistake when I tried to imagine playing the campaign myself and was bored to tears just thinking about it. 

I wanted to flush out the world and explain the system so badly that I forgot that I was creating a game. Not a travel brochure, not a manual, and not a lorebook. A game.

So in the second draft, I cut the first four chapters and threw the players right into the action. Allowing them to learn the system by using the system as they went along. Critical facts about the world and how the game works are expressed through natural gameplay instead of through a handholding tutorial.

This, I think, would be a much better way to structure games in the future. A game should reflect its cover. The cover of The Corruption of Ganon showed heroes on an adventure, so the game should begin with heroes already on an adventure.

Games aren’t cut scenes, how-to tutorials, or even conventional stories. They’re narratives that players have an active role in shaping and creating for themselves, where success or failure depends upon your own decisions.

In short, games are games.