Jonathan Blow in Portland: Free-to-Play Games and Bad TV

Let's talk about TV, namely the sub-genre, "Drama".  When compared to the shows of, let's say, the 70s (M*A*S*H, The Six Million Dollar Man, etc.), audiences have much better TV now!

There used to be a need for commercial breaks and syndication.  Commercial breaks were needed to finance the show and the station, pitching advertisement whenever possible; this raised the question for television writers of, "how do we keep people coming back after a commercial?"  Syndication was a post-production marketing attempt to sell a show to local broadcast stations; from here, when designing the world of fiction, a given universe couldn't really change much so as to not confuse the viewers.


All the constraints of old television programming made TV an engineering endeavor, not leaving much room for it to be art.  Now a days, a number of shows seem to have trumped this; Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men, just to name a few.

So what is Drama?  Drama is something that happens with a lot of risk. Fake "Dramas" have no stakes or major change.

Fake "Drama" on TV was superseded when HBO cut commercials and didn't want syndication with their programs!  In turn, they broke-away from the common mold; "not subject to government and industry regulation on sexuality, profanity and violence", HBO's service could air events such as the Game of Thrones Red Wedding.

TV constraints (commercials and syndication) were invasive.  Cinema and HBO didn't have as much to deal with.  The result: different audiences existed that both expected and were subject to different cultures of quality.

Now to games, their evolution, and their constraints.  In broad terms, games stared in arcade cabinets, then moved to home consoles, and are now increasingly mobile.

Arcade machines were expensive, therefore driving arcade owners to want a player to keep putting in money every few minutes.  To fit this, games were action-challenges with high-tier difficulty.  This was mildly invasive, restricting the time or attention a designer could put into the work (commerce > art).

Consoles allowed players to stay at home and, after the initial machine and game purchase, didn't require further payments to be made to have a good time.  The notion that games had a fixed price gave development teams free rein to pursue subjects that maybe wouldn't test the player's ability 24/7, or force only bite-sized experiences to be had.  Interactive entertainment matured as a result, letting the medium engage in things impossible for the arcade model to embrace.

Today, there's mobile, helping give rise not only to games being more "mainstream" than ever, but also of various models of monetization.  Specifically, "Free-to-Play" (F2P), when combined with Facebook that attracted people to a near-universally used platform, got a lot of users playing games.  But, in retrospect, F2P's delivery of content is much like TV (not Cinema), being fairly shallow; therefore, such a casual audience can be seen more as a TV audience than an HBO crowd.

Here's an analysis of the "Free-to-Play" business model: F2P changes the core bearing of what games are towards the audience.  The job of the designer is no longer to engage meaningful or deep exchanges with the experience and the player, but it became about ensnaring the user for payment.  Here are a few examples of F2P tactics to get money from their users:

However, some designers are in denial about what F2P does.  "This is the future, all games will be this way" and "it doesn't change the nature of good design" are common arguments for F2P.  To these points, we can look to TV; it didn't make cinema go away.  But who knows?  F2P may keep a major foothold in the entertainment medium; until then, there is only waiting.

"The shape of the container determines what can be contained."  Think on that.

In an exercise to try taking non-F2P games and reorienting them into a F2P model, here are a few examples:

1. Gone Home is an intimate game of discovery and understanding between the player and their immediate family; money could be made here if there was a world of people to understand and find things about, but the immediate connection between the player and the fictional characters would be lost.
2. Papers, Please requires a gamer to be the sole decision maker in accepting or rejecting all sorts of characters from a fictional country; certain scanning devices could be sold to make the decisions a little easier, but then that would demean the choices that are made over the NPCs' lives.

If all of this is taken in, essentially it can be understood that F2P is the new "bad" TV!  "But I like playing Candy Crush!  I have fun" is something that may be said, but there is confusion here.  There is no concrete discernment between "good" and "bad" games.  Food doesn't have this muddied view; someone may like french fries from McDonald's, but there is no argument about whether it is good food or not.

So, here is a warning to game makers in how they act toward their audiences and who they become professionally.  Have aspiration; in the talk, The Secret of Psalm 46, "awe is the Grail of human achievement [...] awesome things don't hold anything back".  Such a definition is a high bar to meet!  Therefore, if a person plays games, think about the 'awe' feeling; what does that game look like and what kind of game is that?  For the game developer, what is the trajectory to take to make awe-inspiring experiences, and how hard must it be worked for?

In conclusion, don't settle.  If a person can recognize when they are being taken advantage of or when life is being wasted when there are better experiences readily available, games will improve.  If designers don't give in to the massive push for F2P models, such models will recede from the entertainment industry spotlight.