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[PATV] Wednesday, October 23, 2013 - Extra Credits Season 7, Ep. 7: Spectacle Creep
So the unspoken assumption is if we just save the world a second time, nobody would buy it?
Is this assumption valid? Is it rooted in sales data? Psychology? Can we point to an era in games where developers were just iterating, not escalating, and we discovered that that was totally unacceptable?
Worst case scenario, I suppose you'd get Madden, but across all franchises and genres. It sounds kinda bad when I say it like that.
But hey, Portal 2 was a more worthy sequel than a Machine for Pigs, so maybe there's something to be said for just making a competent second helping of what came before? It beats throwing out everything that worked in favor of *EMOOOOOOOOTIONS!*
I wonder how time affects spectacle creep. I get the feeling that if you have a series/franchise and you've been sitting on it for a long, long time, you also make people expect more, unless you reboot. An annual franchise (say, Assassin's Creed) has its own 'arc' that demands more and more each year, but it can only give so much. But making people wait a long time (like Duke Nukem Forever, Diablo 3, The Old Republic, etc) can also make players anticipate and desire way bigger than a dev team can deliver.
Hey back off Fable 2! That had nothing to do with spectacle creep. I LOVED being able to dress as a pirate and have a drunken threesome, most people that didn't like the game just played the story solely, expecting that's all there was, and never even knew there was a way to dress as a pirate and have a drunken threesome.
That would actually be a good subject for an episode, how people can miss entire features ore entire games because they play the way other games have trained them to without ever realizing this game might be different. I.E. play testers complaining you couldn't defend yourself well in the Thief reboot (because it's a stealth game and not an action game...) and the devs putting it in due to this feedback, turning it into an action game instead of a stealth game.
Spectacle creep - the idea that you need to outdo the previous installment - is one of those ideas that have no basis in reality.
Hey, ever heard of Mario? Of Zelda? Some Mario/Zelda entries even *downgrade* the creep compared to previous games.
The problem is AAA devs again. They try so desperately to mimic hollywood movies that they even copy the stupid parts. That's why we have reboots - Hollywoods movies do it, so games follow. It's pathetic.
One of the reasons I though Bioshock Infinity was so good (and admire the developers of the entire series) was that (at the end of the day) the story was actually very small. The end goal (reality/time-warping aside) was little more than any episode of Quantum Leap: set right what once went wrong. You save the world (kind of), but that wasn't the story.
It seems to be especially a bit problem with games like WoW, where spectacle creep ends up feeling like a form of power creep. "We destroyed what! And now we're supposed to be all super worried about some panda bears?"
And it sets up the kinds of negative expectations you guys spoke of earlier. If you keep building, and building, eventually you have to pull out the biggest gun and then stop.
Edit: On reread, I needed to clarify a few statements to make sure that if I was lambasted, it was for what I *meant* to say, not what I missed on my initial preview of my writing.
I actually signed up for this episode, soooo... thanks for the seasons Extra Credits. I don't always agree but you do make me think.
Spectacle Creep vs. Power creep are two different things. I fear your readers may not get that from the very short episode you did this week, though I've been impressed by the majority of you readers, as well as your work.
Spectacle creep, from the view of an old gamer, has happened for *ages*, even in the spotlight games... and most older gamers burned out on it that I've spoken with. I'd speak of FF VII (US) as a primary example of when that world short circuited in our heads.
FF has had a long history of 'save the universe' scenarios. Noone, for a while, did bigger... barring the Phantasy Star mimics (shaddup, I loved Meow too). But, seriously, think this through for a moment. The entire thing dies when you're waiting on chocobos to BREED while a giant meteor threatens to destroy the world. The impetus dies. The internal requirement dies. The story falls on its face when you simply know the game will wait for you. In some cases... for years while you race for a random materia.
Spectacle creep, to me, is only a valid requirement when you're dealing with the new audience. 'eh? Yeah, the new audience. The the ones who didn't grow up on Atari with the simple premise of climbing Pike's Peak on a double ended cartridge as a worthy way to spend a few dozen afternoons. The ones who didn't load up Wildcatter on an 8088 and then delve into the code to figure out why it was facinating.
Why do I make that point? It's not to bring out the old skool. It's because this has been happening for ages, since the original video games existed. Once upon a time, simply getting your 4x4 go-cart over the racetrack faster than your buddy who was stepping on your foot at the arcade was a game (Offroad). There was a game that you will never get the voice out of your head (Sinistar) that most couldn't even figure out but enjoyed shooting things in. There was another game where simply beating on each other in two tanks was a hella good time... (Help! I can't find the name! Ninja vs. Russian tank...)
Since then, we abandoned the game and went for story. Cool. As I get older, I love story. Bioshock I told an awesome story. Diablo II told an awesome story (if you didn't get blinded by gear, it was there). CoD 1 and 2 told a reasonable story. But where'd the game go? CoD 1 had some of the most horrendous hitboxes and NPC respawns I've ever seen in a particular scene.
I can't have spectacle creep when I'm playing a game as a player, at least not when I'm not spinning the game as fast as I can simply to get to the end of the book. I know the game will wait for me. I'll get there. Spectacle creep belongs in books and stories.... not games. Particularly not if the bad storyline is going to exposition at me mid-game. Let it run in the background. Example: Radio chatter from random boomboxes on the street.
No game is worth the burn through for spectacle creep, at least as described here. When I think spectacle creep, I think of the upgrade in graphics drivers and/or artistic talent (both are needed). If I look at the screen and go 'DAMN THAT'S AWESOME!'... that's a spectacle to me.
Saving the house from zombies (Plants vs Zombies), saving the area from the evil commies (Command and Conquer), or saving the world from rancid aliens (Prey)... really, does anyone care? They're plot devices to my (at least) enjoyment of the mechanics. The story they're escalating is merely a way to explain the scene changes for the game we're playing. If it's fun, well, cool! If not... shaddup already. Where's the skip button?
A game like Papers, Please... or Spacequest... or even Dwarf Fortress.... these are games where the story matters, and none of them are 'save the entire race from X!'. Sometimes the story is the game. In most? Meh. Fine. Who cares? Where's the meat? Let's play.
Oh, yeah... and shaddup already devs. If you're going to wallpaper a plotline into my enjoyment, at least get it over with quickly if you're not going to do it well. If you want to see a game that doesn't need anything but basic starting point plotline yet the mechanics still hold over for execution and effectiveness, please see Nectaris (aka: Military Madness).
The games industry doesn't HAVE to keep making franchises to make money, it wants to in order to make excessive amounts of money (take Ubisoft saying that every new game it makes now HAS to be part of a franchise). Furthermore, games don't have to be expensive to make, most people don't care about the graphics and advertisements (2 big sources of the rising costs of games), they just don't. So, please, tone down the graphics, stop putting so many advertisements up and make games that are long (without being padded) with coherent story arcs. That's ALL WE WANT! *ugh*
This outlines the niche that indie and smaller titles fill. Let the studios with $100,000,000 titles and budgets save the world, gimme a shop to run, a seed to plant, and a couple procedurally generated worlds, and I'm good.
Still gonna fuck over Gotham when the time comes, but for now, I'm good.
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ShadowenSnores in the morningLoserdomRegistered Userregular
So the unspoken assumption is if we just save the world a second time, nobody would buy it?
Is this assumption valid? Is it rooted in sales data? Psychology? Can we point to an era in games where developers were just iterating, not escalating, and we discovered that that was totally unacceptable?
It's like a lot of accepted wisdom. It's not really true, but people think it is, so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I think the main thing is not just the money involved, but the time. If you're going to invest X money in something--and you will, because it's a tentpole franchise--and it takes you three years from day one of shooting to release weekend and finding out if we're going to make a profit (and it will, because that's where post-production is at these days), there had better be a damn big spectacle to put butts in seats and make the money back. Spectacle, in visual media, is basically the ultimate lowest common denominator. More than sex, more than dick and fart jokes, bigger, louder, brighter, and faster is seen as the way to appeal to everyone. And spectacle is never the same the second time you see it. If you want to bring them back, because there's no such thing as too much money, you have to promise (and hopefully deliver) something bigger and better than last time. Hence, spectacle creep.
So in the Batman movies, for example, because they sink all this money in and spend all this time, every single one comes down to a threat to Gotham as a whole (because he's Batman, not Superman). (And once the world, in Batman and Robin, but least said, soonest mended.) Whereas in the comics, both because they have more opportunity for storytelling and the investment for a huge spectacle is roughly the same as a thrilling detective story, Batman helps the Justice League save the world from an invading cosmic threat one month, and next month he's almost shot to death by that most wicked of supervillains, Armed-With-A-Gun-Man.
I have to object to the Modern Warfare series being used. Every time I talk to a person about it, all I've ever heard about was the multiplayer. And I've heard from a lot of people about it. The story line felt more like an add-on. Most people got a Modern Warfare game to blow up people with Noob Tubes, not any kind of story engagement.
I think the Mega Man X series would be a better example of spectacle creep.
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The worst crime you can commit against another human being is to make them think.
@fluxxdog
Whilst most people do buy CoD for the multiplayer, that didn't stop CoD : MW having a brilliant single player campaign that was fairly widely praised. The later installments weren't so well received, with the latest one being, from what I've heard, a mishmash of uncorrelated set pieces. This sounds like spectacle creep to me. So regardless of whether people buy it for the single player, it's still a valid example of how spectacle creep can harm a franchise's story arcs.
That said, I can't tolerate CoD's multiplayer, with the unlock system just flat-out barring me from competing until I've sunk enough time in. I don't want to have to grind to an even playing field. And killstreaks are the stupidest thing ever. And so I played far more of CoD:MW's singleplayer than I did the multiplayer, because the singleplayer impressed me and was far more fun.
I also never bought any of the games, and instead tested them at internet cafes. Why buy something I'm only going to use half of?
I think we need to take a look at comic books for how to overcome this, as there they save the world (even the barely heroic heros) on a fairly regular basis. Yet they have managed to keep the ideas coming for several decades now.
Personally I think they do that by making the journey the important thing and not that they saved the world. Oh sure those 'final earthshattering battles add to it, but... That wasn't what made it special. I'm not sure if they still do it, because I haven't been buying comics in a decade or so, but Marvel and Image used to weave massive stories into their annuals each year involving half or more of their title characters in interconnected threads to 'save the world'. Yet each story was different for all that the end result was the same.
I make a distinction between literary "raising the stakes" and the graphical/audial spectacle.
From the literal side the assumption is that "Since the character saved the hostages last installment then saving more hostages is no longer a challenge for the character." In a passive interactive medium this assumption doesn't hold up; the character is not the one who is challenged, the player is. But we have thousands of years of literature telling us that characters' need to be challenged by greater and greater stakes.
From the graphical spectacle side there is pressure to "wow" with more animations, more shaders, more polygons, etc. All of this drives the cost up and up.
The options seem to be:
1. Keep the literary stakes constant. Mario saved the Princess dozens of times, the stakes were never raised. The number of named enemies did sometimes increase but in the end it was several minibosses and then bowser.
2. Raise the stakes after every iteration and then once you hit the roof reset them.
3. Have no real coherency between iterations. Long running serials like comic books and Doctor Who are good examples of this. The important character based story lines are carried forward but reality is often ret-conned to fit the current narrative.
If you tell a good story people will listen. Every time. This is true for all media. The problem is that there is no formula for what constitutes a good story, and each person have different tastes, so the "perfect game" for one person can be horrible for another. And this is the situation with AAA games, as the publishers get larger and start spending tens of millions of dollars in a game they want to make sure they'll see the return of that money, so they usually don't want to risk it with an unknown story. So the way to keep the people's attention is through greater and greater gimmicks. Look, we blew up a city! look more explosions! and so on.
The problem is that instead of asking "what franchise can give us the most money?" they should ask "what's the best story we can tell?". We can see that in movies, with Ghibli studio or Tarantino movies: they have a project, they have a story to tell.
This video perfectly describes a problem with many mediums, not just games. Look at certain anime shows for instance. Dragon Ball Z and the need for a Super Saiyin 3 and the enemies that would drive Goku to transform into this form. These enemies could literally just blow up a planet if they wanted to, but they did not. They fairly fought Goku every single time. This is one of the reasons shonen anime started to cause a certain amount of disillusionment for me, and also why I have trouble playing many mainstream AAA games today.
@theshadow99 Comics suffer from their own version of Spectacle Creep in the form of "Yet Another Even Bigger Crisis." Huge crossover events happen on a regular basis, each trying to top the previous one. And comics practically invented the reboot as a means of resetting audience expectations.
I have to disagree with you there. MMX had the same amount of spectacle until the final game, which is MMX 5. MMX 6 and above did not involve Keiji Inafune and therefore do not fit in the original canon. After X5 you have to jump to MMZ to get the rest of the story. MMX 5 was the only canon MMX game where the entire world was threatened outright. The other games had reploids terrorizing separate areas of the planet in ways that had the potential to threaten the world.
I encounter this everywhere, but just like "literally" was recently officially watered down, some day the same will likely happen to "have to". There were a few "have to"s which simply aren't have to's. People don't have the balls to say, "No, we *don't* actually 'have to' do things the way others are and have been doing. We don't have to!"
It'd be great if everyone would quit cutting developers, publishers--and yes--consumers so much extraneous slack and just expect them to have a spine and some standards.
I myself don’t dislike sequel creep as a concept, I like it when stories go from saving new York\Tokyo\Vienna to save earth\the universe\the Austrian empire as long as it 1 doesn’t take the call of duty approach and starts to become silly 2 the series end after the big save the world finale
I've seen this precise phenomenon in Tabletop RPGs. Kicking the plot up to a "Save the World" level has become distressingly common, because the Player Characters are guaranteed to be at least minimally emotionally invested in the World (cue The Tick - "That's where I keep my stuff!"). Even if they're an overtly evil team of omnicidal lunatics (a.k.a., every single "sandbox game" I've ever tried to run), worst case scenario, they'll react to someone else trying to destroy/conquer/fundamentally alter the World by going "Hey, I wanted to do that first!" It's a cheap way to manufacture concern about the plot, when the PCs are so often the typical roving band of murder hobos with no ties to the community.
When non-interactive media does it, I think it may be because WE are the rootless murder hobos. Ok, sort of. It's not that the viewers have no ties to the community, it's that we have diverse and unpredictable ties, and the architects of these stories don't want to produce a niche product that only appeals to people who empathize with more focused protagonists. They want to cast as wide a net as possible, and the easiest way to do that is to focus on the biggest common elements we all seem to care about. It's a very risk-averse approach, and often a lazy one too, as it absolves the writers from having to put much thought into their protagonists OR antagonists.
Realizing lately that I don't really trust or respect basically any of the moderators here. So, good luck with life, friends! Hit me up on Twitter @DesertLeviathan
I think the worst offender of spectacle creep here is the History Channel and all their programs on the so-called "World War II".
Let's start with the bad guys. Battalions of stormtroopers dressed in all black, check. Secret police, check. Determination to brutally kill everyone who doesn't look like them, check. Leader with a tiny villain mustache and a tendency to go into apopleptic rage when he doesn't get his way, check. All this from a country that was ordinary, believable, and dare I say it sometimes even sympathetic in previous seasons.
I wouldn't even mind the lack of originality if they weren't so heavy-handed about it. Apparently we're supposed to believe that in the middle of the war the Germans attacked their allies the Russians, starting an unwinnable conflict on two fronts, just to show how sneaky and untrustworthy they could be? And that they diverted all their resources to use in making ever bigger and scarier death camps, even in the middle of a huge war? Real people just aren't that evil. And that's not even counting the part where as soon as the plot requires it, they instantly forget about all the racism nonsense and become best buddies with the definitely non-Aryan Japanese.
Not that the good guys are much better. Their leader, Churchill, appeared in a grand total of one episode before, where he was a bumbling general who suffered an embarrassing defeat to the Ottomans of all people in the Battle of Gallipoli. Now, all of a sudden, he's not only Prime Minister, he's not only a brilliant military commander, he's not only the greatest orator of the twentieth century who can convince the British to keep going against all odds, he's also a natural wit who is able to pull out hilarious one-liners practically on demand. I know he's supposed to be the hero, but it's not realistic unless you keep the guy at least vaguely human.
So it's pretty standard "shining amazing good guys who can do no wrong" versus "evil legions of darkness bent on torture and genocide" stuff, totally ignoring the nuances and realities of politics. The actual strategy of the war is barely any better. Just to give one example, in the Battle of the Bulge, a vastly larger force of Germans surround a small Allied battalion and demand they surrender or be killed. The Allied general sends back a single-word reply: "Nuts!". The Germans attack, and, miraculously, the tiny Allied force holds them off long enough for reinforcements to arrive and turn the tide of battle. Whoever wrote this episode obviously had never been within a thousand miles of an actual military.
Probably the worst part was the ending. The British/German story arc gets boring, so they tie it up quickly, have the villain kill himself (on Walpurgisnacht of all days, not exactly subtle) and then totally switch gears to a battle between the Americans and the Japanese in the Pacific. Pretty much the same dichotomy - the Japanese kill, torture, perform medical experiments on prisoners, and frickin' play football with the heads of murdered children, and the Americans are led by a kindly old man in a wheelchair.
Anyway, they spend the whole season building up how the Japanese home islands are a fortress, and the Japanese will never surrender, and there's no way to take the Japanese home islands because they're invincible...and then they realize they totally can't have the Americans take the Japanese home islands so they have no way to wrap up the season.
So they invent a completely implausible superweapon that they've never mentioned until now. Apparently the Americans got some scientists together to invent it, only we never heard anything about it because it was "classified". In two years, the scientists manage to invent a weapon a thousand times more powerful than anything anyone's ever seen before - drawing from, of course, ancient mystical texts. Then they use the superweapon, blow up several Japanese cities easily, and the Japanese surrender. Convenient, isn't it?
...and then, in the entire rest of the show, over five or six different big wars, they never use the superweapon again. Seriously. They have this whole thing about a war in Vietnam that lasts decades and kills tens of thousands of people, and they never wonder if maybe they should consider using the frickin' unstoppable mystical superweapon that they won the last war with. At this point, you're starting to wonder if any of the show's writers have even watched the episodes the other writers made.
I'm not even going to get into the whole subplot about breaking a secret code (cleverly named "Enigma", because the writers couldn't spend more than two seconds thinking up a name for an enigmatic code), the giant superintelligent computer called Colossus (despite this being years before the transistor was even invented), the Soviet strongman whose name means "Man of Steel" in Russian (seriously, between calling the strongman "Man of Steel" and the Frenchman "de Gaulle", whoever came up with the names for this thing ought to be shot).
So yeah. Stay away from the History Channel. Unlike most of the other networks, they don't even try to make their stuff believable."
Kinda why video games need to get over the difference in size and go for difference in kind when making a new game in a series.
Marvel is doing this wonderfully with their movies. Yes, Iron Man helped save the world, but he didn't do it alone. When you want to go from there, you need to point out what made Iron Man able to do that and focus on it while making him fight a different kind of enemy, not a different size of enemy.
The sequential things that were a threat to Iron Man in the movies. Fire, Ice, Crushing, Electricity, Lack of Oxygen, PTSD, Massive Damage, An Organization of Unknown Size and Scope, and Fire. Even though it kind of loops back on that last one, that is an amazing scope of difference in kind. So why are we stuck on just making bullets or dragons the major threats?
DragonBall Z did that. It went from "we gotta save Gohan!" to "We gotta save the world!" to "We gotta save the universe!" to "We gotta save THE FUTURE!!!"
One video game series that took this almost handicap and made it work for them is Saints Row. They don't try to hide the spectacle creep at all. They fully embrace it and its hard not to love every minute of how ridiculous and over the top what you are doing is.
@Ushio: Funny stuff, but you lost me at "Ancient Mystical Texts." Is that a reference to the Periodic Table? Ancient, arguably, at the time of the Manhattan Project, but Mystical?
@Dedwrekka: Dragons and bullets are chosen for thematic reasons, not for the Differences in Kind they might lend to a setting. Everyone buys Call of Duty, therefore every AAA game has to BE Call of Duty, and has to spend the budget of Call of Duty and it can't have anything WEIRD in it because Call of Duty doesn't have anything weird in it. Then they sink Call of Duty budgets into a game that nobody ends up buying because, DERP, Why WOULD they? THEY ALREADY OWN A COPY OF CALL OF DUTY!
I'm seeing a lot of great comments so far, and a lot of reference back to things we've learned in the past, both from previous Extra Credits episodes and notable examples from general games industry bullcrap we've all lived through. High-fives, all around.
Now that we have this insight, what do we DO with it? What is the solution? Spend a modest budget developing an indie game about space whales and missile combat, don't water it down with quicktime events, don't hold the player's hand and just trust that "real" gamers will be willing to put in the time and effort required to learn its systems?
What then? The industry bullshit non-wisdom we all just shrugged off suggests that each and every one of those design decisions-- a novel premise, gameplay first, no QTEs, general lack of spectacle and polish and graphics that will inevitably end up being derided as "last gen" at best-- each of those design decisions will supposedly reduce the number of players who will want to play our game.
Now, that doesn't mean the game can't make money. It just means that for every potential player we lose, turn off, or scare away, the game needs to be one purchase price cheaper.
And basic competition means that, whatever game we end up with, it's going to need to compete with others of its kind. Sure, we can SAY "no it's not meant to be compared to call of Duty, it's meant to be compared to Half Life 2," but we can't force reviewers, players and passers-by to SEE it that way.
Are players going to just EXPECT that if the game looks this bad, it HAS to have infinite worlds? Be on iphone? Be FREE?
How do you control audience expectations in a world where everyone can instantly download and play any game that a random youtube blogger happens to say is better than yours?
How do you make the BEST GAEM EVAR when keeping your development costs insanely low was a necessary but not sufficient requirement of making your money back?
You can say "just make the gameplay the star of the show," but do we really have the ability to make a game that plays 10 times better than Call of Duty and yet still somehow looks 10 times better than... say, the original Unreal?
Only thing that's coming to mind is "Use cartoony graphics. Realism is for chumps." And gearbox ALREADY crapped all over that business model by releasing an INCREDIBLY GOOD AAA franchise that milks the hell out of its cartoony aesthetics. "Oh, you're making a cartoony game? That's cute. Good luck competing with the next Borderlands."
Nothing I've just said is objectively true. These are the paranoid ramblings of an insane mind, numbed to Good Ideas by endless industry hype and pretentious indie awards shows. Show me a way out. Show me anything to give me hope. Even just smack down one or two of my worst ideas, maybe it'll resolve a paradox and I can think again. But I'm in a place right now where I find it hard to believe that any amount of earnest introspection can lead us back to a place where good games are Allowed to Succeed.
Until the most recent one, the Doctor Who series finale suffered from this badly.
Series 1: Stop the Daleks taking over Earth at some time in the future
Series 2: Stop the Daleks and Cybermen taking over the Earth after a very damaging war.
Series 3: Stop the Master taking over the universe after he has already taken over the world
Series 4: Stop Davros destroying the entire universe
Series 5: Save the universe after it has already been destroyed (sort of it's complicated)
Series 6: Save all of time and space after it has been smooshed into one point.
Series 7: Save the Doctor being erased from all history (therefore making undoing every one of his victories up to this point, not quite sure if this one counts)
The Discworld series has managed to do the opposite. In the early books the world was being threatened with destruction by the things from the dungeon dimensions pretty often, now Pratchett comes up with more genuine and inventive small scale threats that fit the story.
@WarpZone: I have seen a gameplay footage from the Alpha version of Age of Wonders 3. I'm hyped. My point: the FPS genre is saturated to the point where there is no room for innovation (practically speaking, I.E. the pie isn't big enough as it is), but other genres are flourishing. Look at the MOBA scene, or at the handheld market (the new pokemon game is HUGE).
I 90% disagree with this idea that spectacle creep is necessary. Why 90%? Because there is a real reason for ramping up the spectacle. IT has nothing to do with need of the spectacle, but need for something worth your atention. If you intend on using the same meaningless spectacle, this is correct, more is well ~ more.
But worthwhile media doesn't need "spectacle", spectacle is simply a cheap trick in the tool box that is over used and abused. IT is a deterent from the need for actually healthy input, quality input.
I would go into detail about this argument, but it's like trying to hammer down bubble wrap, i envelopes the human psyche in it's entirety. But I will state that even modern commercial entertainment disproves a "need" for this, and demonstrates a more complex approach that lights the reality of its uses.
Try watching Bones, or X files for instance they have a plot thread within the mechanizations, but it is not necessary to ramp the "excitement" for each consecutive episode.
The category this falls under in my opinion is that of the rest of corporate "needs" to survive, all that which draws the life from real meaningful art and human interaction to become molded around the almighty $.
We need to stop the dissemination of these bogus prerequisites. Including "flow", skinner box excuse and achievements.
I don't think they were saying Spectacle Creep is necessary, just explaining what it is and why it exists. If people are going to start improving writing in games, we need to acknowledge genuine struggles and not just assume that it's because all the current writers are hacks and surely no decent writer would have this trouble. Understanding things like this means knowing your enemy so it doesn't, erm, creep up on you.
I was just thinking about this idea as I rewatched the Bourne trilogy (yes, I said trilogy), and said to myself, "Self, isn't it a relief that these movies existed before these movies existed?" When the Bourne Identity came out, its genre and adjacent genres weren't so bloated with spectacle that every one had to outdo the last (Let's have the guy kill a helicopter with a car! Oh...someone did that already? Guess he's going to have to take out a fighter jet...). While the stakes increased as the story progressed, the trilogy keeps this in line--one of the tensest sequences in the third was Bourne talking an inept reporter through a mall--low on spectacle but enthralling to watch. The stakes don't really expand beyond Bourne himself, and the actions scenes don't really ramp up significantly. IIRC, the first movie doesn't really stray beyond France in geography, and they manage to spend extended time in Paris (even returning there after leaving, instead of insisting on a new location for variety) without once passing the Eiffel Tower or Notre Dame.
Then I rented Legacy and realized the exact repercussions of Spectacle Creep, in a movie that held an iron grip on meaningless trappings (including reusing background music at the end when it didn't fit the tone at all...) but entirely abandoned the tone and restraint that made the series memorable.
Ok, /rant. In any case, I do think it is possible to avoid this (Portal still hasn't bumped the stakes past Chell herself, as GlaDOS has yet to imply any ambition beyond the limits of Aperture Science), but it's important to realize why writers see it as necessary and work out how we can scratch those itches without resorting to "bigger is always better".
It was pretty undertonedly introduced as being a separate from the author's opinion, the entire article hinged on an unemphatic statement in the beginning. It lacked the normal interested contrast.
Sorry but I am completely against anyone making the argument that "AAA games need better writing." Why? Because we've DONE the experiment, over and over again, blown billions in development costs on games made by idiots who think polygons == emotions. And what did it get us? Three or four mildly quirky third person adventure games in the Unreal Engine with all the terrible writing, terrible acting, and terrible gameplay AAA is known for. And a little bullet point in the advertisements and on the back of the box that says "- GOOD STORY!"
AAA GAME DEVS CAN'T WRITE A GOOD STORY. EVER. It just can't be done. You can have a bad story that's executed well, sure. Or you can have a boring story that's innoffensive and safe and makes sense but we all saw it coming. But you absolutely cannot have a good story that is also surprising and also allows for good gameplay. AAA developers just can't fucking do it. I don't know whether it's Word of God from the publishers or what, but it just can't be done. Not in America. You might get something with a halfway decent story from an Indie developer, or something out of Japan from like Suda51 or whatever, and if you're very lucky it'll even be localized during the post-holiday doldrums, recieve no advertisement or support, get good reviews, and then wither on the vine. But AAA just can't do it. You're asking a souless moneymaking machine with more heads than a hydra that doesn't play games to approve putting a good story in a game. IT WILL NOT HAPPEN. You can't make it happen. And MOST INSULTINGLY OF ALL, every single fucking E3, we get another batch of games promising good story this time! It's like "enemies that know how to use grenades properly," or "treating a long-running franchise with respect and dignity." They keep promising it to us over and over again because they know it's what we want to hear. But they'll never deliver. They will never fucking deliver! It just won't happen!
Absolute best possible outcome, we'll get something like another Alan Wake. And the people who buy it will go "ehhhh.... it's okay. Yeah, I'm glad I played this once." Which on Metacritic is a DEATH SENTENCE.
[PATV] Wednesday, October 23, 2013 - Extra Credits Season 7, Ep. 7: Spectacle Creep
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Is this assumption valid? Is it rooted in sales data? Psychology? Can we point to an era in games where developers were just iterating, not escalating, and we discovered that that was totally unacceptable?
Worst case scenario, I suppose you'd get Madden, but across all franchises and genres. It sounds kinda bad when I say it like that.
But hey, Portal 2 was a more worthy sequel than a Machine for Pigs, so maybe there's something to be said for just making a competent second helping of what came before? It beats throwing out everything that worked in favor of *EMOOOOOOOOTIONS!*
That would actually be a good subject for an episode, how people can miss entire features ore entire games because they play the way other games have trained them to without ever realizing this game might be different. I.E. play testers complaining you couldn't defend yourself well in the Thief reboot (because it's a stealth game and not an action game...) and the devs putting it in due to this feedback, turning it into an action game instead of a stealth game.
Hey, ever heard of Mario? Of Zelda? Some Mario/Zelda entries even *downgrade* the creep compared to previous games.
The problem is AAA devs again. They try so desperately to mimic hollywood movies that they even copy the stupid parts. That's why we have reboots - Hollywoods movies do it, so games follow. It's pathetic.
It seems to be especially a bit problem with games like WoW, where spectacle creep ends up feeling like a form of power creep. "We destroyed what! And now we're supposed to be all super worried about some panda bears?"
And it sets up the kinds of negative expectations you guys spoke of earlier. If you keep building, and building, eventually you have to pull out the biggest gun and then stop.
How much does spectacle creep apply within a single game?
I actually signed up for this episode, soooo... thanks for the seasons Extra Credits. I don't always agree but you do make me think.
Spectacle Creep vs. Power creep are two different things. I fear your readers may not get that from the very short episode you did this week, though I've been impressed by the majority of you readers, as well as your work.
Spectacle creep, from the view of an old gamer, has happened for *ages*, even in the spotlight games... and most older gamers burned out on it that I've spoken with. I'd speak of FF VII (US) as a primary example of when that world short circuited in our heads.
FF has had a long history of 'save the universe' scenarios. Noone, for a while, did bigger... barring the Phantasy Star mimics (shaddup, I loved Meow too). But, seriously, think this through for a moment. The entire thing dies when you're waiting on chocobos to BREED while a giant meteor threatens to destroy the world. The impetus dies. The internal requirement dies. The story falls on its face when you simply know the game will wait for you. In some cases... for years while you race for a random materia.
Spectacle creep, to me, is only a valid requirement when you're dealing with the new audience. 'eh? Yeah, the new audience. The the ones who didn't grow up on Atari with the simple premise of climbing Pike's Peak on a double ended cartridge as a worthy way to spend a few dozen afternoons. The ones who didn't load up Wildcatter on an 8088 and then delve into the code to figure out why it was facinating.
Why do I make that point? It's not to bring out the old skool. It's because this has been happening for ages, since the original video games existed. Once upon a time, simply getting your 4x4 go-cart over the racetrack faster than your buddy who was stepping on your foot at the arcade was a game (Offroad). There was a game that you will never get the voice out of your head (Sinistar) that most couldn't even figure out but enjoyed shooting things in. There was another game where simply beating on each other in two tanks was a hella good time... (Help! I can't find the name! Ninja vs. Russian tank...)
Since then, we abandoned the game and went for story. Cool. As I get older, I love story. Bioshock I told an awesome story. Diablo II told an awesome story (if you didn't get blinded by gear, it was there). CoD 1 and 2 told a reasonable story. But where'd the game go? CoD 1 had some of the most horrendous hitboxes and NPC respawns I've ever seen in a particular scene.
I can't have spectacle creep when I'm playing a game as a player, at least not when I'm not spinning the game as fast as I can simply to get to the end of the book. I know the game will wait for me. I'll get there. Spectacle creep belongs in books and stories.... not games. Particularly not if the bad storyline is going to exposition at me mid-game. Let it run in the background. Example: Radio chatter from random boomboxes on the street.
No game is worth the burn through for spectacle creep, at least as described here. When I think spectacle creep, I think of the upgrade in graphics drivers and/or artistic talent (both are needed). If I look at the screen and go 'DAMN THAT'S AWESOME!'... that's a spectacle to me.
Saving the house from zombies (Plants vs Zombies), saving the area from the evil commies (Command and Conquer), or saving the world from rancid aliens (Prey)... really, does anyone care? They're plot devices to my (at least) enjoyment of the mechanics. The story they're escalating is merely a way to explain the scene changes for the game we're playing. If it's fun, well, cool! If not... shaddup already. Where's the skip button?
A game like Papers, Please... or Spacequest... or even Dwarf Fortress.... these are games where the story matters, and none of them are 'save the entire race from X!'. Sometimes the story is the game. In most? Meh. Fine. Who cares? Where's the meat? Let's play.
Oh, yeah... and shaddup already devs. If you're going to wallpaper a plotline into my enjoyment, at least get it over with quickly if you're not going to do it well. If you want to see a game that doesn't need anything but basic starting point plotline yet the mechanics still hold over for execution and effectiveness, please see Nectaris (aka: Military Madness).
Still gonna fuck over Gotham when the time comes, but for now, I'm good.
It's like a lot of accepted wisdom. It's not really true, but people think it is, so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I think the main thing is not just the money involved, but the time. If you're going to invest X money in something--and you will, because it's a tentpole franchise--and it takes you three years from day one of shooting to release weekend and finding out if we're going to make a profit (and it will, because that's where post-production is at these days), there had better be a damn big spectacle to put butts in seats and make the money back. Spectacle, in visual media, is basically the ultimate lowest common denominator. More than sex, more than dick and fart jokes, bigger, louder, brighter, and faster is seen as the way to appeal to everyone. And spectacle is never the same the second time you see it. If you want to bring them back, because there's no such thing as too much money, you have to promise (and hopefully deliver) something bigger and better than last time. Hence, spectacle creep.
So in the Batman movies, for example, because they sink all this money in and spend all this time, every single one comes down to a threat to Gotham as a whole (because he's Batman, not Superman). (And once the world, in Batman and Robin, but least said, soonest mended.) Whereas in the comics, both because they have more opportunity for storytelling and the investment for a huge spectacle is roughly the same as a thrilling detective story, Batman helps the Justice League save the world from an invading cosmic threat one month, and next month he's almost shot to death by that most wicked of supervillains, Armed-With-A-Gun-Man.
I think the Mega Man X series would be a better example of spectacle creep.
The worst crime you can commit against another human being is to make them think.
Whilst most people do buy CoD for the multiplayer, that didn't stop CoD : MW having a brilliant single player campaign that was fairly widely praised. The later installments weren't so well received, with the latest one being, from what I've heard, a mishmash of uncorrelated set pieces. This sounds like spectacle creep to me. So regardless of whether people buy it for the single player, it's still a valid example of how spectacle creep can harm a franchise's story arcs.
That said, I can't tolerate CoD's multiplayer, with the unlock system just flat-out barring me from competing until I've sunk enough time in. I don't want to have to grind to an even playing field. And killstreaks are the stupidest thing ever. And so I played far more of CoD:MW's singleplayer than I did the multiplayer, because the singleplayer impressed me and was far more fun.
I also never bought any of the games, and instead tested them at internet cafes. Why buy something I'm only going to use half of?
Personally I think they do that by making the journey the important thing and not that they saved the world. Oh sure those 'final earthshattering battles add to it, but... That wasn't what made it special. I'm not sure if they still do it, because I haven't been buying comics in a decade or so, but Marvel and Image used to weave massive stories into their annuals each year involving half or more of their title characters in interconnected threads to 'save the world'. Yet each story was different for all that the end result was the same.
...Is it bad that one of the biggest things I took away form this episode is "OMG they're rebooting ReBoot!?"
From the literal side the assumption is that "Since the character saved the hostages last installment then saving more hostages is no longer a challenge for the character." In a passive interactive medium this assumption doesn't hold up; the character is not the one who is challenged, the player is. But we have thousands of years of literature telling us that characters' need to be challenged by greater and greater stakes.
From the graphical spectacle side there is pressure to "wow" with more animations, more shaders, more polygons, etc. All of this drives the cost up and up.
The options seem to be:
1. Keep the literary stakes constant. Mario saved the Princess dozens of times, the stakes were never raised. The number of named enemies did sometimes increase but in the end it was several minibosses and then bowser.
2. Raise the stakes after every iteration and then once you hit the roof reset them.
3. Have no real coherency between iterations. Long running serials like comic books and Doctor Who are good examples of this. The important character based story lines are carried forward but reality is often ret-conned to fit the current narrative.
The problem is that instead of asking "what franchise can give us the most money?" they should ask "what's the best story we can tell?". We can see that in movies, with Ghibli studio or Tarantino movies: they have a project, they have a story to tell.
I have to disagree with you there. MMX had the same amount of spectacle until the final game, which is MMX 5. MMX 6 and above did not involve Keiji Inafune and therefore do not fit in the original canon. After X5 you have to jump to MMZ to get the rest of the story. MMX 5 was the only canon MMX game where the entire world was threatened outright. The other games had reploids terrorizing separate areas of the planet in ways that had the potential to threaten the world.
It'd be great if everyone would quit cutting developers, publishers--and yes--consumers so much extraneous slack and just expect them to have a spine and some standards.
When non-interactive media does it, I think it may be because WE are the rootless murder hobos. Ok, sort of. It's not that the viewers have no ties to the community, it's that we have diverse and unpredictable ties, and the architects of these stories don't want to produce a niche product that only appeals to people who empathize with more focused protagonists. They want to cast as wide a net as possible, and the easiest way to do that is to focus on the biggest common elements we all seem to care about. It's a very risk-averse approach, and often a lazy one too, as it absolves the writers from having to put much thought into their protagonists OR antagonists.
I think the worst offender of spectacle creep here is the History Channel and all their programs on the so-called "World War II".
Let's start with the bad guys. Battalions of stormtroopers dressed in all black, check. Secret police, check. Determination to brutally kill everyone who doesn't look like them, check. Leader with a tiny villain mustache and a tendency to go into apopleptic rage when he doesn't get his way, check. All this from a country that was ordinary, believable, and dare I say it sometimes even sympathetic in previous seasons.
I wouldn't even mind the lack of originality if they weren't so heavy-handed about it. Apparently we're supposed to believe that in the middle of the war the Germans attacked their allies the Russians, starting an unwinnable conflict on two fronts, just to show how sneaky and untrustworthy they could be? And that they diverted all their resources to use in making ever bigger and scarier death camps, even in the middle of a huge war? Real people just aren't that evil. And that's not even counting the part where as soon as the plot requires it, they instantly forget about all the racism nonsense and become best buddies with the definitely non-Aryan Japanese.
Not that the good guys are much better. Their leader, Churchill, appeared in a grand total of one episode before, where he was a bumbling general who suffered an embarrassing defeat to the Ottomans of all people in the Battle of Gallipoli. Now, all of a sudden, he's not only Prime Minister, he's not only a brilliant military commander, he's not only the greatest orator of the twentieth century who can convince the British to keep going against all odds, he's also a natural wit who is able to pull out hilarious one-liners practically on demand. I know he's supposed to be the hero, but it's not realistic unless you keep the guy at least vaguely human.
So it's pretty standard "shining amazing good guys who can do no wrong" versus "evil legions of darkness bent on torture and genocide" stuff, totally ignoring the nuances and realities of politics. The actual strategy of the war is barely any better. Just to give one example, in the Battle of the Bulge, a vastly larger force of Germans surround a small Allied battalion and demand they surrender or be killed. The Allied general sends back a single-word reply: "Nuts!". The Germans attack, and, miraculously, the tiny Allied force holds them off long enough for reinforcements to arrive and turn the tide of battle. Whoever wrote this episode obviously had never been within a thousand miles of an actual military.
Probably the worst part was the ending. The British/German story arc gets boring, so they tie it up quickly, have the villain kill himself (on Walpurgisnacht of all days, not exactly subtle) and then totally switch gears to a battle between the Americans and the Japanese in the Pacific. Pretty much the same dichotomy - the Japanese kill, torture, perform medical experiments on prisoners, and frickin' play football with the heads of murdered children, and the Americans are led by a kindly old man in a wheelchair.
Anyway, they spend the whole season building up how the Japanese home islands are a fortress, and the Japanese will never surrender, and there's no way to take the Japanese home islands because they're invincible...and then they realize they totally can't have the Americans take the Japanese home islands so they have no way to wrap up the season.
So they invent a completely implausible superweapon that they've never mentioned until now. Apparently the Americans got some scientists together to invent it, only we never heard anything about it because it was "classified". In two years, the scientists manage to invent a weapon a thousand times more powerful than anything anyone's ever seen before - drawing from, of course, ancient mystical texts. Then they use the superweapon, blow up several Japanese cities easily, and the Japanese surrender. Convenient, isn't it?
...and then, in the entire rest of the show, over five or six different big wars, they never use the superweapon again. Seriously. They have this whole thing about a war in Vietnam that lasts decades and kills tens of thousands of people, and they never wonder if maybe they should consider using the frickin' unstoppable mystical superweapon that they won the last war with. At this point, you're starting to wonder if any of the show's writers have even watched the episodes the other writers made.
I'm not even going to get into the whole subplot about breaking a secret code (cleverly named "Enigma", because the writers couldn't spend more than two seconds thinking up a name for an enigmatic code), the giant superintelligent computer called Colossus (despite this being years before the transistor was even invented), the Soviet strongman whose name means "Man of Steel" in Russian (seriously, between calling the strongman "Man of Steel" and the Frenchman "de Gaulle", whoever came up with the names for this thing ought to be shot).
So yeah. Stay away from the History Channel. Unlike most of the other networks, they don't even try to make their stuff believable."
Altered from original here ( http://bg.battletech.com/forums/index.php/topic,31591.0.html )
Marvel is doing this wonderfully with their movies. Yes, Iron Man helped save the world, but he didn't do it alone. When you want to go from there, you need to point out what made Iron Man able to do that and focus on it while making him fight a different kind of enemy, not a different size of enemy.
The sequential things that were a threat to Iron Man in the movies. Fire, Ice, Crushing, Electricity, Lack of Oxygen, PTSD, Massive Damage, An Organization of Unknown Size and Scope, and Fire. Even though it kind of loops back on that last one, that is an amazing scope of difference in kind. So why are we stuck on just making bullets or dragons the major threats?
@Dedwrekka: Dragons and bullets are chosen for thematic reasons, not for the Differences in Kind they might lend to a setting. Everyone buys Call of Duty, therefore every AAA game has to BE Call of Duty, and has to spend the budget of Call of Duty and it can't have anything WEIRD in it because Call of Duty doesn't have anything weird in it. Then they sink Call of Duty budgets into a game that nobody ends up buying because, DERP, Why WOULD they? THEY ALREADY OWN A COPY OF CALL OF DUTY!
I'm seeing a lot of great comments so far, and a lot of reference back to things we've learned in the past, both from previous Extra Credits episodes and notable examples from general games industry bullcrap we've all lived through. High-fives, all around.
Now that we have this insight, what do we DO with it? What is the solution? Spend a modest budget developing an indie game about space whales and missile combat, don't water it down with quicktime events, don't hold the player's hand and just trust that "real" gamers will be willing to put in the time and effort required to learn its systems?
What then? The industry bullshit non-wisdom we all just shrugged off suggests that each and every one of those design decisions-- a novel premise, gameplay first, no QTEs, general lack of spectacle and polish and graphics that will inevitably end up being derided as "last gen" at best-- each of those design decisions will supposedly reduce the number of players who will want to play our game.
Now, that doesn't mean the game can't make money. It just means that for every potential player we lose, turn off, or scare away, the game needs to be one purchase price cheaper.
And basic competition means that, whatever game we end up with, it's going to need to compete with others of its kind. Sure, we can SAY "no it's not meant to be compared to call of Duty, it's meant to be compared to Half Life 2," but we can't force reviewers, players and passers-by to SEE it that way.
Are players going to just EXPECT that if the game looks this bad, it HAS to have infinite worlds? Be on iphone? Be FREE?
How do you control audience expectations in a world where everyone can instantly download and play any game that a random youtube blogger happens to say is better than yours?
How do you make the BEST GAEM EVAR when keeping your development costs insanely low was a necessary but not sufficient requirement of making your money back?
You can say "just make the gameplay the star of the show," but do we really have the ability to make a game that plays 10 times better than Call of Duty and yet still somehow looks 10 times better than... say, the original Unreal?
Only thing that's coming to mind is "Use cartoony graphics. Realism is for chumps." And gearbox ALREADY crapped all over that business model by releasing an INCREDIBLY GOOD AAA franchise that milks the hell out of its cartoony aesthetics. "Oh, you're making a cartoony game? That's cute. Good luck competing with the next Borderlands."
Nothing I've just said is objectively true. These are the paranoid ramblings of an insane mind, numbed to Good Ideas by endless industry hype and pretentious indie awards shows. Show me a way out. Show me anything to give me hope. Even just smack down one or two of my worst ideas, maybe it'll resolve a paradox and I can think again. But I'm in a place right now where I find it hard to believe that any amount of earnest introspection can lead us back to a place where good games are Allowed to Succeed.
Series 1: Stop the Daleks taking over Earth at some time in the future
Series 2: Stop the Daleks and Cybermen taking over the Earth after a very damaging war.
Series 3: Stop the Master taking over the universe after he has already taken over the world
Series 4: Stop Davros destroying the entire universe
Series 5: Save the universe after it has already been destroyed (sort of it's complicated)
Series 6: Save all of time and space after it has been smooshed into one point.
Series 7: Save the Doctor being erased from all history (therefore making undoing every one of his victories up to this point, not quite sure if this one counts)
The Discworld series has managed to do the opposite. In the early books the world was being threatened with destruction by the things from the dungeon dimensions pretty often, now Pratchett comes up with more genuine and inventive small scale threats that fit the story.
But worthwhile media doesn't need "spectacle", spectacle is simply a cheap trick in the tool box that is over used and abused. IT is a deterent from the need for actually healthy input, quality input.
I would go into detail about this argument, but it's like trying to hammer down bubble wrap, i envelopes the human psyche in it's entirety. But I will state that even modern commercial entertainment disproves a "need" for this, and demonstrates a more complex approach that lights the reality of its uses.
Try watching Bones, or X files for instance they have a plot thread within the mechanizations, but it is not necessary to ramp the "excitement" for each consecutive episode.
The category this falls under in my opinion is that of the rest of corporate "needs" to survive, all that which draws the life from real meaningful art and human interaction to become molded around the almighty $.
We need to stop the dissemination of these bogus prerequisites. Including "flow", skinner box excuse and achievements.
I was just thinking about this idea as I rewatched the Bourne trilogy (yes, I said trilogy), and said to myself, "Self, isn't it a relief that these movies existed before these movies existed?" When the Bourne Identity came out, its genre and adjacent genres weren't so bloated with spectacle that every one had to outdo the last (Let's have the guy kill a helicopter with a car! Oh...someone did that already? Guess he's going to have to take out a fighter jet...). While the stakes increased as the story progressed, the trilogy keeps this in line--one of the tensest sequences in the third was Bourne talking an inept reporter through a mall--low on spectacle but enthralling to watch. The stakes don't really expand beyond Bourne himself, and the actions scenes don't really ramp up significantly. IIRC, the first movie doesn't really stray beyond France in geography, and they manage to spend extended time in Paris (even returning there after leaving, instead of insisting on a new location for variety) without once passing the Eiffel Tower or Notre Dame.
Then I rented Legacy and realized the exact repercussions of Spectacle Creep, in a movie that held an iron grip on meaningless trappings (including reusing background music at the end when it didn't fit the tone at all...) but entirely abandoned the tone and restraint that made the series memorable.
Ok, /rant. In any case, I do think it is possible to avoid this (Portal still hasn't bumped the stakes past Chell herself, as GlaDOS has yet to imply any ambition beyond the limits of Aperture Science), but it's important to realize why writers see it as necessary and work out how we can scratch those itches without resorting to "bigger is always better".
AAA GAME DEVS CAN'T WRITE A GOOD STORY. EVER. It just can't be done. You can have a bad story that's executed well, sure. Or you can have a boring story that's innoffensive and safe and makes sense but we all saw it coming. But you absolutely cannot have a good story that is also surprising and also allows for good gameplay. AAA developers just can't fucking do it. I don't know whether it's Word of God from the publishers or what, but it just can't be done. Not in America. You might get something with a halfway decent story from an Indie developer, or something out of Japan from like Suda51 or whatever, and if you're very lucky it'll even be localized during the post-holiday doldrums, recieve no advertisement or support, get good reviews, and then wither on the vine. But AAA just can't do it. You're asking a souless moneymaking machine with more heads than a hydra that doesn't play games to approve putting a good story in a game. IT WILL NOT HAPPEN. You can't make it happen. And MOST INSULTINGLY OF ALL, every single fucking E3, we get another batch of games promising good story this time! It's like "enemies that know how to use grenades properly," or "treating a long-running franchise with respect and dignity." They keep promising it to us over and over again because they know it's what we want to hear. But they'll never deliver. They will never fucking deliver! It just won't happen!
Absolute best possible outcome, we'll get something like another Alan Wake. And the people who buy it will go "ehhhh.... it's okay. Yeah, I'm glad I played this once." Which on Metacritic is a DEATH SENTENCE.
EMOOOOOOOOTIOOOOOONS! *disgusted expression, flailing hands*