THE UNIVERSAL APPEAL OF PAPERWORK

Sorry, guys. According to the Arstotszkan Border Authority, 4 of you are not allowed to enter the country. That's including you, Blond Dave.

There are some games that everybody likes. Well, maybe not EVERYBODY, per se, but there are games that have that deep appeal, hitting the right notes for hardcores and casuals alike. I remember the night we got a Nintendo Wii, my entire family was in the living room hot-potato'ing a pair of video-game controllers. These were just the out-of-the-box Wii Sports Bowling and Boxing apps, and they were a smash hit at my house. Or take Candy Crush. Every time I see somebody on public transit with that focused frown as they stare down at what's obviously some kind game on their smartphone, I'm shocked to see it's Candy Crush in such a person's hands: old biddies, fatigued salarymen, meatheads. These games feature basic interfaces, yet boast intuitive controls & causal relationships. They epitomize gaming, in a sense, offering the most pleasure for the least up-front investment in terms of rote memorization and skill fluency.

Among my friends, I've seen customs official simulator Papers, Please make a huge resurgence recently -- especially among my gaming friends' non-gamer girlfriends. And that is awesome. To me, there can be no greater success for a game than to capture the imagination of its most improbable player. Seasoned gamers truly take for granted the massive baseline barrier to entry against getting into most video-games. We understand that the RT button fires our weapons; we, the inveterate players, know to reach for WASD, or QWER, before gameplay even begins. But these are hard-won intuitions dating back through decades of personal experience and game design tropes. Gamers carry with them a sprawling lexicon of input and output algorithms, controller schemes, and menu hierarchies. Most of the time, we're in so deep we don't even realize the assumptions we're making when we jump (Spacebar, duh) into a new game. 

And then a complete oddity like Papers, Please comes along, equally unprecedented to both the amateur and the super nerd. From the start, the game draws you into its weirdness through the simplicity of its design: check passports for discrepancies before allowing or denying passage through your pseudo-Soviet border crossing. Make a mistake, and your daily pay will be docked, preventing you from feeding and housing your family at home. However, before long, amidst the increasingly deep dossiers you must shuffle through in order to process each traveler, ethical considerations begin to interfere with your pencil-pushing efficiency. Do you translate the spy's encrypted message? Detain the innocent for a cut of the guard's commission? Let your uncle starve, so your wife and son may eat? Papers, Please succeeds for so many players, because its deepest challenges aren't located in its mechanics, but in the weight of the choices you must make within them. These moral challenges become increasingly muzzled by the anxious monotony of the too-short workday, in much the same way it likely would for a real Russian customs official. Through the drudgery of a thankless job, the player may realize opportunities to influence change in his own life, in those of others, and in the fate of his nation -- or he may never see past the paper-thin labyrinth surrounding him. Papers, Please is a game that not only stays in your head long after playing, but has probably been with you since long before. It deeply evokes the frustrating experience of working life itself, and the emphasis on this particular depth is its throughline to such a wide range of players.

As a side-note on universal appeal in games & its obstacles, isn't it interesting how the games with the most complex control schemes also have the most violent and potentially offensive content? Why is it that stringing together a 4-level interchange in Mini Metro is something anyone can do, while gunning down a platoon of undead zombies is a privilege reserved only for more fluent gamers?

CONFESSIONS OF A TERRIBLE GAMER: FILTHY CASUAL EDITION

I have a confession to make -- and no, it’s not that I’m a terrible gamer (I will never admit to that). It’s that... well, over the past week, I think I'm becoming a Blizzard fanboy. As someone who writes about a variety of games, I guess I thought I should give full disclosure.

Something about the design of Blizzard games has me gravitating toward them not strictly in and of themselves, but as preferable alternatives to similar titles. Over the past decade, each release seems intended to fill in successive slices of the genre pie: Real Time Strategy is what they’re known for, followed by Action RPG’s, but now they have a highly successful card-based puzzler in Hearthstone, a fun-for-all MOBA game in Super Smash Bros. Blizzard (Heroes of the Storm), and in June, Blizzard’s first Team Fortress 2-alike first-person shooter Overwatch comes out. I put Starcraft 2 down a long time ago - I found it literally too challenging to focus through a real-time, multi-battlefront resource management wargame - but these most recent 3 titles have become like safe injection sites for some of my most toxic gaming habits. Blizzard games are polished, generic, internally consistent, and low on time demand. A game of Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, or Overwatch comfortably fits into the 10-30 minutes slot. Compared to rival games in these genres, where a match tends to take upwards of forty minutes, this is a really attractive feature.

I don't want this to have melted by the time my game is over.

Take my 2200 hours of experience in Dota 2. I worked hard at that game; I invested hours and hours of research to improve, always seeking opportunities and advantages. But regardless, a painful loss can take 60 minutes. SIXTY. MINUTES. There is no surrender. You can Abandon the game, but you get punished for this by playing against other players who’ve also abandoned, which is even more unpleasant. Ask me today which game I’d rather play, and I would tell you Heroes of the Storm nine times out of ten. It’s a “lesser” game, certainly. It’s simpler, smoother, more forgiving. Finnicky annoyances like last-hitting enemies in order to get gold, or micromanaging the precious, gear-toting courier, are condensed in order to make the game faster and more fun. Small variances matter less in HOTS than Dota 2; what matters more is the overall movements and tactics of each team. And that’s why I’d rather play it. Also, that your name goes on fire when you get a killstreak.

Ever wanted to play as Pandora the Explorer... in a bugcatching costume? What's that? You don't? 

Or look at Hearthstone. I’ve been playing Magic: the Gathering on and off for probably 14 years. I LOVE Magic: the Gathering. Sometimes I can’t find a friend to play with so I will wiggle my shinies in the light for a few hours, just longing to play. A MTG friend of mine recommended HEX to me, a game so similar to Magic it was sued for plagiarism, and yet different enough that many experienced MTG players prefer it over Magic’s digital counterpart. The funnest way to play these CCG’s is in a format called Drafting, in which you buy a few randomized packs of cards, and build a deck from them. Win games against other players who have done the same, and you could win enough packs to Draft again (and then some)! The legendary self-sustaining one-time investment is attractive to the smugly clever folk who enjoy these games. So I dropped $7 and drafted a pretty good Blood/Diamond deck. I had to *shudder* “pass a rare” - sometimes when drafting, you will forego using a rare, valuable card in order to pick less cash-valuable, but more efficient, synergistic cards - in order to make a better deck. I smashed Round 1 of my first best of 3, lost the second match badly, and in the tiebreaker, it was tough to call the winner before my internet crashed. I couldn’t get it going again in the 5-minute permission window, so by the time I signed in again, I had nothing to show for my $7 investment but a bunch of common cards that accomplish almost nothing beyond the Draft. Betrayed by about 90 minutes of gameplay which amounted to nothing by a fluke, I immediately uninstalled HEX and downloaded Hearthstone.

I might be new to the game, but I cannot even IMAGINE how these numbers got onto the board.

Like Heroes of the Storm, Hearthstone balms the wounds left by wasted time. Hearthstone’s Arena drafting costs either $2 or some in-game currency you can earn just by grinding, and lets you play one 5-15 minute match at a time, whenever you want. So even though there’s the same risk of disconnecting I experienced in HEX, it’s less costly, and less painful. There’s no pain in passing rares, because you don’t keep the deck you draft; instead, you use your rental draft to rack up wins (you can play as many matches with the deck as it takes to lose 3 times) which translate into card packs and game currency. And while there is a strong incentive to sink money into the game for cards, with no buyout, the free-to-play features give you access to all the same resources, should you boast the patience to grind.

All told, my near-exclusive Blizzard fixation of late hasn’t stifled, but brightened my view of games today. I’m happy to have a client outside of Steam that reliably offers up fast, fun, & fair match-based gameplay.

In spite of all my clicks, I am still just a rat in a ... clicker game

The Monster Summer Game, Valve’s gamification of this year’s Steam Summer Sale is a self-proclaimed homage to the “56 trillion” gamers hooked on the newest genre of non-game to numb the skulls of players everywhere: Clicker games.

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Look, it's on a pixelated CRT machine! Charmed, I'm sure!

Non-games are similar to games; they involve some kind of activity, and usually some accumulation of points or currency in exchange for the activity, which can then be spent to enhance the completion of that activity. Non-games are linear, yet without end, and frequently invite you spend money to play more frequently, for longer bouts, or more efficiently. The chronology of non-games doesn’t go very far back; it has not been until recently that the leisure to game has become so widespread, that our leisure now also needs leisure. Non-games strike me as a syndrome of the iPad generation: minimum-input, take-anywhere, play-anywhere monetization shells. They are the pinnacle of casual diversion, designed not to stimulate the mind, but to stuff it up with cotton. Farmville. Proteus and Mountain. Clicker Heroes. These games would not be popular unless there were a significant group of people out there who either:

1. Game often enough that they seek much lower-impact gaming experiences between bouts of “proper” gaming;

2. Don’t play “normal” games at all but seek lower-impact fun / diversion.

I will admit, I prejudged clicker games based on mechanics alone. I mean, come on: nearly every PC game in the past 20 years has been a “clicking” game to some degree, insofar as clicking is a gameplay mechanic. Gaming intensity in RTS game is commonly measured in terms of Actions Per Minute - on PC the vast majority of those actions tend to be clicks. Having played Valve’s tribute to the genre today, I can testify that the clicker genre might more accurately be called “nothing-but-clicking” games. Aside from the 10-15 minutes I spent gradually lowering my mouse-arm off of my desk into a completely relaxed position in the crotchal area, and figuring out the optimal clicking rhythm, the game immediately became an exercise, and not a game. There’s no interaction or development whatsoever. Just an infinite highway of...more clicking.

Clicker Games turn their mechanic into a kind of engine. Not a game engine; rather, your clicks become the fuel powering an engine that propels you forward through the diverse audiovisual landscape of the clicker game. Much like browsing for porn in this era of recommended video sidebars, what you’re really clicking for is to see what you’ll be clicking next. In the Steam mini-game, you’re clicking on weird android-zombies named Greg and Lola until you reach a boss-level with a giant crab-arm pirate-tank who takes 10-20 times the clicks the previous goons did. The music changes. The target is larger. Then you click him to death, and it’s onto further, minor variations on the Greg & Lola concepts. Each day at 10am, the game resets, and the enemies & backdrops take on a new visual theme. There is added value, in that you're on a team with at least 1000 other players, amassing clicks to whittle down the enemies. But it sure feels like you're sitting there alone, pawing at your button, speeding down a road that turns in downward spirals. This is the Clicker Highway and I’m pretty sure it leads straight to hell.

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To the man with the battered mouse, six hundred MILLION BILLION CLICKER POINTS !!

I suppose it’s decent amusement, but as a passionate gamer, I acknowledge ethical design issues with regard to game like this. The Skinner Box - a Psychological experiment apparatus, containing a rat, a button, and a feeder-bottle of heroin-laced water - tends to produce fairly predictable results. Give it time to get hooked on the reward, and that rat will literally click that button till it starves to death (addiction studies in the modern day prove that what goes on in the Skinner Box is much more nuanced than that; but that’s for another article). Literally defined, this is learning. But nobody will argue that a rat’s experience of life is enriched by the Skinner Box. I direct this point back towards Clicker games. Any good game will consume your attention span. Battle arenas, epic quests, & sandboxes suck you in with their unique gravity; but at least they leave you with something to talk about and reflect on. Many games are games because the decisions made by players significantly affect the game-state, which motivate further decisions from the player. In a clicker game, nothing matters. Clicking barely even regards space-time as a thing that exists, for it traps the mind in the first dimension, teetering on a single pinhead-point of homogenous repetition. Much like Warhol-era pop art, Clicker Games insult the audience’s intelligence and the value of their time.

Step into the wild world of unethical game design, and this could be YOU !!

However, their popularity cannot be argued with, and this is a wave I intend to ride all the way to the bank. Keep an eye out Autumn 2015 for my first original Clicker Game, called Hammer & Nails Simulator, where players smash increasingly large and extravagantly decorated nails into surfaces of varying density and thickness. Hmm. Maybe I’ll just call it Smashy!