This past Saturday I attended a birthday party held at the DisneyQuest “indoor interactive theme park” in Orlando, Florida. Essentially, this interactive theme park is a mega-game arcade filling several floors with classic video games, pinball machines and air hockey tables, and a wide range of virtual reality simulations and multi-sensory video environments that place the game player in roller coasters, river raft rides, pirate ship battles, and many other imaginative settings.
The funny thing is that I repeatedly felt drawn back to the classic arcade games from my youth: Centipede, PacMan, Joust, Frogger, and—one of my all time favorites—Zaxxon (that’s me getting tons of freeplay). The question of why so many people keep returning to the older video games has always fascinated me. Sure, there’s the element of nostalgia for these classics, but the phenomenon is much more than that (especially for the kids that weren’t even born when these machines were all the rage). The idea that game play is more important than graphics is almost heretical in this age of super-computing videogame systems. Yet, that’s what seems to be at the heart of the matter: A game with superior game play will invariably capture a person’s imagination and keep it for a much longer period of time. Read here, here, and here for some more in-depth discussion on the topic.
For game players this creates an interesting dilemma regarding where to spend your money and your time: on the visual masterpiece or on the satisfying blend of challenge versus playability? The same dilemma holds true for game designers: where should they spend their finite development resources? My personal preference is in playing games that are easy to get into (little to no learning curve) and play to some form of completion in a very short period of time. In creating games, I tend to enjoy the process of creating logical puzzles—not necessarily abstract, but that can be woven into the fabric of a game story, for example.
Overall, I think we are seeing a wide range of games the spans one end of the visuals/gameplay spectrum to the other. And that’s a good thing, as the market for this type of entertainment is tremendously large and continuously growing. Perhaps nearly as much fun for me as playing those old arcade classics at DisneyQuest was watching what all the different game players chose to try. My little six year old daughter loves her Wii and Playstation and PC for playing games at home (She’ll find a Wii version of the Ben 10 video game under the tree Christmas morning.)
But at DisneyQuest she was all about air hockey and ski ball.
And playing with me.
- Hap Aziz