And yet, if inspiration runs dry, you find yourself falling back on a few old standbys: even if some of what should be enormously powerful objects are cunningly weakened (it is somehow heartbreaking even to a non-believer to see how easily God can be killed), you develop a small repertoire of get-out-of-jail-free cards. You feel guilty, but you do it anyway, because there’s always the next level to check out. In decision theory and economics, this kind of behaviour – choosing a good-enough approach rather than seeking to optimise or maximise – is called satisficing. And I think videogames too often encourage it.
The same problem, in a different guise, appeared when I was playing Uncharted 2, which with all its relentless prodding and funnelling is the exact opposite of Scribblenauts. Now, it is unfair to criticise Uncharted 2 for not being a ‘sandbox’ game, just as it would be unfair to criticise LocoRoco for not being a sci-fi-themed firstperson shooter. Still, let’s face it: much of the time in Uncharted 2, you are running through lovingly rendered corridors. (This is why the train level is the game’s masterpiece: a train just is a long corridor.) I was reminded most strongly of Crash Bandicoot, another game in which you run up lovingly rendered corridors, except that Crash was a more lovable lead character and had a more satisfying jump animation.
There is something almost hysterical, too, about Uncharted 2’s constant interruption of play with mini-cutscenes in an attempt to add unnecessary ‘drama’. I lost count of the number of times the game stopped to show me one of Drake’s hands slipping off a ledge, the camera swooping up to peer down on my avatar dangling one-handedly over the latest routine precipice, before he, in no way surprisingly, regained a safe grip and the game saw fit to restore my control. The game is like a bossy child, constantly tapping you on the arm and ordering you in a squeaky voice to Feel Excited Now. There is nothing less dramatic than a constant anxiety to keep the tension at a single high pitch.
Uncharted 2 does indeed, as people have said, boast one of the best videogame scripts yet, which is only to say that it more or less attains the heights of a straight-to-DVD action B-movie. Nonetheless it does provide an irresistibly propulsive element to proceedings – which, unfortunately, I found to work against the most successful aspect, which is the combat. Maybe it’s just me, but I didn’t try to optimise the way I played the superb set-piece gun battles: instead, I satisficed, stumbling through them any old how because I was impatient to see the next chapter.
In their different ways, then, my experiences with Scribblenauts and Uncharted 2 awakened a concern that the traditional ways in which videogames try to ‘motivate’ us – through the desire to know what happens next in a scripted narrative, or the desire to acquire new gadgets and weapons, or simply the desire to see what the next puzzle is – are by their very nature also those kinds of structures that will encourage us to satisfice rather than aspire to optimise our strategies of play. Because we are so fixated on what the next thing might be, we hurry to get the current thing out of the way, even if that means doing the minimum required rather than playing with style. In this sense, games’ standard strategies of motivation are strangely demotivating.
Now, it’s very likely that many people have more self-discipline than I do in this regard; and others wisely choose to balance a satisficing first playthrough with optimising replays. Yet maybe we don’t need to be dragged so forcefully through videogames in the first place. Maybe one aspect of the fuzzy ideal I have previously invoked under the slogan ‘slow gaming’ would be that it afforded us the freedom from narrative (verbal or structural) really to maximise our involvement in what’s in front of us. Noby Noby Boy has you playing creatively from the start because there is nothing else to do with it: no carrot of a next chapter or new puzzle dangling before your nose, just the bizarre world as it is. It makes no sense even to try to satisfice in Noby Noby Boy – which is why, for me, it was the best game of 2009.
Steven Poole is the author of Trigger Happy: The Inner Life Of Videogames. Visit him online at stevenpoole.net.