First Impressions Matter
(06/07/2011) They say a novel has to grab the reader in the first paragraph. A novel must make a good first impression, even more so than a film or a TV show, because a novel is asking for a lot more of a reader’s time. A film will be over in 90 minutes or so (unless it’s Transformers: Dark of the Moon, the running time of which is closer to a full calendar month), a TV show in under an hour. If you didn’t enjoy it that much, it’s not taken up a serious chunk of your time. No biggie. A novel, however, requires a more serious time investment, and if it doesn’t draw you in immediately, the urge to put it down and save wasted hours is greater.
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| A playable essay on terrible openings. |
The same should be true of videogames. Even a ‘short’ game is at least three times the length of an average film, and a ‘long’ game can last longer than the most studied read-through of War and Peace. We commit a lot of time to these games, so the onus should be on the developer to create an introduction that is compelling enough to keep us playing.
Why is it then, that the beginning of a videogame is almost always the weakest section? The play mechanics are certainly part of it; games are obliged to drag us through a tutorial at the first chance they get. Certainly, frustration at not knowing how to play the game properly would be a key factor in a player giving up early on, but so is a badly-designed tutorial section that almost invariably makes the game seem way less interesting than it might be an hour down the line.
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| No one wants to look at this. |
This problem has worsened since developers have realised that no one gives so much as a cursory glance at a game’s manual any more, meaning they have to clarify the function of every damn button with massive icons right at the point when the game should be drawing the player into its world. What most developers fail to grasp is that the reason no one reads the manual is because reading the manual is incredibly dull; turning the first half-hour of your game into an interactive version of its own manual only serves to make the game itself appear incredibly dull. It’s the equivalent of a novel opening with a brief recap of the alphabet followed by a description of what a paragraph is.
What’s the solution? We can’t demand that gamers read the game’s manual; inflicting reading upon a person is heinous. The obvious answer, of course, is to make a good tutorial section. Does anyone remember the tutorial sections in Half Life 2 or Bioshock? No? Well they were there, believe me, they were just interwoven with the narrative and gameplay in a way that meant the player absorbs the tutorial whilst convinced they are in fact already engrossed in the game proper. And they are, because in a well-designed game the tutorial is part of the game proper, not a tacked-on-at-the-last-minute training course that teaches you to shoot cardboard men and how to identify the ‘do a knife stab’ button.
The worst offenders for dreadful introductions are almost certain RPG and adventure games. The crime of the terrible intro is worsened by the fact that these are usually the games that last the longest, and therefore have the most pressure to make a good first impression. Who wants to spend 70 hours playing a game that is no fun for the first 5? Anyone remember the 15-hour tutorial in Final Fantasy XIII? Of course they do, because it half of the whole damn game and sucked, enormously, for just the longest time. I know plenty of people who gave up on that game way before it deigned to take the training wheels off, and I don’t blame them in the slightest.
My pet hate, and one pretty much exclusive to the RPG genre, is the obligatory ‘make a character and do all their stats’ part. This usually happens before you even start the tutorial, and can take anything from a few minutes to up to an hour. And it’s boring. Really boring. You’re not even playing the game; you are, in fact, giving the game instructions on how it should play when it can be bothered to start. It’s like the programmers got bored, and decided to leave the last little bit of tweaking up to the player.
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| I totally would. |
Now there’s not really a way around character creation; it’s a necessary part of these games, and besides, you can usually just pick a preset and fire away in a few seconds. Mass Effect does a good job, in that it has an ‘official’ Shepard, who goes on the box art and everything, which everyone can use hassle-free. If a player wants to spend an hour making Shepard’s face look like someone ran over a mongoose, then they can, and that’s great. That’s choice, and that’s what videogames are all about.
What hacks me off is when the game demands that I customise my character’s stats before I’ve even started playing. Now, I’m the kind of player that gets a perverse pleasure from stat-tweaking once I’m playing a game. I like fiddling around to give my sword a +2 fire stat. As an RPG fan, the right amount of stat-twiddling gets me sort of excited.
The trouble with making the player set their stats right at the start is that there’s no context to the stats themselves at this point. I don’t have a clue what a ‘perception’ stat does when I haven’t been allowed to play the game yet, so how the hell should I know how many arbitrary points I want to put into it? What if I put all my points into the ‘perception’ stat only to discover, upon actual gameplay being introduced, that the ‘perception’ stat sucks? “Tough shit,” says the game, “you used up all your starting-the-game points in that laborious, context-lacking create-a-character section that you spent an hour swearing through earlier. Deal with it.”
Nothing makes me less inclined to play a game than the first thing I see being a massive stats table that the game expects me to absorb, understand and manage before it lets me actually play. As an example, I’m going to look at Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. These two games are almost exactly alike except that one has a good introduction and the other has a terrible one.
Fallout 3 merges its stat-building into the narrative; you start the game as a child growing up in an underground vault. You grow up, and as you do, you go through a number of experiences common to childhood. Things every player will be able to relate to. You have to deal with the local bully. You experience your first childhood romance. You have to go school and take exams. You get given a rifle for your birthday and use a giant mutated cockroach as target practice (alright, maybe not everyone can relate to that one).
Not only does this give your rubber-faced character some narrative weight and a level of player involvement – you helped this character grow up, after all – but the game is setting your character’s stats in the background, based on the actions you take. When it’s time to leave the vault, you get the option to tweak these stats as much as you like, but if you don’t want to, you can leave reasonably safe in the knowledge that you’re using a character that you’ve shaped through your own actions.
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| The stat screen, or, the antithesis of fun. |
In New Vegas, you play as some guy who has recently emerged from a bullet-to-the-head induced coma, and as a result has lost all sense of his identity. It turns out the only way to forge a new identity for yourself is to walk over to a machine and spend ten minutes pressing ‘plus’ and ‘minus’ keys on the stat screen. Then you answer some completely context-free questions. Then you choose some ‘perks’. All before you have the slightest clue what any of these decisions you are making mean. And do you get a chance to change your mind if it turns out you made a bad decision? Nope; you deal with it.
The resulting feeling is something akin to anxiety. I desperately want to skip this section to get to the actual game, but I know that the decisions I make at this point will affect the entire of the game’s billion-hour length. Anxiety is not the emotion a game should be invoking with its introduction. Awe, yes. Joy, wonderful. Anxiety? You’re doing it wrong.
The solution is the same as the solution to the much-maligned Tutorial Section; weave your stat-building into the actual game. Make the player’s choices matter in the context of playing the actual game, not in a tedious menu screen. Having a character evolve as we play builds up a relationship between the player and their character – the way you play the game affects the way your character behaves. Making us define the character before we’ve even started is just annoying.
It’s like a novel opening with a ten-page description of its main character, including vital statistics such as what they eat for breakfast and whether they prefer cats or dogs. Would you want to read that? I sure as hell wouldn’t, so I don’t understand why we have to sit through the equivalent at the start of so many purportedly ‘epic’ videogames. I propose that a game, however grand and deep it might eventually become, cannot be deemed ‘epic’ if it starts with a series of sliders and a description of what the A button is.
