Transferable skill and genre
November 30, 2009
Econ professor Jeff Ely has a fascinating post about the economics of pinball on the blog Cheap Talk. Here’s an excerpt:
Pinball skill is transferrable. If you can pass, stall, nudge, and aim on one machine you can do it on any machine. This is both a blessing and a curse for pinball developers. The blessing is that pinball players were a captive market. The curse was that to keep the pinball players interested the games had to get more and more intricate and challenging.
Pinball developers struggled with this problem as pinball was slowly losing to video games. Video games competed by adding levels of play with increasing difficulty. Any new player could quickly get chops on a new game because the low levels were easy. This ensured that new players were drawn in easily, but still they were continually challenged because the higher levels got harder and harder.
I’ve been mulling over the concept of transferable skill as it applies to video games, and I have a theory.
As Ely notes, arcade games differ from pinball machines in that each game has its own difficulty ramp; a Pac-Man fan won’t automatically have any particular skill with Donkey Kong. Since beginners burn through more quarters than experts, minimizing skill transfer between games was a profitable approach for developers.
In the past twenty-five years or so, that approach seems to have shifted. Arcades have been marginalized by home consoles, and the rising cost of both developing and playing games has made the marketplace more risk-averse. Gradually, skill transfer became a selling point; if gamers enjoy Sonic the Hedgehog, and the developers already have the resources to make it, it makes sense to try Sonic the Hedgehog 2.
More than sequels, though, I think this shift is what helped establish — or at least further entrench — the video game genre.
Genres operate on a different axis for games than for other media; rather than revealing anything about content (Dr. Strangelove and Dogma are both comedies), they tell us about the mode of interaction (Serious Sam and Half-Life are both first-person shooters). Put another way, a video game genre elucidates how and where a gamer’s skills will transfer between similar titles.
This is vitally important information for us. Given games’ relative cost, length, and inaccessibility, we often stick with the familiar. Knowing that one game is similar to another lets us carry over accumulated experience and get the most from our investment in the medium — all of us pinball experts in our own domain. Qualms about stifled creativity aside, I think that’s one benefit of genre that’s worth praising.
6 comments
“Genres operate on a different axis for games than for other media; rather than revealing anything about content [...] they tell us about the mode of interaction [...].”
This is a very important observation for me. It reminds me of an essay from a month ago on the “separation” of content and mechanics (http://malvasiabianca.org/archives/2009/10/the-beatles-rock-band-and-genre/).
As for your main point—it also puts into words some things that, as far as I know, have not been articulated yet in the context of video games. The proliferation of sequels is commonly noted (and complained about), but it is certainly useful to see how sequels’ demand-development cycle is facilitated by the degrees of transferable skill between certain games. “Vitally important information for us” indeed.
by Jill Jackson on December 1, 2009 at 1:04 am #
I think the assumption of transferable skills is the reasons some games/genres tend to have a steep learning curve. For instance…
RTS games assume you understand the concepts of ordering units and gathering resources.
Shooters assume you can handle 3D mouse/keyboard movement.
Some puzzles in Braid depend on platformer genre knowledge (“you can bounce off enemies to jump higher”).
Modern games don’t make an effort to teach these fundamental skills because they assume their audience is composed of veteran gamers. This is a major hurdle for broadening the gaming audience.
(This line of thinking is lightly stolen from Theory of Fun)
by Matthew Gallant on December 1, 2009 at 1:53 am #
I think this is the exact reason we need a more faceted, more detailed, and more rigorous categorization system for video games, rather than just these mushy, ill-defined genres. Take for example, “platformer”, or even worse, “sim game”. So many different types of games (and skillsets) are lumped together in these vague genres that I have no idea whether I’ll enjoy the game or not.
Time to dust off my Ontology of Video Games project… (:
by Pace Smith on December 1, 2009 at 10:26 am #
I think some people confuse the appeal of sequels for just this reason. Sequel are appealing as much, if not more so, for their similar mechanics. E.g. I’ve been playing quite a bit of Left 4 Dead 2 with random Internet strangers and I’ve noticed the level of competency has been a lot higher than in L4D1. I could just have been lucky, but I think it’s because lots of folks were able to transfer what they learned.
I think there’s a relatively unexplored but possible fertile space for “sequels” that are mechanically similar but don’t involve any narrative continuity, except perhaps for taking place in the same universe.
by Nels Anderson on December 1, 2009 at 11:50 am #
Jill: Agreed! As Nels points out, sequels sometimes get undeserved criticism. While there are certainly cheap cash-ins, there are also brilliantly realized games that owe their success to greater audience familiarity and a bit of additional polish.
Matthew: You’re right that games tend to assume a lot of knowledge. In fact, I would argue that the ability to balance accessibility for newcomers with interest for veterans is one of the most critical challenges a game developer faces. The industry leader here is, of course, Nintendo; New Super Mario Bros. Wii hits that sweet spot better than any game I’ve ever seen.
Pace: Well, good luck with that! I’ll be curious to see what you can do with the term “RPG,” as it’s surely been diluted beyond all recognition by now. :-)
Nels: The term “spiritual successor” has some of the connotation of what you’re talking about. There are some good examples on the Wikipedia article.
by Dan Bruno on December 1, 2009 at 10:17 pm #
I hadn’t thought about it this way before, but his is a really good point. What we call genres in videogames are really more about the skill set needed to enjoy a particular category of games.
It would almost be more accurate to call these “languages.” What language is Portal? It’s FPS. Reviewers talk about Portal having a perfect difficulty curve, but that’s really only true for people who already know the FPS language.
The word “genre” is maybe still appropriate if you think of books or movies that really depend on knowledge of their genre to get it. Trying to watch Scream without ever having seen a horror movie. Or some sci-fi writers like Gene Wolfe or Samuel Delany, who are hard to appreciate if you don’t already have some familiarity with that genre.
by Urthman on December 4, 2009 at 4:54 pm #